Umbrella Academy fic: Changing All the Scenery (5/20)
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
PART TEN
PART ELEVEN
PART TWELVE
PART THIRTEEN
PART FOURTEEN
PART FIFTEEN
PART SIXTEEN
PART SEVENTEEN
PART EIGHTEEN
PART NINETEEN
PART TWENTY
FIVE
It’s not all according to plan, but they save the world, so Five figures it’s probably okay. Yes, they do have to make an unexpected stop in the past. Okay, fine, it’s complicated as they try to navigate meeting their past selves in order to ensure that Vanya is told the truth at a young age and trained in a supportive setting. And of course, it’s a trial not to murder their old man, who is such an unremitting bastard that Five himself is tempted to do the deed.
This is incidental, however. If you ask Five later, he hardly recalls any of it. He can’t even tell you what year they disappear to.
All he knows is that it took him three days to recover, another two weeks to sort out the timeline, and another week to finalize the final equation to get them back home.
Back to 2019.
The only year that matters. The year Five gets his family back.
The year the world doesn’t end.
As far as Five’s concerned, that is and will always be, the only year that means anything at all.
-o-
It’s all very dramatic, but they fall back into things quite quickly. Luther sits them down and says, “I think we should get the Academy back together.”
This seems rather sudden, but it occurs to Five that he has no idea how many days have passed. He’s thinking in days, but he realizes a second later that it’s been weeks. He doesn’t think it’s been months, but that probably wouldn’t surprise him.
“You think we can do it? Be a crime fighting unit again?” Allison asks. She’s skeptical. No, she’s sensical. That’s what she is. Common sense.
“Hell, yeah,” Diego says. “But we have to get back in shape. We’re lazy and unprepared.”
It’s something of a surprise that Luther agrees with him. “I thought we could work together to make a training regimen we all liked.”
Diego is rather taken aback by the fact that Luther hasn’t objected to his suggestion, and it’s a good few seconds before Vanya asks the next question. “All of us? Me, too?”
This timeline is changed, but she’s not quite. Five’s had to explain this to them a number of times. They don’t get how they could change the timeline so significantly and still return with the same memories and experiences as they left with. They don’t quite grasp the temporal mechanics involved, especially minor details like how their altered selves still disappeared upon their arrival. It’s theoretical quantum physics that Five is only just now starting to process as definitive fact, so he’s mostly told them to be grateful that things have worked out as well as they have.
“Of course,” Luther says brightly.
Diego hedges a bit. “But, like I said, with lots of training. Not all of us are as field ready as the others.”
He looks at his siblings. His gaze lingers on Vanya and then Klaus.
Klaus objects. “Hey! I’m totally ready for this so don’t look at me! I can conjure anyone I want now, practically on demand and did you miss the part where Ben is now at our family meetings. Right, Ben?”
Ben looks somewhat bored. No doubt he likes being seen again, but he’s also a bit exasperated by being Klaus’ go-to bragging point. His siblings have also been confused about the bit where Ben is still dead and there had been some discussion about going back to save him, too, but Five has resisted this because, truth be told, he’s not sure how he managed to make things work out so well the first time around. Any further incursions, and he worries he’ll mess things up worse than before.
He simply tells them that the odds are against it, and they take it fairly well. Ironically, Ben takes it better than the rest of them.
“They can see me, Klaus,” Ben intones.
“Oh, right,” Klaus says, snapping his fingers. He smiles sheepishly. “I forget that still. Because I’m learning about new powers that I have every single day.”
He finishes by glaring back at Diego, as if to say I told you in way more words.
“More training will only help you figure out all you can do,” Luther says, trying to be helpful.
Five clears his throat, crosses his arms over his chest and stands up. “I think it’s a necessary plan of action,” he says. “As our previous experiences have proven, the Umbrella Academy is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.”
“Well, sure,” Allison says, and she laughs as if he’s told some kind of joke. “But we stopped the apocalypse, right? I mean, that’s not going to happen again or anything.”
