A bend in space-time

I make it a point to respect canon, weaving Rin’s story into the series in the most coherent way possible. She mainly exists as a lens through which to re-explore the characters we already know. This fic isn’t centered on her: it’s centered on them, and on The Umbrella Academy universe.

My challenge - throughout all four seasons - is to make her appear only in deleted scenes, with clear time markers showing exactly where they slot into each episode. That way, anyone can rewatch the show if they like, with a fresh perspective.

I deliberately chose to write in the first person: it forces me to analyze the Hargreeves family from Rin’s outsider point of view.

Like the series itself, this story is steeped in music. Each chapter comes with suggested tracks to listen to. I also try to keep the balance of tone - serious yet funny - that the show is known for.

We finally departed on January 12, around midday, on a whim of Klaus's, who decided it was time to 'Run the World'. In less than twenty minutes, the bus was packed with fabrics, bangs, hair and suede boots. Everyone crowded into the leather seats and cushions, and Tim took the wheel for the first shift. "Get on the Bus!" many shouted, and I quickly realized it would be a rallying word. It's certainly one of Destiny's Child's lesser-known singles, but it'll stick with us for a long time. Klaus naturally named the bus "Priscilla" - yes, like the 'Queen of the desert'", and I think everyone already calls 'her' like that.

Urban landscapes gradually gave way to those of the Texas plains, wide skies over crops and ranchlands. Fort Worth, Abilene, Odessa, Van Horn… The road stretched endlessly to the horizon, amid songs, laughter and nonsensical conversations. As the land became more arid and the ground rugged, a few smokes rose above the cushions, no doubt to euphorize hearts in front of the dawning desert. Klaus wouldn't take even the slightest whiff, no matter how hard they insisted. It's still not my thing either. I don't think it ever will be.

Klaus's little amphatic introduction on my arrival had a virtue I didn't expect. Nobody here is surprised to see me teleporting here and there, especially not Kitty, who seems to associate me with some kind of prodigy of the same species as her dear protégé. Most of them simply don't say anything, some recite a Veda to my dismay, but I'm certainly not the strange beast I was once labelled back in school. I feel a kind of liberation, as if I can at last be myself. I don't know if Klaus planned this, but I'm grateful to him for it.

The Children don't judge your color or your accent. They don't care about your height, your glasses, your curls or your fat. They embrace your attractions and respect your reservations. They don't care if you love one person, three or a hundred. They are an oasis in a time even more difficult than the era we come from. Klaus likes to say that among them, 'our true colors are shining through'. Cyndi Lauper would probably like that.

We took our time and reached El Paso in two days, stopping often. We made quite an impression in a roadside store retailing a whole hodgepodge of Western-style clothing, fabrics, hides, local art and useless souvenirs. I ogled at a wood and bone necklace, and it only took one minute for Klaus to buy me three. Having money tends to thrill him, no doubt. Unlike most of the Children, who prefer to live penniless and trade one item or another for a service rendered or a bit of tobacco. After trying on every cowboy hat in stock and annoying the manager, he finally decided it didn't match his bandhgala.

A few more hours took us to park Priscilla on the heights of Tucson, above desertic lands where reminiscences of the old West entwine with a nascent form of modernity. Here, the evening sky is the color of tangerines, against which the cactus grow like black sentinels. Even the dust seems beautiful, at this hour when the warm breeze lifts the scent of mesquites. Klaus gets lyrical at times. I can feel how much joy this adventure gives him, and it's even with a smile, sometimes, that he fiddles with his dog-tags on his fingertips. It's a rebirth, yes, I guess it's fair to call it that.

I'm thinking of keeping up this travel diary. I think I'm discovering a taste for it.

---

January 17, 1961, Baja-Norte, Mexico

« The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars ».

Sleeping on a bus is no picnic. The small school pick-up seats are neck-breaking, and the air quickly becomes saturated with the smell and sound of all those people. The Children don't seem to mind: everyone sleeps in a heap. Sing in a heap. Eats in heaps. Loves in a heap. Collective promiscuity isn't something that I'm attracted to, and - whatever Klaus says - neither is he. I'm getting used to sleeping on the roof, even if it's colder at night than you'd think. At least you can see the stars, and listening to the 'Holy Wanderer' name the constellations after kitchen utensils inevitably lulls me to sleep. Back in The City, amidst the urban lights, we couldn't see that many.

Another day took us across the border at Nogales, and through the ochre hues of the Sonoran desert on narrower highways lined with agaves and succulents. I keep opening my eyes to Mexico's small towns, to the daily life I glimpse there from just a fish taco or a hibiscus agua fresca. Even before I saw it, I guessed from the food that we were approaching the Gulf of California. How long had it been since I'd seen such briny, salty landscapes? Through Priscilla's thick windows, I saw for the first time the shallow waters where the great blue herons land. The sand dunes shimmering in infinite shades. And the Colorado Delta, as far as the eye can see, weaving the horizon with sandy furrows.

Jill finished 'On the Road' and lent it to me. Kerouac never really liked hippies, those who politicized his work, anyway. But his words clearly resonate with our journey, and although I don't like books that much, I find myself reading some quotes again and again. Klaus has already read it three times in rehab, and I'm sure that it contributed to his decision to buy Priscilla. He reads the local newspapers in castilian, especially the obituaries, to get a better understanding of the kind of ghosts he encounters on our Mexican nights. Lots of fishermen caught in nets, farmers gored by their oxen, miners burieda alive and occasional bullet-riddled bastards. Nothing he couldn't repel. Once again, the dead tell us many stories about the living we come across.

Yesterday, we enjoyed a river branch so that most could wash. I say 'most', because a few don't even bother. Keechie, for instance, smells like an old bald pony. Klaus had to tell him he 'only wanted to see him bathing in the purple rain' before he deigned to immerse himself, still wearing the salaryman suit he never takes off. I'd have imagined I'd mind bathing like that along with everyone, amid rocks and pebbles. And to think I hated swimming in high school, and the bathroom door at Hargreeves Mansion that wouldn't close. But let's face it, after five days of this life, you don't give a shit about 'showing your lotus' to everybody, and nobody's going to judge you about anything anyway. Once again, Klaus is the only one who minds. You can laugh if you like: he's capable of living practically naked all the time, but would only show 'it' to them furtively in the event of a 'unification'.

We restocked the food containers with rice, corn and beans, all paid by Kitty's hand. We negotiated some fresh fruits, including delicious mameys and condensed milk cakes. A local old lady befriended us and treated us to a delicious menudo. Much tastier, no doubt, than the one I used to buy on the corner of Argyle street to take to Klaus on hangover days, in a time lost both in the past and the future. We smiled at it like two idiots, and nobody understood why. Tonight, on the beach at San Juan de los Lagos, we crafted absurd necklaces from starfishes that we just painted gold. Priscilla is full of sand, so sleeping will once again be an ordeal. Tomorrow, we shall head for Pinta Prieta.

---

January 21, 1961, Baja-Sur, Mexico

« But why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see? »

Tim managed to get us a ferry slot to take Priscilla from La Paz to Topolobampo on the 'mainland': the first available, and the last before a month. This is our first temporal obligation, our first mandatory deadline since our departure, for us who are already used to living out of time. Lloyd, who has taken over the wheel from Tim, is driving fast on the roads lined with sparse vegetation and solitary trees - certainly too fast - for the Dodge bus's engine to cope with.

Jill started reading "Howl and Other Poems", a collection Allen wrote a few years ago, a copy of which he always carries around with him. She's an intelligent girl, who took a beneficial distance when her parents forced her into Berkeley. Her conversation is pleasant when she stops idolizing Klaus for two seconds. She's realized that - with me anyway - devotion doesn't work. She keeps calling me 'White Lotus', which makes me sigh, but after all Bạch Liên is indeed my name, and it's literally inked on me. I laugh so hard at the way Ben looks at her. If only she knew.

I discovered that she loved soil, flowers and vegetables, and that she had tended her parents' garden and patch for a long time. She mentioned that despite its desert-like appearance, Baja is home to some three thousand species of plants, hundreds of which only exist here. I'm interested in her know-how, and have entrusted her with the secret of the satchel of seeds left in the safe at Kitty's Mansion.

And so we headed South, from Baja-Norte to Baja-Sur, across vast stretches of desert casting their ochre shades into the turquoise sea. I've come to understand that the populations here are concentrated in the border areas to the north, and in ports such as La Paz, which we're now reaching. We see very few human beings on our way. And when Priscilla broke down this morning, it took all my power and effort to get her to a rare service station in the middle of nowhere.

Beneath his bushy bulk of hair, and even though at least four of the other Children wear the same, Lloyd isn't like the others. He makes no secret that he's not going to stay forever. That he's here to roam around one last time, before taking over the family electronics store. He's not really into Klaus's ditties. I even wonder if he might have sensed that they weren't Klaus's own words, because he just smiles when he prattles on and doesn't contradict him. During the two hours we spent waiting for the mechanic to resuscitate our Priscilla, he questioned the power I used to keep this engine alive through energy, to get us here. With quiet tact, no disgust, no outrageous admiration either. Just an intrigued benevolence that made me smile. I don't have many answers for him. Once again: I don't know why I can do this either.

Tim and Allen bought their first mushrooms on the port of La Paz, marvelling at what looked like very ordinary fungi to outsiders. They paid a hefty price for them, but hope to harvest their own in the heights of Cuernavaca. They distributed them sparingly to those who wished to try them, according to Tim's skilful dosages, which he recorded in a small notebook. I wonder what he'll mention in his future Harvard paper, but no doubt the Destiny's Children will have served science with joy… An hour and a half later, they saw reality distorted into colorful swirls. The other ferry passengers attributed it to seasickness, and Klaus told them it was a collective allergy to iodine. Him, though, wasn't even tempted, which is amazing to me. The Children praise his purity of body, I could choke on it.

Without needing to take anything, I had a strange dream, again. I don't know why I'm reporting it here. A shootout in front of Stadler's, Tipman's and Cecilio's, over there in Dallas. I hate those three racist bastards, that's a fact, but I wouldn't wish it on them either. What was the target? Five. Don't ask me why. The images were clear, vivid, as if I'd experienced them myself. I woke up to them again, suddenly, on the ferry bench: even Klaus noticed. In the past, the only nightmares were his own. Now I'm a bit worried that he'll have to be the one singing for me.

However, it didn't take much to make me forget. The reflections of the sun glinting on the sea, the roar of the boat, like a nomadic trance, the mountainous horizons in the twilight, more verdant beyond Topolobampo. It is said that whales sometimes accompany the Gulf crossings here. We didn't see any, but I'm as delighted by the thought, just as I am by the colorful fishermen's houses. We are now reaching the mainland, and will be heading for Chihuahua.

On the leather seats and cushions, it's said that - maybe - we'll go to Costa Rica, Panama. 'All the way to Rio', says Klaus, although I don't know if he's fully aware of the journey it'd take to get there. I smile, I dream, I tremble. I think Lloyd and I will have many more opportunities to revive Priscilla.

---

Notes:

Writing this chapter was a journey in itself. I've always felt that the Destiny's Children's peregrinations deserved a spin-off. One chapter won't be enough; we've still got a long way to go aboard Priscilla. The Children are really hippies already, for sure. And happy are the queers who landed among them.

It's an opportunity to discuss how one can (bear to) live in such a community, twenty of them crowded into a small bus. To address issues as prosaic as sleep and hygiene. It amuses me to suggest that Klaus never really liked it, which is quite clear between the lines in 1963. And without Kitty… they wouldn't even eat.

I think it's easy enough to pinpoint the Baja flashback scene from the series within this chapter. In it, you see Lloyd driving down the road at top speed. But obviously (because of the vegetation), this scene wasn't really shot in Baja California.

In recent years, Kerouac's work (from which the quotes here are taken) has fallen into the public domain. As Rin says, he had a critical eye for the way his work had inspired the hippie movement. If you'd like to read 'On the Road', it's now available for free just about everywhere.

See you soon on the road! Any comment will make my day! ♡

This morning, Klaus sleeping like a log, I took time out to explore the thousand-six hundred square yards of land. To spot, without saying so, the planting beds where we might sow Wilson's seeds. The possibilities are numerous: Kitty has an army of somewhat idle gardeners, who tirelessly prune the bushes into ogives. But I don't know if I want to delegate this task to them, or if I'll have the time. Because a departure is coming. A departure that everyone is awaiting, and that I only found out about this morning.

As I walk up the gravel driveway, my eyes fall on the 1942 Dodge bus parked there. The one that half a dozen of the 'Children' are painting in swirling shades of pink and purple, amusingly, as it seems suited to school transport. They're tracing patterns on inspiration, in a psychedelic, spontaneous way. Galaxies, flying saucers, mushrooms, and that huge, tongue-tied mouth at the back, whose teeth a forty-year-old is currently painting white.

"That's…" I can't find the words. This is so hippie before time, it almost makes me smell patchouli. "That'll prevent rear-end collisions, that's for sure," I say to the man wielding the paintbrush, and he looks over his shoulder at me. "You're Rin."

I arch an eyebrow. We haven't been introduced, but news travels fast here, as if spun by the synapses of some kind of creepy collective mind. And a young, brown-skinned girl - all smiles and glasses - comes around bowing slightly to me, before even letting me answer.

"Oh Timothy, you must refer to her as 'The White Lotus'." My expression turns to surprise, as I look at her, somewhat bewildered. "What? Did Klaus say that?". "Oh the Holy Wanderer was very clear about it…". "What a bastard". "…so that slowly we unfold ourselves like lotus flowers, filling the empty space inside our hearts where weeds take root." I look at her with dismay. "It's Radiohead." "It's beautiful!".

She touches my arm with uncommon fervor, then moves away, her step graceful and light. As if carried away by a euphoric breeze, ready to paint another swarm of little planets on the side of the bus.

"Rin is fine…", I say to the one called Timothy. "Are you going with us to Mexico?" he asks, resuming his painting. "I'm the one who set the itinerary for the trip".

Oh, I suspected it wouldn't be Klaus. He's never had much interest in route planning, he'd just leave at random, without even filling up the tank.

"Which way are we going?"

This question leaves no doubt that I'll be along for the ride. Do I have better things to do? Certainly not. Do I intend to stay here on my own? Even less so. And I've never had the chance to travel elsewhere than France and Vietnam.

"Baja California, Chihuahua, Guadalajara, Cuernavaca. That's a route I already rode alone last year." "Oh, so you're looking for the group experience now…" "I think everyone here can get the most out of it. I'm glad I'm talking to someone who seems to be somewhat sane. "For cultural openness?" "For the elevation of consciousness. You can find all sorts of interesting mushrooms there.

~Of course~.

I purse my lips, as he adds: "I'm studying their hallucinogenic properties for science. For my research." "At Hogwarts?" "Harvard. I don't know that university."

Astonishment quickly replaces my sarcasm, because he's not joking. Clearly, Klaus hasn't just recruited lost people. And he goes on, still wielding his paintbrush, for which perhaps his PhD was not intended:

"When correctly dosed, psilocybin could cure psychosis, alcoholism, provide long-lasting benefits to the-" "Hand me the wrench, Tim," says a guy with round glasses on the roof of the bus, busy fixing railings that will make it safe to sit up there.

"This is Allen," Timothy tells me, looking puzzled over the toolbox. "He's a poet."

So I go ahead and - no pun intended - give Allen his key. At least, working in a hardware store for seven years has made me useful. Tim goes back to painting, successively showing me a young woman with olive skin and long brown hair, a short balding man, and the young woman with glasses that I've just met.

"Over there are Faiza and Keechie, who also just arrived. And you know Jill.

She gives me a little wave again, as if she's experiencing a moment of transcendence just for being with me. I don't know what Klaus has told her, but it makes me a little anxious. And then she comes back to me, her paintbrush in her hand, and the first edition of Kerouac's "On the Road" in her apron pocket.

"White Lotus, please tell me which pattern to choose to portray destiny." "Destiny?" I almost look suffering at this question. It's addressed to me: the person who likes this idea the least. And she says: "Yes, just like us 'Destiny's Children': 'No one can rewrite the stars, all I want is to fly with you!' This Veda sums up so well the humanistic significance of our journey towards eternity".

This 'Veda' will primarily be sung by Zac Efron and Zendaya. But 'Jill' has a disarming candor, and a kindness that can't be ignored. And I have to admit - if she really needs an idea for a destiny-inspired design to paint on that coachwork - then it's easy to find one.

"A sparrow," I say. "'Please' call me Rin."

I don't even need to advocate Shakespeare and that line Reginald Hargreeves was so fond of. As if it were a sacred word, she begins to exult.

"A sparrow, how prophetic! I need brown paint".

I sigh, while Allen - on the bus roof - hoists from the ground a new railing to be installed. There's a clamor among the few 'Children' around, a brief halt, then I see Klaus step out of the house, Kitty and two caftan-clad groupies hot on his heels.

"Rin!" he calls out to me as he crosses the gravel driveway, arms wide open, Jill greeting him with a thousand intimidated bows.

If only she knew she's looking at the grand master of the frozen waffle, the supreme guru of fancy underwear, the man who eats spaghetti without hands and knows all the lines from "The Devil Wears Prada" by heart. The one who's attempted to summon Heath Ledger three times and got Christopher Lee. I sigh, shaking my head in amusement.

"Quarter past ten," I say. "Indeed, you're sleeping now." "And I can see you're adopting the dress-code!"

He looks at the clothes I've 'borrowed' from Kitty's huge dressing room, which she's opened up to everyone and shared. A bohemian purple tunic with paisley motifs, and flared pants. I'm nowhere near as classy as Yoko Ono, but I feel comfortable enough this way, and my Led Zep t-shirt is ruined.

"What did you say to Jill, exactly…"

I'd rather ask right now, because I'm sure it'll take less than twelve hours for everyone to hear about it.

"I've got to introduce you to everyone, that's what we always do when someone's just arrived. And the other one over there too. DESTINY'S CHILDREN!"

