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“I’m not looking for happy.”
==
The year is 1989 and Reginald Hargreeves is found dead in his mansion. Murder. A gunshot through the heart.
==
The year is 1989 and forty-three extraordinary children are born to women who, at the beginning of the day, had no signs of pregnancy.
==
The year is 1999 and a boy gives away his name for the chance to save the world.
The world kept on ending. He was going to stop it.
He has twenty years. The clock started ticking.
==
The year is 2010 and Ben Miller makes an agreement.
He is drunk. He is so very blissfully drunk and he doesn’t remember being this drunk before, even in his freshman year of college when his friends convinced him to go to a fucking frat party. He is alone and he is drunk, and maybe that’s a sign of alcoholism? But that doesn’t fucking matter. This isn’t every night, so he’s nothing like his mother. He smiles at the thought. Yes, nothing like her.
The agreement – yes, the agreement, that’s where I was. Ben Miller makes an agreement with the thing inside of him.
He had grown up with himself and his sisters lovingly calling the monster inside him “The Horror” and their mother “The Terror”. He used to get the worst stomach aches when he was a toddler, like something was trying to crawl out of him, and only when he turned six and the Horror made itself known did he realize that something was trying to get out. The Horror was a fucking demon squid or something, he didn’t really know, but it lived inside of him and whispered to him when he was alone, whispered things about destruction and things about control. At the age of twenty years old, Ben had only released the Horror a grand total of ten times, about once a year when the pain got so bad that he had to release it or black out from the pain.
But Ben was done with that shit. It’s time to make an agreement.
Ben looks down at his belly. He was wearing a shirt a minute ago-? It doesn’t matter. Focus, Benjamin.
“Hey, hey Horror,” he says, his words sliding into each other. “What’re you doin’ in me?”
The Horror churns inside him, annoyed or angry or happy? Ben doesn’t fucking know.
“Use your words, bud,” Ben pats his chest.
He listens.
“I don’t understand.”
The Horror pinches inside him, but drink numbs the pain.
“Okay okay okay, calm down,” Ben takes another swig of his bottle. “I don’t know why either man. I just live in this body okay? I don’t know why you’re here?”
Fear. Ben recognized the tension in the Horror with a sick familiarity.
“No no no, don’t be afraid,” Ben sits up straighter, putting down his drink. “Why’re you afraid?”
He listens.
“Of me? You’re afraid… of me?” Ben almost laughs. “You’re a tentacle monster and you’re afraid of me?”
The Horror pinches him harder then grows warm.
“Oh, I can get that,” Ben rubs his chest. “Control. Yeah, control’s important to me too. Don’t wanna be like the Terror, you know? Not you, you’re the Horror. I wouldn’t mind being a cool monster.”
The Horror grows colder in his chest. Ben listens. He listens.
“Okay,” Ben feels suddenly sober. “Not the Horror, I get it, okay. What do I call you then, bud?”
The year is 2010 and Ben meets – really meets the Eldritch.
The Agreement (the capital letter meant it as official and serious business) was such: Ben and the Eldritch are the same but they are not the same. They may share a body but that body is neither his nor the Eldritch's, but both of theirs. They are in control. Both of them.
They are brothers.
==
The year is 2010. Klaus didn’t think he’d make it this far.
==
The year is 2012 and a woman moves to America.
She is twenty-three. She is starting over as much as a woman like her can. It feels like her entire life has been a progression of snapshots and items, a series of too-bright moments followed by ages of numb. While the world ticks on, she has been ticking a moment behind, it seems, and while there are moments that she feels everything become overwhelming and scary, they are few and far between and it isn’t enough. She hasn't been herself in years.
So she leaves.
A bottle of meds, a backpack of clothes and essentials, a few dollars and rubles, and a violin: this is what she brings to America.
An apartment with big windows, a job as a music teacher, a seat in a local symphony: this is what she gives herself in America.
A musician, a neighbor, an American: this is who she becomes.
Russian still stains her words and she still has dreams of her mother crying because “The nation is falling, myshka,” and “Your father is missing, myshka, ” and “You need to calm down, myshka – take your medicine,” but she long ago took her past and tucked it into her closet.
She is starting over. She is settled. She is content.
She meets a man with no name almost a year after her move.
A man with a blazer and a heart shaped face busts into her apartment bleeding and swearing up a storm, briefcase dragging behind him. The Russian woman pulls a knife from her knife block but doesn’t go to attack even as he collapses on her couch, staining the white upholstery.
“Please tell me you have Neosporin,” he grits out, throwing down the briefcase and gripping his upper arm in a weak attempt to stop the bleeding there.
The woman only stares, frozen to the spot in her kitchen with her knife held in front of her in shaking hands. The man on her couch removes his hand from his wound long enough to give her a good look at the deep gash there before letting out a soft “Fuck” and taking off the blazer and his white button down, now shirtless on her couch. He looks up at her, annoyed for a moment, before noticing her frazzled defensive stance.
“Vanya?” he says weakly. She puts the knife up with a little more energy. His expression falls. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
She shakes her head jerkily, totally unsure what to do with the now shirtless man bleeding on her couch and looking at her with big, sad eyes. She thinks maybe she should know him – the electricity around him feels like a memory and the way his ears stick out just a little too much is endearing in a weirdly familiar way. It feels like maybe she did know him.
The man only begins apologizing, rambling on about timelines and “Forget you ever saw me” and the wrong place. He pulls back on his shirt and his blazer, grabbing the briefcase in one hand and gripping his wound tightly with the other. It feels like a dream, watching the man stumble out of her apartment, leaving only bloodstains and a remaining tremor in her hands to prove he was there.
She is not crazy. She cleans the blood. She makes herself a drink.
==
The year is 2012. Klaus thinks he might not make it to thirty. The thought makes him laugh. It makes Dave look sadder than he’s looked in years.
==
The year is 2013 and boy meets girl.
They find each other online: a woman with magic words and a man with the strength to throw trucks. She’s from Seattle, he’s from Manchester; she’s an aspiring actress, he’s an aspiring astronaut; she’s twenty-four, he’s twenty-four; they are both born on October 1st, 1989 to women that were not previously pregnant. They don’t know what to do with that last fact.
They meet on the east coast of the US after chatting online for almost three years. When he first sees her at the coffee shop they agreed to meet at, he hugs her. She freezes at first, and for a terrifying moment he thinks he’s crushing her. But then she’s hugging back – saying “It’s so nice to meet you, Luther,” and it feels like something falls into place.
You may think this story ends in a kiss. You may think boy meets girl and they live happily ever after. You may be expecting a romance story with all the clichés.
That's not how this goes.
Allison shows Luther photos of her three-year-old daughter; Luther shows Allison photos of his German Shepard. Allison explains how she figured out her powers are based on suggestion; Luther tells the story about literally tossing his mother’s asshole boyfriend out of their apartment at age seven. Allison tells him about her divorce, about how wrong her powers went; Luther tells her about his wife and how even super strength and all the love he could muster couldn’t lift the weight of depression off her shoulders. They go back to Allison’s hotel’s bar and get smashed.