Five manages not to roll his eyes, but only just. “Vanya may not explode again, but that doesn’t mean that we’re free from all threats,” he says. “If anything, we should know now more than ever that the timeline is never completely secure. I managed to take out the Handler, but we can’t be so naive. The Commission is still out there, somewhere. Which means they’re not just existing at some time. They’re existing at every time. We need to be ready.”
The warning is more dire than he probably intends, but it’s not an overstatement. It is also a really good point. For all that Luther is Number One and good at leading, it’s Five who can pull the inspirational speech out of nowhere. It’s not a talent he’s quite sure he understands, but he thinks it’s a matter of perspective. As in, he has it. His siblings, no matter how smart and talented, simply do not.
“Okay,” Luther says, clapping his hands together and smiling as if Five hasn’t just predicted further negative and irrefutable interference in the timeline. “The Umbrella Academy has officially been reinstated.”
-o-
Then, with that determination, things become very normal. They become routine. It’s all a bit of an adjustment, the Hargreeves siblings living together, but they’ve been through a lot together. It’s amazing what nearly dying and then subsequently saving the world can do to make you forget all the stuff that came before.
It’s perspective, of course.
Perspective takes time.
Time is the one thing, more than anything else, that Five has given his family.
He likes to think that counts for something.
-o-
Training is interesting.
This is not some kind of euphemism. Five likes training. He always had. His siblings always resented their father’s training, and while Five objected to some of the methods and limitations, he always liked the training in and of itself. He had embraced it at a young age, and he’d never had any qualms with the notion of bettering himself for superior performance.
By this point in time, Five hardly needs help fine tuning his spatial jumps, and he’s fortunate that the others don’t insinuate otherwise. Instead, he focuses on learning teamwork again, learning plans, cues and methodologies. He works to predict his siblings’ actions better in order to maximize his effectiveness in the field.
Luther and Diego likewise need minimal instruction. Allison just needs a few brush up sessions to get back on her game before she quickly embraces advanced training in singular techniques. She shows an aptitude for throwing knives, and Five is pleased to teach her the most effective ways to kill a person with your bare hands.
Ben’s training is mostly related to staying manifested appropriately, which means the lionshare of the time is spent with Vanya and Klaus.
Vanya is still new to her powers, and she’s somewhat afraid of them, which is hard to work with but they’re committed. She makes slow and steady progress, though Five doubts she’ll be good in the field for quite some time. It’s Klaus, then, who is the more vexing of the two. Because Klaus’ powers have always been poorly defined, mostly because he has never had any desire to define them. It becomes clear rather quickly that Klaus can do more than conjure the dead and manifest them into the physical realm. Soon, Klaus shows abilities involving levitation, astral projection and even to some extent mind control.
“You could be the strongest one of us all,” Five confides in him, one day after a training session leaves Klaus whining in exhaustion. “If you apply yourself, then there’s nothing holding you back.”
Klaus groans, clearly miserable. “But it’s so tiring!” he whines. “Why is it so tiring?”
“It’s called work,” Five advises him seriously. “I know it’s a novelty for you, but you seem to have a potential for greatness.”
“But what if I don’t want greatness?” Klaus says and he moans again, throwing his arm melodramatically over his face.
Five scowls. “Of course you do,” he says. “Why settle for mediocrity? With a little more work, you could take any of us down in a fight. Even me.”
Klaus peeks out from behind his arm. “But why would I need to take you down in a fight?”
“It’s hypothetical,” Five says with a sigh. “I was hoping it’d inspire you.”
“Uh huh,” Klaus says. “Because taking you out is the top thing on my list of life aspiration.”
Five rolls his eyes, clucking his tongue as he walks away. “Well, you never know,” he says. “Stranger things have happened.”
-o-
It’s not supposed to be prophetic.
The odds are that what happens the next day is entirely coincidental. The odds aren’t wrong, but it’s still weird.
In all the worst ways.
-o-
Five is out getting coffee when it happens. Caffeine is his main vice, especially since he’s giving up alcohol at his siblings’ insistence. They present him with facts about the effects of alcohol on the developing body, but ultimately he’s swayed by the fact that if he gets caught drinking underage, then it will trigger a massive police investigation into his identity, which would be nothing but a mess.