Suddenly, they all gather in a single murmur, and - even though there are only twenty of them - they seem to come from everywhere. From the house, from behind the bus, even from the groves. They have long hair, more fabric than skin, and all of them look as if they're eagerly drinking in the words he hasn't even spoken yet. Even Allen, on the roof of the bus, remains frozen, the metal railing he was hoisting dangling from the end of his rope.

"On the day before - or before the day before - our departure, we welcome… well the little bald guy in blazer and shirt, over there, the one with the little glasses".

"Keechie," Ben whispers.

I hadn't spotted him, but yesterday he seemed to know the names of the 'Children' perfectly well, whereas Klaus doesn't give a damn. And he repeats, as if from the bottom of his heart:

"Keechie. You'll have to wean yourself off that tie, dear. And best of all, here's my precious, diaphanous White Lotus."

He gestures at me and I furiously resist the instinct to elbow him in the ribs in front of everyone. We'll resolve this in private, no problem. But the reality is… my urge to laugh is even stronger.

"Soon you'll see the wonders she's capable of. If you were impressed by my 'Flight of the Albatross'…" I feel Ben fidget at my side, as if dreading having to do it again. "…then you'll love her cosmic leaps through the fabric of reality, her ethereal waltz with energy, where here and there merge." He laughs. "She complements my transcendence so well". "Klaus, seriously?". "My friends, embrace her as you embrace yourself, as you embrace me. We're meant to be together, I'll be there, you'll be near, and that's the deal, my dear." And they all cheerfully declaim, as he beckons me up the steps to the house with him: "Whenever, wherever!"

We climb up a few steps, while some of the Children softly intone 'Le-do-lo-le-lo-le', like a mantra. On the terrace, Klaus turns around, his small audience insatiably awaiting more words from him.

"Good, and I remind you that if my bedroom door is closed, it's because I'm sculpting my being in the serene postures of yog-" "WATCH OUT!"

There's a scream, a sudden movement on the side of the bus roof. We all turn our gazes, in a single movement, and my blood runs cold as Ben's face literally crumbles. Above poor Jill's head, the rope hoisting the metal railing installed by Allen is breaking. I scream, as do the others, but I have a reflex I never thought possible.

Shhhwwwooo

Around Jill, an energy bubble has just formed, bluish and waving, on which the metal bounces before crashing down to the gravel.

"Geez," Klaus murmurs softly, and we both go wide-eyed.

Neither of us suspected that I could do that. My blood is pounding at my temples. I've been so scared for Jill, even if Ben even more : he'd probably have fainted if he'd still had a physiology. The sphere dissipates as if it were raining down, and I finally breathe. Then Jill quits the reflex she'd had to protect herself, curled up stiffly, her paintbrush still in her hand. Silence falls for a moment, in stupefaction. Until Klaus breaks it, seizing the opportunity:

"Children: praise the White Lotus". "Shut up. Really".

I look down at my hands, trembling slightly, as Ben rushes to the bus to check on Jill. A clamor rises as Klaus beckons me inside the living room, grabbing the handles of two casements of the window. And he tilts his head, looking down at them all again.

"We're on the threshold of a long journey! Mexico! Central America! Brazil! Who knows, maybe beyond!" He takes a breath, as if moved by his own words. "Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? We'll travel the world and the seven seas : everybody's looking for something".

On this phrase, he stands still for a second, and as they applaud, some with tears in their eyes, he closes the window and suddenly quits his composition role.

"This one was pretty spot on".

We are alone amidst the floor cushions scattered here and there. But I'm not laughing anymore.

"What the hell was that?" "Oh. Maybe an energy sphere? It was lucky you triggered that thing, or that poor girl would have ended up flat as a tortilla". "No. The 'White Lotus', Shakira's 'Vedas', and all that bullshit." "Come on," he says, "It's just for your introduction… the first impression matters a lot. Afterwards we all treat each other as equals, you know."

I don't think that's true. Jill, from what I've seen, makes me feel she doesn't treat him as an equal at all, it's almost frightening. And I sigh.

"So, we're going to Mexico". He smiles, ecstatic at the thought. "I've never left The City, you know. We've always stayed… so confined. I can't believe I'm going to travel for real".

I know it's true. The way their father always kept them out of the world, his only outings practically being for missions. When he left the Academy, when Reginald Hargreeves cut off his funding, travel was out of the question, not beyond Argyle Park anyway. And that Vietnam was not exactly a leisure trip. Today, there's nothing left of that reality, and the one in which we find ourselves undoubtedly opens up unhoped-for horizons. It's time to seize the day and see what the world has to offer. Who knows if another apocalypse won't take place tomorrow? Me too, I want to go, although I'm not sure I'll be comfortable travelling on a bus adorned with hallucinogenic mushrooms. He shrugs and purses his lips humbly, in no comparison to the narcissistic show he's staged outside.

"We'd always said, one day we'd go around the world," he whispers, and I'm almost nostalgic. "We'd also said we'd move to Middle-earth." He laughs softly. "Let's adjust our goals downwards."

I'll probably have a hard time accepting the persona he's invented himself, but I think I have to take it as a working suit, that he takes off as soon as he's off-screen, just like at this moment. For once he's got legitimacy somewhere, if I blame him for that, I think it'll kill him. I say nothing, finally thinking that if I take the situation with a sense of humor, I might be able to get used to it. I shake my head, giving up.

"Let's go on the road, then," I say.

And he adds, happier and more mischievous than ever:

"If we've got two years before Five shows up in 1963, we should make the most of it".

---

Notes:

I've laughed so much writing this chapter, I hope you have too, at least a little. We will be riding with the 'Destiny's Children' for a while, embarking on a two-year journey. I thought it would be interesting to see how, after three years, a huge joke (with a touch of self-motivation) ended up getting completely out of hand. And while Jill is lovely, she bears some of the responsibility, in my story, I think.

I had a lot of fun introducing some of the 'Children'. Keechie and Jill, of course, but also the 'Moroccan girl with a limp', who finally gets a name. Timothy and Allen are along for the ride, and you might have sensed they're a bit different. They're actually Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, early pioneers of the psychedelic movement, whose practices I wouldn't recommend, but which were to have a major influence on the sixties and the foundations of the hippie movement. The timing of this journey (1961) and the destination (Mexico) in the series seem to me not to have been chosen at random, as they coincide with Timothy Leary's personal chronology.

And a sparrow will eventually end up painted on the bus, it can be seen in the very last episode of the season.

Le-do-lo-le-lo-le, my friends! Any comment will make my day! ♡

In less than half a second, I'm outside, standing on the wet sidewalk. I turn around. And I see him, in a long, light-gray suede coat with fluffy bangs.

"Klaus, holy shit." "Great googily moogily, Rin!"

We both laugh loudly, probably attracting more attention than we should. I know, I swear a lot, but that's always what pops out in moments like this. Because my joy is boundless right now. And I can't believe my senses, as we merge into an inextricable mess of hair, beard (beard?) and motley clothes. Maybe I'm shaking a little, but so is he actually, and he could choke me if he keeps squeezing me like that. I pull myself free, with as much desire to laugh as to cry, I run my hand across my forehead, because I can hardly believe what I'm seeing.

"What the hell…"

If I didn't know him by heart, maybe I wouldn't have recognized him. But I don't have much time to process: through the lace curtains of her window, the next-door neighbor is staring at us with an unfriendly look on her face. Without missing a beat, I grab Klaus's arm again and squint. Crack! I teleport us inside Wayne's living room, where he chuckles happily:

"Ooooh, I've missed this little ride so much".

A second passes, maybe two, where we stand there stupidly wondering if we're dreaming, then we embrace again, this time without effusion, somewhat in shock, while I realize I can easily circle him with my arms.

"I thought…", I stammer. As my legs give way beneath me, I let go of him and fall to sit on the musty sofa. "I really thought I wouldn't see you again this time. God, I HATE TIME TRAVEL, it's such a FUCKING NONSENSE."

He remains standing over me, his swamp-green gaze euphoric and wet as I swear again, and he agrees, his expression indescribable:

"Those damn vortexes really are the assholes of the universe".

I laugh, because I thought I'd never hear his silly but always relevant comparisons again. But he sighs as he sits down too, in the dim light of the wood-blocked window.

"I thought I'd lost you too, just like I've lost…" Suddenly, his urge to laugh seems to fade away. "…everyone." "Except me," speaks another voice.

And I turn my head to see that Ben is the one who just said that. Ben, in his everyday black clothes. Ben, well-combed for eternity. Ben, with his jaded little smile, who has just drawn in the air from the small living room to speak.

"Jeez, guys…," I say before uttering: "Can you two do it? Materialize Ben for good?"

I'm about to be amazed, but one nods, the other shakes his head no, and Klaus shrugs in resignation.

"A few minutes, only when we're just the two of us or in a dangerous situation. And danger, I can tell you, never happens here".

No more danger? God, I love hearing that. My whole body is still pumping with adrenaline: for the last ten days, I've had the impression that we were running away from one danger only to encounter a worse one.

"We're making progress," Ben says, but Klaus nuances again. "I'd say we're more like in the middle of updating the operating system, you know… but there's improvement." Ben crosses his arms. "You sleep at night, that's already something." "Yes. I've gotten so good at sleeping. I can do that with my eyes closed. Besides, Rin, you're lucky I listened to that old ghost at two in the morning, because - usually - I don't let them in anymore."

Behind this seemingly innocuous sentence, there's a piece of important news, which I catch on the fly, my throat tightening with joy.

"You manage… to keep the ghosts at bay…"

I stammer, and Klaus places a hand tanned by the Dallas winter sun below the dog-tags he's obviously never taken off. Somewhere on a Gao Yord I can't see.

"I'm not saying it works every time.

I stare at him as he shakes his absurd goatee, with his paradoxical lack of self-confidence. Why on earth did he grow that? So I finally detail him, from his bare feet in the middle of January, to his attire. Klaus's clothes have always been unconventional. But this time, they're absurdly out of keeping with his own style.

"Are you wearing macramé pajamas under there?" I lean in for a better look, and my eyebrows pinch incredulously. "Someone brought me these from India," he says. "Don't I look like a magnificent earthly version of Yama?"

I laugh softly. It's silly, but - even if he's unrecognizable - I have a vague, happy feeling of having the 'flamboyant' Klaus of our younger days back. He'd been a shadow of himself lately, let's be honest. He stands up, turns around a little and then - as I look sceptical - sits down again without further bluster. Instead, I linger over his long hair, which he doesn't dye or straighten any more. And this capillary profusion, as a good time marker, prompts me to ask:

"How long have you two been here?" While Klaus calculates on his fingers, Ben replies, arms crossed against the small, out-of-order stove: "You don't have eleven fingers, Klaus. It'll be a year next month."

I open my eyes wide, trying to take in the information, then look back at Klaus like someone who has - quite literally - just fallen down from the sky.

"It's unbelievable. Every time I leave you for two days, it invariably ends up being a year, and I find you half your weight lighter." He looks down at his limbs, as if discovering himself. "Oh, that. It's because of legumes. Tofu. Turmeric. Yoga, maybe? Oh, and kombucha. God, Rin, you're going to love kombucha."

With a perfect timing, my stomach rumbles and I put my hand to it to try and stop its protests. But Klaus looks back at me, as if scanning me.

"And you, then… you live in a squat. You always wear the same clothes… You're obviously starving." I sigh. "I'm broke." "I can see that you're broke. You smell like crappy whiskey. And you…" He gestures to the Ouija board. "…you're getting accointed with afterlife. Hang on, hang on. I have a theory: you're trying to become the old me." I laugh softly as Ben gazes warily at the Ouija, and I concede: "I could have ended up a lot worse: I've only been here for two days".

He sits up with astonishment, as if by a sudden realization.

"Two days… You've been spat out with a serious delay. But then, maybe the others are around too. Or they'll arrive, sooner or later…"

I understand that he really hasn't found anyone, and I nod: I share that hope, that they can all still show up. We haven't had time to talk about it since, but…

"Five had mentioned a risk of landing around 1963".

There are still two years to go before that year. An eternity to wait, in my eyes. But for what? There's nothing left in this world beyond April 1, 2019. For us, 'going home' means nothing, unless we try to find Viktor and help him to fix his… This is the moment my stomach chooses to growl again, and I look up at the ceiling.

"Rin, you rumble like a washing machine in spin cycle." I sigh. "I only ate an apple and some bread… for lunch, yesterday. I'm not allowed in the restaurant, and…" Without needing to hear any further, Klaus stands up, gesturing to Ben. "We'll fix it, I promise. At the Mansion, you'll be able to eat whatever you want." " At the… Mansion."

He grabs my arm, waiting to teleport, almost anticipating the move by hopping on his toes.

"At the Mansion - yes - you'll see. Today is bulgur day. Now come on, do your thing. 'Crack!' Take us outside." But I stop him. "Wait."

I wriggle free of his grip, scurrying across the room past the coffee table. And on the shelf, I grab the black handle of Wayne's leather satchel, realizing that it weighs a good deal. Flowers to sow: the old man's treasure. That's all I'll be taking with me from this little house. So I return to Klaus, carrying my precious luggage.

"What's this bag? Think you're Mary Poppins?" I let out a chuckle. "It's my half of the deal that got you here, these are seeds. This ghost's name is Wayne Wilson, he was an old gardener."

Although he could have been disapproving again, this time he looks grateful, almost touched. I don't think he would have expected me to go that far to try and find him. And yet…

"It was an absurd risk," he tells me, "Rin, you have no idea. Negotiating with a random ghost…" "I know. But I had nothing to lose." He reiterates his grip on my arm, pondering the meaning of my words. "Really, you never give up. You're lucky he didn't ask you to concede him your sanity, all your memories before twenty, or to hand him over your firstborn: some of them do." I whisper in another chuckle. "He'd have waited a long time".

We laugh quietly, and I'm so relieved to have him here, goatee or not. I take one last look at this shack, to which I finally owe everything I've got since I arrived. Black meets green, we disappear once more into a jumble of hair, leathers and linen. And Crack! we leave the living room, the dead plants and the Ouija.

10:52 am

Standing in front of the open door of the car I identify as a Dodge Polara, I am speechless as Klaus moves to the other side to get behind the wheel. A ~car~. I hadn't anticipated that either. And now that I'm about to get in, I have a major moment of hesitation.

"You're going to drive," I say, and Klaus looks at me over the glossy bodywork.

It's a statement. It's also a cause for terror, for me, to be perfectly honest. The only time I've seen Klaus drive in the past, I thought we were going to crash through the guardrails of the suspension bridge over the Vaughan River.

"I'm as white as snow," he tells me. "You've got my word, Dallas has never seen me doing a single shot of anything."

I purse my lips. So he wouldn't have taken anything since… since he got dopesick after coming back from Vietnam. It's really weird, but in ten days, he is almost two years older than me, and I'm almost starting to think it shows.

"Even sober, Klaus… You're unable to assess distances… or even to walk straight." "Relax, Rin. That's what curbs are for."

I sigh, aghast. I don't have much choice anyway. But as I place Wilson's seeds case at the foot of the passenger seat, a middle-aged woman, all pearls and furs, brushes past me leading a small dog and vigorously waves her gloved hand.

"Why, it's our miraculous Klaus! It's been months!" she greets him with a big smile. "How good to see you! Best regards to Kitty!"

I arch an eyebrow, but settle into the leather seat as he soberly greets her. Then he plops down on the driver's seat and closes the door with a clunk, just as I realize he's going to drive barefoot. A turn of the keys, the car begins to hum… and I grab the handle above the window, as if clinging to dear life.

"Stadler, that twat," he mutters as he maneuvers. "The first time I had lunch here, he kicked me out, too."

With a wave of his goatee, he points to the owner of the restaurant I didn't enter yesterday, taking a cigarette break in front of his establishment. Carelessly leaning against his 'White only' sign.

"He does seem to be cherry-picking," I say with a hint of sarcasm, and Klaus shakes his head sadly. "Some would say he's 'a man of his time'," he says, "I'd simply call him 'a huge prick'. And I'm sure he'd serve my lunch, now that I'm wealthy, attractive, and smelling of ylang-ylang. You know what? I think he's gay, and that's why his wife-". "This is none of our business."

I giggle, and look at him as we drive past the Avon cinema. One thing did cross my mind earlier, when we approached this brand-new car. And I quote a word he just said.

"Wealthy, huh?" He laughs softly. "Hold on to that handle better: I happen to have a job." And I do indeed nearly choke. "What? What kind of job?"

The car speeds up a little along Roseti & Sons Swap, where the Ouija board has been replaced by a soup tureen, without any drama.

"I work… sort of in wellness coaching, you know. I'm learning so much myself. I've started meditating - a lot - getting interested in Eastern mysticism, in the significance of words, in chakras opening…" My eyes widen in disbelief. "Holy cow."

I'm trying to absorb it. The City's underground concerts seem a million years away. Clearly, the future has well and truly come crashing down. But finally, having spent a considerable amount of time in Klaus's room at Hargreeves Mansion, I know he's always had an inclination towards these trends. I check the satchel's safety.

"If you're a coach… what kind of clients do you have?" "I'd rather call them… 'converging multiple spirits', you see. We all journey together. I just provide them with a little inspiration." I arch an eyebrow. "Inspiration." And he nods briskly, as if it were obvious. "You have no idea of the magnificent messages pop music conveyed in our time. I can recite any lyrics, they'll take it as a message. All I do is carry Beyonce's prophetic word". I'd choke on the laughter. "You do everything to look like a Bollywood version of Jesus, that's for sure." His eyes sparkle. "Thank you! It makes me so happy that you noticed."

We laugh for a moment, but my expression quickly turns more serious.

"Do they pay you?" " Mmm yeah. But everyone pays taxes, you know."

He shrugs and fiddles with the gearshift. Really, I'll never get used to it.

"That Mansion you mentioned, are you paying for it with your own money?" "Nooo. There are only twenty of us. No. It belongs to our 'benefactress'. She's a widow, and she's found a splendid second wind to her life, she's gradually detaching herself from her bourgeois shell, she's reconnecting with the laws of the universe, nature and confraternity." "Wow".