They remain friends when they fly back to their respective homes. When Allison starts to appear in movies and TV shows, Luther sends her texts full of thumbs up emojis and “my favorite line was” and “you were so good in the scene where” and Allison responds with stories about Luther’s favorite actors she’s worked with. When Luther gets an offer to work for Space Tech in America, he sends her a photo of a little one-story home with an American flag and a UK flag out front and an address. Claire spends an entire summer with him when she’s five as Allison films a movie she eventually wins an Oscar for.
It’s not romance. It’s not sibling love. It’s friendship and it’s enough.
==
The year is 2013. Klaus looks at Dave and says “You’re my only fucking friend and you’re dead.” He laughs and laughs until the pills take over.
==
The year is 2014 and a man gets arrested for the murder of a friend.
He sits in the holding cell, waiting to be taken to prison, waiting to be locked up even though he didn’t fucking do anything. Holding his head in his hands, he cries. He cries and panics and wonders if his mother will hear about her little boy getting sent to the slammer and nothing hurts him as much as that thought.
“Diego Castillo?”
He looks up, eyes still bloodshot and teary, at the woman in front of him.
“My name is Detective Eudora Patch. Can we talk?” she drags a chair over in front of the cell, taking a seat and leaning forward in her chair. She has an air of confidence about her that, in any other situation, Diego would’ve been finding very attractive, but in the current circumstances it only made him tense. “I heard the cops who picked you up got kind of a scattered story from you and I was wondering if I could set the story straight?”
Diego stares at her. Nods.
“Good. Okay. Let’s just start at the beginning, yeah?” she smiles at him encouragingly. “How did you know Mr. Montero?”
“Work. We- we both worked f-for the same construction company. We were… we were friends. We’d box t-together down at Al’s,” Diego flinches with every stutter.
“And did you and Mr. Montero ever have any disagreements of any type? Arguments? Anything of the sort?”
“Nah. Nick and I got along p-pretty well. He was… I was going to be his fucking groomsman and…” Diego felt his eyes starting to overflow again. He looks up at her. “I c-couldn’t do that to him or his girl, you have t-to believe m-me. I-I didn’t kill him, please.”
“I believe you, Diego. But my word doesn’t mean much without proof,” she looks genuinely bad for him. He feels his heart warm slightly at her belief. “Can we go back to the night of March 2nd? You weren’t able to give us an alibi for the night and one of the victim’s friends left a voicemail throwing your name around a little rough. Can you tell me anything about that night?”
Diego was out throwing knives at a couple of would’ve-been rapists at one of the dingey little bars in the bad part of town. He didn’t kill anyone, but if he did then he doesn’t know how bad he would’ve felt.
“I was at home.”
Detective Patch looks a little disappointed by that. “Your roommate said you went out late that night.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Then where were you?”
“I didn’t –“
The door behind the Detective opens, a scruffy dark-skinned man stepping in with keys dangling in his hand.
“Well, Castillo, looks like you’re off the hook,” he says, passing by the woman and going to unlock the cell.
“What?” Diego and Patch say at the same time.
“Man just rolled up to the station with a gun he said he found a block from Montero’s house. The bullets matched and the finger prints weren’t yours, Castillo,” the man opens the cell door, taking Diego by the shoulder and leading him out. “In related news, if you happen to know where one Harold Jenkins is, then give us a call.”
Patch watches the two men leave.
Diego walks out of the police station after almost ten hours in a holding cell. He rubs a hand over his face, faintly wondering if he had enough cash for his bus fare home.
He starts walking towards the bus station and promptly runs into a man in a blazer.
“Woah, sorry man,” Diego feels himself flush in embarrassment as he goes to help the man up.
The man accepts the help, a little shaky on his feet. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve had worse,” the man smiles empty at Diego. He slaps Diego on his shoulder and walks away, shouting “Stay out of jail, brother” over his shoulder.
Diego feels a familiar tinge of annoyance.
==
The year is 2015. Klaus wakes up in the hospital.
It wasn’t an overdose this time – no, that he’d been through many times and at this point the ambulance workers just know to shock him back to life and let him go. He sees the casts on his arm and legs, the IV sticking out of him, the feeling of broken ribs and a throbbing headache. He tries to remember something – anything – and finds the last three days missing from his memory.
The Doctors tell him he jumped. Klaus doesn’t laugh this time.
He wants Dave. He wants that stupid fucking ghost that had been bothering him for years to come and start nagging him like he always fucking did but instead he was met with the strange ghosts of the hospital – the paper-thin gowns clashing with pasty sick skin.
He is in the hospital for seven days. He is in rehab for another thirty. He moves into an apartment with a guy and a girl from his Alcoholics Anonymous group a month after that.
He misses Dave.
==
The year is 2015 when Diego meets one Detective Patch again.
She sits at a bar, looking down at her phone with a frown. She looks nice, Diego can’t help but notice. A splash of color on her eyelids, a bright top that fits her in all the right ways. He feels his heart beat a little faster in his chest as he tucks his sheathed knives into one of many pockets in his jacket.
“Detective Patch. Long t-time no see,” Diego tries to be smooth as he leans up against the bar next to her. “Can I buy you a drink?”
She tells him that was the worst pick-up line ever, but she also tells him to stay. She was stood up by a guy she met online, so she tells, and Diego tells her that “whoever that guy was, he’s an idiot, a total fool, a complete bozo-“ and she chuckles. He buys her a drink.
They both want to save the world, he learns. She wants to lock the bad guys up, Diego wants to stomp them into the ground. She wants to make people feel safe, secure, supported.
“The world is ugly,” she laughs though she’s frustrated, he can tell. “But there’s people out there that just want to keep what little beauty there is left. I want to make sure they know they can keep it.”
She has hope in her eyes, and that shit is contagious. The beauty is no match for the ugly, so the ugliness has to be contained.
He wonders what the world would be if the beauty fought back.
==
The year is 2016 and the man with no name drinks himself half to death at a bar in the city.
The Apocalypse wins. He’d done it all. He fucking – he killed dad and it didn’t work. He’d skipped forward and found himself in the world of ashes and flames and as much as he tried to go back and fix things it wasn’t fucking working.
This was the twentieth total restart. He kept going back to 1989 or to 1999 or to the moment when they all split up and he can’t fucking undo anything. The first time it was Vanya. The second time it was Ben, then Klaus, then Vanya again, then fucking Luther (damn that man and his fucking moon) and it never fucking stopped. On attempt number nine he killed Vanya and the apocalypse still occurred (he doesn’t think about the blood or the betrayal. He doesn’t think of sweet, mousy little Vanya with the gunshot wound lying on her living room floor.) On attempt number ten he killed all of his siblings and the apocalypse came with a vengeance, because if you remember, there were forty-three children and they could feel the loss of six. On attempt number eleven, he got all of the forty-three together and the apocalypse came three days early.
