prcdigy:
enthusiastically, lila bites into the mars bar she’d shaken free from the vending machine of the crappy motel she calls home. free food, after all, always tastes best. she chews contemplatively, arms crossed over her chest as she leans up against someone’s car and stares up at the building where she’s been dumping the other twenty-nine gifted assholes over the last few weeks. the umbrella academy. a ragtag group of, arguably, whiny babies, that somehow seemed to always get their shit together in the eleventh hour and come together. she’d trusted them to know what to do with the whole lot of them, what their purpose was, but as it turns out … maybe she should have taken a proper look at the timeline before assuming things were the same.
given she’s loitering in a place where people are apt to recognize her, it comes to no surprise that she feels heat against the back of her neck. someone’s staring. she turns slowly, smile stretching playfully as she wiggles her fingers in their direction. “ fancy meeting you here. ” she drawls, casual as ever. “ miss me ? ”
sir reginald had done a lot of fucked up things, and vanya would have told you before this brand new complicated mess that she was USED to it. she was used to her father being the worst - him seeing just how badly his longterm investment turned out and choosing to adopt an entirely different set of children so that he could form the SPARROW ACADEMY instead of his original brand was just one more example of him being an altogether horrible person.
over the years where she was separated from her family, people who....- who at the time didn’t feel like family - she’d always known where the academy stood, where she could find the people she’d grown up around, and she had always felt as if everyone was better off if she stayed on the outside. she’d avoided passing by the building, actively, because to see it was to be reminded of EVERYTHING that had happened. but this was different, regardless of how similar it should have been. over the past month, vanya had taken to walking by ( an outsider always looking in, regardless of the reality they were stuck in ) just to see it was still standing, or maybe, just to see. she told herself each time that she was going to quit it, that this habit didn’t HELP -
but either she was lucky she hadn’t stopped, or she really needed to start listening to her internal monologue a little bit more.
“what are you doing here?” the inflections said more than vanya could even manage, in that first moment. you ( DIEGO’S GIRLFRIEND, vengeful spirit, the person who’d tried to kill them all - most recently ) and here ( MY HOME, or it was, the place filled with people you probably hate in any reality ). she had changed her entire trajectory to make a beeline towards the other and stopped dead in her tracks as a BONE CHILLING, horrifying thought occurred to her : “don’t tell me : hargreeves adopted an eighth child in this reality, and you’re it.”