I've heard a lot of Klaus-crap, but I'm still flabbergasted.

"Is she 'Caty'?". "Kitty. She's so rich. She worships me, you can't imagine." "You live with her…" "Oh. Yes. I haven't spent a single night in a squat in eleven long months." He stares at me instead of checking his mirrors, and cracks me a wide, innocent smile that lets me guess he's about to blurt out something petty: "Unlike you, these last two days". "Keep your eyes on the road!"

I'm fidgeting nervously, but there's objectively no reason.

"We ~all~ live there, now. You'll be able to stay with us, no problem. One more or one less, in that big house…" I sigh. "Is it some kind of community?" "You could say that. A spiritual… alternative… utopian community. Everyone's free in spirit and in body: you'll like it. Being alone, even for a second, is over." "How did you… recruit them?" "Oh. Word of mouth, you know? They're young salarymen breaking with the superficiality of consumer society, gap-year students looking for psychic experiences, idle debutantes…"

I finally let go of the handle as we drive up a long avenue, threading our way between more upscale houses. I'm beginning to realize that we're not going to crash. And Klaus adds, quite seriously:

"They're idealistic and tolerant. From all corners of the world. You won't have any trouble like with that racist Stadler, I can tell."

Our eyes meet again as I wonder how he manages the feat of being both visionary and totally nuts. And in the midst of his brief seriousness, I see him take a deep breath, as if about to speak words of wisdom.

"Meet me in the crowd, people, throw your love around… Love me, take it into town, happy. Put it in the ground where the flowers grow gold and silver shine". I frown, not knowing whether to laugh or cry again. "You'll see. They are shiny happy people holding hands". "You're quoting R.E.M." He suddenly gives up his composing role. "Yes, you're more into rock, I'm adapting my playlist".

I shouldn't, but it does me a world of good. Who'd have thought that in a couple of days - sorry, a little less than a year - he'd turn so sharply into some kind of wacky New Age. But he's found an undeniable social context, some kind of meaning to his life, people who listen to him… which is unheard of enough to be worth noting. I sigh, with a vague smile.

"Are you aware, Klaus, that it'll be another five years before the flower-power movement explodes? It's a long way off.

He gives me a sidelong, intelligent glance, as if I'd seen through him. Then he returns to his theatrical self.

"So what! It's called awareness-raising, it sets the stage, it infuses society. I'm sure that in two years' time, there'll be thousands of us. And that's exactly what I want: for people to 'make love, not war'".

I stare at him, because I'm not fooled by his comedic skills: I know there's no joke in his words anymore. And even though I didn't go beyond high school, I'm not ignorant: I know very well in protest of which war the hippie movement was largely founded.

"This is what you're hoping for…" I smile sadly. "'You're hoping to boost the hippies to stem the tide of the Vietnam War?"

For a moment, only the purr of the Dodge Polara's engine fills the cabin, and Klaus's now dull voice answers me very low.

"I don't know."

Today, as yesterday, he is an open book: I have no trouble reading through him. Does he hope - consciously or not - that whole battalions will end up not enlisting? That public opinion will turn enough to influence political choices? I think his mystical phase goes far beyond trying to be liked and listened to. To me, Dave's name is at the end of this causal chain.

"You never give up either," I say, garnering a vague, pained smile from him.

And as we pass the gates of a huge estate, I add, looking out the window towards a neatly trimmed lawn:

"You know what? I kind of want to help you".

---

Notes:

At last, Rin and Klaus are reunited, for better and certainly for worse. It doesn't take long for Rin to realize what she's getting herself into. But is she really ready to meet his holy trinity?

It's an opportunity to give an update on the evolution of Klaus's powers now that almost a year has passed. The ghosts, with the exception of Ben, are mostly absent from the hippie period, while Klaus is distinctly seen refusing a joint in Baja. I propose here that he has partially succeeded in getting over them, which is probably canon.

It was a fun chapter to write, and I laughed out loud several times along the way, because these two's naturalness comes back very easily, after the terrible events of season 1. A dynamic undoubtedly more similar to their younger years. It's a good thing, after all, that the '60s let them breathe a little. For how long…

Here's my interpretation of part of Klaus's motivation (consciously or not) to found what will gradually become a cult.

Any comment will make my day! ♡

In the living room, I let my eyes wander. There are horticultural books in the shaky bookcases, chipped crockery including a single mug, and a pretty black-handled leather satchel. And most of all… numerous pots of houseplants and flowers, withered long ago. In the dim light streaming in, I stand for a moment on the dust of what was once a carpet, contemplating the story told to me by the objects. Tiny air dusts dance in the clear rays, and my stomach rumbles: I haven't eaten anything since the popcorn and bad hot dog from the 2019 bowling alley.

So I try to make myself look decent. My jeans are beyond repair, but I make cuffs under both my knees, to at least hide the fact they're torn. I find a toothless comb, which allows me to untangle my hair a little, and I zip up my perfecto: that way, the zeppelin won't raise any more questions. I adjust my bowling shoes and take a deep breath, as if I'm about to enter the fray.

"Brace yourself, Rin," I say to myself.

And Crack ! So here I am outside, in this residential street now bathed in the Texas January sun. There are a few houses, low-rise buildings and the smell of roasted corn. The air is calm, and you can hear the humming of the nearby shopping avenue. It's an outlying district of Dallas, far from the picture you'd expect.

I reach into my pockets and find a dollar bill. Certainly the equivalent of twelve or thirteen, in the purchasing power of my own era. It's stamped "series 2017": I hope the person I'll be giving it to won't look at it too closely. But I soon realize that's not my main problem. At Stadler's, the only restaurant in the area, I could have eaten a whole menu in exchange for this bill. But I spot a rectangular sign claiming 'White only', and I renounce pushing the door open. I pass on my way, shoving back my hands into my pockets.

Being 'mixed race', as they say, I've already attracted curious looks in more clement times. Because depending on the angle, on the way I tie my hair up or not, on a make-up line that changes everything, I disturb the senses, and people don't really know where I come from anymore. Back in my platinum-blond days, no-one could figure it out. But one thing's for sure: I'm not going to risk being thrown out now.

I opt for a small local grocery store, run by an old man, almost blind anyway. First, I buy a drink, because I can't take it anymore. A soda for 10 cents and an apple for 2, can you believe it? Anything that fizzes and refreshes is called a 'coke', here. I buy a few slices of Kraft brand sandwich bread for another 20 cents, the first of which I share with a street pigeon. The rest of my change is spent on Bayer aspirin. And here I am, as broke as a church mouse, but a little fuller at least.

I hang around the movie theater, resisting the temptation to turn invisible to get in. I promised myself a long time ago that I wouldn't do this anymore, even if I feel my resolutions are a little eroded today. I cross the street, to the alley where I arrived last night. The garbage cans have been collected, the brick walls are still the same. There's no sign of another arrival.

Sighing, I decide to wait a little, just in case the others do the same. I lean against the wall, and end up crouching, while time ticks away. An hour passes, maybe two, maybe three. I begin to realize that no one will come. And just as I'm dozing off, I hear Mark's hoarse voice draw me back to consciousness.

"Hey, Zeppelin kiddo, you were supposed to find yourself another spot".

He looks drunk, so I don't think his lecture will last very long. When Klaus gets to this point, he's usually about to stop talking at last. This thought makes me sad, and I don't retort anything.

"Besides - yesterday - I 'might could' have seen you…" "What?" "I saw you disappear into old man Wilson's shack."

I just stare at him. He seems more interested in the fact that I went in, than in the fact that he saw me teleport: he must be used to seeing double, or even hallucinating.

"I needed a place to sleep". "The neighbors don't like squatters. And 'people like you'. In ten years they've had a whole bunch of them evicted, and they finally got the place walled off. 'Fizyu', I wouldn't hang around there…" He returns to slouch against the bank wall. "Besides, everybody knows it's haunted." "What did you say?"

Mark lifts his brown-paper-wrapped bottle.

"Yeah, they threw them out by the scruff of the arse, those buggers. They don't like idlers like you and me, who-" "No, what did you say next?"

He grumbles, shaking his head, as if my understanding was really limited.

"Say, you've got the engine runnin’ but ain’t nobody driving, girl".

It's the pot calling the kettle black: he's himself sinking into Jim Beam whiskey. I get up and take a painful step in his direction.

"Say it again!" "Ah I don't know! Now let me snooze." "Haunted. You said it's haunted."

He rolls his cloudy eyes and gestures to remove my hand from his collar, which I've grabbed unwillingly.

"It is. You're goin' to calm down, kiddo".

He lies down on his piece of cardboard, facing the wall and giving me one last texan 'Assit'! And within a second, he starts snoring.

I stand motionless over him, blinking three times. I leave him the rest of my bread and half my coke, because I think he's earned it. Without even hobbling that much anymore, I turn the corner of the alley where I first appeared, I walk along the storefront of 'Rosati and sons Swap', I face the window where I almost cried last night. There, behind the glass, amidst a jumble of second-hand items… the Ouija board seems to have been waiting for me. I stare at it. I look at the door, I clench my fists in my empty pocket. I had promised myself I'd never do this again, never. But I'm out of money, out of everything and everyone. I close my eyelids for a long moment, then reopen my dark eyes, probably with an overly determined look.

Crack!

No one will ever know how this odd spiritism object managed to fly away.

Sitting over the dusty coffee table, I stare at the black letters carved in the worn wood of the Ouija board, the little teardrop-shaped planchette resting on top. I stare at the alphabet, the numbers. 'Yes', 'No', 'Hello', 'Goodbye'. A sun and a black crescent moon, as if I needed to recall that.

I've never held a seance with such a board. As you can imagine, until recently, I'd had my fill of ghosts. However, I know that I'm not supposed to do this alone, nor to do it if weakened. That I should clean this place up and air it out. I objectively don't meet any conditions, apart from having a dim light and a strong will. Honestly? Right now, I don't give a damn about risking being possessed by an evil spirit haunting me for ten years. Let's lure one in, first, then we can talk.

I look around me: at the shelves, the books, the old crockery and the faded flowerpots. The 'old Wilson', Mark said, eh? My index and middle fingers settle on the planchette. And after a long breath… I slide it all the way to 'Hello', keeping my touch light.

"Hey, Wilson," I say in a way that's certainly not ceremonious enough.

I feel a bit stupid for a second. As if I had no right to do this. As if I'm just going to talk to the dust, and end up stupid and alone, in the middle of my gloomy squat. I sigh. I have to force myself to do this the right way. And maybe I've got an advantage on my side, because I can feel energy. I close my eyes, scanning everything in the room. The potential energy of elevated objects, the energy they would convert if they happened to fall. The one nestled in the heart of matter, even in the core of dead plants. I breathe quietly, letting my environment resonate with me. And then I say, a little more politely:

"Mr… Mr. Wilson. I was told you were still here".

At first, nothing happens, and I'm seized by a doubt that could easily make me give in, and curl up on the bedroom mattress or the antique sofa. But I hold on and focus. I feel that - under my fingers - the planchette has just moved. Just a little. Or maybe it's just a trick of my mind.

"If you're here… please… show yourself".

It's strange to almost beg in the void. But again, the feeling of the planchette moving returns, and this time I reopen my eyes to check where it is. There, on the old Ouija board, the little prank now rests distinctly on the word 'Yes'.

My blood is racing, and my senses are searching for the faintest glimmer of energy anywhere in the small rooms of this walled-off place. Behind me, on the ceiling, under the table. But it's in the bedroom that I spot it, near the bed where I slept. There, faintly, there is a presence moving. Calm and resigned, like the way Ben is too often. Whoever I'm dealing with is a sorrowful spirit. I take another breath, and ask the question I must as a precaution.

"Mmmm are you… a good spirit, or one of those who would like to - you know - haunt my nights for just coming to bother you?"

The planchette rattles, I feel it buzz shortly, and I see a trickle of energy around it, making it move. The shape from the room has come closer, I can see it clearly now, in all its human form. In the same way as I used to see Ben, at first. And the planchette points to the Sun: a favorable omen about the person I'm talking to.

"My name is Rin. What should I call you?"

Presenting myself properly seems a basic respect to me. And the board slides along, no longer quivering. 'W. A.' I call out the designated letters. 'Y. N. E'.

"Wayne." I smile. "Hi, Wayne".

And saying this, I look up from the board, right at him in the doorframe, where he stands. I see his astonishment as my eyes catch his energy beam. He steps back, he hadn't imagined I could ever see him. But now that I've summoned him, I owe him an explanation. If he ever felt in danger, the consequences could undoubtedly be terrible.

"I'm able to see your spectral energy, Wayne. I know… I know this sounds crazy. But if you come closer, maybe I can get you to talk."

I've already done it on Ben, on myself too. I know how to materialize just enough of my head, my vocal cords and respiratory system to be able to speak through immateriality. I doubt I'd be able to do much more, because as a matter of fact: without Klaus, I'm unable to materialize a ghost entirely. Despite my plea, Wayne doesn't come closer. Legitimately: after all, he doesn't know me. It's an odd feeling: I'm conjuring a ghost all by myself, and he's the one who's afraid of me. Because maybe he's worried: if I'm able to materialize him, then maybe I'm also able to destroy him.

"I don't mean you any harm…", I say. "I have… I have a deal for you."

A deal? This word seems to make him react, and suddenly he's moving fast, unrealistically fast. In a flash, he's on the other side of the coffee table, almost on top of me, with his human shape now cristal-clear to me. Wayne Wilson wasn't very tall, with a slightly arched back and a large, receding forehead. Gnarled fingers, strong neck. And little eyes that I guess had once been bright, now that I can see the details of its features. Beneath my fingers, the planchette has eagerly come back to settle on 'Yes'.

I take this as permission, clinging to his empty yet piercing gaze. And gently, as I would do to Ben, I nudge the spectral energy of the old ghost to furrow itself with matter. He suddenly breathes in, as if trying to swallow all the air he can. And he looks at me again, his voice now audible in the small, dingy room.

"Damn, girl, what the hell are you?" His spectral voice seems to come straight from the darkness, and I give him an apologetic smile. "I don't really know, Wayne. Can I really call you Wayne?" "Everyone used to call me that down here."

From Mark's words and the neighbors' reactions, I can tell that Wayne Wilson was once a child, then a local figure of this area.

"You've spent your whole life here, haven't you?".

I ask this with genuine interest. The living have always interested me, that's a fact. Now I'm discovering that the dead do too.

"I used to run the little gardening store where that bloody hat seller is now".

I sense a hint of bitterness in his voice. I gaze again at the many flowerpots around me, now as dead as he is, but which he once grew with his bare hands.

"Were you a gardener yourself? A nurseryman?" He chuckles sarcastically. "Then an indoor gardener. Or a gardenless nurseryman."

Under my fingers, the Ouija planchette has shifted to 'No' without either of us noticing. But he's not angry with me, he just looks regretful, and I smile at him a little sadly, aware that our lives don't always take the turn we want.

"You never could get a little piece of land?" And he sighs, still amazed at being able to breath again.

"Too much debts, not enough guts. And the asphalt of Dallas that coated everything. Fewer and fewer people owned a garden. This world is crazy."

I realize that - for many - the urbanization of those outlying districts must have been a radical change. And above all for those who, just like Wayne, earned their living from the soil: on sap and flowers. The air must have changed in the seventy or so years he's lived here. I think the future of the Earth would sadden him even more. But he doesn't need to know, otherwise - truly - he'll never rest in peace.

"I admire people who know how to grow plants. Your garden would surely have been fabulous."

He smiles sadly. No doubt I've hit the nail on the head as to why his spirit has lingered here with an unfinished task. But finally he lifts his face, wrinkled with pale energy.

"What deal were you about to offer me, you who don't even know what you are?"

I stand still for a second, searching for my words. How do you make a deal with a ghost? I run my hands over my face, and no doubt he senses how important to me is what I'm about to say.

"I'd need you to fetch… someone." "Someone dead? We ghosts mostly wander alone, my young fr-" "Someone alive. I mean, I don't know if he's alive right now. But if he happened to be…" I look at Wayne in the eyes, with unshakeable conviction. "Then you'd probably see him as a beacon in the night."

This time, Wayne Wilson stops and stares at me, and I immediately sense that I'm not the only strange phenomenon to have recently entered his ghostly horizon. What I've just said makes sense to him, and the expression on his face gives me a wild hope I'm trying to refrain.

"I won't be able to materialize you much longer… I'm sorry if… if it cuts…" I squint an eye: I don't know how else to say it. "Have you spotted something - someone - calling to you unintentionally? Is there-" He interrupts me with his eyes open, raising a hand. He didn't even hesitate. "I know what you're looking for. I know who."

I knew it: that Klaus was a magnet for ghosts from miles around. And as Wayne stands up, perhaps due to emotion, my focus wavers. His features turn blur, as if he's slipping through my fingers. But I can see him move again, as the planchette on the Ouija board slides over 'Hello','Goodbye', then over the letter K. Wilson stretches out his arm, pointing to the shelf where his books lie, some fifteen chipped jars, and the black-handled leather satchel I'd noticed this morning. I stammer:

"I'll give you whatever you want". I know that's a risky thing to say to a ghost : Klaus would probably facepalm. But I don't know how else to put it. And he doesn't hesitate. "Please take my seeds. My flowers, make sure they're sown…"

I stare at him with quivering eyes, then at the satchel. I don't even have the words to thank him. And I lose him, despite my best efforts, as the materiality of his throat fades into spectral energy. He tries to say another word, but it doesn't ring. He drifts away, fading, back into the shadows of that little house where he's always lived. And I know I have to do things right again: I have to end this summoning properly. I close my eyes, less nervous this time.

"Thanks a million for the Seance, Wayne Wilson. Now go back to where you came from." I look at my fingers on the Ouija, I smile. "Your seeds will be sown, you've my word."

And with tangible hope beneath my two trembling fingers, I move the planchette one last time to a word that is worth a hundred to me:

'Goodbye'.