He was done. He didn’t know anymore. He was just fucking done.
The year is 2016 and a man with a monster inside walks into a bar. This is not the beginning of a joke, but a chance.
His name was Benjamin Miller, he was twenty-seven, and he was happy. Five looked at Ben with big, startled eyes and tried to keep his cool. He almost didn’t recognize him at the age of twenty-seven. Ben. This was Ben who died at the age of seventeen in thirteen of the twenty past attempts, died younger than that mostly thanks to Five – let’s not dwell on that – in five of the twenty, and in the remaining two attempts he was the fucking cause of the apocalypse. But here was: happy and smiling and twenty-seven, sitting down at the bar next to Five, ordering a drink and laughing with the bartender like they’re old friends. And maybe they are. Five doesn’t know. He doesn’t know any of his siblings in this doomed timeline.
Ben looks over at him. He smiles. “You okay there friend?”
Five nods. “Yeah, sorry, you just… you look like someone I knew.”
“Okay,” Ben’s smile falters only a little. He looks at Five, curious. Five knows he looks familiar to the man next to him: one of the side-effects of messing with the timeline. He sticks out a hand. “My name’s Ben. Ben Miller.”
Five accepts the handshake. A name. Fuck. A name. He panics. “Hargreeves. F-Finn Hargreeves.”
==
The year was 1989 and Reginald Hargreeves met a man with no name.
The man appeared in his dining room as he ate dinner, a blue light flashing him into existence at the opposite end of the table. Reginald didn’t jump, didn’t scream, didn’t flinch, but only raised an eyebrow and continued to cut his steak.
Across the table, the man stared. He looked angry. He looked frustrated. He looked torn apart. His hair was a mess, his clothing torn, his face dirtied save for rivers his tears had traced through the dust. He stared at Reginald Hargreeves, eyes haunted and hateful and – and devastated.
“Dad.” The man said this to Reginald, who in turn only scoffed and looked back to his meal, ignoring the figure across the table from him.
There was a lull of silence. The man wondered vaguely if Pogo or mom existed yet. He wondered if they were here. He wondered who would find him.
“Do you know what will happen on October 1st?” The man asked his father, voice empty. Reginald put a piece of steak in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully and opening a newspaper on the table next to him.
“Do you know?” The man repeated, louder this time. No answer.
“Do you know what will happen on April 1st, 2019?” No answer.
The man grew louder still. “Do you know who the Commission is?” No answer. More trails were cut through the dust on the man’s cheeks.
He shouted “Do you know who I am?!” and stood, banging his hands on the table and knocking a plate off the table in the process. “Dad?!”
Reginald Hargreeves looked at the man now, expression showing only that familiar look of disappointment that the man knew so well.
The man with no name pulled a gun from his pocket.
==
The year is 2016 and Finn shares a drink with a brother.
He’s killed and he’s manipulated and calculated for years, but for one night he does something he can’t remember ever trying.
He listens.
Ben Miller is a youngest child with two older siblings from a father who died when they were young. He does not mention his own lack of a father. Ben is an English teacher at a local high school – and he was always reading when they were kids wasn’t he? – and he’s a regular at this bar because the owner is a family friend. He went to college, once upon a time, to be a journalist but decided after sophomore year he could do more good on an individual level with kids. Kids - he’s so excited to have kids. His eyes light up. Five had never considered any of them having kids – well, besides Allison that is, but that’s only because of Claire. But Ben gushes about his wife – wife holy shit Ben’s married – and how she’s due in October and – and –
Five doesn’t have words for what’s welling up inside of him.
The world could end tomorrow, and yet Ben would die happy. There’s hope in his eyes – well, there’d always been hope there, but now there was light. Ben was happy. Ben was alive.
Five left that night with Ben’s phone number, an invite to grab coffee, and hope. Fuck, Ben’s hope was contagious. He had forgotten that.
He had forgotten so much, hadn’t he?
==
The year is 2017 and Klaus gets a job at a coffee shop.
He knows the owner through a friend – an uncle or something of one of the girls in his weekly drug-free support groups. The owner, Joel or something, he tells Klaus that he gets one chance: if he finds out that Klaus is back on the drugs, then he’s done. Klaus figures that makes sense.
So he makes lattes and macchiatos for a few hours a day to pay the bills. After a learning curve steepened by the fact that he hasn’t had a real job in years, he comes to realize that he actually does like his job. Next to heroin, the warmth of rich black coffee spreading throughout his chest is the best feeling in the world. He drinks drip coffee on his breaks and befriends the regulars – dead and living. His coworkers think he’s a bit odd, but they each seem to have a sort of affection for him, so he thinks he’s doing fine.
His favorite regulars are the school teacher, the musician, and the Vet.
The school teacher comes in maybe two to three times a week, sometimes with a little girl on his hip, other times with a proper backpack full of papers to grade, and other times still with an exhausted looking man in a blazer who seemed to have a slight mental shutdown the first time he met Klaus (Klaus knew he was a catch, but that man was so painfully straight he knew his beauty wasn’t what made the man pause). Ben, the teacher had introduced himself as at one point. He was a total sweetheart who laughed good-naturedly at the stupid shit that inevitably came out of Klaus’s mouth at seven in the morning. A familiar warmth radiated off of him that Klaus didn't quite know what to do with.
The musician comes in in the afternoons, picking up an Americano with room before heading off to rehearsal. She’s a mousy little Russian woman with a violin and huge button-down shirts, and while she doesn’t say much when she’s in, Klaus finds her giggling as he makes little quips to his coworkers or the dead that never leave their favorite coffee shop. Once and a while she’ll come in after rehearsal too, a woman by her side who wears her cello like a backpack and smiles a big dopey smile at her. He smiles slyly at the musician whenever she brings in the cellist, waggling his eyebrows as he looks between the two women. He giggles when she blushes red at his wink.
The Vet was one Staff Sergeant Katz who fought in the A Shau valley in Vietnam. He comes in around 9 am every morning except Saturday, orders a cup of black coffee and sits by the window with a book. On slow days, Klaus will go over and listen to the man tell stories of the war and his life that came after. He tells of men dying in war, about the repair shop he ran with his brother, about the stages he would’ve rather been on, the men he would’ve rather been with. Klaus’s favorites stories include a man named Private Hargreeves, or Spooky as they all called him. Klaus could tell Sargent Katz loved Spooky by the softness in his voice, the sorrow in his eyes. Spooky left or he died or – well, Klaus is never really sure, but he knows Katz got left behind one way or another. Sargent Katz never married after the war, he knows. Klaus thinks maybe he’s still waiting for Spooky to come back.
Sometimes, Sargent Katz will look at Klaus in a very odd way. Klaus wonders if the Sargent feels the same aching familiarity as him. He never asks.
==
The year is 2017 and there is an explosion at the Space Tech building.
Allison storms into the hospital, taking some doctors and nurses by surprise because holy hell Allison Fucking Munro is here.
