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Luther, Vanya knows, is Number One. This means that he is the best example of Father’s teachings, the strongest member of the family, the leader. When reporters swarm the six, it is always Number One they go to first, because he is the real hero of them all.
And Luther-Number One, had decided that Vanya was too dangerous to live. Number Two had been right by his side.
At first it is betrayal that steals her breath away, that fills the space around her with dizzying, electrifying potential. And then Vanya is rocked by so much anger that the old, familiar fear creeps in again to match it, amplifying the buzz to the rhythm of her heart and making it impossible to ignore. Vanya tries anyway.
She’s known all her life that she is an outsider, a failure, but it still hurts that her brothers and sister had deemed her a lost cause. That Number One had pretended to care, and nearly broken her spine as she’d started to hope. That they hadn’t hesitated for even a moment before locking her away in that cell.
The cell, Vanya realises, that she can currently see the ceiling of. When she remembers enough about her limbs to move them, she scrambles up clumsily, desperate to prove herself wrong.
She is not wrong.
The panic propels her not to pound on the glass in the door with her fists, but to feed her fear into the area around her, and suddenly she feels very, very sick. Has this happened before? She thinks it might have, in a dream.
There had been Allison, Number Three, an argument with words that were more sound than meaning flung about in the enclosed space of Leonard’s cabin by the lake. Vanya’s power had sung then, in tune with her pain and frustration, and somehow there had been so much blood-
Then Leonard, he hadn’t been Leonard at all. He’d lied to her all along, used her to get to her siblings, and the trust she’d had in him had turned to sharp, biting rage. The horror on his face had been so clear as knife after knife had followed her directions and led to the kind of mess that was only supposed to happen in movies.
And the house, she’d gone back there so naively, as if the others would actually want to help her. Every molecule within it’s walls had sung with her will, and the song had grown louder with every remembered betrayal until even Pogo had gone flying. That part was hazy, because the world had been so distant against the backdrop of her power, yet his dying breaths had complemented her melody and been all the clearer for it.
Had there been something after that? A concert? A smile turned into a scream?
A nightmare, it had all been just another nightmare. She’d had lots of them, about a room like this one, and if she could snap herself out of it she’d be back in her apartment wrapped in a lenor-scented blanket in the bedroom she’d been allowed to paint herself.
Vanya sinks down to the titanium alloy floor, unforgivingly cold against her bare knees, and clasps her hands together as if in prayer.
It is at this point that she actually looks at her hands, to see not her own fingers calloused from years of violin practice, but spindly stick-thin appendages. She swallows, and the sound reverberates in her cell with so much promise that it nearly swallows her whole.
She is not thirty, but ten. And she can’t stand for the weight of her horror because she is not dreaming, and her power is still smothering her like Lu-Number One’s hug.
Vanya stops herself from gulping in air, terrified of the noise, and tries to push past it to focus on the door. She is scared, after all, and if she doesn’t somehow stop being so frightened, things will start exploding. Small, enclosed spaces have been the source of her panic attacks ever since she was- well. Since she was ten, thereabouts.
She is absolutely capable of forcing her way out, if what she remembers is correct. Only, that hadn’t led to anything good, that had been giving in. She doesn’t want to surrender to her power this time, not even for a moment.
So the ever-excluded Number Seven does what she is good at. She squeezes her eyes closed, and pretends she’s back in that first chair, with her precious violin. She pretends that she’s playing something quieter than a whisper, the soothing lullaby that Mother had sung so sweetly, and she lets the real world grow distant.
“Number Seven. It seems you have some measure of control after all.”
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The strangest part, Vanya decides, is sitting at the opposite end of the dining table to Father, with six siblings staring sullenly at their plates. She remembers that Number Five had sneaked glances at her before, worried about the special training she’d been given, only this time he doesn’t look up once.
Number Three rubs at her throat three times in the span of a minute, and Number One glares down in a way he definitely hadn’t as a teenager.