Five’s not unreasonable, after all.
But that means that no one -- absolutely no one -- is taking his coffee from him. He will drink it as often as he wants, and he takes a certain perverse pleasure going to as many local restaurants and ordering it to see the strange looks from the waiters and baristas.
He’s finished two cups and is on his way back and he’s in a rather good mood accordingly. However, one block shy of the Academy, he sees two white vans. They’re parked innocuously with dark windows and no license plates. Five is on alert, and when he rounds the corner, he sees three armed men fleeing.
Five doesn’t need to run the odds on where they’re running from.
Instead, he immediately engages.
The first one goes down easy, but he ends up in hand to hand with the next two. He narrowly avoids being shot, and jumps a few times to put one of the men in the sightline of the other. The shot is followed by a cry and a thump, and Five uses the man’s distraction of having shot his associate to finish him off with a few well placed kicks. When he’s well and out, Five doesn’t bother securing them. Two are likely dead; the third won’t be waking for awhile. Besides, he has other things to think about.
He looks down the road where the Academy looms. Three downed agents, fleeing. That means that there are more inside, and presumably they had been on the losing end of things. That’s the only reassurance Five has as he rushes forward again.
He won’t do the math to tell him the probability that no one in the Academy has been hurt.
The odds are pointless.
Sometimes, just sometimes, Five must rely solely on belief.
-o-
He comes inside, looking for a fight.
Instead, he finds the aftermath of one. The entryway is a mess -- someone has knocked down that stupid chandelier again. There are bullet holes in the walls, and a few pieces of furniture have been smashed in the nearby living room. The door has been blown off its hinges, but Luther is propping it up with his hands. Diego is all but sulking on the couch while Allison pokes at a clearly superficial wound on his arm. Vanya is blinking rapidly, a little wide eyes, as she hugs herself. Ben hovers anxiously over the scene while Klaus chews his lip nervously.
“But how they hell did they find us?” Klaus asks.
“I don’t know,” Diego says. He shoots an angry look at Five. “Ask him.”
Five steps over a few bodies. Some of them are breathing; some are not. “I told you,” he says with a mild grimace. “It was likely only a matter of time.”
“That’s all well and good,” Luther says, walking back toward them. “But what did they want?”
Five looks at the men. He doesn’t recognize them, but he doesn’t expect to. Given their gear and their weapons, he suspects they’re local hires. This is somewhat off putting. Surely the Commission wouldn’t expect, after everything that had happened, for local hires to be able to do the job when trained agents had failed so spectacularly. He’s struck by a fleeting moment of doubt before answering. “At this point, it’s impossible to tell.”
Allison grunts. “But it’s pretty safe to say they don’t have good intentions.”
Five allows this. He steps closer to Vanya and tries to smile at her, for what that is worth. “We’ll have to figure it out, starting doing some researching, looking for clues,” he says with a shrug. “The Commission is only as good as their people on the ground. There will be agents and monitoring and--”
He stops, voice trailing off. He hears a sound, a familiar sound. A sound that makes him forget what year it is all over again.
A whoosh and a thump.
The timeless sound of a pneumatic tube.
Shaking, he turns, looking for the likely source. He sees a panel in the wall glow, and his fingers are shaking when he reaches for it. He presses it and it opens for him, and he wraps numb fingers around the tube as he pulls it out.
He’s aware that his siblings are watching him intently now, all but gaping, and his throat is dry as he pops the top off and pulls it out. Protocol has changed somewhat. The roll is sealed with a sticker. The sticker has a name on it. The name is not Five’s.
He stares at it blankly for a moment. Then, he holds the tube up and turns to Klaus. Offering it out, he wets his lips. This isn’t what he expects; he has no probability for this. Still, he can’t find any way around it as his mouth manages to form words. His gaze is tenuous as it locks on Klaus, who stares, just as wide eyed in return. “It’s for you.”