“Where is he? Luther Vice. Please, I’m a friend. He has nobody, please,” she starts babbling to the doctors before they can tell her no.
Within the hour, she is sitting beside Luther’s hospital bed holding his big, burnt hand in her manicured one. They were always an odd pair, she supposes, but the jarring juxtaposition of the Hollywood starlet and the workaholic-physicist is not lost on her in this moment.
Luther almost died. He flatlined for ten seconds, the doctors tell her. There was damage done to his spinal cord that could potentially limit his mobility, the scar tissue from the explosion would likely remain and, in all reality, he should be dead with the injuries he sustained, but he was going to live. He was going to live.
When Luther wakes, he tells the doctors that he can’t feel his legs.
When Luther wakes, he wishes he hadn’t because he can’t feel his legs and you need legs to complete training to go to space and –
Allison can only hold Luther’s hand as he cries for a dream lost with his ability to walk.
He receives a large sum of money and care from Space Tech. The company doesn’t know what happened to cause the explosion, but they seem truly remorseful at Luther’s condition. The CEO shows up in Luther’s hospital room about four days after the accident. Allison gives them the room, but when she comes back in Luther is crying again. The company is offering him another job, and it’s not as an astronaut, but it’s a good job and they thanked him for all he’s done so far and told him how they were rooting for him and how grateful and – and – and Luther refused the job.
Luther was done looking at the stars he would never be able to touch.
Allison and Claire help Luther move into his new apartment in the city. He’s in a wheel chair now, but he keeps talking about physical therapy and experimental medicine and it gives Allison hope that he’s still kicking but it also makes her so fucking sad because Luther – her Luther – is suffering.
She starts sticking around a bit more. Luther gets a job as an analyst. He begins volunteering at a mental health institution, starts putting up pictures of his deceased wife in his apartment.
They keep fighting. It's enough.
==
The year is 2018 and Five – er, Finn – Finn can feel the world changing around him.
He gets coffee with Ben about once a week and joins his family for dinner maybe every month. Ben’s wife, Ashley, is as beautiful as she is intelligent, and their daughter is no doubt going to be just as beautiful and intelligent. Ellaine. Their little girl was named Ellaine. The first time Five met her, he felt his heart clench because holy shit, Ben was alive and in his life and happy and he had a family and she is so small what the hell and I will never let a single thing hurt her or so help me God.
Klaus works at Ben’s favorite coffee shop, he learns, and it almost gives him a heart attack when he sees him the first time. Klaus was sober. He had a light in his eyes that was missing before, and while he still twitched and flinched his way through his day, Five could tell it was nothing stronger than distraction from the dead or coffee that was causing his ticks.
He sees Vanya’s face on posters and billboards all over town advertising the Icarus Chamber Orchestra, and Allison’s face on TV. He sees Diego around every once in a while, either following around that Detective Patch like a puppy or passing out flyers for a boxing match or a rally or a restaurant opening. He doesn’t really know what Diego does anymore, but he can tell he wouldn’t be doing anything else by the way he greets about 50% of the people he sees by name.
Luther, he finds out, lives in the same apartment complex as him. Yes, he has an apartment. He even has a job too – although he knows he could do better than the ragtag gig he has at Dolores’s shop. But Luther – he sees Luther about a second after he sees Claire (Little Claire, who is so much bigger than Ellaine, but still so little – Fuck he’s going soft) who runs from the Lexus in the guest parking spot right into Luther’s lap. Luther’s lap. He’s in a wheelchair. Five takes a moment to process that. Allison gets out of the Lexus next, smiling and half-heartedly chiding Claire to be gentle even though Luther is already egging her on by seeing how fast he can go in a circle around their lobby, the little girl squealing in delight.
Five, for one terrible moment, thinks he knows where this is going as Allison lays a hand on Luther’s shoulder in greeting, but she only kisses his cheek in a way similar to the way Ashley kisses his own cheek when he comes to dinner. He lets out a sigh he didn’t realize he was holding.
“Didn’t realize people watching was your thing, Finn.”
Before Five can get whoever it is behind him in a chokehold, they step next to him with hands up.
“Hazel?” Five looks at him incredulously. “What the fuck are you doing here? I thought you were in 1952 with that old hag.”
“Her name is Agnes, so watch it buddy,” Hazel’s eyes flash dark for a moment. He looks back to Allison and Luther. “Just wondering if you’d really managed to do it. Stop the end of the world and all that.”
Five grits his teeth. “I wish.”
I don’t know how to save them but I know I can’t let them die now. I can’t give up.
“What’s going to get it this time? Do you know?” Hazel is eating a donut, Five processes somewhere in the back of his mind.
“Vanya. Again.” Five feels his skin crawl.
“Well, how’re you going to stop it?”
Five watches Claire, Allison and Luther disappear into Luther’s apartment. His heart aches for his family, so close yet so far.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “But I will. I have to.”
“Why you?” Hazel asks. He says it so flippantly, shoving the last bite of donut in his mouth and wiping the sprinkles from his beard. But Five’s heart aches and his family is so close and… and as he learned, hope is a contagious disease.
So he says “It’s not going to be me, Hazel. It’ll be us.”
Hazel looks over at Five, but he’s already zapped away, leaving the lingering feeling of electricity in the air behind him. Hazel sighs.
==
The year is 2018.
Five people receive messages from a man by the name of Finnegan Hargreeves with a “please.” and an address.
Five convinces Ben to help him pick the lock of the old Hargreeves mansion – (“Hargreeves? Wait, holy shit, Hargreeves? Wait, are you- ? Are you related to Reginald Hargreeves?”) – and clear debris and cobwebs from the interior. They build a shoddy ramp to the front door wide enough for a wheelchair and Ben watches Finn stumble around the building for about twenty minutes calling for “Grace” and “Pogo”. He never gets a response. Ben doesn’t ask many questions, although he has thousands. He’s known Finn for almost two years now and never seen the guy so motivated, so who is he to question him?
On Sunday, April 1st, 2018, they come.
Finn and Ben arrive first, although Ben doesn’t know what’s to come. Finn brings coffee and muffins and a whole lot of hope in his siblings, and Ben brings only a hoodie and a book.
Next comes Vanya, mousy mousy Vanya, who takes one look at Finn and freezes. The man bleeding to death on her couch from years ago, he was here and doesn’t that just make fucking sense? The man looks a little older but also years younger in a simple black button down and jeans instead of that ripped formal blazer. He smiles at her sheepishly.
“Hello,” his voice attracts Ben’s attention from his book. “Thank you for coming. Thank you so much, okay. Coffee?”
Vanya stares at him. “You were in my apartment.”
Ben looks at Finn incredulously. “You were what?”
“I can explain that, okay? I can, but can we wait until the others get here?” Finn holds up a muffin as a peace offering.
“Others?” Vanya reiterates. Ben looks just as confused.
“Others,” Finn nods.
Vanya sighs and takes the muffin. This might as well happen.
Next came Diego, who looks silently around the room for a moment before asking “Which of y-you is Finn?”