Vanya forgets for a second that there is a piece of chicken dangling from the fork inches from her mouth, because suddenly things make a little more sense.
Number Five, with his time travel- he had to have…
Taken them back. Taken them all back, to before Vanya had filled the house with her refrain.
She fights to keep her breathing even, because her nightmare was not a nightmare at all, and lets the dinner drop down to her plate. It makes sense, that none of them will look at her, if she lost control and…
Vanya stills, and works to keep her pain from tainting the space around her. The task is challenging enough, an ocean of hurt trying to spill out of her, but she decides abruptly that she does not get to feel that way, not if her memories are true.
Her siblings had betrayed her, that was true, but they always had, they always would. She had reacted…worse than she ever could have imagined.
She had blown up their home, Father’s home, Pogo’s home…with Mother still in it. With One through Six still in it.
“Vanya?”
Mother asks, breaching protocol, and the monster can’t react. She doesn’t deserve that name, not at all, it’s the name Mother had given her to make her seem human and she is anything but. Someone else fills the silence, she almost resents them for the temptation, but she won’t give in to it.
“Is something the matter, Number Seven?”
That is what she is, Number Seven, Father’s failed weapon. She shakes her head minutely, determined not to pollute the dining room with her voice, and the meal goes on as if nothing had happened.
Five does not slam his knife into the table and demand to bend time to his will, he does not look like he will do that any time soon.
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Seven refuses to take off the mask that Father gives her, and she knows that the others take it as a sign that she is the old version of herself, the jealous one, even if she won’t say a word to anyone. It is actually because when she does dare to remove it before showering and sleeping, her reflection in the bathroom mirror is just as freakish as she expects. Her irises are a glowing silvery white, filed with the promises that her power won’t stop making and she knows that these are the last eyes that Pogo ever saw.
“Number Seven has had sufficient training to join you in your debut this afternoon.”
Five’s head snaps up in shock, his shoelaces no longer very interesting, and Seven can’t help but flinch at the terror coiled around him like a snake about to bite. She deserves this, there is no doubt about that, and she won’t set her pain loose like a rabid dog again.
“Sir, you said she was dangerous!”
One speaks for all of them, his shoulders squared, ready to fight for the safety of the siblings he gives a shit about. Father merely scoffs and pushes Seven forward as if she actually is just a little girl.
“You are all dangerous. Number Seven has demonstrated more restraint with her powers than even you, Number One. Or was it another who tore the bathroom door of its hinges?”
One blushes, actually blushes, and Seven is somewhat shocked at how easily he stands down. There is an oppressive weight between them all, not simply distrust but fear so strong that it hums without any assistance. Seven doesn’t know how to make it go away, so she sticks to her guns and goes for the silent approach.
Three is the first to approach, skittish, tense. Seven watches her, ready to bolt, and somehow the other girl manages to pick up on that.
“Was Father’s training that bad?”
Seven blinks uneasily, and chooses not to respond. The answer is both obvious and not, depending on which angle her sister is coming from. It takes a moment for the awkwardness to pass, and then Three takes Seven by the hand.
The last person to hold her hand had been Leonard, but Seven’s poker face must be improving.
“So the plan is to have me go in first, and distract them enough for Luther to take some of them down from above and Diego to take to the floor. Then Five can take the leader, and Ben can handle the others raiding the vault. You and Klaus can be the initial recon and then back up. How does that sound?”
Seven is grateful that she gets to hang back, but she gets the feeling that their father won’t have any of it. He wants to test her, no matter how scared everyone is of the results. She pulls away to clasp her hand behind her back so they won’t shake so obviously and tries to stare the ground into swallowing her so she doesn’t have to be the one to break the news.
Fortunately, Three has always been quick on the uptake.
“Father won’t like that, will he?”
There’s resignation there, a little less on the fear side, and Seven can’t help but let a little of her neglected hope brighten the pace around her. She thinks she gets away with it, only Three gasps, and it’s not out of horror.