PART TWO
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
PART SIX
PART SEVEN
PART EIGHT
PART NINE
PART TEN
PART ELEVEN
PART TWELVE
PART THIRTEEN
PART FOURTEEN
PART FIFTEEN
PART SIXTEEN
PART SEVENTEEN
PART EIGHTEEN
PART NINETEEN
PART TWENTY
FIVE
It’s not all according to plan, but they save the world, so Five figures it’s probably okay. Yes, they do have to make an unexpected stop in the past. Okay, fine, it’s complicated as they try to navigate meeting their past selves in order to ensure that Vanya is told the truth at a young age and trained in a supportive setting. And of course, it’s a trial not to murder their old man, who is such an unremitting bastard that Five himself is tempted to do the deed.
This is incidental, however. If you ask Five later, he hardly recalls any of it. He can’t even tell you what year they disappear to.
All he knows is that it took him three days to recover, another two weeks to sort out the timeline, and another week to finalize the final equation to get them back home.
Back to 2019.
The only year that matters. The year Five gets his family back.
The year the world doesn’t end.
As far as Five’s concerned, that is and will always be, the only year that means anything at all.
-o-
It’s all very dramatic, but they fall back into things quite quickly. Luther sits them down and says, “I think we should get the Academy back together.”
This seems rather sudden, but it occurs to Five that he has no idea how many days have passed. He’s thinking in days, but he realizes a second later that it’s been weeks. He doesn’t think it’s been months, but that probably wouldn’t surprise him.
“You think we can do it? Be a crime fighting unit again?” Allison asks. She’s skeptical. No, she’s sensical. That’s what she is. Common sense.
“Hell, yeah,” Diego says. “But we have to get back in shape. We’re lazy and unprepared.”
It’s something of a surprise that Luther agrees with him. “I thought we could work together to make a training regimen we all liked.”
Diego is rather taken aback by the fact that Luther hasn’t objected to his suggestion, and it’s a good few seconds before Vanya asks the next question. “All of us? Me, too?”
This timeline is changed, but she’s not quite. Five’s had to explain this to them a number of times. They don’t get how they could change the timeline so significantly and still return with the same memories and experiences as they left with. They don’t quite grasp the temporal mechanics involved, especially minor details like how their altered selves still disappeared upon their arrival. It’s theoretical quantum physics that Five is only just now starting to process as definitive fact, so he’s mostly told them to be grateful that things have worked out as well as they have.
“Of course,” Luther says brightly.
Diego hedges a bit. “But, like I said, with lots of training. Not all of us are as field ready as the others.”
He looks at his siblings. His gaze lingers on Vanya and then Klaus.
Klaus objects. “Hey! I’m totally ready for this so don’t look at me! I can conjure anyone I want now, practically on demand and did you miss the part where Ben is now at our family meetings. Right, Ben?”
Ben looks somewhat bored. No doubt he likes being seen again, but he’s also a bit exasperated by being Klaus’ go-to bragging point. His siblings have also been confused about the bit where Ben is still dead and there had been some discussion about going back to save him, too, but Five has resisted this because, truth be told, he’s not sure how he managed to make things work out so well the first time around. Any further incursions, and he worries he’ll mess things up worse than before.
He simply tells them that the odds are against it, and they take it fairly well. Ironically, Ben takes it better than the rest of them.
“They can see me, Klaus,” Ben intones.
“Oh, right,” Klaus says, snapping his fingers. He smiles sheepishly. “I forget that still. Because I’m learning about new powers that I have every single day.”
He finishes by glaring back at Diego, as if to say I told you in way more words.
“More training will only help you figure out all you can do,” Luther says, trying to be helpful.
Five clears his throat, crosses his arms over his chest and stands up. “I think it’s a necessary plan of action,” he says. “As our previous experiences have proven, the Umbrella Academy is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.”
“Well, sure,” Allison says, and she laughs as if he’s told some kind of joke. “But we stopped the apocalypse, right? I mean, that’s not going to happen again or anything.”
