westwhere | i've spent all of the love i've saved { open }

Where do you think?

[Sorry, Five, she doesn't have the patience for questions you already know the answer to. Because she thinks it should be obvious enough. Nothing in Serithca could have made her this angry, except maybe finding confirmation of all of Five's paranoia and finding Diego's body dead in a ditch somewhere. But given she is sans a corpse and trying to destroy the beacon with her mind, because it's clearly as useful as a pile of rubble, that is not the case.

But before he can yell at her for jumping the gun and using the beacon as a shortcut:]

I really don't want to hear it.

[ He flexes his jaw, but manages to disguise how deeply that stings. She went back. If he hadn't been so gun shy about getting answers from Lila, he might already know what she's angry about. Maybe then he would have been able to warn Allison of what they'd be facing back home to dissuade her from making any rash decisions.

There was just too much going on and he couldn't afford to be distracted. It was stupid. He should have asked the first time he saw Lila. Now he's the one in the dark, trying to catch up. ]

Okay. [ He gestures to her arm. ] You want to tell me what did this?

[She takes a deep breath, because that's a more complicated story than she can answer in a sentence but she's going to try:]

Dad has a reset button for the world in a space ship attached to Hotel Oblivion.

[Yeah. That makes sense.]

This was from one of the guardians. It's dead now.

[ From the look on his face, not one word of that made any sense to him. Although it really shouldn't surprise him that Reginald is still alive, or that he has a spaceship. He did send Luther to the moon. The rest of it though...

He kicks the words around in his brain, trying to find the logic behind them, until he abruptly snaps back at her. ]

What do you mean reset button?

[She takes a deep breath before scrubbing at her face, and tries to find a way to put all of this into a cohesive story. She's not sure she can - she doesn't have enough of the pieces from Reginald beyond what he told her, but she's going to try.]

There's this thing called the Seven Bells. It's one of those stories that just gets repeated over and over again, constantly changing but it all says the same thing in the end? Find the signs and you can get whatever your heart's desire granted to you. And it's guarded by these three guardians that we had to distract while Dad was trying to find the Bells.

But he needed certain things in order to make it work. Seven ... sacrifices, with the particles that give us our powers. That's why there's always been seven of us.

[Seven children, seven sacrifices. The math adds up, though not until she was looking at it with all the details.]

Anyway, Dad found it, built the Hotel around it to protect it, and started collecting everything he needed.

[ Five opens his mouth a few times, but no words come out. He always suspected their father had plans for them that were bigger than saving the world, he just thought he was a man of science. He can't even picture him saying the words 'whatever your heart's desire' unless he was mocking one of them.

There's a more important point lodged in the middle of that story. He has to ask before he can move past it. ]

He sacrificed us?

Kind of.

[It was most of them. It wasn't her, but she knows now that that was only because he had spare children to use as options. She knows she needs to start at the beginning.

So she starts at the beginning.]

When we got back to 2019, it wasn't to the Umbrella Academy. It was to the Sparrow Academy, and we were no longer Reginald Hargreeves children. Ben's also alive, by the way, but he's kind of a dick.

[Granted, they're all dicks, in their own way, so that's probably the least surprising thing.]

[ 'Kind of' isn't the answer Five was looking for, but before he can press the details she drops another string of startling revelations. He fucked up. In the '60s, he insisted on seeing Reginald, and now... obviously their meddling didn't go well.

Ben's alive. That's one bright side he hadn't thought was possible. ]

We changed the timeline. [ That much isn't a question, but something he really should have paid closer attention to. Why sparrows? ]

There were seven of them too?

Yeah. Though one of them was Ben, so there's still thirteen of us, not fourteen.

[Anyway.]

It's really more Viktor's fault than yours, if that helps.

[Then a beat, as she realizes.]

Vanya is Viktor now. It's probably the least crazy thing that happened.

Edited 2022-12-18 00:23 (UTC)

[ It isn't the first time he heard the name; Lila mentioned it in passing when he found her, but he'd barely had time to question it. His memories being what they are, it was lacking some impact. Now he seems to understand a little more.

He's quiet for a moment before nodding. His siblings are alive, all of them, and he should focus on that. It sounds like Ben was adopted and the rest of them weren't. If they ever needed proof that they were directly responsible for his death, take a look at what happened when they weren't around.

He just can't connect the thread that puts the blame on... Viktor. ]

How?

Remember Harlan? That kid Viktor accidently gave his powers to?

[Deep breath. Here we go.]

He didn't do as good a job of taking them back as he thought. Harlan still had some of his powers, and he had trouble controlling them. Apparently he and Sissy were looking for Viktor for decades, until Harlan finally felt him in the ether - on October 1, 1989. What Harlan didn't realize, though, was that Viktor hadn't been born yet. So when Harlan tried to reach out ...

[Well. Better rip off this bandaid.]