“Is it mood based? Is your power mood-based?”
Seven tilts her head, then brings a finger up to her own lips.
“Father said you used sound. I can’t – does that mean-“
Seven doesn’t like the expression on Three’s face, so she tries for a little bit of charades, moving her hands up and down as if they belong to an old fashioned scale.
“Both? But Father doesn’t know. Why?”
Well, because Seven has done enough damage. She doesn’t want to see the look on their faces when they realise that the last time she last control, it had been less because of too much noise and more because she was too much of a weakling to roll with the punches as they had. On top of that, Father had trained her like one of Pavlov's dogs to rely on sound, and the rest of it is all hers.
She shrugs in answer, and then Three’s eyebrows rise up.
“Is there something wrong with your voice?”
Seven smiles tightly, because this is so incredibly ironic, and yes her sister’s lips do twitch at the sick inside joke she doesn’t know Seven is in on. The self loathing comes roaring back in, and then Seven has to stop concentrating on the moment and try to stop something bad from happening.
The next thing she knows, it’s showtime.
Seven settles on the least dangerous contribution she can give while still meeting Father’s combat competence goals. She veers away from her own pain, her own anger, because what’s there is so intense that it can only lead to thins best avoided, and instead trips up a skinny prick holding up a little girl with her pigtails using only his excitement. There’s enough left over, even, for Seven to do something she’d thought impossible. She takes the energy, crushes it into something nearly visible, and folds it under the girl like a mattress.
It works.
Three stares from the doorway, wrapped in a cloak of surprise and … awe. At that, Seven finds the fog creeping in again, the self loathing that tries to strangle her, because she doesn’t deserve such a positive response. Her powers are dangerous, and she is a monster, those are the facts.
One breaks through the skylight, and the action resumes. It’s almost a relief.
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Sometimes Seven loses her grip on the sense of unfairness she has, on the rage turned inwards and the dregs of betrayal that she can’t justify. On those occasions she usually lingers in doorways waiting for the knife in her heart, for the I heard a rumour to start closing in on her, for One’s arms to wrap around her like a vice even if they aren’t nearly so big yet.
The old Seven would have tried to go running to Five or Klaus, but she knows better than to expect a warm welcome. Instead she makes use of the training she’s getting this time around, and makes as if to go for a bath in her en-suite. There’s no camera there. She lock the door for pretence, and slides down the guttering to the blind spot next to the porch, and then she shoves her hands in her pockets and starts walking.
The distance helps, it always has, and she finds herself exploring a city she’d always been scared of before. She’s more scared of herself than any would-be muggers, and it’s almost a relief.
She steers clear of the antique shop, and instead wanders through a retail district further south, more entranced by people’s delight at their new wares than anything else. There’s a waver in the air, something less than explosive, and Seven doesn’t dare to touch it but she gravitates towards it all the same.
The best place, she realises, has to be the soup kitchen on the outskirts of the supply depot. At first there’s doom and gloom, a tenseness, wariness, the atmosphere is akin to a cornered tiger. When Seven get’s a little closer, there’s…compassion.
She thought she’d forgotten that.
The people queued up are hunched over, in tattered clothes, but with the soup in their hands they’re visibly grateful. It’s a wonderful process, and she thinks she might be grateful for a power that lets her see that so clearly.
She visits again the next day, after Father slaps her for refusing to use her voice to answer him, and it’s the first time someone notices her. The mask and the school uniform aren’t exactly inconspicuous, but she’s gotten good at staying out of the way with the new physical conditioning routine coming into play. This time she thinks her wrist might be sprained, which is more than a little annoying. She’s enough of a freak in the field, to be a liability as well is pretty much a death sentence, in One’s eyes, she’s sure.
“Where’s your mum?”