Five raises his hand. Diego pats a jacket pocket threateningly. Knives. Right. Finn only nods in understanding and hands him a cup of coffee.
Allison and Luther arrive together. The others seem surprised and a little star-struck at Allison, but that’s quickly forgotten when Luther says “That ramp seems new.”
Ben and Finn exchange a glance. “It is,” Finn says. “I wanted to make sure you could get in with no trouble.”
“Thanks,” Luther looks at Finn with slight distrust but also appreciation. Allison puts a hand on his shoulder.
The last to arrive is Klaus, of course, who swings open the door with a venti Americano in one tattooed hand and cigarette in the other. He takes a look around the room, eyes settling on Vanya then Ben and Five. “If I’d’ve known you guys were going to be here I would’ve brought your orders,” he laughs. He seems to listen for a moment before laughing again. “Your wife is funny, honey,” he looks at Luther, who pales.
Before Luther and the rest of them have time to unpack that, Five speaks up.
“Okay, okay, thank you all for coming today,” he says, clapping his hands together. “My name is Finn Hargreeves and I was born October 1st, 1989, to a woman who was not pregnant when the day began.”
Everyone was silent at that. Ben looks the most taken aback, and Five feels bad for that, he truly does, but here we are.
“I was born with… abilities…” he had planned this before-hand, had a speech all thought out and everything, but with his family here in this house and the whispers of another life deafening him, he lost his words. “There were forty-three of us.” Everyone seemed shocked at that one. “And seven were adopted – or more like bought – by Reginald Hargreeves to be trained as a sort of… hero super-troop. They were called the Umbrella Academy.”
He could feel Ben’s eyes burning into the tattoo on his wrist.
He could feel mousy little Vanya putting the pieces together in her mind as she looked around with wide eyes at the six other people around her, the air around her shimmering.
“We were supposed to stop the apocalypse. We were. But I…” he looked around at his siblings, all under one roof. “I took it upon my own shoulders to be the soul savior of the planet or some bullshit and… and it doesn’t work. So I’m trying again. One last time.”
“What’re you saying?” Allison is the one to call him on his bullshit – of course she is.
“I’m saying that I need you. All of you. The full force of the Academy,” he knew he wasn’t making sense, could sense the confusion and tension coming off his siblings in waves. “I know you. I know you’re all good people, so I need you to help me.”
“Finn- “ Ben grabs his hand. “Finn, you aren’t making any sense.”
“I know, okay? Fuck, just, give me a second to- “
“You came to my apartment like you knew who I was,” Vanya steps forwards, and even after so many timelines with Vanya being freer than she was in his childhood memories, it still surprises him when she speaks up. “You knew my name. How?”
“I said already, I know you – “
“How?”
“I can’t- I can’t explain any of this to you in a way that doesn’t make me sound crazy, okay? I’ve tried and it doesn’t work.” Finn threw his hands in the air. “I just- I want-“ Five felt a panic attack coming on. It was something he was used to at this point, the familiar feeling of his chest tightening and the world ebbing into a void of color and light. Ben grabs his shoulder.
Number Six. The boy who should be dead. The brother Five thought that one way or another he was going to lose.
Klaus grabs his other shoulder, leaning down to look him in the eye. Five sees the same haunted look in his eyes that he sees in the mirror.
“There’s a guy with the monocle behind you. Very cold guy, he seems like a prick if you ask me. He told me to trust you,” Klaus rests his other hand on Five’s cheek. “I only started my life two years ago. Now you say the world is ending? Nope. I’m not going to let it end so quick, okay? Breathe, honey.
Finn breathes.
He looks up.
He tries to explain.
==
The year is 2018.
They rebuild.
==
They have a year.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ben asks.
“I didn’t know how to start.” Finn chuckles.
The bar is closing in an hour, but barely anyone remains. Ben grips his beer tight. The Eldritch has been restless since learning of the earth’s imminent demise and Ben doesn’t know how to calm him.
“You say you knew me in that other life?” Ben asks. Five nods. “Was I the same? Were we friends?”
Finn looks at him, haunted. Ben almost takes it back.
“You were afraid. The Horror, you called it. Dad tried so hard to get you to control it, but it was just a game of tug of war. You’d be in control and fine one day, then the next you’d be bedridden and screaming,” Finn laughs an empty laugh. “Eventually one of you lost though.”
“The Eldritch.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t like being called the Horror,” Ben avoids Finn’s glance. “His name is the Eldritch.”
“How did you learn that it’s called the Eldritch?” Finn leans towards him, probably a little more tipsy than he ought to be for this conversation.
“I don’t know. I listen? Took us a while to stop being afraid of each other, but being on a first name basis helps the entire, you know, mutual hatred thing,” Ben takes a sip of his beer.
“Fear?” Finn repeated. “The H- The Eldritch was afraid of you?”
“It was afraid of being controlled,” Ben looks over to see the war of emotions on his friend, his brother’s face. “It thought I was going to use it as a tool or a parasite or… well, anything less than a living thing. I don’t control the Eldritch, and he doesn’t control me.” Ben looks away. “We’re just trying to do the best we can. Together.”
The Eldritch warmed in Ben’s chest, the affection felt by both.
Finn grabs Ben’s hand, looking at him intently. “Fear. Oh my God, Ben,” he looks slightly crazed. “I’m so fucking stupid.”
With that he zaps away. Ben blinks. Yeah, he’s not going to get used to that one anytime soon.
==
They have three hundred and sixty days.
Finn convinces mousy little Vanya to down her dosage of pills.
Her and her girlfriend listen intently as Ben talks about the Eldritch and what it entails for himself and his loved ones. He uses words like trust and words like family and words like brother – “The Eldritch is my brother. We just happen to share a body.” Five shudders – and Vanya listens raptly, clutching her girlfriend’s hand so tight her knuckles white.
They tell mousy little Vanya to be brave. Her power is not her enemy, but her friend.
They have three hundred and fifty-nine days and Vanya calls him crying, saying she can’t do it, she’s afraid she’s so afraid fuck, I’m going to do it all again, Finn, please –
In Russia, her mother disowned her, she tells him. Vanya decided that she was done playing the straight woman and her mother was done playing supporter and threw her on the streets. She was without her meds for three days and in that time, she managed to kill three people – men who tried to attack her. Her fear and outrage had a body count.
Her girlfriend – Rosa, her name is Rosa. Names matter, Finn – Rosa the cellist took Vanya’s face in her hands and kissed her. “I’m not letting you lose it, Van. I’m not.”
One day, Five will stop being awed by the women in his siblings lives. But not today.
==
They have three hundred and forty-two days.
Allison starts sticking around a lot more. She still gets recognized, but she deals with it: the idiot with the time travel, he needs her, apparently. She doesn’t get why until he calls her, late.
“Tell me a rumor,” he begs over the phone, his voice shaking. “Tell me that you heard a rumor that I did it. I stopped it. All the dying and the end, I stopped – t-tell me I can do it.”