He killed our mothers. All of them. In the future we returned to, we were never born. It triggered something you called a kugelblitz.

[ He twitches as she explains, never bothering to point at the gaps in his memory when it comes to Viktor. It's hard to focus on anything else when she describes what happens. He recognizes it immediately, and suddenly the open air feels suffocating.

He can't find his voice at first, barely muttering "The Grandfather Paradox" as he tries to wrap his brain around what this means. Lila hinted at some horrible future, but he assumed it was something they could handle. If they triggered a kugelblitz that means... ]

We did it again. [ He can't seem to get enough air and he backs up a few steps as the full impact hits him. All his theories, his plan... ] ...Shit.

[Allison would love to place the blame on Viktor, but she remembers, now, that Five doesn't have any context for that, so it won't really do her much good.

She also knows that this might be too much. That there's more to deliver, because she doesn't want to be policing what she says if she can help it. But she knows it might be too much at once.]

Do you need a minute?

[ Five laughs at the question. She just told him that their existence causes the end of the world. Again. He can't be protected from something that big.

He just doesn't know if he has it in him to stop it a third time. Allison might. When Lila appeared he didn't have the time to let the future distract him, but he can't avoid it any longer. ]

There's more?

Yeah.

[Honestly, that's just halfway through the season, we've still got lots to cover.]

Not all of it is bad though. Luther got married at the end of the world. It was actually rather sweet.

[She wishes she had been a little less angry and able to enjoy it more.]

[ His eyebrows shoot up at that. Luther got married? To who? Add in Lila's pregnancy and it sounds like they almost had a shot at the life that was stolen from them. ]

...How long did we have?

[ From his tone, he's aiming for an exact number of days. He thought it wasn't long. How much time did they have before they knew the world was ending? ]

Less than a week, I think?

[The usual timeframe for these kinds of things.]

And ... I know how that sounds. But when you think you're going to die, might as well go out with a bang.

[ A few days. On the face of it, it's ridiculous, and telling of what they were up against. If Luther had time to get married, they didn't think they could stop it. What the hell was he doing?

He clears his throat and tries to take it one tiny piece of information at a time. ]

Who did he marry?

Her name's Sloane. She was the new Number Five.

[And as though to confirm Five's suspicions:]

There was nothing we could do. Even you agreed that we should just let it go. So Luther and Sloane decided that it was now or never.

[ The 'new' Number Five. Luther married a Hargreeves? ]

Even... [ He can't take it standing any more. He sits down on the ground and rubs his face in his hands. Dying together isn't what he wanted for them. There has to be something else that made him give up. He would have explored every angle possible to save them. ]

What's meant to be is meant to be, huh? I always hated that bullshit.

Me too. Especially since giving up meant giving up on Claire.

[She makes a face.]

Since we didn't exist, she didn't exist and I ... did not take it well, to put it lightly. I was not the best wedding guest. But that wasn't the end of it. Dad was still trying to convince us to save the world. And I ... I fucked up.

[Because she can see that now, even if she doesn't necessarily think she was wrong.]

[ He looks pained when she mentions Claire. He'd known it was a possibility back in the '60s, that the lives they had in 2019 wouldn't be exactly how he left them. But he'd forced her to come anyway.

They have an opportunity while they're here, to have time to figure something out to change it, but it's too overwhelming to piece together right now. He's so tired of starting over only to make things worse. And knowing dear old dad decides to sacrifice them... it's hard to imagine how else they could have fucked up. ]

What do you do?

I made a deal with Dad.

[She shakes her head.]

He told me he had a way to fix it. Reboot the world so that everything was how it was supposed to be, but we needed to convince the rest of you to help. And I was so desperate to get my daughter back that I agreed.

[There's a deep shuddering breath as she finally has a moment, and the weight of what it cost them really came down on her.]

He didn't tell me that part of the plan was killing Luther.

[ 'Reboot the world' doesn't make any sense to him, but his expression hardens the moment she starts talking about making a deal with Reggie. She'd already mentioned that he intended to sacrifice them. Apparently he succeeds.

He swallows and looks up at her. Dying together is one thing, but it doesn't sound like they all make it. Because of Allison. ]

He killed Luther. [ He takes a few deep breaths, trying to keep his anger under control while he's still getting the full story. ] You know he never gave a shit about any of us. You really thought he was telling the truth?

[She did preface this by saying she fucked up, Five.]

I didn't care. And he didn't tell me all of it. I didn't know what the cost of the Bells was, or why he needed all of us. He just knew that some of the family needed to be ... persuaded. And he knew I was motivated.

[And because she feels the need to clarify:]

I didn't rumor anyone. I just tried to plead my case. But no one was biting, so ... Dad felt like he had to take it to the next level, I guess. And it worked. Killing Luther got everyone into the other hotel to find the Bells and the thing started and I realized what was happening, I stopped it. I stopped him.

Permanently.

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