Seven pretends she can’t hear the well meaning volunteer, but the man doesn’t take the cue to leave. She stares at his trainers, well worn once-white high-tops, at the hems of his jeans, but he steps closer and out of habit she looks up to gauge what his next move will be. She registers a plain white T-shirt, a wispy brown beard, round cheeks and crows feet before he hisses and his space is filled with some kind of contained fury.
Her confusion gives way to caution, and she moves one foot back as the emotions begin to play out across his face. Whatever it does to her expression stops him short.
“Hey, I’m not going to hurt you, okay?”
She knows that. She is stupidly capable of defending herself even if he is, but she really doesn’t want it to get to that stage.
“Just-did someone hurt you? Is that why you’re here?”
She swipes at her stinging lip with the back of her hand and it comes away smeared with red. Right. Is this man…angry for her? That is all kinds of wrong.
She shrugs, backs away again towards the ally she usually perches above, and hesitates when she recognises the self-recrimination clinging to the good Samaritan.
Oh Geez.
And, somehow, the naïve bastard manages to con her into weekly sign language lessons, as if she needs some other form of communication.
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It’s hard, facing reporters who are so hungry for the story on the seven preteen superheroes in the care of an eccentric billionaire. Most of the time, at least, the bruises and cuts can be explained away by the recent fight, and Seven never actually says a word, but –
“So you have names, right? You aren’t just One through Seven?”
The rest of them, they’ve used Mother’s names for decades, and Seven has used one too but she’s long since lost the right to respond to it. Maybe her poker face is worse than she thinks, because one of the vultures turns towards her. They all know she won’t respond, not verbally, but this prick can sense blood in the water like a shark or something. She can see the curiosity-hope-satisfaction-triumph at finding a weakness, and Three has never needed to cheat to read people. Three steps in front of Seven as subtly as possible, and Seven tries very hard to brush it off as defending the family honour.
It comes back to bite her when she burrows under the covers later that night, and her door is cracked open.
“Vanya?”
Three tries again.
“Vanya, are you awake?”
Three sticks her head in, squints through the darkness, and seems to realise something.
“Hey, Seven?”
Seven turns her head, and her sister’s face spasms oddly. Apprehension lingers between them, something sad and heavy.
“Do you…not like your name?”
Seven could say so much, and yet she knows her sister won’t stand for the excuses or the stories. Besides, her voice is far too dangerous. She settles on a shrug, only to pause as Three flicks on the bedroom light and starts to use her hands to form very familiar shapes.
Of course, of course – Three would have gone out of her way to learn how to talk after having her throat sliced open like a ripe freaking melon. The guilt hits like a train, so thick that Three must see it because her eyes flick from left to right at the potential for Seven’s power to manifest.
Seven takes pity on her sister, and reassures herself. She teases the miasma into the soft blue hues of moroseness and apology, giving it enough form to become real, and Three’s eyes pop out as if she belongs in a cartoon.
Three signs fluently, even when taken by surprise.
“That feels like sorry please don’t be sorry.”
Seven smiles a little.
“Sorry always.”
“Sad always?”
Seven waves her away, but it doesn’t have any effect.
“Why are you quiet?”
Seven stares at her sister as if she’s the stupidest person on Earth because – really?
She gestures very purposefully
“Dangerous. Scary. Voice noise sound music – monster. No.”
Three seems to fold in on herself, mumbling along with half-coherent signs.
“You’re not. You’re not. You’re VANYA.” As if that helps. And Seven purses her lips to stop herself from speaking even though she’s out of the habit.
“I don’t deserve a name.” She tries to communicate, and drags a finger across her sister’s throat where her power had slit it. Three goes still, and then all of a sudden her arms are around Seven in a vice like grip that is just shy of absolutely terrifying.
“You came back with us. You came back.”
Seven pries herself away, using the usual finger to her lips to stop the conversation there.
“Why didn’t you say?”
Seven shrugs, but Three doesn’t need a response-
“You’re scared, aren’t you? Of Luther? Of me?”