---

Notes:

Here's a chapter I had to do some research for! About the Texan accent, the purchasing power in 1960 (everything you could buy with a dollar!), how a ouija board session works… I've had a lot to keep my mind busy.

In season 1, we saw how much Klaus depended on Rin, but not so much the reciprocal was true. You've probably sensed it since the first chapter of season2: the trend could be reversed now.

You can guess that Wayne's flowers will bloom. The '60s witnessed the rise of a form of early ecological awareness in the midst of urbanization, mainly through the hippie movement (which hadn't yet begun, in that year 1961). Could it be that Flower Power has something to do with an old gardener ghost? May Wayne Wilson rest in peace.

Any comment will make my day! ♡

Suddenly, the sounds of the city take over. The irritated hiss of a particularly bold cat staring at me from the wall, the sound of car engines at the end of the alley, even noisier than Hermes's. Muffled retro music, footsteps of passers-by and cries of children. God, my head aches, even more than my calf. I'd forgotten how unpleasant time-travel sickness could be. My side itches, my thigh…

"Damn it".

Painfully, panting a little, I sit down against the garbage can and try to clear my vision. At the end of the street, the neon lights on the blue façade of the Avon movie theater force me to squint again. On the bill is "The Marriage-Go-Round", an adaptation of an old Broadway classic, white panels proclaiming the names of Susan Hayward and James Mason. I blink a few times, trying to get rid of the headache. I pull myself to my feet using the garbage can, trying to breathe.

I'm alone. No Klaus, no Ben, even if our matter and energy were still merging two minutes ago. No Five, even if our wills were fully combined on this goddamn vortex. No Diego, no Allison. No Luther… and no Viktor. I run my hand over my eyes, as if this whole horrible day was gliding over me again. I try to take a step, fully tensed: I'll have to grit my teeth, but I should be able to walk. Hobbling, but to hell with dignity.

I quickly realize that I'm going to be stared at. As soon as I reach the end of the alley, I'm met with intrigued, if not downright frightened glances. Wage earners in trench coats and hats, mothers in heels and flared wool coats. Pastel colors that contrast with the blackness of my jeans with their half-ripped leg. With my oversized leather perfecto, right up to my tousled haircut. Here, I'm a timeless anomaly, myself.

The music becomes clearer, coming from the half-open door of a second-hand store labeled 'Rosati and sons swap', still open in the evening. 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' Dear Elvis Presley does have a sense of irony. Behind the window, there's a Ouija board, and it almost makes me want to cry. And one thing is certain: if the Plan B Five had in mind to save us from the apocalyptic flames was to send us back in time, then our attempt kind of worked.

Kind of. We knew there was a risk of ending up scattered. Because we were two people, combining our efforts to take us all away, and more so after having used so much energy to fight. It was a theoretical risk. But now that I'm here alone, in the middle of this street in the early '60s, reality hits me hard. The truth is, I'm not used to being alone. Not at home, not at work, certainly not at Hargreeves Mansion: I've never really been. Where are they? And I know the question isn't as much ~where~ they are, as ~when~. My head still hurts, and my chest weighs a ton, just like an overwhelming jetlag. I gasp. I…

"Dang! This sidewalk's already taken, kiddo".

Kiddo? I'm almost thirty. But what a Texan accent. I turn around, scratching my forearm until it almost bleeds. There, against the wall of the Dallas Southern Bank, closed at this hour, a miserable guy is downing a bottle of hooch in shabby clothes. A balding forehead, scaly skin, stringy gray hair… and the look of someone who just stayed here when he didn't know where else to go. I've always attracted bums. But I think it's mostly because of my tendency to legitimately see them as people.

My leg's killing me, really, so I crash on the floor next to him, and never mind if he wants to charge me a fee for occupying his private corner of the sidewalk. He looks at me as if I'm an alien, or as if he's deciding whether my facial features are acceptable or not. But eventually he shrugs. After all: he's an outcast too.

"What year is it, dude?", I ask him. This question makes him burst out laughing into his bottle. Exaggeratedly, as if he wanted the whole street to enjoy it. "I've known a lot of weirdos, but you're a corn-fed one." "Answer me. Then you can decide if I'm mad as a hatter." He shrugs and takes a swig.

"1961. And in an hour, you'll feel it's January." "It's not cold. I'm from up north, you know." My accent betrays me as well. "East coast, huh? Y’all are really not like us, up there. I like your airship shirt by the way". I look at what his cataract-white eyes are looking at. I'm sure he's not even that old, but his life must have been hard and it shows. "Oh. That's Led Zeppelin." "They stopped making those in the '40s."

He's talking about the airship. That makes me smile through my exhaustion. Actually, it'll be '68 before the band comes together, but he doesn't need to know that. And it's fine with me, if he thinks that - if I'm weird - it's because I'm following fashion from the other side of the country. I rub my leg over the bandage Klaus put on me, which has already partly torn off. The guy whistles.

"Say, did you clean up that shit?" It's obvious that he's already had a bunch of wounds, some of which must have festered. "Let’s Git-R-Done".

With a flick of his wrist, he turns his bottle upside down and sends a shot of bad whiskey to lick the wound inflicted by the Icarus Theater gunmen. In another time, another world, now pulverized. I hold back a scream, let the pain fade away. But I'm grateful to him, because I know what it's like to sacrifice a little of that expensive liquor when your hard-earned fortune has been drained to pay for it.

"Thanks, man," I say. "Mark." "Rin." "You're a strange bird, aren't you. What'd you come for, from up north?" I sigh. "I just… escaped here." That's not such a lie, and he takes it at face value, starting to booze again. "Bless your heart. Well, Rin, you'll still have to get a spot of your own. Because this place is already busy, see, and this isn't my first rodeo, so if you know what I mean, you're going to get the hell out and… Shit, the cops." I look toward the end of the street, which a car is crisscrossing. "They don't like me hanging around. Shit. Shit."

All of a sudden, he's on his feet, packing up all his stuff, in a matter of seconds, as if he were used to doing it in a hurry on a daily basis. Probably even several times a day, before letting a little time go by and coming back to hang out once the patrol's over. He points a finger at me.

"This is my spot, get it?" I struggle to my feet. My leg like my head keeps hammering at me. "Okay, okay. I never intended to take it from you, you know."

He takes a step towards the crossroads, and the unlit shopfront of a butcher's, overlooked by a huge bovine figure standing out against the dark night. The cops sound their siren, and Mark mimics it with a demented laugh, before staring at me one last time… and then flying off. I make myself discreet, pretend to walk normally, and I blend into the shadows of the closed shops. The police car passes by. I might still be able to make myself invisible as a last resort, but I'm really exhausted. I should sleep. I really should. I've never felt the need so strong.

Sleep… As if the universe had heard this wish and didn't care, a fine drizzle begins to fall. I shove my hands into the pockets of my jacket and cross the street. I'm still wondering where everyone is. If any of them got there before me, or others will do so afterwards. I walk a little further along the sidewalk, eventually turning into the neighborhood, some of whose houses are lit up. I notice the atmosphere of Dallas, almost intimate in this neighborhood, at this time, so different from the immensity of The City in 2019. But it's not wonder, no. It's a kind of painful awe, and my stomach is somewhat knotted.

I hobble around the block, arriving right at the back of what I identify as the Avon cinema. The Rocky Horror Picture Show won't be released until fifteen years from now, I just can't believe it. I don't even know if Klaus is breathing at the same time as I do or not, in this year. What a weird feeling. I sigh. And then, a movement catches my eye. That of a cat - another one - escaping from a black window barred by boards and bricks intended to wall it off.

It's a small house with decrepit walls, certainly abandoned for some years. With a few vines invading a fence that's never been closed. I don't really have the strength to think. Even though I've bragged to Mark, the man from the South, I'm starting to shiver from the cold. I shake my head. Squats used to feel better when there were two of us crowding in, with a shamelessly pilfered dairy-free pizza. I don't even try to remove the firmly nailed boards, I gather all the strength I have left.

Crack!

Within a second, I collapse on a musty old mattress, where I close my eyes and let myself be carried away again. By sleep this time. Heavy, thick. Until the dreams seized me. Troubled dreams, like nothing I've ever had.

I see the street where I've wandered so much this evening: Rosati and sons, the butcher's shop which cow has fallen to the ground. The bank, and the Avon movie theater, devastated by tank fire marked with a red star. The dust of brick and bodies, the wrenching shrieks of fighter aircrafts flying low over the rooftops.

And in the midst of this chaos Viktor, sonically disintegrating the T-62 missiles. Klaus, who raises and materializes a dozen soldiers and civilians - who just happened to fall under the bullets. Just while bringing me back once more, and materializing Ben and the Horror in their deadly ambush. Luther, parrying flames from his bare skin, Five, wandering aimlessly. Allison, blowing brains with her own voice. Diego, tossing back bullets with a single salto. I have blood on my conscience as much as on my hands, and I'm turning myself invisible and intangible again, sabotaging bodies as much as machines.

Until I see them tear through the sky. The deadly warheads, the toys of Oppenheimer, the Destroyer of Worlds. A rain - again - even more destructive than that of Moon rocks: that of nuclear fire. Crack! I teleport away in the distance, where I can try to prevent the terrible chain reactions of fissions at the heart of matter. Maybe I can do it for one of those bombs. For two, who knows. But for so many? I teleport again, I exhaust myself, and the first nuke hits the ground. The second. Once again, the umbrella is useless.

And so I wake up gasping for air, I roll over on the cold mattress… and I fall painfully back to sleep. For many hours this time, eyelids and fists clenched, frightened and torn. Then and there, never and nowhere, for the first night I spend even before I'm born.

---

Notes :

And we're back in our bowling shoes, my friends, for the start of 'A bend in space-time' (and The Umbrella Academy) season 2. This is 1961 in Dallas, with all its inequalities and a situation that might seem distressing… Come on. It's already satisfying to be alive!

Remember the homeless guy who yells "Allisooooon" with Luther in episode 1? I've always thought he should be given more space. Since he's only credited as "homeless man", I allowed myself to name him. And I had to learn a bit of a Texan accent…

So what's Rin going to do now, once she's had a bit of a rest? We'll soon find out! And just like in the good old days of season 1…

Any comment will make my day! ♡

Maybe he senses his family looking for a way to stop him, and for a moment I'm afraid his actions will outpace my thoughts. Because already his bow lingers, his phrasing shifts, and it's the entire structure of the Icarus Theatre I feel beginning to rumble. Like Hargreeves Mansion only a few hours ago: a terrible echo of what collapsed. The colonnades, the mezzanine, the balconies, the faces of Bacchus: everything shudders, as long vertical cracks tear through the plasterwork and concrete, all the way up to the gilding of the vault. I don't know whether the Horror's intervention weakened the load-bearing walls. But handfuls of dust are falling onto the carpets now, in the central aisle where I'm still slumped. All I'm hoping is that Diego - who hasn't reappeared - isn't in trouble.

"You're going to have to teleport for a bit," Klaus tells me, clocking my calf where the bullet went through. "Or alternatively, hop."

Laughing would be my first instinct, but a clench of pain replaces it quickly as he tightens a bandage around my leg, improvised from an abandoned silk scarf. I'd underestimated his combat first-aid abilities. Which is funny, when I think of all the times I've had to patch him up: wounds that generally healed in under a day. Most recently three weeks ago, when he tried to cut a bagel in half with his finger still in the hole. If Ben hadn't dissolved, he'd probably be smiling to see us switching roles like this, but it seems Klaus gave everything and can't summon him anymore for now.

Has something changed, after he demonstrated how he can bend spectral energy at that border that is his alone, where death and life collide? In his siblings' trust, maybe. Fractionally. If only. And if I weren't busy grinding my teeth, maybe I'd tell him how proud of him I am.

I don't even register Diego coming back: my eyes linger on Viktor's diaphanous silhouette, raising opalescent irradiations beneath the stage's arches. Pure and white. White? I didn't remember his costume or his violin ever being white. Is this a sonic alteration of matter, or a visual expression of the energy he's now lifting? Or maybe just a hallucination from the fact that my wound is screaming at me.

"Are we all in?"

Luther's voice pulls me from these thoughts, nearly making me flinch. A little further along, in the aisle where Klaus has joined him, he's proposing they surround Viktor. Rush him from every angle simultaneously, give one of them a chance to reach him. Again, I won't weigh in: it's not my call to make. And even though Klaus notes it's a suicide mission, the general consensus seems quickly sealed.

General? No, Allison's gaze has just found mine. She knows, as I do, what rushing Viktor will trigger. But even her, Luther doesn't listen to: he's already assigning positions, mapping who will converge on the stage from which direction. He dismisses entirely whatever silent feeling she might have, no doubt taking full advantage of her missing voice. And in almost the time it takes to teleport, he goes stage right, Diego stage left, Five and Klaus absurdly head-on, in the sacrificial position. And I stare at Allison in turn, who stands as frozen as I am in the middle of the aisle.

"If Luther spent one moment trying to understand his power," I say from the floor where - diminished - I can only sigh in the thrumming of the air around us, "…he'd know that Viktor will react to the slightest incursion into the aura he's built around himself."

As if sensing his siblings approaching, Viktor strikes up the ascent of a crescendo that goes straight through me. Because that's my read: it's no longer possible - as things stand - to breach his integrity, to enter the bubble of destruction he's wrapped around himself. Doing so would only force him to release the immense potential energy he's been accumulating.

Allison knows that I can feel it in my own body: this energy Viktor is lifting and concentrating. It resonates with my power, my nerves, my bones. And her voiceless gaze asks me: what would I do.

"Viktor is a tuning fork, Allison," I say, trying to push my words above the crackling of the air. "Sound waves are how he bends energy."

The difference between Luther and me is that I spent summers doing odd jobs in festival tech crews. My hand goes to my chest, and to the name on my t-shirt.

"To stop him playing… it's his feedback loop: his hearing that needs to be disrupted."

This isn't a musical metaphor. Just as Viktor silenced Allison's voice, it's his own hearing that would need to be taken from him: temporarily, at least. But on stage, that bloody Number One is already bellowing an assault order, sealing what's about to happen.

"Now!" he shouts, and the bellow makes me flinch.

Allison holds my gaze one last time through the falling dust, as her brother is rushed from every side, the echoes of his pain stoked again. In the immense, audible expansion of the blinding aura emanating from the magnificent laments of his bow.

SHHHHHHRRRAAAAA.

Both of us are thrown to the floor in the middle of the aisle, swept and blasted by this new detonation of Viktor's. I brace to see Five, Klaus, Diego and Luther in pieces among the seats, but that's not what happened. When my sight clears, it's to find Viktor holding them - trapping them - through the energy of their very beings. Lifted, paralyzed down to their smallest nerve. And he has that cold gaze that no longer holds anything human.

I push myself up on my elbows, Allison crouching nearby, and she watches my face fill with the purest dread. Because I can feel in the convections of matter and energy what Viktor is doing, my blood freezing at my core, all the way to nausea.

"He's about to drain them," I can only murmur, ashen.

To erode the very physical essence of what they are, now with the unshakeable will to kill them.

It takes Allison one second to grab a gun from among the lacerated bodies of the shooters, and I watch her disappear down the aisle, a thread of ice water sliding through me. I saw the conflict in her, and despite the 'don't kill Viktor' scrawled hastily in her notebook a little earlier, I just watched her doubt it. I don't know if she heard me. I don't know what she's going to try.

Crack!

I collapse again against the lip of the stage, right beneath Klaus's form, twisted with stunned pain. I close my eyes in a desperate attempt to assess whether my power can so much as slow the erosion Viktor is imposing. My fists clench, and if I had any breath left I think I'd scream. I can feel that if I let go now, they would be nothing but dust and radiation. So I fight, I fight, while despite my efforts I can feel them deteriorating. I won't hold long. Who could? My strength is running out, and the tears would come, if-

BANG!

At the crack of a single gunshot, Klaus's formless mass drops roughly three metres, barely missing me. Five rolls against the seats, Luther destroys an entire row going down. Diego doesn't even have the reflex that usually has him landing on his feet like a cat. All of them gasping, gulping air for a moment…

Until a beam of light like a laser splits the theatre. Pure, straight, powerful, it passes through the ceiling in the drastic release of all the energy Viktor had accumulated. The glass of the dome rains down in sharp hail around us, a final crash. Then the beam dies, the theatre plunged once more into the faint glow of the electric lamps. No note, no trill, no vibration of the air, not even a hiss. Silence falls: the kind that precedes everything, or announces the end. I drag myself to where Klaus rolled against the first row of seats.

"Jesus Christ," I hear myself say, grabbing him and checking he's in one piece, to which he retorts, the swamp-green of his eyes stunned but intact: "Holy crackpipe!"

Like the others, he's on his feet in an instant. Because we all see Viktor collapse up on the stage into Allison's arms, the gun barrel still near his eardrum. She listened. She knew what to do to disrupt his hearing. The buzzing of relief floods my head as I register what we just escaped.

"We saved the world," Luther congratulates himself under his breath, and I barely dare believe it: I've hoped in vain so many times these past days. I slump against the red velvet, anchoring myself to the Moon's eternally steady presence through the shattered glass roof. Like so many chaotic, unhinged nights over The City in the past. Like…

"Klaus?" My mouth falls open again, stunned. I call his name the way I almost never do, purely so he'll turn around. "KLAUS!"

Toward the sky, I've just pointed a finger, and his expression quickly mirrors mine as he rises up on the stage. This is not a hallucination: not from my exhausted mind, not from his brain burned out by too many years of substance abuse.

Against the black sky, its jagged silhouette growing visibly larger with every second of its inexorable, vertiginous fall, an entire chunk of the Moon has just broken away.

What is your reaction, when the end of the world is finally, truly upon you? When it's no longer an abstraction, a prospect - even an imminent one - but an active reality? The truth is that every living being in the world right now probably has the same reaction as us: tilting their head back to look at what's coming down, in a transfixed terror.