It is three in the morning. She knocks on his apartment door ten minutes later.
“I’m not going to tell you a rumor,” she says, not even entering, just crossing her arms over her chest and giving him one of her looks. “You don’t need one. I know you can do it, rumor or not.”
And there it is again, that stupid little disease that these people suddenly seem full of – hope.
“But what if I can’t?” Finn wills himself to stop shaking. “Just, please, Allison, please, I promise I won’t ask for you to use it anymore- “
“I heard a rumor…” she says, cutting him off. He waits. He waits for her to declare his fate – the good one, the one he’s been fighting for. “That you end up happy.”
He stares at her. Nothing about him changes. He assumes nothing will. He’ll either end up happy or dead, that’s what will come with the apocalypse. She gently kisses his cheek like she does to Luther and goes back to Luther’s apartment.
==
They have three hundred and ten days.
Klaus shows up to Diego’s apartment looking pale and panicked.
“Hello, brother dearest,” Klaus says in a haughty voice, pushing inside.
“Hey-“ Diego tries to grab him, but it’s no use. Klaus crashes onto his couch, his fingers drumming on the soft fabric. He hums to himself in a spooky key. “What’s g-going on, man?” Diego approaches slowly.
“Why’s something gotta be going on? Can’t a guy just spend time with his favorite knife-man? Bro-time?” Klaus points finger guns at him.
“You look like d-death. What’s going on?” Diego softly moves his legs and sits beside him on the couch, promptly setting Klaus’s legs back over him like it doesn’t matter. Klaus stares at the ceiling. “C’mon, man. Talk to me.”
“I lost someone,” Klaus’s voice is soft. He closes his eyes. “I lost someone. A friend.”
Diego puts a hand on Klaus’s shin. “Do you want to t-talk about it?”
Klaus shakes his head.
“What do you need me to do?” From anyone else, Klaus would find this condescending, but from Diego it sounds genuine.
“Don’t let me leave for a bit, okay? I don’t think I’ll try anything but… but just in case. I need someone to take away my options.”
Diego doesn’t understand, but he listens. When Eudora comes home, he just tells her Klaus is crashing on their couch. She makes chicken noodle soup for dinner.
It’s late at night when Diego wheedles it all out of him.
The vet at the coffee shop, Staff Sergeant Dave Katz, had a heart attack two nights ago. His niece came to the coffee shop this morning to tell him.
“His name was Dave. His name was Dave, Diego, Dave ,” Klaus says this like it matters, and Diego can’t say it doesn’t if it makes him cry like this.
Diego learns about the drugs and the drinking and what he’d do to support his dirty little habit. He learns about the suicide attempt that he, to this day, isn’t sure if he meant or not, having been on a three-day bender of beautiful numbness that stole any memories of that night. He learns about the ghost that followed him around until that day, the beautiful, beautiful soldier with the dopey eyes and the kind heart. Diego faintly wonders if the ghost gave up on him.
Diego doesn’t know when he started crying, but he clutches Klaus as tight as he can, whispering “You’re okay now, Klaus. You’re okay, I have you, brother.” Eudora finds them in such a state and says nothing, only embracing them both and kissing their foreheads.
Eventually, Eudora ushers them to bed, and they fall asleep with Klaus in the middle. Bracketed by two people so full of love, he begins crying all over again.
A few days later when Diego brings the ghost up to Finn, he gets that haunted look that he gets whenever they ask about the lives he came from. He only says “In another life, Klaus got clean too late.”
They leave it at that.
==
They have two hundred and ninety-one days.
Sometimes, Luther wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t agreed to meet Allison in person that first time. He wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t gone into work on the day of the explosion. He wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t gone to Hargreeves’ mansion.
The what-ifs start to haunt you, you know?
He used to be alone. Then he had Allison and Claire. Then Ben and Vanya and Diego and Klaus and Finn and –
The comfort they bring him feels uncomfortable sometimes, if that makes sense. Like somehow, he’s undeserving of the love they shower on him. The doubt feels like a phantom limb holding him apart from the rest of the group.
But they don’t let that stop anything.
Allison and Claire basically move in to his guest room. It starts as a “Just until Finn says we can go home” and then turns into a “Hey, when is rent due?” Luther only sighs and tells his landlord about his two new occupants. Allison starts getting Luther to join in on Claire’s homeschooling. (“You’re a physicist . You can teach an eight-year-old math.”) and she starts getting back into live-theatre and asking Luther to help her memorize and it feels something like family in a way that doesn’t quite hurt.
Ben starts to ask him if he’ll join him and Ellaine on walks to the park. The toddler has found Luther’s lap to be her own personal roller coaster as he rolls around corners fast enough for her to just feel the momentum. Ben will laugh and laugh and buy them coffee or hot chocolates at Klaus’s coffee shop afterward, and the three brothers will chat as Ellaine falls asleep on one of their shoulders. When they part, Klaus will tell him to make enough dinner for four and sure enough he’ll show up at Luther’s with leftover pastries and join Luther, Allison and Claire for dinner.
Vanya invites him to her performances and gets drinks with him sometimes after rehearsals. Luther gets that uncomfortable comfortable feeling the strongest around her, like somehow he did her wrong. She seems to have a similar apprehension, but after the third “Wanna get drinks?” text, she starts to laugh more and poke fun and it feels better. Not perfect, but like they’re getting there.
Finn and Diego are other deals entirely. Finn lives three floors above him in his apartment complex, and so he sees him often enough. There’s random nights when Finn will bust in with some weird dish in hand (“I’m teaching myself to cook, okay? I haven’t had to do this before.”) and some board game, and soon enough Diego will be knocking on the door, half the time bringing Eudora, and looking at Finn and saying “Stop inviting me to an apartment that’s not yours” but he’ll stay anyway. Finn calls them “Family game nights” even though half of their so-called family is missing.
Diego's the only one who asks about the pictures of his wife. They get drinks.
==
They have two-hundred and sixty days.
Diego proposes to Eudora. He calls Luther afterwards. “SHE SAID YES!”
“I TOLD YOU SHE WOULD! CONGRATULATIONS, MAN!”
Luther doesn’t know when he became Diego’s hype-man. He’s never been a hype-man before.
He loves being Diego's hype man.
==
They have two-hundred and fifty-three days.
There is a briefcase on the top shelf of Five’s closet. The last of its kind, they say.
Klaus mentions his soldier in an offhand way to Finn as they sit on his couch watching bad TV and drinking lattes, and Finn looks into his cup.
“If… If I told you that in another life… in another life, you go to war and you stay for him… your soldier…” Finn looks up at Klaus – Klaus the junkie medium who hadn’t been able to stay sober for more than a month in every other life, Klaus the ever-distracted skirt-wearing barista. “Would you want to go back?”
Klaus stares at him. “Absolutely.”
==
The year was 1968.
Dave Katz kisses Klaus “Spooky” Hargreeves under a Vietnam sky.
Klaus knows how this ends.