Seven goes for a shoulder pat, and then tries for a sensible response. It’s a little clumsy without a voice.
“Prison. Phobia. Gone.”
That takes a few goes.
“The cell, it’s you’re biggest fear. If you go back there…then you’re gone? You’re too scared?”
Close enough.
“I won’t let him, he can’t do that when I’m conscious, okay? I’ll use a rumour if I have to.”
By the time breakfast the next morning rolls around, Three sits much further away from One, but otherwise nothing seems off. Seven isn’t wrapped in a bear hug tight enough to squeeze the life out of her, or shoved into an apocalyptic future where she can’t screw everything up again, so she makes an effort to believe that the rest of the family don’t know.
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Seven is fourteen when the idea sticks and doesn’t go away, because it makes sense.
She’s the bogeywoman of the Umbrella Academy students, the one the police don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole, the one Father won’t talk to without a sedative to hand, and she knows she deserves it.
She’s a monster, she is. She doesn’t know why they haven’t killed her already because she’s so tired of waiting for them to make their move.
She’s their pet freak, but…she doesn’t need their permission for this, she can trust her own judgement on this one call can’t she?
So she makes it, while she’s staring into her too-white irises in the bathroom mirror for the millionth time. She has the rope already from a training session on rappelling, all the light fittings are of the highest quality. It takes a few attempts to get the right knot but after that –
She falls, only her power gathers like a storm as soon as she starts to lose her breath, and the horribly familiar white sweeps across her vision.
She tries to reason with the madness. There’s no one to fight, nothing to hurt, nothing to take it out on. It can’t damage the house with out putting her in danger.
Only the strength of her unhappiness is nearly enough to undo her, and it isn’t something she can rationalise away.
She finds herself curled up in a ball in the bathtub, a noose slack around her neck with it’s other end swinging incriminatingly from the ceiling, and one of her brothers is leaning over her whispering desperately.
“It’s alright it will be alright I’m here we’re here let me help let us help please don’t go away.”
Seven makes sense of the words, makes sense of Four trying to hug the life back into her, and comes to the only possible conclusion. Four sees the dead. How insane would it drive him to have the cause of the end of the freaking world dogging his footsteps? He’d never dare to sleep again. She can fix this, definitely.
She grasps his shoulders, like she’s seen Two do sometimes, and gives herself a bit of room. She squares her shoulders and schools her power into something she thinks she can keep at bay for this one moment.
“Don’t worry.” She breathes. “I wouldn’t haunt you, you’d be safe.”
He starts bawling, it’s honestly bewildering, and takes a while to abate.
He mumbles things like moron and idiot into her ear, but Seven thinks he just doesn’t understand yet.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Two keeps a careful eye on every one of his knives, but Father still has a machete from somewhere secret. Seven sneaks out into the woods, to where her power can’t kill anyone but herself, and tries again. And again. And again.
She’s more of a monster than she thought. The air screams with the havoc she won’t unleash, and she spends most of her remaining energy trying to keep it from becoming tangible.
It turns out her despair is harder to keep from leaking. That’s how Five finds her, why he teleports across half the city to an unknown location.
He doesn’t say a word only tuts and slings her over his shoulder, before landing in the middle of an emergency room. She can’t wail like she wants to without breaking things, but she thinks he knows anyway.
“Vanya Hargreeves.” He says to the nurse manning the desk, and Seven can’t correct him.
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The next time, Seven knows better than to take a slower route. Five has a couple of pistols, and Seven is getting better at sneaking around.
She goes for it when everyone else is out making a press statement, and they don’t want the mute monster scaring the decent reporters away. The first shot is so loud that her power takes the sound and runs, shielding her soft palate so completely that she spits out the flattened bullet. That same thing happens with the rest of that round, so she tries to go straight for the heart on the second. That angle doesn’t bear any fruit either.
She’s a failure even at this.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Vanya, is there any way that I can help?”