The ground shakes. This time, it isn't the theatre's foundations: it's the structure of the Earth itself, rattled by the dozens of simultaneous impacts of what are, in comparison to the lunar behemoth hurtling toward the very point from which the beam tore it free, nothing but tiny fragments.

I think of Granny, probably asleep in front of her TV drama. At least, for her and the others, we will have tried everything. I don't know what the definition of failure is, which Diego's voice echoes back to me. But even if we're gathered here together, we're each utterly alone in this moment, in the face of the meteor shower beginning to fall.

No umbrella will protect against this. A laughable shield of fabric against a burning storm. We won't save everyone. We won't save even a handful. We can only - I've just felt Five's small blue eyes fix on me.

~We can only set plan B in motion.~

"It doesn't have to be the end," he murmurs, amid his siblings' disbelief, including Klaus's, who has just caught the look that just passed between Five and me, and who understands, even as Five's explanation unfolds, that we had considered a way out.

I don't know if we're still capable of opening a bend in space-time massive enough to carry all of us. We've given a great deal in the last minutes: Five has just been partially drained, and I'm wounded. We've each teleported half a dozen times. But his argument is clear, and in any case: what do we have left? Is there anything at all still left to lose, now that the electrical power of the entire city is starting to flicker?

Klaus has just managed to bring Ben back, which is in itself an acceptance of leaving. I know that this time, he doesn't hold it against me, not having told him about this possible way out. Having made an agreement with his brother again. Because it's not a question of trust this time. Because having people's backs has always been as much in my nature as keeping my own hopes. And because he, too, trusts that we can do this.

Crack! I teleport to his feet, Ben close by, and try to get up. But I don't have that in me, and what's left I'd rather keep. Luther lifts Viktor, not without hesitating to bring him. Did he just commend the family being together at the end of everything, right before considering leaving him behind? I'd rather hold onto Five's proposal to try to 'fix' his power: I no longer have the time to be angry about it.

Klaus looks down at me on the stage floor as it begins to vibrate. In this moment, possibly from the impact of the great meteor, a terrible shudder makes us all stagger enough that we have to hold onto each other. Which is exactly what Five and I need: close contact between all of us, to take everyone along as though we were one.

As I grip Klaus's ankles and Ben's, the electric light of the theatre goes out: probably along with the rest of the world. Darkness falls over the neoclassical mouldings, opaque, as Five's full attention locks onto me again. Then he tilts his head back toward the darkness of the ceiling, narrows his eyes, and draws in all the air his lungs can hold. And then, like pulling together on two different edges of the same veil, I tear open the fabric of space-time alongside him.

Wooshhhh.

My part in it is modest. Five's power is the one that speaks directly to space-time. I'm logistical support, working through the fabric of matter and energy, doing nothing different from what I'd do if I were trying to teleport everyone at once by myself. The energy swells, joining with the terrible energy of a world catching fire. Every shred of my power crackles inside me. Inside us.

The anomaly opens above our heads in circular furrows of white and blue light. Narrow at first, tentative, widening as our wills converge. As agreed, I let him breathe the destination into it: to whatever extent a destination can be chosen. This jump will be into relative unknown, beyond the imprint the universe retained of Five, some five decades back.

I hold on to Klaus and Ben as hard as I can, fingers probably tight enough to hurt, as every nerve ending in my body resonates inside the space-time continuum.

"Hold on! It's gonna get messy!", Five shouts.

But suddenly I feel Ben's leg give way under my fingers, and I look up blankly at Klaus. He's fighting to keep him tangible, gaze locked on the immense vortex that will take us all the moment we choose to seal it. He gave too much against the shooters, he's at the end of himself: without quite realizing it, he's letting go. And if Ben were to dissolve now, I don't know if he'd be carried with us.

Part of my concentration slips immediately into Klaus's, down into the matter of Ben, through the spectral energy threading our beings. For an instant, I feel as though I'm made of nothing but energy, dividing my strength: in a way that is probably perilous, between the vortex and the two of them. But no one is being left behind. Klaus needs him at least as much as he needs me.

My head spins, and keeps spinning. For a moment, I feel like a child again. Like Bạch Liên, about to teleport onto the greenhouse roof to her mother's screams. Like the five-year-old who had to rebuild her life on another continent, and is about to do it again. Like Marine at thirteen, the day she shaved the sides of her head. Like Rin, drawing her first breath among the scattered papers in the antechamber of the town hall after being brought back to life. Like the one of police custody, sewers, squats, retro movie theater, concerts. The one of a few shames, but mostly of all prides. Like crying and like laughing, like blazing rows and long deep sighs. From the corridors of detox to the tops of skyscrapers. My head spins and keeps spinning, as a burning red light rises on all sides of the theatre.

I close my eyes harder than I ever have. ~Lock and trigger.~ ZAP!

In a single blink, as the flames of hell come roaring in, we no longer belong to this time. The words finally make sense: 'Ut Malum Pluvia', 'When Evil rains'. And soon, the rest is silence at last.

---

Notes:

It's not easy to find the words when you put the final period on a story. But this one isn't over, you know that, of course!

I genuinely didn't know what to expect when I started this fic. Choosing the risky path of a plot running parallel to the main story, trying not to fall into rewriting, adopting the present tense and first person POV. Knowing full well what I was getting into… I hope I've given you something good, in this anomaly in time.

If you've read this far - even if you've been silent until now - leave me a little note, even just a small emoji! And I want to thank everyone who gave me the desire and the courage to keep going, especially my dear ReiraLoxar, who knows how much she has meant to me since the two years ago when this adventure began.

Season 2 is available on my profile!

So here I am, alone in this magnificent corridor with its empty red carpet, assigned to relay anything happening at the front of the theatre or through the side doors. Klaus hasn't stopped saying he's starving, and I'm worried he's genuinely too hungry to be usefully alert. I just hope Ben will somehow manage to kick his ass into gear.

The padded quiet under the wall lanterns has a paradoxically gentle softness, threaded through with the melancholic variations of the piece the orchestra has struck up. I can only make out its muffled echoes from here, but I can't help being moved: Viktor is an extraordinary soloist, the kind of prodigy that only comes along rarely. And I know now that his virtuosity echoes his power, the sound waves vibrating with his nervous system, down into the deepest part of his art.

"Aren't you going back to your seat?" asks a theatre employee passing by with a fur coat destined for the cloakroom. I shake my head with an apologetic smile. She can't understand. And I can't explain it to her. I don't like it, but I give her a small lie that could very easily have been the truth:

"I needed some air, don't worry, it'll pass."

She looks me over, from my Led Zeppelin t-shirt to my bowling shoes. Clearly not the Sunday-best style of the audience members she's used to seeing in these bourgeois walls. But she seems to respect my 'condition,' and moves off after letting me know to come to reception if I need anything.

I'm alone again in the muffled arpeggios, between the colonnades and mirrors, my eyes drifting to the historic lift whose walls of red and gold are probably treasures in their own right. I hope Allison can reach Viktor. That her presence alone, and the others', will be a clear enough message of reassurance for him. I hope it's not already too late, that he can still come back from his grief and his rage, that he-

SHHHHHHRRRAAAAA

A sonic blast tears through me like an auditory blizzard, knocking me back a step. A single wave, violent, designed to push away anything in its path. My eyes go wide as I register that Viktor's solo has stopped for a moment, but I don't have time to process it. Immediately, screams rise from beyond the walls. And the multiple access doors to the hall burst open, all at once, in a great crash of abused woodwork.

I press against a column. Within seconds, the corridor, the lobby, are flooded with an incoherent crowd dressed in velvet and pearls, screaming, running, shoving each other to be first out. The poor employee doesn't understand, and I don't know what to do either. I'm supposed to relay any threat coming from outside, but the chaos is now coming from inside.

"What's happening?" I grab someone at random by the arm as he surges toward the exit. "There's an attack," he stammers, "an attack… two men stormed the stage and there was an explosion-"

I don't have time to ask him anything more. The crowd carries him away, and I look toward the hall doors, pulse beating at my temples. Holding my position here is pointless. In there is where I'm needed. So I walk toward the nearest entrance, fighting against the mass of panicked music lovers pouring against me. If I want to stay operational, if things get more critical than this, I need to save my teleportation, my power, my energy. No burning options on nothing. I push through, against the current, make it past the last stragglers who lingered for a look inside before giving up. I reach the doors knocked off their hinges…

Viktor is at the far end of the now-empty hall. On stage, in the middle of the orchestra that absurdly keeps playing with terror in their eyes. His gaze brilliant with a senseless clarity, his face expressionless. And his music sad, so sad, carrying all the pure and beautiful pain that the strings of his soul can express through the violin. I know I should be careful with what I have left, but I could teleport behind him. One clean strike to the back of the neck, send him under, just like I did with the gas-mask sniper at the bowling alley. If I'm fast enough… I hesitate. I tense…

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

My eyes snap wide as I recognize that sound: precisely the sound of the bowling alley shooters' submachine guns, behind me. The Commission's snipers.

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

I drop to my knees feeling an impact at my calf: the kind you know will precede the pain by a few seconds, the time it takes to travel up the nerves to the brain. I go intangible, but it's too late: they're already walking through me. Weapons raised. Agile, fluid, relentless, numerous. And as they open fire into the hall, I pass through the wall to discover, with a sickening lurch, that others have already taken over some of the upper balconies through every other access point.

Crack!

This time I don't hesitate. I teleport myself up above the bullet-storm, onto one of the empty balconies. Stage left, beyond the wrought ironwork with its Bacchus heads and grape motifs. There, I bring my hand and my gaze to my calf, slightly trembling, tearing away the shredded section of my trousers to assess the damage. The bullet isn't inside, but it has cut me properly. So I press on the wound, to stop the damn bleeding.

"Shit."

I knew it: the element of surprise was always what could catch me out against bullets, intangibility or not. They came up behind me while I was going against the crowd. I should have held my position… I'd have seen them… Where was Klaus? Is he even alright? Given the number of attackers coming from every direction, our ability to keep watch was laughably inadequate in any case… I seethe against the balcony railing, amid the detonations erupting everywhere, over Viktor's solitary musical laments as the orchestra begins to abandon him.

I force myself to move to get a view of the hall, the pain held at bay by adrenaline and the urgency of doing something, of not staying crumpled like this. The shooters are on the other balconies, in the stalls, their red eyes glowing in the theatre's low light. I catch a glimpse of Five appearing and immediately ducking down between the rows of beautiful red seats folded up over a scatter of abandoned bags and coats. Allison. Luther. Diego, hurling knives along the floor in a desperate attempt.

I close my eyes for a moment, trying to focus, still compressing my calf. I can feel the energy of hundreds of those damn bullets, right down to the barrels of the assault rifles. And like at the bowling alley, I open my eyes again and try to jam, to deflect, to sabotage. A drop of water against the hostile ocean of the gunfire. But it's impossible not to try. All the way to the end. Just as Viktor keeps playing, his movements growing broader and more resolute. There are so many of them. Always more…

"Aaah guys, it's Cha-Cha! It's Cha-Cha she's-"

Klaus has just burst into the hall through the side entrance Diego cleared a moment ago, vaulting over the railing, Ben at his heels. Recklessly, it has to be said, and quickly reminded of his imprudence by a shooter who charges down the aisle with the clear intention of shooting him point-blank. I watch him below, diving into a row of seats. I release the pressure on my calf, I'm about to teleport down, but Five beats me to it. Crack! He's on the bastard gunman's back, spinning him and making him riddle his own side. I could almost cheer, but the pain catches up: I compress my wound again, as Viktor's notes lift the energy around the broad movements of his bow.

How desperate is the situation? The thought crosses me. Something pushes me to haul myself up on the railing and look properly. I just caught Klaus and Ben reaching an understanding. Ben positioning himself in front of him. And as Klaus fails to materialize him a first time…

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

This time I'm the one being targeted, by the shooters on the balconies opposite, and even though I'm still intangible, by instinct, I teleport to the next tier over. Klaus immediately spots the tear of blue light that comes with my jump. He's always caught them. I look at him below… he fixes on me one last time. And as the volleys of gunfire start up again with fresh intensity, he folds down between the seats, in a concentration effort that is unmistakably unlike anything he's done before. Of course I understand what they're doing, and Ben, for his part, gives me a resolute jerk of his chin. But I tremble at it. I tremble, because I know now what pain he'll feel if…

I don't know what stops the gunfire first. The immense spectral energy deployed above the red velvet seats, Ben's screams tearing through Viktor's melodic arpeggios, or the otherworldly roars of the Horror as its four tentacles pierce through his chest.

His suffering is immense as the creature tears through him at the will of his power, and I understand now what Klaus had told me: that Ben had faced this alone, so much physical pain, on top of everything else - more insidious, more diffuse - inflicted on all of them. He suffers, but he will not yield, and the Horror's first target is directly the shooters on the balconies: the ones who'd just been concentrating their fire on me.

Higher, higher than the mezzanine itself, the creature's tentacles rise in roaring that merges with Ben's screams. They unspool, rear up, relentless and terrible, like the appendages of something ancient and vast. Slash! They come down a first time, and the entire theatre shudders: they are material, more so than ever. Prehensile, they seize, sweep, slash, crush. And the scruples I'd had about triggering a heart attack in these bastards seem deeply small when I watch the Horror deployed by Ben tear one of the shooters in two.

What exactly is the Horror? What is the nature of this creature, whose very existence makes me feel as though space-time is trembling?

Klaus's eyes are vacant, I can't tell if he's looking at me or through me. I could help, materialize Ben alongside him, but I won't. Because one thing is certain, absolutely certain:

~He doesn't need me at all~.

He just needs to know I'm there as backup if it comes to that. So I stay, gradually releasing the compression on my leg, watching what seems to stupefy the others so much more than it does me. Because I never had any doubt. Not once. And I smile in the middle of the chaos, the violin trills and the blood. I know Klaus is capable of infinitely more than this.

One of the bastards still standing at the back of the orchestra fires again, toward Ben. Or toward Klaus, I can't tell. And it doesn't matter, because I deflect his bullets with every scrap of rage I have left: upward, one after another, volley after volley, as much as I can manage. Until the Horror's tentacle tears the shooter off the floor by the waist and sends him to come apart against the wall beneath the mezzanine. Now it's the turn of everyone in the stalls to meet the same fate as those on the balconies. One by one, in the roaring darkness and the spectral energy: vivid to my senses, blinding. Until the last one. And then, suddenly, Ben retracts the impossible limbs he'd unleashed, and the sound of the theatre returns to the pure sound of the violin.

I burst out laughing where I'm perched, and immediately regret it, the pain catching up with me. But I can't help it. Crack! In a blink, I'm sitting on the carpeted aisle below, amid the debris of bone, flesh, and metal. Smiling at the end of the world, as Klaus addresses the brothers and sisters who won't even thank him:

"Now who's the lookout?"

---

Notes:

I think I've finally developed a taste for action scenes: I no longer have the slightest difficulty writing them.

I've chosen not to try to explain why Klaus failed to hear roughly 350 people screaming their way out of the Icarus Theatre (which are admittedly harder to miss than snipers on a stealthy approach). If you're wondering, however, know that it was because of the noise from the coriander grinder. Which he hadn't asked for.

You'll notice that the one character who can go intangible against bullets still gets hit. Those with a fondness for 'butterfly effects' (or alternatively, 'the fall of a sparrow') will have noticed the causal chain. The one that runs from the name 'Omega' to anxiety; from a Valium tablet to Klaus's bitterness at not being heard; from that bitterness to a brother's punch, and then a waffle to celebrate it… and finally from the change kept in a pocket to a burrito bought across from the theatre… and a warning never given.

One of this chapter's lessons lies in the subtlety of what cooperation actually is. Sometimes it means doing nothing: showing you believe in someone, without supplanting them, without offering help that wasn't asked for. Just having their back. It seemed to me that was the only right choice for Rin toward Klaus.

Finally, you'll note that - yes - Rin is about to head off to the early 1960s in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt (a band that won't be formed until 1968). My friends, there is only one chapter left in this season 1. The final notes will be played soon.

And as always, any comment will make my day! ♡

Cheering goes up from the lane next door. I think that if my mother had organized my birthday at a bowling alley even once - just once - I would have gone invisible and stayed that way until it was time to return the polished shoes. I feel for young Kenny, celebrating his here, with cousins he doesn't even seem to particularly like, and a mother treating him like a baby chick on top of it all. Not exactly ideal conditions for Klaus to focus on materializing his ghost brother, it has to be said.

"And yet you managed it again, at the Mansion. That's what you told me."

Nearby, I feel Ben's energy nod in agreement, and Klaus confirms it.

"Yeah. When the ceiling was coming down, in the stairwell… Ben, it was Ben who pulled Diego. He's the one who saved his ass and kept him from ending up as a pancake. Not me."

It pains me to see him give himself no credit for this, that he even felt like a fraud when Diego thanked him, when he should feel the exact opposite. It's genuinely his power, his will - conscious or not - that materialized Ben. The first time, I probably played a role in the punch he landed, and I won't do that again: what Klaus needs is to get there himself, and absolutely not another layer of feeling like an impostor. Yes, it's him who made his brother's spectral energy tangible. Nobody else.

"It was a synergy, Klaus. You saved Diego together."

I mean it, but he's already shrugging it off, inside the worn fabric of his sleeveless military jacket, the one Granny had called a stylistic insult.

"I needed it to work again in front of the others, Rinny. So they'd believe me. Allison was already rolling her eyes when I so much as suggested I might be useful. Now I just look like the lame duck desperate for attention again."

As Allison sends a ball down the lane, I think back to the way she talked about him in the bathroom, and I get it. I understand what Klaus feels every time his siblings treat him that way. I know he's doing everything he can right now to try to rehabilitate himself in their eyes, and it genuinely hurts me to think the apocalypse might pass over us without him having managed it.

His mood has dropped a lot this evening, I can feel it in his posture. His sobriety is no doubt a big part of it, and despite everything, he hasn't even considered touching a single drop of alcohol, despite the options being plentiful in this dingy bowling alley. He won't give himself any credit for that either. Yet it's a considerable feat, at his scale. Still a fragile one, but one that sends his power rippling through all the spectral energy around him. I exchange a look with Ben: he felt it too. And he has no idea why their little attempt didn't work earlier.