He knows Dave grows into old Staff Sergeant Katz with the books by the window and the venti black coffee and the heart attack at age seventy-eight. He knows in another life he died and followed Klaus like a shadow, but something he did changed the timeline. He knows he is not Klaus Hargeeves but Klaus Weber and he knows he cannot stay. He knows he loves him. He loves him so much it hurts.
So, the night after he drags Dave back from the frontlines with a hole in his chest, medics rushing him and taking Dave from his arms, he knows his time is up.
He wishes he could stay. Wishes he could kiss him one last time. Wishes so many things.
Private Klaus Hargeeves is declared MIA and eventually KIA.
Dave lives.
==
They have one hundred and eighty-three days.
Diego invites them all to dinner.
Finn comes with a bottle of wine in hand. He doesn’t know what to do in situations like this – he’d never been invited to a dinner party before – but he’d read online that it was polite to bring wine or a desert or something. If anything, Eudora seems charmed when he gives it to her.
And Eudora – Finn meets her for the third time in twenty timelines, and one day he will finally understand how she puts up with Diego’s hot-headed ass. She’s all confidence and softness at the same time in a way that Finn will admit makes his head spin a little. In this timeline, she’s Diego’s fiancée, and Vanya and Ashley both fawn over the ring when they enter.
Diego is busy in the kitchen cooking something that smells absolutely delicious, Klaus bothering and following him around trying to help. In every timeline, it seems, Klaus will stick to Diego whether he wants him to or not. Finn can tell that as much as Diego bitches, he loves the scrawny little medium to pieces. Claire comes into the kitchen after Allison and Luther arrive, and Klaus helps the eight-year-old stir sauces on the stove while Diego finishes dicing vegetables.
Allison sits with Ben and little Ellaine on one of the well-worn couches, bouncing her on her knee and cooing “I remember when Claire used to be so little!” Ben laughs, making faces at the toddler. Five has never seen them so close. He smiles.
Ashley sits on the other couch with Vanya and Rosa, giggling about classic composition or bars or movies. Rosa holds Vanya’s hand, and Finn can see the little squeezes she gives when Vanya gets overwhelmed.
Luther and Eudora have some sort of weird serious talk at the dining room table, Eudora periodically putting a hand on Luther’s arm in a way that seems to ground him. Finn worries for a moment until he sees Eudora pretend to swing a funny punch at him and he blocks it easily. They both laugh, and to Finn it looks like relief on both their faces. He smiles. These two softies with so much to protect. He thinks he understands.
When dinner is served, they manage to get ten chairs around the cramped dining room table, and with children on laps, they make it work. Claire sits on Klaus’s lap, chiding him “You need to eat your vegetables, young man” and Klaus looks ecstatic to comply. Diego and Eudora talk about weddings with Ben and Ashley, little Ellaine bubbling on her mother’s lap. Allison has Vanya and Rosa enthralled with a story about Leonardo DiCaprio, and even with the noise, even with the bustling and the bumping elbows and the mishmash of pasts all come together, Five is overwhelmed for a second by how perfect it all is.
“Look what you’ve done,” Luther’s voice brings Finn back to the apartment. He looks just as awed as Finn is, the familiar sad-misunderstood-puppy look gone from his face. He looks… content. Finn liked the look on his face. It made him softer. “Look at this, Finn. This is amazing, really.”
“I didn’t…” Finn knows he can’t say he didn't do this, because he did. He did this. The love pouring out of the cramped little dining room is all because of him. “I didn’t think I was capable of making people happy - of being happy.”
Luther puts a big hand on the back of his neck and squeezes. It’s comforting. Finn had never thought of Luther as comforting before.
“I would like to make some toasts, if you guys don’t mind,” Vanya stands. Mousy little Vanya. Finn might have to change that title in his head. The people around the table cheer and Vanya gives a wobbly smile.
“I’d like to toast first to Diego and Eudora for this wonderful dinner, and for their future. You are both so wonderful and sweet, and I love you both so much,” she raises her glass and the rest do the same, taking a small drink. Finn doesn’t know if he’d ever heard Vanya say love about one of his siblings like she’d meant it before.
“I also want to toast to Klaus –“ She begins, and Klaus instantly starts to protest, turning red. “Because even though he doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it, today marks three years of a sober and clean life.”
They all cheer and take another sip, Diego patting his back and chirping a little “I’m proud of you.” Finn feels his eyes burn with tears.
“And mostly, I’d like to toast to Finn,” she smiles at him with so much warmth he can feel her aura almost wrap him in a hug. “For bringing us all together.”
“To Finn!” “Finn!” “We love you, brother!” They raise their glasses and cheer, and fuck, now he is crying. He viciously tries to wipe the tears from his eyes as Luther slings an arm around him on one side and Ben ruffles his hair from the other side.
He wasn’t looking for happy. He wasn’t looking for hope.
But it looks like it found him anyway.
==
They have one hundred and sixty-three days.
==
They have one hundred days.
==
They have eighty-three days.
==
They have fifty-six days.
The world is still ending.
==
They have twenty-five days.
Five doesn't understand.
==
They have two days.
He flashes forwards and finds nothing.
They have two days.
He remembers a time when the mantra went that He had two days, He had to save the world. He is grateful for them all, but he knows that in two days they will be dead.
He punches a hole through his apartment wall, tears streaming down his face. He screams into a pillow, throws plates on the floor. The world is ending. He breaks everything because soon it will all be gone. He hears his neighbor knocking but doesn’t answer. He falls to his knees on the floor, sobbing so hard his chest aches, shards of dishes digging into his knees.
This time, there was nothing in the future. No rubble, no ashes. Only a vast nothingness. No signs of life, no signs of death, no nothing.
He doesn’t understand.
“What did I do wrong?” he screams. “What did I miss?!”
“It’s you, you know.”
He looks up to find Hazel standing there again, a smoothie in his hand. He doesn’t understand.
Hazel slurps his smoothie.
“It’s you, Five.”
“What do you mean?” Five crawls towards him.
The look Hazel gives him is one of pity. “You’re the cause of the apocalypse.”
Hazel disappears at the same time that Finn’s door slams open, Allison and Luther entering wildly. They find him hunched on the floor wild and destroyed, a second away from slamming a piece of glass into his temple.
“I heard a rumor you drop it!” Allison screams, and the shard falls from Five’s hand. Luther looks lost but Allison only darts towards him and engulfs him in a hug, ignoring the glass that tears into her legs.
Finn collapses into her embrace, wailing like the child he never got a chance to be.
“You don’t understand. It’s me,” he wails. “It’s me. It’s been me all this time.”
Luther makes some calls and an hour later there are seven superpowered adults in Finn’s apartment and Claire is over at the Millers. Diego and Allison pick up the things thrown around Finn’s apartment while Luther deals with Finn’s angry or concerned neighbors. Finn is laying on the couch with his head in Vanya’s lap, Ben is sitting on the floor next to the couch, holding his hand tight as Klaus paces the room, worrying a curl around his finger.