Three is so earnest and alive. Seven pats her sister’s arm placatingly and is stopped from fleeing by a hand on her collar. At which point, Three sees the rope burn, which probably doesn’t help matters.
“Please? What do you need? A drink? A friend? A therapist? A violin?”
That last one sees Seven reeling back in shock, in a mantra of nononononono and Three knows better by now that to hug her like their brother did.
Three squeezes Seven’s hands and goes quiet, almost still.
“I trust you, even with a violin bow. Don’t look at me like that.”
Seven has found a way to express herself even with a mask hiding half her face. It is definitely not a useful trick in this instance.
“What happened back then – we deserved it. We still do deserve it.”
Seven wants to argue, but she doesn’t have the drive. She signs something sensible as a substitute.
“Did the world?”
Three’s smile is sad, and terribly understanding.
“You’re only human Vanya. You can’t stop yourself from getting angry, God knows I’ve done enough damage with my trick. Do you blame me?”
Seven shakes her head emphatically, and Three relaxes.
“I don’t know how you manage it, you know?”
Seven does not know.
“You’re still – still Vanya, silly. You blow up the moon, and you’re still the biggest bleeding heart since Mother Theresa.”
Seven is not. Definitely not. She wouldn’t piss on One if he was on fire.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Seven finds the kid on top of the bleakest abandoned office block in the whole city, perched on the very edge of the roof, and she sits down beside him before she can rethink it. His frustration is about as subtle as a brick to the face, but it’s the resignation that weighs down the space around him, the ever shifting cloud of unhappiness that she can see from miles away.
It’s familiar, and she knows she wouldn’t ever talk herself out of something like this.
But this kid isn’t a monster.
She smiles at him, and he doesn’t lean away. She takes all the optimism she ever felt, which isn’t that impressive all things considered, and she tries to give it to him in the form of a whisper on the wind.
She sees his mother on Fox news the next morning, sobbing out heartfelt thanks for the Heroine who saved her baby-boy, and maybe feels lighter.
The soup kitchen weirdo, the one who taught her to sign, grins even more fiercely at her next time she sees him.
It doesn’t stop her from sidling up to the young woman hiding on the side of the bridge, teetering precariously between I should, I shouldn’t and crying her eyes out.
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Two corners Seven in the kitchen, icecream spoon in one hand and a carton of cookie dough Ben and Jerry’s in the other.
“So. Good Samaritan, huh?”
Seven makes a beeline for the living room, where no one will dare to ask in front of Father. Only Three, Four and Six are staring at her like a science experiment. She has to scurry away from them too, but at least her embarrassment doesn’t sing in the air like it wants to.
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“We need to talk.”
Three signs at Seven, backed up by One and Five of all people, the rest of the siblings lounging on the couch with orchestrated carelessness.
“We’re just going to set some ground rules okay?”
Seven nods mutely, ready to run, and One shifts uncomfortably.
“We won’t hug you without asking.”
That takes her by surprise. It takes One by surprise too, because her looks at Three, then at Seven, and some sort of horror breaks across his face and fills the space around him that’s usually crammed with resolve and grief.
Two’s mouth goes slack. Four whispers holy shit. They all know what the rule means.
“We won’t ask you to hurt people, there are other ways you can give back-up.”
That one gets a confused nod. Naturally, they don't want to test her control and let anyone to get hurt.
“We won’t tell dad about you sneaking out to help people. And in return, you tell us the next time you want to do something…drastic.”
Strange, fair, but altogether impossible. Seven cocks her head, scowls, and somehow Four is the one to break the silence with something useful.
“That’s not going to work, is it?”
One scoffs derisively, clearly about to rail at the village idiot, and Seven is so not in the mood to see Four being used for target practice again. Fortunately Five saves them all from the trainwreck once he’s finished his mug of coffee.
“What Klaus probably means is that Vanya doesn’t have one or two suicidal thoughts every other week. The evidence suggests that she almost always has them, and we are just really shitty siblings. We need a better plan.”