Five manages not to roll his eyes, but only just. “Vanya may not explode again, but that doesn’t mean that we’re free from all threats,” he says. “If anything, we should know now more than ever that the timeline is never completely secure. I managed to take out the Handler, but we can’t be so naive. The Commission is still out there, somewhere. Which means they’re not just existing at some time. They’re existing at every time. We need to be ready.”
The warning is more dire than he probably intends, but it’s not an overstatement. It is also a really good point. For all that Luther is Number One and good at leading, it’s Five who can pull the inspirational speech out of nowhere. It’s not a talent he’s quite sure he understands, but he thinks it’s a matter of perspective. As in, he has it. His siblings, no matter how smart and talented, simply do not.
“Okay,” Luther says, clapping his hands together and smiling as if Five hasn’t just predicted further negative and irrefutable interference in the timeline. “The Umbrella Academy has officially been reinstated.”
-o-
Then, with that determination, things become very normal. They become routine. It’s all a bit of an adjustment, the Hargreeves siblings living together, but they’ve been through a lot together. It’s amazing what nearly dying and then subsequently saving the world can do to make you forget all the stuff that came before.
It’s perspective, of course.
Perspective takes time.
Time is the one thing, more than anything else, that Five has given his family.
He likes to think that counts for something.
-o-
Training is interesting.
This is not some kind of euphemism. Five likes training. He always had. His siblings always resented their father’s training, and while Five objected to some of the methods and limitations, he always liked the training in and of itself. He had embraced it at a young age, and he’d never had any qualms with the notion of bettering himself for superior performance.
By this point in time, Five hardly needs help fine tuning his spatial jumps, and he’s fortunate that the others don’t insinuate otherwise. Instead, he focuses on learning teamwork again, learning plans, cues and methodologies. He works to predict his siblings’ actions better in order to maximize his effectiveness in the field.
Luther and Diego likewise need minimal instruction. Allison just needs a few brush up sessions to get back on her game before she quickly embraces advanced training in singular techniques. She shows an aptitude for throwing knives, and Five is pleased to teach her the most effective ways to kill a person with your bare hands.
Ben’s training is mostly related to staying manifested appropriately, which means the lionshare of the time is spent with Vanya and Klaus.
Vanya is still new to her powers, and she’s somewhat afraid of them, which is hard to work with but they’re committed. She makes slow and steady progress, though Five doubts she’ll be good in the field for quite some time. It’s Klaus, then, who is the more vexing of the two. Because Klaus’ powers have always been poorly defined, mostly because he has never had any desire to define them. It becomes clear rather quickly that Klaus can do more than conjure the dead and manifest them into the physical realm. Soon, Klaus shows abilities involving levitation, astral projection and even to some extent mind control.
“You could be the strongest one of us all,” Five confides in him, one day after a training session leaves Klaus whining in exhaustion. “If you apply yourself, then there’s nothing holding you back.”
Klaus groans, clearly miserable. “But it’s so tiring!” he whines. “Why is it so tiring?”
“It’s called work,” Five advises him seriously. “I know it’s a novelty for you, but you seem to have a potential for greatness.”
“But what if I don’t want greatness?” Klaus says and he moans again, throwing his arm melodramatically over his face.
Five scowls. “Of course you do,” he says. “Why settle for mediocrity? With a little more work, you could take any of us down in a fight. Even me.”
Klaus peeks out from behind his arm. “But why would I need to take you down in a fight?”
“It’s hypothetical,” Five says with a sigh. “I was hoping it’d inspire you.”
“Uh huh,” Klaus says. “Because taking you out is the top thing on my list of life aspiration.”
Five rolls his eyes, clucking his tongue as he walks away. “Well, you never know,” he says. “Stranger things have happened.”
-o-
It’s not supposed to be prophetic.
The odds are that what happens the next day is entirely coincidental. The odds aren’t wrong, but it’s still weird.
In all the worst ways.
-o-
Five is out getting coffee when it happens. Caffeine is his main vice, especially since he’s giving up alcohol at his siblings’ insistence. They present him with facts about the effects of alcohol on the developing body, but ultimately he’s swayed by the fact that if he gets caught drinking underage, then it will trigger a massive police investigation into his identity, which would be nothing but a mess.