"Your moment will come," I tell him, and he exhales slightly bitterly through his nose. He doesn't argue, though. When I try to give him a little reassurance, he takes what he can from it.

"I would sell one of my kidneys for tacos," he murmurs. "The hot dogs here are spongy, and the popcorn tastes like old styrofoam."

The worrying part is that he knows what old styrofoam tastes like, but Diego suddenly calls him from the lane, because it's his turn. Keeping the score going is our ticket to staying: the manager has his eye on us. So Klaus leaves me with Ben and goes to grab his favorite pink ball.

I stay quiet for a moment, watching him try to aim, while his hand-eye coordination will almost inevitably send the ball straight into the gutter. And then, after a moment, I say to Ben, the way I might have said it to myself:

"For now, he can only do it when the adrenaline's high, right?"

Ben nods silently. It's always under the force of one emotion or another that our powers evolve, and Klaus's subconscious seems particularly wired to urgency and danger. I wonder if Vietnam has something to do with that. He manages to hit one pin - just one - which wobbles but doesn't fall, while at Kenny's birthday party, the whole family cheers an equalizing score.

Luther comes back with a decisive stride, and Ben tenses, trying to gauge what's going to be decided. We exchange another look, because it sounds like Viktor's concert is going ahead. If so, we'll need to move fast. And without making a pun of it, get our act together.

"All right, so what's the plan?" Luther stares at Diego for a moment, who just asked that. "Well, I think that, uh…" Drawing himself up to appear even more massive, he goes solemn. "We go to the Icarus Theatre." "That's a location, not a plan."

Fundamentally? Diego is right. But even if Luther objectively has nothing intelligent to offer yet, Diego is being contrary and has absolutely no intention of helping him find a useful way to intervene. He just lets him flounder and fail, possibly with the unhealthy pleasure of a Number Two about it, which seems particularly counterproductive and dangerous given what we're facing. These bickering matches exhaust me, and frankly I-

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

Flinching at the first burst of gunfire is a primary reflex. What's less of one is everything that follows: whether you drop and take cover or not, whether you even know to, it shows exactly how much you've had to deal with this kind of thing before. It takes the Hargreeves less than a second to be at the bottom of the high bar table at the end of the lane, and Ben even less to disappear to wherever he knows to go. All around, Kenny's family, the Super Star Lanes employees, the panicked bowlers, everyone is running in every direction with no idea where to go.

What?

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

My own blood runs hot: I'm the most exposed at the bar, so I go straight to what works for me. Intangible, invisible, I don't even have a reflexive movement to protect myself: the bullets are too fast for that. No doubt half a dozen have already passed straight through me. Only then do I turn my eyes toward the moving shapes that have entered with the careful, muffled footsteps of people who've practiced them. Silent as cats, precise as lasers: snipers in gas masks, their red eyes glowing with a surreal aura in this dingy old bowling alley.

Why here? Why now?

Unfortunately, I have no doubt about it. I've heard Five mention the Commission, and the means this organization is capable of deploying to make sure 'what needs to happen, happens.' In this case, a disproportionate strike force, aimed at stopping a handful of ordinary people from going to 'attend the concert' of Viktor Hargreeves.

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

I told Five that if they were willing to go this far to make sure the Apocalypse happened, then we were genuinely capable of stopping it. So faced with these bullets, only one thought lands, crashing: if these snipers are here, it means we actually have a real chance of getting out of this alive.

"Maybe they're here for Kenny's birthday!" Klaus shouts, hands clamped over his ears the way he always does when sounds are loud and sudden.

Luther corrects him, not even registering it was a joke. But Diego has already sent one of his knives into one of the attackers, who goes down onto the bowling alley's turntables. Black lights replace the harsh fluorescents in an instant, as the first ectopic notes of the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night blare out. And from there… it's nothing but chaos, against a backdrop from the top of the 1973 charts.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

Another knife flies. And as stupid as the thought is, I wonder how Diego's going to get them back.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

The submachine gun fire riddles the entire room, amid explosions of popcorn bags and gumball machines. How many of these people are there? There seem to be more of them every time I look.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

Luther fights by hurling bowling balls at the shooters, one after another. I watch more bullets fly past, another knife, and an entire birthday cake.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

I climb onto the bar table. After all, I've got nothing to fear: they can't even see me, and their bullets go straight through.

'Gonna keep on dancing to the rock and roll, on Saturday night, Saturday night.'

The energy released from the propulsion of their bullets through the barrels is strong enough that I barely need anything to knock them off course. One at a time, which feels pathetically small. But doing it, I notice that it's exactly what Diego is doing too, between knife throws. I realize this at our mutual expense, when we both go for the same shooter at the same time: our two actions contradict each other, and a bullet narrowly misses Allison.

'Dancin' to the rhythm, in our heart and soul, on Saturday night, Saturday night.'

Working on the energy inside the mechanics, I manage to jam the weapon of one of these absurd pro-apocalypse foot soldiers. I'm about to do the same to a second submachine gun when I see one of his colleagues approaching, trained on the side of the table where Klaus and Allison are barricaded.

'I-I-I-I just can't wait, I-I-I-I gotta date'.

Crack! In a blink, I'm behind him, my brain running through options at lightning speed. Intangible, I could easily plunge my fist into his chest and squeeze his heart until it gave out. I could probably block the electrical impulses in his brain and drop him where he stands. My own chest tightens at the thought, and I'm frightened of myself. But I don't have time to dwell on the kind of monster I could be. No time at all. He's advancing. Advancing with his weapon raised, and even if I jammed it now, he's close enough to do damage by hand.

'At the good ol' rock and roll folk show, I've gotta go, saturday night, saturday night!'

Thwack. With a dull sound, I've made my elbow tangible again and, one sharp hit to the back of his useless gas mask, sent him to sleep against the bar stool. Without him seeing it coming. And probably neither he nor any of his little friends will ever understand why. I crouch down in the corner of the table adjacent to the one Klaus is hiding behind, turning visible just long enough to signal that I'm fine.

'Gonna rock it up, roll it up, do it all, have a ball, saturday night, saturday night!'

Another of Luther's bowling balls sails over our heads, while Klaus is registering the brutal strategic reality closing off every attempt to get out of here. The shooters have meticulously covered every exit. And Diego challenges Luther again, who doesn't seem capable of anything beyond launching cannonballs.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

Allison points toward the lanes, toward the pit, beyond the pins. Where the pin-setting mechanism sits, and an access to the service corridor. Without being able to say a word, she's just been more useful than Luther, who nevertheless picks up the idea and announces it at full volume. Her, who had objectively not done much up to this point.

"The lanes!" Luther bellows. "Go!"

I think the smoke machine just kicked in. Without a second thought, everyone rises into the black light where colored reflections from the disco ball dance across everything. Launching themselves along the slippery lanes, between the gutters Klaus has cursed extensively, through the gunfire raining down like metal hail.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

We run, we run, Luther in front, quickly overtaken by Diego. Allison giving everything she has despite the residual exhaustion of her recent surgery. And Klaus, who turns around recklessly to check that I'm visible in his wake.

"Move, dumbass!" I shout at him through the music, taking the risk of making my top half tangible again.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

And he dives, without the slightest concern for hurting himself: straight into the pins at the end of the lane, scoring the only strike he will probably ever make in his life. At the pit, I slide in after him, my ridiculous bowling shoes first, straight into the narrow space leading to the service corridor. I have no idea how Luther fit through. And suddenly, the sound of the gunfire is somewhat muffled.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

Ben is there, amid the cables and piping of Super Star Lanes' decrepit backstage, watching us like he'd been eagerly waiting for us to make it to this escape. He's already clocked the emergency corridor door, through which we file out. The music fades into the distance as the corridor unspools, all the way to the emergency exit that spits us out of the building to the crack of our footsteps.

'S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!'

Then the evening air bites at us, under a full and high moon. We run, run in our finest bowling attire, leaving our shoes behind, except for Diego.

Heading for the Icarus Theatre. Which remains a location. And not a plan.

---

Notes:

It is indeed in adversity that the powers of this ragtag (or just plain pathetic?) team are born and grow, and Rin has just experienced that again, realizing under fire that she might be capable of things far more terrible than disappearing. And I think she's starting to understand that she's not as useless in a fight as she'd assumed. And that what we become really does depend on our choices.

I enjoyed scoring this chapter as much as the show scored its own scene. I'd recommend reading this section with the track running on your player of choice… This time, I didn't struggle at all writing the action, and I think the soundtrack genuinely helped!

We are now on our way to the Icarus Theatre, where the action will end for this season… With a small pang at the thought, but also a great deal of joy!

Any comment will make my day! ♡

---

Tonight, nobody is playing seriously: the balls roll mostly to justify our staying here, sheltered from the downpour currently hammering the outside world. For the past fifteen minutes, our stunned conversations have overtaken the crash of the pins, and I'm watching the bowling alley employee making her way toward our group with the expression of someone who has bad news to deliver.

"Hello," she says with an awkward smile. "I hate to intrude, but my manager says if you're not gonna bowl, you gotta leave".

The poor girl is really just the emissary of the bald-headed Cerberus at the shoe rental counter, who is slapping a pair of shoes against the desk with some feeling, because Diego refused to put any on, rather than risk a fungal infection.

"Whose turn is it?" he asks, and I look up at the screen.

The third frame was in progress, and even if I genuinely dislike this game, I have to admit that bowling says more about people than I'd given it credit for.

Diego, for someone whose power depends on manipulating trajectories, is entirely average. Possibly because he refuses to put his fingers into the communal ball holes, but more likely - and this is a pleasant surprise - because he plays honestly. Five, whose name the operator entered as a numeral, is doing middlingly as well, as is Luther, who is actually doing rather poorly. Allison leads at 48 points through three frames. And you won't be surprised to learn that with his catastrophic hand eye coordination, Klaus is scraping the bottom of the scoreboard with a grand total of 2 points, though he is - with dignity - refusing to have the bumpers raised for him like a child.

It was his turn, but with a curse at the staff's remonstrations, Luther hurls a ball across the lanes, sending it bouncing like a rubber ball: scoring a strike for someone else's team through sheer, through sheer dumb luck. I sigh. It's obvious I'm not playing. So I get up and make my way, with some effort, toward the bathrooms.

They say the toilets are a reliable indicator of an establishment's quality, and - believe me - Super Star Lanes must rank very low on the Lonely Planet index. Fortunately, there is at least running water, and I splash some cool water on my face, attempting to freshen my thoughts along with it.

There is no longer any doubt that the Apocalypse can still happen - that it will happen - and that Viktor is very much the bomb about to set it off.

This situation is so much worse than anything I had imagined: because the end of the world hatched from inside the very core of those supposed to prevent it. Sadly, I've been able to watch the suffering that generated it, all week. A development that is, bleakly, almost the logical conclusion of the destiny line Reginald Hargreeves drew. Did he genuinely want to prevent the Apocalypse, or did he provoke it instead? I pass more water over my face. Probably, I'll never know.

What pains me most is what Klaus told me while we were running toward this absurd refuge: while I was at work today, Viktor came to Hargreeves Mansion looking for help. Possibly after having eliminated Jenkins himself, in the most terrible way. Klaus murmured, his throat tight, that Luther's response was not one of welcome and understanding: far from it.

He locked him up.

Without listening to anyone, not even Allison, who was silently imploring. Viktor was possibly on the verge of imploding, but perhaps one act of compassion from his only family - just one - could have stopped everything. Instead, all he received was an ego display from someone still trying to convince himself of his Number One status. I seethe inwardly. I regret having believed Luther had changed.

I felt Viktor's power all around me in the collapsing hall, right into my own nerve endings, his sonic power resonating with the energy of mine. I understood immediately that I would be incapable of containing it: in his grief, he has become like the billions of tonnes of water behind a broken dam, surging down a valley. At the stage I'm at with my own abilities, I could only be swept away. Was Reginald Hargreeves right to want to push us, to force us to grow in mastery? For this reason? The thought knots my throat.

I raise my head and look at myself in the chipped mirror. I wonder whether Viktor will actually go and play at the Icarus Theatre tonight. It meant so much to him. Yes. Probably, if anyone goes looking, that's where he'll be found.

I turn off the water and take a miserable paper towel with the texture of tracing paper. And as I'm awkwardly trying to dry my hands, I see a familiar silhouette come through the bathroom door in the mirror.

Allison looks furious, above the bandage crossing her throat: I can feel it in every line of her posture, still curved with pain that hasn't left her. Furious? That's an understatement. She's seething, without the means to express it. Outside the ladies' room, I can hear Luther calling her name. She ignores him magnificently, and not only because her vocal cords have been partially severed, and leans against the sink next to mine. I look at her, she looks at me.

"Something wrong?"

The question comes naturally: the way it would have if she'd been able to speak. She sighs with rage, pained and frustrated. Then she digs in her pocket, pulls out her notepad, and in a few quick strokes writes me an answer that is clear, precise, and irrefutable:

[Luther is an idiot]

I raise an eyebrow. That is an admirably concise summary of my own thoughts, from someone currently diminished in her means of expression. I stand there blinking, in the stormfront she seems to be generating around herself.

"I… Klaus told me, yeah. That he locked Viktor up. That otherwise maybe none of this would have-" But I can see her scrawling furiously again, and she shoves the notepad at me: [Slept with someone. Wasted.]

I'm even more taken aback by the rage-trembling hand holding the notepad under my nose. What? That's what's making her blow a fuse like this? She has clearly never had to pick Klaus up at 2 in the morning. I blink three times. And since I'd be surprised if Luther himself had volunteered that information, I can easily guess who put his foot in it.

"I must say, it was acoustically a nightmare," I admit, even though, underneath, I'm genuinely irritated. And I watch her eyes almost physically leave her head when she understands that I witnessed it too. It's remarkable, in the end, how much passes through people's expressions without needing words at all.

"I think it was just a bad day for him…" I say. "We've all had one this week…"

God, it irritates me to have to defend him, but it was objectively true. He found an entire pile of unopened correspondence from their father, he literally felt he'd been sent to the moon to get him out of the way. Allison knows that, surely, so I narrow one eye, wondering why, really, it's hitting her this hard.

"It was pathetic. And yes, a little funny," I say, with a degree of kindness, to see what my words do in her. Unfortunately, far from softening, she looks as though she's about to cry.

That stops me cold. Does she feel some kind of betrayal in what Luther did? I can see conflicting feelings jostling in her: adolescent memories from that closed-off house surfacing in her. I'm hardly well-placed to pass judgement on other people's emotional or sexual situations, but if there's one thing I'm certain of in this moment, it's that on the subject of her and Luther, I have no desire to know more. And besides, she's already writing:

[Klaus's fault]

No question mark. As a self-evident statement, just because Alcohol, Drugs, Klaus and Sex just happen to appear in that order in the universe's alphabet? That hasty, groundless verdict gets under my skin in turn, enough that the electric hand dryer beside us suddenly roars to life, blasting the scraps of toilet paper scattered across the old buckled linoleum.

"Hold on. Are you talking about the Klaus who tried to talk him out of it?" I say coolly. "The one who spent hours tracking him down through every shitty corner of the city while going through his own withdrawal? Or the one who got his head smashed in trying to pull him out of trouble?"

My eyes are burning, because enough is enough: I'm sick of watching him get treated like this too. And if the world ends in two hours, I have absolutely no problem telling Allison what I think of her prejudices and her navel-gazing, if it comes to that. She doesn't write anything, but I can see her hesitating, so I look pointedly at her pen.

"Don't you think what Luther did, locking Viktor up, is actually worse? Honestly, I’d rather he think with his arse than his head."

She writes something, and just as I'm thinking I may have gone a little hard, we reach the same moment simultaneously, as I speak and she turns her notepad toward me:

"Sorry." [Sorry.]

Our words cross each other, and I think this is genuinely the first time either of us has heard - or read - the other say that. I sigh as the hand dryer falls silent. The toilet paper scraps drift back down, almost gracefully, and I pass my hand over my eyes.

"Don't you think there are better things to do, maybe two hours before the end of the world? Don't you have your daughter's voice to listen to?"

I know those words will hit even harder, but that's all right. Several times this week she's repacked her bag without ever managing to board the flight that would take her back to Los Angeles and Claire. She can't speak, but I can see the full journey her thoughts are making: the return to reality, beyond all the feelings she carried from adolescence. I sense her posture change, becoming the sadder but more grounded one of the mother she is.

[You going home?] she writes, and I look at the floor. She can't know that - in a way - my goodbyes to Granny are already done.

"I have a part to play here now."

I fought against that, and she knows it. But I made a promise to Five that I'm keeping to myself. We have a plan B, a last resort, that feels more relevant than ever right now. Allison nods, with a kind of trust toward me that I hadn't suspected. My relationship with her is extreme ambivalence: she irritates me as much as she unsettles me.

She turns her eyes toward the now-silent hand dryer, then back to me. And she takes me in, as if evaluating me one last time, or giving some form of approval. Her expression turns serious, grave even, and she writes once more before turning her notepad toward me.

[Don't kill Viktor]

Reading this chills my blood. Because I realize this is absolutely one of the eventualities that exists before being ruled out. The raw reality of what awaits us is right there, set down in black ink, and I can't stop myself reading it again and again.

"Of course not," I say, almost horrified, but before I can say anything more, she adds, no doubt because she knows how few scruples Viktor might have left, in the state he's in:

[Be careful]

What happens tonight is uncertain, but it will inevitably be a seismic event in all our lives. I'm not afraid anymore, I said so. The bowling ball is already rolling, we'll see where it strikes: possibly well off the lane. Now, I just want to see it through to the end, once and for all.

Allison watches me as I nod, and in a final gesture, she writes one last thing that could change everything:

[We're still family]

---

Notes:

Despite the gravity of the situation, this scene also has lighter moments. It's a form of absurd breathing space, of the kind The Umbrella Academy does so well.