Seven…cannot actually deny this, although she can give a decent effort. She’s so smothered by the blanket o her own guilt that anything she tries will likely come off as insincere.
“Is there anything in particular that precedes a particularly bad time?”
Five stares Seven down hard, and it’s so bizarre to see him trying to help her that she finds herself wringing her hands together. In the end, she settles on the truth. She gives the universal sign for no idea and lets them fun with it.
“Hugs. Violins. Leonard. Father. Antiques. This house.”
Four is good at this game.
“Us. Us?”
Seven really needs to leave it here, because this has gone far enough, only One is blocking her exit and she really doesn’t want to test it.
“Is there anything that helps?”
Three is the one to turn around and give one the look, because duh. Everyone with a brain points at the television screen blaring in the middle of the living room, some bull about the latest act of the mysterious Good Samaritan.
Using her powers to not kill people definitely does help, yes.
“And while we’re at it, your name is Vanya, Mother gave it to you, and you don’t get to throw it away. We aren’t numbers, okay? We’re people. Human.”
Well, they certainly are. Seven can give that part a shot.
Three is Allison. Never Allie, or Honey, or Sweetie, just straight-up Allison. That’s a start.
Seven avoids One, because that’s hard, but okay-Two can be Diego, he’s never belonged to Father. Four is easily Klaus, ever the rebel. Five being Five doesn’t mean he’s anyone’s tool, he has always owned his number like a name. Six gives her pause, she’d never gotten to know the Ben who’d broken free of the save-the-world mindset, but she sticks a temporary tag on that.
Seven is Seven, because she can’t tear out the freakishness that makes her Father’s failure. Luther doesn’t fit One, and she doesn’t want it to, not after the cell-
She stops there, she’s made enough progress, and then she swallows to test the movement of her vocal chords. It hurts, but she can do it, if she trusts her control enough.
She cushioned a forty year old accountant from a twenty storey fall yesterday. She can squeak out a reply without breaking a few vases. Or people. Just this once.
“We’ll see.”
It’s quiet, but it’s still her voice after everything, and that’s a relief. It hangs in the air, a visible string of noises ready to be sharpened into something wickedly dangerous, but she doesn’t reach out to wield it. Her lack of reaction tastes like victory.
The team have stayed together for longer than the first time round, but there are still a few hairline fractures. The press rib each of them constantly, and even though Seven isn’t the same person who sold her story for revenge, apparently most teenaged girls are better adjusted.
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Gerald Falcone isn’t the first to suggest that the Umbrella Academy students have been the victims of abuse, but he is the first to track down Seven’s sign language tutor. Father swears colourfully at the kitchen table for the first time she can remember, even Pogo blushes, Four-Klaus whistles impressed, and the paper is slammed down where everyone can see it.
“What is this?”
Five points out the obvious for her.
“A newspaper.”
Seven gets the backhand and then things go a little wonky. Her power gives her some breathing room after a while, but it leaves her self-loathing manifested as an actual raincloud. She takes the win where she can, because there’s no anger, there’s no damage, there are no cracked tiles this time around.
At that revelation, at a loss of control that hadn’t gotten the whole world killed, Seven stares wide-eyed at her sister, who’s nonchalantly eating toast across the table.
“What? You’re the only one who didn’t trust yourself, you know.”
Right. Of course.
“Five dropped Father and Luther off in the mausoleum. Apparently, Klaus made some friends there, so they’re stuck in time out for a while.”
And if anyone deserves to punish Father in that way, it’s Klaus. Seven can’t help her smile, even though it hurts to pull off, and Allison beams back at her.
“So, do you want to introduce any of us to the one old timer in this city who is not, apparently, an asshole?”
Seven shrugs, and fiddles with the mask that barely clings to her face. After a moment’s hesitation, she drops the piece of plastic onto the table, eyes downcast, and starts walking.