Five’s not unreasonable, after all.
But that means that no one -- absolutely no one -- is taking his coffee from him. He will drink it as often as he wants, and he takes a certain perverse pleasure going to as many local restaurants and ordering it to see the strange looks from the waiters and baristas.
He’s finished two cups and is on his way back and he’s in a rather good mood accordingly. However, one block shy of the Academy, he sees two white vans. They’re parked innocuously with dark windows and no license plates. Five is on alert, and when he rounds the corner, he sees three armed men fleeing.
Five doesn’t need to run the odds on where they’re running from.
Instead, he immediately engages.
The first one goes down easy, but he ends up in hand to hand with the next two. He narrowly avoids being shot, and jumps a few times to put one of the men in the sightline of the other. The shot is followed by a cry and a thump, and Five uses the man’s distraction of having shot his associate to finish him off with a few well placed kicks. When he’s well and out, Five doesn’t bother securing them. Two are likely dead; the third won’t be waking for awhile. Besides, he has other things to think about.
He looks down the road where the Academy looms. Three downed agents, fleeing. That means that there are more inside, and presumably they had been on the losing end of things. That’s the only reassurance Five has as he rushes forward again.
He won’t do the math to tell him the probability that no one in the Academy has been hurt.
The odds are pointless.
Sometimes, just sometimes, Five must rely solely on belief.
-o-
He comes inside, looking for a fight.
Instead, he finds the aftermath of one. The entryway is a mess -- someone has knocked down that stupid chandelier again. There are bullet holes in the walls, and a few pieces of furniture have been smashed in the nearby living room. The door has been blown off its hinges, but Luther is propping it up with his hands. Diego is all but sulking on the couch while Allison pokes at a clearly superficial wound on his arm. Vanya is blinking rapidly, a little wide eyes, as she hugs herself. Ben hovers anxiously over the scene while Klaus chews his lip nervously.
“But how they hell did they find us?” Klaus asks.
“I don’t know,” Diego says. He shoots an angry look at Five. “Ask him.”
Five steps over a few bodies. Some of them are breathing; some are not. “I told you,” he says with a mild grimace. “It was likely only a matter of time.”
“That’s all well and good,” Luther says, walking back toward them. “But what did they want?”
Five looks at the men. He doesn’t recognize them, but he doesn’t expect to. Given their gear and their weapons, he suspects they’re local hires. This is somewhat off putting. Surely the Commission wouldn’t expect, after everything that had happened, for local hires to be able to do the job when trained agents had failed so spectacularly. He’s struck by a fleeting moment of doubt before answering. “At this point, it’s impossible to tell.”
Allison grunts. “But it’s pretty safe to say they don’t have good intentions.”
Five allows this. He steps closer to Vanya and tries to smile at her, for what that is worth. “We’ll have to figure it out, starting doing some researching, looking for clues,” he says with a shrug. “The Commission is only as good as their people on the ground. There will be agents and monitoring and--”
He stops, voice trailing off. He hears a sound, a familiar sound. A sound that makes him forget what year it is all over again.
A whoosh and a thump.
The timeless sound of a pneumatic tube.
Shaking, he turns, looking for the likely source. He sees a panel in the wall glow, and his fingers are shaking when he reaches for it. He presses it and it opens for him, and he wraps numb fingers around the tube as he pulls it out.
He’s aware that his siblings are watching him intently now, all but gaping, and his throat is dry as he pops the top off and pulls it out. Protocol has changed somewhat. The roll is sealed with a sticker. The sticker has a name on it. The name is not Five’s.
He stares at it blankly for a moment. Then, he holds the tube up and turns to Klaus. Offering it out, he wets his lips. This isn’t what he expects; he has no probability for this. Still, he can’t find any way around it as his mouth manages to form words. His gaze is tenuous as it locks on Klaus, who stares, just as wide eyed in return. “It’s for you.”