The man with the monocle that follows Finn everywhere is perched at the dining table, eyes cold and trained on Finn. Klaus studies him for a moment before taking a seat across the dining table from him.
“You’re Reginald, aren’t you?” Klaus asks the monocled man. The man looks at him sharply but doesn’t respond. Klaus feels a coldness sweep over him. The dead become a little bit louder, but he quickly pushes them out. All except the man in front of him. “You’re his dad. Or, I guess, all of our dad, now aren’t you? Man, that’s confusing. Time travel is a bi-“
“Is there a purpose to your insistent babbling, Number Four?” Reginald snaps, and suddenly Klaus feels two feet tall.
“How do we help him?” Klaus gestures towards his brother. “You seem to know plenty, so tell me if you know that, you prick.”
“Always so quick, Number Four. Always so ready to run to others for help before you even try,” Reginald shakes his head. “Pathetic. You were always my greatest disappointment.”
“You don’t know me.” Klaus smiles. He smiles and smiles because he understands. He was his own greatest disappointment too, for a while there. Now, though? Now he had a lot to be proud of. “But you know him. He’s your son. So, help us.”
Reginald pretty much growls. Klaus looks into the other room to see Ben and Vanya whispering to Finn in low voices. He looks back at the ghost. Klaus reaches a hand to Reginald, plucks the stupid monocle from his stupid face and examines it. Reginald isn’t growling anymore, but instead is looking at Klaus with raised eyebrows.
“You don’t scare me, Monocle-man,” Klaus flicks the monocle onto the table. His smile turns sinister. “But I can promise that you have a reason to be scared of me.” He leans into Reginald. “What do you know?”
Before the old man can talk, Finn starts screaming in the other room. He screams like he’s being murdered, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere on an empty wall. He scrambles close to Vanya, trying to get away from it. Klaus looks back to Reginald to find him disappeared. He swears under his breath.
“Finn! Finn, please, what is going on? You have to calm down! Finn! Finn!” Ben and Vanya’s voice bleed into each other, hands grabbing the man, trying to ground him. Allison and Diego run into the room, Luther hot on their heels, eyes looking crazed with worry for the man screaming on the couch.
“Please, no, please she can’t – she can’t- Get away! Get away! Don’t-“ Finn is screaming, fighting against Ben and Vanya’s hold.
Finn suddenly goes slack in their arms.
Everything is silent for a moment, ears still ringing from the screams.
==
In another life, Number Five lived in Turkey. He was born in Istanbul to a beautiful woman who named him after her father. In this timeline, Number Five stayed. He grew up and became the owner of a little shop. He had a wife and twin boys and a stray that his sons kept feeding so it kept coming back. He lived a simple life free of time travel and apocalyptic pressure and the Commission. He stayed. It was trial seventeen. He tried to leave it alone. But on April 1st, 2019, the world still ended. He sobbed and sobbed in the wreckage of his little shop. He wished he was dead. He wished he could just be dead.
==
They have two days.
Finn lies half in Vanya's lap, body slack and face peaceful.
Klaus for a moment is confused, because there are two Finns in the room, the one unconscious in Vanya’s arms and the one standing in the doorway with Allison and Diego. He stares at the Finn in the doorway, but all eyes are fixed on the Finn on the couch.
His blood runs cold.
The Finn in the doorway slowly turns his head towards Klaus, eyes teary and confused. Finn flinches and looks slightly to the right of Klaus.
“I don’t understand,” Finn’s voice trembles. “It was me. Why would you stop me?”
Klaus watches Finn reach as if to take someone’s hand. Klaus swears he hears the sounds of high heels hitting the wood, although he knows not the source, although the room is so still. Finn’s hand grips empty space and looks into empty air with something like fear, something like gratitude. Klaus, for the first time in his life, considers someplace beyond where the dead live. Somewhere beyond life and death and time.
The Finn in the doorway disappears.
Meanwhile, on the couch, Vanya shakes Finn, repeating his name over and over. Ben has his hand in a death grip. Klaus, as if in a dream, walks towards the Finn on the couch, taking the wrist not in Ben’s hold, putting a finger over the pulse point. He puts his fingers to Finn’s neck, double checking.
There is nothing.
Klaus crumbles.
There is nothing.
==
The year is 2020.
Yes, that’s right. The year is 2020.
There are eight things to note:
one. Luther gets drinks with Vanya after work on Monday nights. He goes to physical therapy on Tuesdays. He tutors Claire in math and science on Wednesdays, eats dinner at Diego and Eudora’s with Klaus on Thursdays, and goes to his counseling session on Friday afternoons. The weekends are filled with walks with Ben and Ellaine, coffee at Klaus’s coffee shop, performances of Vanya’s orchestra, visits to Finn’s grave. It may seem mundane and sad and meaningless, but it's not. He is happy.
two. Diego marries Eudora on a summer day in August. It’s a big wedding full of family and friends and coworkers. Klaus is a groomsman, Vanya is a bridesmaid, Ellaine is flower-girl. Diego’s mother cries and so does he. They are Diego and Eudora Castillo. He loves the sound of that. They are happy.
three. Allison doesn’t go back to LA. The presses try to figure out why she dropped out of the movie scene for about a month before leaving her alone. She still gets stopped in the streets occasionally, but the city begins to accept her as another landmark, something that’s cool if you’ve never seen it, but becomes part of the scenery after a while. She puts Claire in public school and works as a director at a local community theatre. She moves out of Luther’s apartment, but only because she can’t stay in that damn complex anymore without thinking of that night. It doesn’t feel like much, especially in comparison to the wild Hollywood life she once led, but despite that, she is happy.
four. Klaus becomes manager of the little coffee shop he once doubted he could hold a job at. He is four years clean. He regularly crashes at the Castillo’s place when he feels like he needs a hit, and he goes with Vanya and Rosa to pride in a crop-top and miniskirt. Ben’s daughter calls him uncle, Ben calls him brother, and Dave calls him sunshine. Dave. Dave, who he’s travelled lifetimes to see, comes back the day after the world’s supposed to end. He’s so fucking happy he could cry.
There is no number five. Klaus doesn't understand why.
six. Ben and Ashley are expecting again, this time with a boy. The Eldritch wants to name him Toothless (“No, you can’t name my son after a dragon from a children’s movie”) and Ellaine wants to name him Kitty (“No, we aren’t getting a cat, sweetie”). Finnegan Miller is born in November. They are happy.
seven. Vanya leaves sandwiches sometimes at night, leaves a light on and has hope for the morning. She doesn’t know why she does it. She doesn’t know who she’s waiting for.
eight. The year is 2020.
They made it.
==
One more thing.
Number Five has lived twenty lifetimes, and this is the one where he takes the hand of the enemy and lets himself rest.
Finn lets himself move on - lets that remarkable, contagious thing called hope carry the people he loves into years the world should not have had.
A man with a name and a family and hope no longer holds the weight of the world on his shoulders.
He is happy.
==