Honestly, the scoreboard in the bowling scene was an absolute goldmine of inspiration. The care given to detail in this series is always remarkable, and I simply couldn't resist making the most of it.

I loved imagining a 'conversation' with Allison… given that she can't speak. And I was surprised by how much came out of it, with an economy of words that was genuinely satisfying to work with.

Any comment will make my day! ♡

---

My brows draw together. Those four stops are the ones that literally ring Hargreeves Mansion. I switch off the tape at once, stuff my headphones in my pocket, and stand up toward the driver, asking to be let out even though it's not a scheduled stop. Given the complete standstill of traffic, he lets me, and I watch for any scooters coming up on the inside before stepping onto the wet pavement. The night is opaque under a clear sky, but there's a strange smell in the air. Something unusual. Dust, maybe, or gas. Around me, people are now moving in the opposite direction.

Crack! I've gained a block, and I round the corner by the Central Bank annex, quickening my pace. The air hums against my ears in a way that makes me squint. Further along, part of the street lighting seems to have gone out. It doesn't matter: the night is clear, the moon is full. I don't care about not seeing well anyway: in this neighborhood, I could teleport with my eyes closed by now.

Crack! I'm only a few dozen metres from the back alley that runs along the side of Hargreeves Mansion below the bedrooms. What's worrying me now is the sound: low, resonant, vibrating up through the tarmac underfoot, like a demolition site. The dust in the air is heavier than ever. And my heart is beating hard enough to pulse in my temples.

Crack! Barely reappeared near the dumpster where Klaus has searched so many times, I freeze and step back on instinct, eyes wide. My gaze climbs the fire escape, which is shaking as if it's about to tear away from the wall. The lights are on even if they're flickering: Klaus's room is lit, Luther's too. I have no idea what's happening on the other side of the façade, but from the way the dust is rising, I'm afraid part of the far side of the house has come down. My breath is short, my legs unsteady, my thoughts stunned flat.

I don't have time to think: not about the undoing of the apocalypse theory, not about the relief I'd felt that has now painfully evaporated. It hurts to see these cracks, as though I want to stop them from opening in a building I shouldn't be particularly attached to. But I am, or rather, to those for whom and through whom it exists. The bathroom light flickers, and its ceiling seems to bow, tearing something in my chest. Did everyone get out? Shit, is Klaus still in there? One pinch of focus is all it takes to make me intangible. Now it doesn't matter: the stone, the plaster, the metal, the wood.

Crack! In the blink of an eye I'm at Klaus's bedroom door, which is empty, as is the rest of the corridor. On the walls, the writing he left behind is crumbling down, one word after another, onto his mattress, onto the rug, onto the overturned hookah. His words disappearing, every thought he'd ever let out of himself in this room: 'Years gone by without a word, now in ink that soon will fade', 'Everything must be reduced to dust to start again.' And the dust is taking them, taking them, as I back away. The bead curtain from the entrance has just fallen near the bookcase, and I step out into the corridor, choosing to abandon my things to the chaos of magazines and darts that was once Diego's room.

Crack! I reappear in the trophy gallery. For reasons I can't explain, the bedroom corridor I just left explodes, room by room. A section of ceiling tears loose, and my arms come up over my head on instinct, even though I can't feel it. It passes through me - my whole body gone intangible by reflex - and crashes to the floor, literally through my feet, and I look around me, unable to believe the devastation I'm actually watching.

Why? How is this possible? Outside, the rest of the world was intact. I saw it.

I can barely accept that I had that conversation with Pogo on this very balcony, a few days ago. I can almost see his posture in that armchair, his aching back beneath those incomprehensibly British manners. Eight days spent here come flooding back, and I stand still, my eyes searching everywhere for any sign that someone might have stayed behind.

Then the glass of the display cases explodes on its own, as though shattered by a high-pitched frequency. My hands come up again on instinct to shield my face from glass that cannot cut me, but through the thickening air, I catch a glimpse of Klaus at the far end of the gallery, moving fast with Diego, with Ben, toward a window giving onto the fragile metal of the outer fire escape.

Crack! Trying to reach them, I reappear on the main landing of the Grand Staircase, in the middle of the dust, with what sounds like only moments before it gives way. Disoriented, no longer sure which direction to turn. I'll barely manage one more teleport, maybe two: I've been covering long distances. A large section of the gallery floor collapses nearby, and I'm trembling where I stand, because I can see the night sky through what used to be the Moorish-style skylight I always found so hideous. I need to at least reach the lower level. I try to focus…

Crack! Around me, it's the entrance hall thundering now. The chandelier, on the ground, drowning in a chaos of rubble. I've always thought of Hargreeves Mansion as a kind of creature: one that grew, decade by decade, like a tentacular organism swallowing its neighborhood whole. A being of bricks and gilding, devoted to its builder, tasked in equal measure with mistreating and protecting. The only place Klaus has ever, against all reason, considered home. And before my eyes, this monster dies in its turn, gaping cracks devouring the colonnades vertically in an insane roar.

Above, what remains of the gallery gives way, taking with it the entire wall section it supported. Hargreeves Mansion seems to weep its full reserve of bricks, metal, glass, and trophy copper. Downward. Again and again. But I freeze, because I've just sensed something beyond the sound of the collapse itself. The air, all around… has changed.

A vibration: one I'd already felt faintly while walking in the street, without paying it proper attention. But now I feel it clearly, powerfully, close: a terrible sound wave outside the audible spectrum, its force making energy shudder through everything. Through every stone, every beam, and possibly through flesh and bone for anyone who isn't intangible. I'm trembling, my eyes fixed on the point from which these vibrations are spreading.

Then I see him. Viktor, in his blue shirt.

He's no taller than me, I really register that for the first time as he turns through the reception room doorway, which collapses behind him. The sofas, the display cases, everything reduced to dust. Our eyes meet, but I don't know if he sees me, even though I'm fully visible.

A beam passes through me and I don't even react. I just stand there, in the middle of the collapsing chaos that cannot touch me, looking into his white eyes that don't even blink anymore. If his face had once been gentle, sensitive, sad, now it holds nothing but a cold and disconnected indifference. And I can feel them around him now, those sound waves, as he sends them rippling outward like the living tuning fork he seems to have become.

I understand, in this moment. I understand that Viktor has always had this power, possibly suppressed by the anxiolytics I've watched him swallow so many times over these last few days. Shit, how did I not think of that, instead of taking them myself?

A power tied to the material waves of sound, I can feel it in my flesh and bones, through the energy. An immense power, far beyond his violin, one he has never had the chance to learn to contain, any more than his emotions. Five told me that the question had never been the nature of our powers, but the degree to which we can control them. Control ~ourselves~, in reality. In that sense, Reginald Hargreeves literally abandoned Viktor, after adopting him.

My eyes go wider as the entirety of the reception room gives way to a pile of bricks, wood, and glass, the vast sky above spreading moonlight over marble that was never meant to feel the wind come through.

Jenkins is dead. I don't know what he did to Viktor, or how. But I can see what it cracked open. This, and possibly the way everyone has treated him: his siblings, no doubt in ways even worse than how they've treated Klaus. I've witnessed it at moments this week, and it pains me to be able to say so. I saw his fragility, even when he smiled over it. But beneath that timid, trembling surface, Viktor was already simply primed to implode.

I don't believe he has any deliberate intention to cause harm: he is nothing but instinct now, and what is expressing itself around him is his emotions without filter or wall. He moves through the hall without looking at me, slow and detached, as if he were simply heading out to catch a taxi, as so many times before. Except that around us, everything is falling in a chaos of rubble and broken glass, in the terrible undulation he is generating. He disappears toward the main door with its stained glass umbrellas blown out, even as inside and outside dissolve into each other beneath the impassive moon.

And then the thought pierces me: painful, obvious, as though it had never been about anything else. Five was right this morning: Harold Jenkins was only the spark. Viktor might actually be the bomb. The rider on the Apocalypse horse. And no: it wasn't me.

That lands in my stomach like a stone, but there's no time. The steps of the Grand Staircase are collapsing in their turn, one after another, like a terrible line of dominoes reminding me we will never climb them again. Above my head, everything that remains of the upper floors of Hargreeves Mansion is caving in. Downward. Toward me.

A desperate impulse rises: get out. Around me, everything is dust now, and I can no longer make out the sky, nor the edges of the storm of art-deco debris inexorably burying me.

Crack! I teleport one last time, in a direction I believe to be the only thing I can still perceive: Ben's spectral energy, somewhere out beyond the chaos: possibly outside. Not far enough, probably, because I find nothing but incoherent rubble again - around me, above me, below me - and I crouch where I am, just pulling my knees to my chest, waiting for the blocks and the dust to settle around my intangibility.

The thunder that sounds is not the sky's. It is the Academy's last lament, in the collapse of what once stood with an oppressive kind of majesty. Gradually, the blocks of brick and cement, the shards of glass, Klaus's writing, the plumbing pipes, the woodwork, Five's equations, the wrecked furniture: everything seems to find a new resting place, without order, but still at last. I stay there, eyes open on the debris passing through me, hearing familiar voices just beyond. Diego. Luther. Five?

Trembling, I pull myself upright, push forward, step out of the rubble that never touched me, and become material again as the full scale of the devastation strikes my eyes. There is nothing left, and the rest of The City continues to stand: legitimately indifferent, untouched. I am without breath, without voice. The sound of sirens and helicopters overhead floods every inch of the air, and soon the sound of hurried footsteps.

"Rin, Holy glitters, you were in there… you could've ended up in pieces."

Klaus's voice pulls me back to reality, and already he's pulling me by the arm, while the helicopters train their spotlights on the smoking rubble of Hargreeves Mansion. I raise my hand to shield my eyes, and I can see the remains of the 'Kids’ Lounge' table, the red billiard cloth, the coffee machine. Shards of crockery on the ground, some fragments still marked with the umbrella. And he pulls me again, as I struggle to tear my gaze from what he has already put behind him.

"Come on, move!"

And then, on instinct, I start running too. Running, even though I don't know toward what.

---

Notes:

This scene was terribly sad to write, and yet so important. Writing the first part where Rin is positive, while knowing where her bus was heading, was particularly hard: the way she gradually understands that something is wrong, above all.

It is a farewell to Hargreeves Mansion, in this version at least, and I wanted to render it from the inside. Like Hermès, Reginald's Rolls Royce, this huge building was for me a character in its own right: one that now disappears along with Grace and Pogo. I feel a kind of sadness about it, because like Klaus, I'd nurtured for it as much resentment as affection.

Now, events are accelerating. Any comment will make my day! ♡

---

"Rin," he says, already starting to gather the knives and whetstones he’s left scattered around all week, which I haven’t touched. "You’ve been here since this morning?" I take a long breath, and sigh. "I went to say goodbye to my grandmother. If the apocalypse is tonight, I wanted-" "Forget it. The apocalypse is off."

He wipes one of his blades and slides it back into one of the sheaths built into his harness: neat, as if he has no intention of using it for a while. And I blink at him, dumbfounded.

"What? What did you just say? The apocalypse is…" "Stopped. Aborted. Finito. The glass eye Five found has been returned to its socket, and its owner had already been neutralized by more sharp objects than I ever dreamed of." "Harold Jenkins? It was really him? Viktor’s boyfriend?" Diego dismisses the thought with a slight curl of his lip. "A psychopath. Trust me, I know the type. Viktor apparently managed to escape: he may come back here."

I take a moment to absorb what Diego is telling me, my mind unable to process that the terror tightening my throat for days would suddenly no longer have any reason to exist. Is it really like this? Truly, it’s over? Five and his equations were right: all it took was eliminating that one link in the causal chain, and the apocalypse simply wouldn’t happen?

"So…" I’m at a loss for words. "That’s it? I just… go downstairs for a coffee, go to work, and we all pick up our lives where we left them?"

All at once, I feel like a vast emptiness has just replaced the terror of the End. Because for a week I’d stopped imagining any continuation to my life. Because I have to abruptly re-accustom myself to the prospect of living for years yet. Truly, spending time with the Hargreeves could drive anyone mad, and I pass a tired hand over my forehead as Diego puts away his blade-polishing cloth.

"As far as I’m concerned: absolutely. I’ve done my part. I’m going to say goodbye to Mom, then it’s ciao for me." He bends down to re-tie his laces. "I’ve got personal matters to deal with."

I know he’d even doubted Five’s word. That he was never entirely convinced he was fighting a real threat. And now he’s preparing to return to his vigilante work: to keep putting on this harness to protect ordinary people from being robbed, because it’s the only thing he believes he knows how to do. Because he can’t breathe without seeking out the act of bravery, shaped that way by his father. A lone wolf. About to go back to the woods.

"Diego, are you…" I get up, I try to take a step toward him, but he’s already heading out. "Aren’t you going to see them again? Your siblings? Will everything just go back to the way it was between all of you too?"

He grabs a bag in which he’d left a razor and some other toiletries.

"Every time I run into them, another piece of my life gets knocked sideways, and that’s not a metaphor." His brown eyes burn: it isn’t. But he adds, lower: "I've got a city to protect, and better shit to do than watch that family implode." My shoulders drop slightly, and I reframe what actually matters to me. "Will you stay in touch with Klaus?"

I should stay out of it, but I’ve watched him paradoxically come back to life this week, despite everything that’s happened to him, despite everything that’s happened to all of us, and for a reason that seems clear to me today: Klaus needs this family, as dysfunctional as it is. He loves his si lings, and Diego most of all.

His step falters for a quarter of a second on the threshold of the corridor, between two posters showing how to hit an enemy in the solar plexus. He narrows his eyes, looks at me, and before disappearing for good to find Grace wherever she is, he brings me back to the reality of the Hargreeves relationships, in spite of my hopes:

"I-I don’t know."

---

11:21 am

On my plate sits a slice of toast, its smell mingling with coffee in the ‘Kids’ Lounge.’ Perhaps it’s Diego’s news, but I’m a little hungry, and I feel the need to eat something before leaving for the hardware shop.

I feel almost drunk on possibility, now that the imminence of the apocalypse is receding, and I feel shaken. Do I actually want to go back to my old life? What would I really want the future to be made of, since it turns out there is one? I’d underestimated how much impact this reopening of possibilities would have. But then a familiar hiss cuts through my thoughts.

Crack!

This time it isn’t my own teleportation that tears the air: I already know who’s just arrived at the long table before I even look up. High socks pulled perfectly taut, movements as restless as ever, an expression paradoxically satisfied and unsettled. I arch an eyebrow. Five has just appeared, carrying in his arms the bald half-mannequin he drags everywhere, and is now installing 'her' in one of the wooden chairs.

Crack! He teleports to the coffee machine and fills two cups without ceremony. Crack! His hand seizes the sugar bowl from the middle shelf. Crack! He’s back at his mannequin, settling her with a kind of delicate attention. He sugars her coffee but not his. Then he sits, and finally deigns to look at me.

"You’ve heard about Jenkins," he says, without troubling himself with morning pleasantries, which doesn’t even surprise me from him anymore. Morning, evening: these are concepts that only mean something to people who experience time linearly, and he’s not one of those. I inhale.

"Diego told me."

I bite into my toast, watching the way he smooths the polka-dot blouse of his resin sweetheart. Or plaster, I’m not sure. And I ask, carefully:

"Five. Who killed him?"

A man’s death is never good news, and I don’t like the small guilty flicker of relief that grips my chest each time I think about the apocalypse consequently being stopped. Five narrows his eyes almost imperceptibly, because the question I’m asking is nagging at him too.

"I don’t know," he says, a little darkly. "Nothing in that vintage house led us to any trail. Clearly someone who wanted him dead in a fairly decisive way, with a passion for the cutlery drawer and anything sharp. But who? I don’t know, and that’s what worries me. That someone 'finished him off', when the Commission was trying to protect him."

I don’t want to picture his end. I don’t have the trained composure of former Umbrella Academy members when it comes to bloody outcomes. I simply blink, and Five adds:

"It wasn’t supposed to be anyone other than me who wanted him dead."

I’ll admit I feel a little uncomfortable around these homicidal considerations, but the result is in fact exactly what Five was hoping for, regardless of the killer’s identity, so I keep chewing and try not to spiral.

"Maybe he was killed by someone else who also wanted to prevent the apocalypse? Because you got what you wanted: now it won’t happen."

Saying those words, the euphoria of being allowed to keep living seizes me again, stronger still: to the point where the coffee machine lets out a hiss of steam, and the toaster goes haywire. But Five’s face remains impassive. Serious. Almost closed, and I frown slightly.

"Why… why aren’t you more relieved than this?"

I don’t understand this expression, these nervous tics running through him, the way he looks at his mannequin as though she understands and I don’t.

"Delores," he says to her. "I know you don’t like my equations. But do you think we should explain to her what happens if you kill the fly… right after it’s flown into the horse’s eye?" I arch an eyebrow. "What?"

Five places his hand on the shoulder of the mannequin he’s just named 'Delores', and rises slowly to lean toward me.

"Let me rephrase. Jenkins was the match. I was betting on breaking it before it lit. But what if, Rin, what if it had already lit the fuse?"

I sink back slightly in my chair. I think I’m starting to get tired of grim metaphors. Tired of the apocalypse, especially if the main factor has just been eliminated. Maybe I’m developing the same skepticism and exhaustion as Diego, because I want those damned hopes back, and that damned optimism that Klaus recently accused me of having lost. I can’t even figure out how Five made me forget them.

"Yes, of course," I say, a little sarcastically, "maybe there’s even a whole box of matches, lit in a chain by just as many flies. You can always imagine the worst, Five, but why this time?" "Delores, I forbid you to agree with her."

I sigh. Really, he’s been locked onto the end of the world as his only horizon for too long, and can’t seem to detach from it.

"Five," I say, more calmly, "do you realize that’s a mannequin?"

With a speed that’s almost instantaneous, he fixes me with those small blue eyes as if they’re going to bore right through me. I’m aware that my question is very direct - blunt, even - and that nobody has certainly yet dared put it to him in those terms since he arrived. But that’s how it is: you only need ten minutes with Granny to understand where this ‘frankness’ of mine comes from.

I couldn’t say whether his expression is sad or relieved as he looks at ‘Delores’ again. And she stares straight back simply because she was molded that way: the same way a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.

"Her name is Delores," he reaffirms, as if that name had the power to give her the life she doesn’t have.

An ironic but touching attachment, from someone who himself refused to receive a name from his mother, who is herself a robot. I take a sip of coffee. Yes, truly, the Hargreeves will drive me mad. Maybe they already have.

"You’re genuinely attached to her."

It’s a fact. I can see it in him, and in the surprising tenderness he shows toward this inanimate being. From the way he narrows his eyes, I can tell he doesn’t like talking about it. But above all, there’s something more. Far more than the questionable fixation of a young old man on a synthetic being. He says nothing at first, looks into his coffee, then - through some form of trust he’s gradually extended to me this week - he finally concedes:

"Delores quite simply saved me."

I tilt my head, attentive, aware of how rarely he likely makes this kind of confession.

"I found her in the rubble of the Gimbel Brothers department store. She never abandoned me, through thirty years."

So, after the apocalypse, this mannequin was the only humanoid presence Five had access to. I can only imagine what that is. I already see the loneliness and suffering of people who appear, on the surface, to be very 'surrounded'. I can’t clearly picture what it means to be alone in the purest and most terrible sense of the word: the last human being among the rubble of a collapsed world. And Five slides his hand again onto her cold, rigid shoulder.

"She always looked on critically at the way I got lost in the physics books from the Argyle library: the ones that had been saved. Because I spent all my time there, calculating, over and over. But she knew why I did it. She disapproves of the booze too, but she always let me drink anyway."

I smile. Delores is living proof that Five has a conscience, behind his thick layer of obsession.

"You really love her, don’t you?"

It’s a strange question, one that might seem to be validating his madness, but it’s what I feel, from the sole way he smooths the bullet-holed fabric of her blouse. It seems to me that this consequence of his solitude is a price to have paid, but a beautiful and touching one in the end, a sign of his own humanity. I smile at him. But then, against all odds, he gives me an answer far from the one I was expecting.

"Yes, and I did it deliberately." I stay a moment at a loss, over my coffee. Eyes fixed on him, then on Delores, as if she might illuminate me herself. "What do you mean?"

Five sighs, as if what he’s about to say will break a kind of spell he’d cast on himself. As if he were at the end of something. And he looks at her, this time in a more detached way.

"When I found myself alone, after burying you all…" My brows pinch. Each time, it gets harder to hear. "…I understood fairly quickly that I was going to come apart."

I say nothing, and I can well believe that Five understood what madness awaited him around the corner of those smoking ruins. How long can a human mind hold out alone, in those conditions? Can it even be measured in days, months, years? Alone, with no hope of going back except a pile of half-burned physics books and an unstable power that guaranteed no certain return to his old reality. He leans back in his chair, looking at me now with something almost like calm.

"I went looking for her deliberately, at Gimbel Brothers. I carried her everywhere, I never stopped looking at her. I knew. I knew I’d end up loving her. I made sure it would happen." He almost looks pained, saying that, but satisfied at the same time. "Sometimes, you know, a manageable insanity can allow you to keep going."

I open my eyes slowly, with a small ache. Is that it? Rather than sinking into the dementia of eternal solitude, Five chose himself a moderate madness: one he could control? She is what allowed him to hold on, and to finally come back. I think I’m starting to love Delores too.

"I understand," I tell him, because it’s entirely true. "And I understand why you’re struggling to detach yourself from the end of the world now that it’s finally been stopped , because since you were thirteen, it’s been your only horizon, and your only reason to exist."

He says nothing, and I know from that silence that I’ve summarized things a little too accurately. He inhales, hesitates, then mutters:

"Klaus called me an apocalypse junkie just now." "He said that?" "He told me to let go. I hate falling within his area of expertise."

I laugh softly. In the end, Five really isn’t so different from Klaus in his survival logic. The difference is that he manufactures his own objects of dependency, and does so while giving the impression of holding three PhDs.

"Look on the bright side: your detox can start. What would it take for you to file this apocalypse away and free your mind to move forward?" He thinks, genuinely, then takes a long sip of coffee. "Having an ultimate backup plan in case we still get caught off guard. If I had that, then maybe I could think about something else. Maybe."

A quiet laugh escapes me. That’s certainly not what Klaus was hoping for, but it’s so very Five. He needs a kind of safety belt before he can drive in peace.

"What kind of backup?" He thinks aloud. "If the fly really did die after hitting the horse’s eye… if the match was broken after lighting the bomb’s fuse… if we happen to be in that in-between where the consequences are coming anyway…" I roll my eyes, but he finishes: "…we’ll need to escape. Leave the desolation behind, and find a way to fix things further upstream."

He goes quiet for a moment, looks at me, and suddenly - as if my face has triggered some eureka - I can see the cogs of his mind start turning again. He takes a long breath, his chin lifting the way it does when he has a brilliant idea.

"Rin, between the two of us…" He sets down his cup and places his hands flat on the table. "We could jump with the whole family. Combining your power and mine is the only way to create a bend in space-time massive enough to do it."

My hand slides along my cup and rests still on the wood of the table. Between the two of us?

"I… Five, you know that I’ve never-" "I know, I know you’ve never done it. And I know what you think about time travel. But Rin, faced with the apocalypse? Isn’t it the only option worth considering?"

My mouth stays slightly open, because he’s right. I’d have nothing left to lose, if it came to that. Like Klaus when he picked up that briefcase to come back from Vietnam, with nothing left to care about regarding where or when it would take him. As a last resort… yes. Yes, I would do it.

"Together… with a novice… isn’t that even riskier?" I can immediately feel my question lands, but Five’s eyes burn regardless. "You’re right, with two of us there’s an even greater chance of ending up scattered. But alone, I simply have no chance of taking all of us: the compromise has to win out."

I’d almost tremble, but Five is determined to prove to me that this exit remains a possibility.

"You remember how you described our jumps when we first met: lock and trigger. I’d lock the destination and we’d trigger together. We’d just need to make sure everyone was in contact, like at the lake cabin when we moved Allison and Diego."

We’ve already done it. Only the temporal factor would change things drastically. And I sigh.

"How do you choose the arrival date? It’s so unpredictable: you said so yourself… especially going into the past." He drums his fingers on his chin. "I don’t think I can choose the destination. I’d need at least a week to calculate the parameters. But is precision truly essential? It needs to be in the past, to be able to act, and before our birth, otherwise a paradox will occur. If it’s earlier, the exact date doesn’t matter. Besides, I have a sense that space-time will have retained an imprint of the last era in which I existed, and will try to reinject me into those waters." "What year was that?" "1963." "Wow."

The sixties. Kennedy. The first man on the moon. The civil rights movement. Vietnam: shit, again. Woodstock. The nuclear age, and those damn Beatles… My eyes say everything.

"I really do hope the apocalypse is cancelled."

I don't believe any era in history is worse than any other. But at least in the present, I’d had the time to get used to it.

"Right. No panic: after all, it’s only a plan B. To help you let go. We’re agreed, aren’t we?"

He stares at me, and I add before he can object:

"You’re still thinking about it too much. Find something else to think about. Something that doesn't end in fire." He shakes his head. "Stochastic calculus. And making my bed properly for once." I sigh. "For fuck sake, Five!"

He finishes his coffee in one go, then drops his shoulders as if finally conceding.

"Drinking a few margaritas, even if Delores will disapprove." He looks at her, then at me. "And returning her to her rightful place."

---

Notes:

I wanted to share here my take on what Delores is to Five. It seems too simplistic that he passively lost his mind under the weight of loneliness. Knowing Five, it strikes me as very likely that he could have calculated it.

I also wanted to include this chapter here so that the moment Five brings Delores back to the store, later in this episode, lands with a little more weight.

We all know how this season ends, which makes it both amazing and tragic to watch things inexorably unfold. We know what will become of this 'plan B'. Rin had better develop a taste for the sixties.

Any comment will make my day! ♡​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

---

"I see we're making ourselves at home," I hear from the corridor off the bathroom, and I tilt my head to listen. Granny sounds about as pleasant as usual. "At home? Oh, trust me, you really wouldn't want that. The haunting alone would tank the property value. Is that a colon irrigation machine?" "It's a water flosser. You're not putting it anywhere near anything, including your mouth." "Do I at least get a towel? Something that isn't a dishcloth?" "Only the ones on the bottom shelf."

Granny grumbles as she heads to the kitchen for her tea, and I suppress a laugh, rolling my eyes. I'm alone here now, letting my gaze drift over the framed photographs in the bookcase: pictures of Granny in her youth, of my mother. I think Ben is watching the drama. A paradoxically peaceful silence settles in the morning light of our modest apartment. And soon the kettle begins its soft hiss.

"I remember that day," I tell my grandmother as she parts the bead curtain coming back in. "That was with Mum and the cousins at the Thảo Cầm Viên."

Mum loved that botanical garden, far more than the grim zoo in Ho Chi Minh City. And I remember that if she was holding my arm like that, it was in the hope that I wouldn't teleport myself into the middle of the orchid collection. I must have been six, my cousin maybe three.

"Do you remember how auntie kept shrieking 'Bạch Liên!' when they had to come and get me off the greenhouse roof." Granny doesn't smile, but her eyes tell me she's glad I remember. "You were unmanageable," she says, "before becoming even worse for a while. But perhaps you just wear your name well after all."

I laugh softly. Like many children from one diaspora or another, I carry a use-name and a name from the culture I come from. Mother to daughter, we pass down the name of the lotus: Liên. The flower of the homeland. A symbol of resilience, of elevation, of rebirth. The lotus blooms by pushing up through muddy depths and opening its beauty toward the sky: through adversity, as if it cannot touch it.

My grandmother, old-fashioned as she is, is simply Hoàng Thị Liên. Left alone and pregnant with her second child - my mother - she named her the more modern Hoàng Kim Liên: the golden lotus. And it was only natural that - without a father too, but inexplicably - I was born Hoàng Bạch Liên, the white lotus.

I use that name even less than Marine, even if it resonates somewhere deep. Paradoxically, Klaus has always known it, and for a simple reason: I couldn't hide it. I was barely eighteen when I had that lotus tattooed between my shoulder blades. A silent apology for all the harm I was doing to Granny, to my mother, that was never going to be enough. The news was taken as yet another affront at the time, read as a rebellious gesture, when it wasn't.

We recall other memories, drawing us westward, then back to The City. Echoes of my school, of the cleaning jobs my mother worked, of Granny's costume deliveries to society dinners. Do I feel nostalgia? Regret? Determination in the face of what's coming? In any case, for reasons I can't explain — I am no longer afraid of anything at all.

Almost.

It's Ben's posture and my grandmother's expression that tell me what's happening: Klaus's satisfied return from the corridor, 'wearing' a tiny violet towel under Granny's open dressing gown. The silk one, with its gleaming embroidered foliage.

"Your exfoliant is an absolute delight, Mme Hoàng," he says, stretching like a cat. "Thanks to you, I've just completed my grand spring cleaning: head to toe, inside and out."

He's raided her forbidden drawers dozens, hundreds of times before. But today - perhaps because he has nothing left to lose, and with a particular kind of affection - he allows himself to be openly, flamboyantly himself, one last time.

I don't have time to open my mouth, because Granny is already scrutinizing him, her eyes lingering on the skin he's shamelessly displaying. And rather than any of the remarks I'd have expected, she exclaims, loud and put-upon:

"Good heavens. A Gao Yord, and an unorthodox one at that. On the stomach, no less."

My eyes follow hers, and I understand what she means. I hadn't exactly had the headspace to linger on that tattoo when Klaus came back, even if I certainly noticed the broad motif inspired by the peaks of Mount Meru. Undoubtedly one of the most sacred designs in Buddhist tattooing, and for that reason alone, Granny's gaze is more rigid than ever.

They are rather beautiful, those lines that tremble faintly when he breathes: those ancient symbols, their ink reaching toward the sky. Like a personal temple, though one whose tremendous act of appropriation I can sense too, probably baffling to Granny.

"Seven peaks instead of nine…" she breathes. "Where did you have that done?" Klaus sighs, and I'm afraid again that I'll regret having brought him here, as he answers with his eyes somewhere else: "Not in some hipster parlour cashing in on the Angelina Jolie hype, if that's what you're wondering."

Granny fixes him with her sharp gaze, arms crossed, her high bun immovable.

"You didn't even use a mantra." Klaus looks at me, then at the fringed rug, and shakes his head. "It's a somewhat personal form of mantra. I'm sorry for that."

She lets out a tight little laugh and crosses her arms in front of her television, which inconveniences Ben trying to see the rest of the drama. And Granny continues:

"It's not me you should be sorry to: it's generations of monks and warriors of the Khmer Empire since the ninth century. But this only offends a quarter of my ancestors, and you young people corrupt everything anyway."

I know the foundations of Sak Yant tattooing only from a distance: essentially Thai in origin. But I know that today, bamboo still drives ink and mystic symbols into skin in the far reaches. Too often for a modest sum on street corners, rather than in the sanctity of temples. But I strongly doubt Klaus did this casually. And the question is as much 'when' as 'where', though Granny can't know that, and she shrugs, going to retrieve the tea that was steeping.

"Did you go to Thailand?" I risk asking. Klaus nods slowly, as if summoning memories from another age entirely. "It was a standard leave destination for a lot of us. But I… ~we~ went specifically for that."

I can almost see them moving behind his eyes: the streets, the noisy markets, the golden temples under a heavy, humid sun. So Dave went with him across the border, in search of ink capable of holding his demons at bay? Granny pours the tea, silent, her face unreadable, and Klaus keeps his head down.

"It was actually a monk who agreed to do it. I think he somehow understood… what I have to fight, and how."

Granny pushes through the bead curtain again and comes back with the teapot and three enamel cups.

"Taming the mind," she pronounces, "mastering cosmic forces… repelling the attacks of malevolent spirits… One doesn't choose the Gao Yord at random, does one, dear haunted junkie?" "Really, Mme Hoàng, there's no need to be quite so flattering: call me Klaus, I insist." I narrow my eyes, and ask, without pausing to breathe: "You did this to hold your ground against the ghosts?"

Granny may find this unremarkable, but I remain stunned. Because - historically - this is the very first time I've seen Klaus make a deliberate choice not to simply endure, smother, push through, but to act, to stand. I see the symbolism in what he did, and above all the step he took toward himself and his power. And I'm grateful to Dave, because I am absolutely certain it was Dave who pushed him to do it.

Granny takes a cinnamon roll and dunks it in her tea, settling into her chair without knowing she's practically sitting on Ben, who shifts to avoid her. She glances at Klaus, still somewhat critical.

"You're not unaware that a certain number of commitments come with having done that."

Commitments designed to elevate the bearer of these marks as a better human being, including the promise not to intoxicate or numb oneself. Klaus looks at the floor, because he very nearly broke that this morning. But my grandmother's words seem to steady his gaze, as if he'd needed exactly this reminder.

"I wanted to gather here…" He places his hand below his sternum. "…everything that gives me the strength to hold on. What makes me safe enough to keep standing. I didn't do it in my back because… I suppose I need to see it daily, to remember what it means."

Granny studies him, just above the navel, but I feel her expression softening. And I know what her dark eyes are doing, moving laterally across the mystic squares where the power of the mantras should have been inscribed. She's reading what he had written there instead. Granny reads Akson, possibly as much Tai as Lao.

"I hope you won't regret those lotuses," she says, "but you know my Bạch Liên so much better than I do now. I don't want to know who David is, but…"

I smile quietly. One day I'll have to tell Klaus what I think about what he did, but from the way the cathode screen just flickered with my emotion, I suspect he already knows. And Granny narrows her eyes.

"…does 'UA' refer to what I think it does?"

Klaus says nothing, then finally nods, with something close to a smile. And I can picture them, those characters, right at the peak of the Gao Yord: a deliberate mention of the Umbrella Academy: by his choice, by his heart, without anyone forcing his hand. Faded and hollow, the umbrella on his wrist might as well no longer be there. Emptied of meaning, by comparison.

"That's also why I chose seven peaks and not nine," he breathes. "It was time to understand what actually matters to me."

Ben smiles quietly, the way he always does, and I feel the full complexity of these relationships. The paradoxical form of love Klaus carries for his family. I understand his resentment and his anger this morning so much better now, and the pain he feels when his siblings don't return it. I remain stunned by what he did: binding his world inside this seal of protection, to give himself the strength to fight.

Whatever Granny might think, yes: just like the Khmer warriors, like the soldier he was, and simply with the courage he has always had without realizing it. I believe he wears the Sak Yant ink legitimately. And if he believes the lotus can still help him, to the point of affirming it in his own skin, then I accept that: without reproach, without regret.

"Symbols are only worth the intention put into them," Granny breathes.

Her worn fingers finally close around the handle of one of the cups, and she holds it out to Klaus. And then, without another word about the borrowed silk dressing gown, she says to him, validating - in her way - everything he has always been:

"Yours come from the heart, and they deserve to bloom, even above troubled water."

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Notes:

The question of the Gao Yord Klaus comes back with from the past is so rarely addressed in the series. And yet the symbolism of that tattoo alone makes it a powerful lens through which to understand how he subsequently manages to hold the ghosts at bay so much more effectively. I haven't changed it at all in this chapter: it is described exactly as it was designed by Trason Fernandes for the show, lotuses included.

I don't know what a monk who practices this centuries-old art would make of the motif without a traditional mantra as shown in the series. I chose to stay true to it for this fic, though it isn't necessarily a choice I would have made myself.

Cody Ray Thompson - the actor who played Dave - has said that the answer to addiction is not sobriety but connection. And I believe Klaus's Gao Yord is also an expression of that, as much as it is a seal of protection.

Any comment will make my day! ♡

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