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In one world, Allison shoots the air next to Vanya’s ear. Vanya implodes, explodes, erupts—the light holding her brothers hostage drops away, and they drop to the floor, and the moon drops from the sky. Luther picks her up and Klaus holds her feet and they circle together and jump back in time.
In this world, Allison doesn’t shoot the gun. When Luther and Diego and Klaus charged at their sister, Allison charged at them, and got caught in the crossfire of Vanya’s self-defence. All four are suspended in the air, and Vanya jolts back into herself when she catches sight of Allison’s gaunt face. Horrified, she pulls at the energy, and it lessens around their bodies but bunches up closer to Vanya’s chest, still wrestling so far out of her control.
Five, behind her, takes exactly one shuddering exhale. He aims and fires.
Vanya staggers.
There’s a hole in her chest.
The siblings drop down to the floor, heaving, panting, hands on their knees, not yet aware of what happened. Vanya sways in place once, twice, and then the energy in and around her shoots up and away, through the roof, up to the sky. All the power she has left leaks out of her chest along with the blood.
She falls to her knees, and then forward, but Five has managed to make himself move, and he catches her. Distantly he can hear Allison scream, a horrified sound that he’s never wanted to hear. She sounds terrified, and scrambles forward on unsteady feet to join him, wrapping her arms around Vanya’s waist.
Five is still holding her upright, his hands on her shoulders, and if his breaths are unsteady and irregular he doesn’t notice it. Klaus comes sliding to the ground next, murmuring “no, no, no no no,” with his shaking, trembling hands floating frantically over Vanya. Diego and Luther are a heartbeat behind, Luther with a hand on Allison’s back that she isn’t aware enough of to want to shake off. Diego sucks in a sharp breath, swearing, and then Vanya is tilting, tilting.
Allison helps her slump down, cradling Vanya’s back against her chest, her hands patting her sister’s cheeks while Diego presses his hands firmly over the gaping wound in Vanya’s chest, his eyes desperately flitting between her and his task. Klaus takes her hand, and Five takes the other one, and Five tries not to look at all the blood on his hands, and unseen to anyone but Klaus, Ben sits next to them all and begs for Vanya to be okay.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Klaus is saying, “Vanya, please, please, Vanya, please.”
Diego, tongue choking on a stutter he hasn’t struggled with for years, manages: “D-Don’t d-do this, Vanya, d-don’t, not n-now. C-come o-on, V-Van-ya. C-c-come on.”
Allison is crying, and smiling as if she can fix it, and she’s saying, “Vanya, we’re here, I’m here, Vanya, I love you.” She sobs and moves her head a bit, Vanya’s hair draped over Allison’s collarbones, shoulders, neck. “I heard a rumour,” She says hysterically, “I hear a rumour you’re going to be okay. I heard a rumour, I heard a rumour,” She’s sobbing and she can’t stop.
Vanya coughs and gags on the blood spilling out of her mouth, and the sight makes Luther ill, reaching one giant hand to cradle her head and keep it from falling. There’s hot red blood sliding over Diego’s hands, even as he pushes down harder, leaking through the gaps between his fingers, coating his hands and elbows and arms in the paint of death.
Vanya is making a quiet, gurgled wheezing sound. It sounds like she might be trying to say something. Her eyes are still shining a brilliant white. She squeezes Klaus’s hand, and Five’s, and they squeeze back, cradling her calloused fingers in both of their own. Her eyes rove over them, from Diego to Klaus to Five, and then she looks upward, out of the window, towards the moon—it’s falling, but the others haven’t noticed yet.
Vanya exhales wetly.
She squeezes the hands holding hers once more, and her lead lolls back towards Allison, with Luther’s palm keeping her neck upright. Allison smiles at her through her tears.
Vanya’s eyes go dim. Their bright white light is suddenly gone, leaving her brown pupils covered in a glassy sheen.
There's a moment of horrible silence.
“No,” Klaus gasps, “no, no.”
Allison buries her face in Vanya’s hair, shoulders shaking, and Diego presses down on the wound in Vanya’s chest even harder as though she can still feel it, and then when Allison pulls her closer, his hands fall away to tremble in his lap. Luther leans back, his hand still lightly on Allison’s back, his expression hopelessly lost. Klaus, similarly, falls backwards, tears sliding over his cheeks.
Five doesn’t let go of Vanya’s hand, covered in her own blood because he’s been holding on to it and he’s covered in his little sister’s blood, all over his chest from where he kept her from falling, on his face from when he shot her in the back.
“Klaus,” says Ben. “Klaus,” he says again, when Klaus doesn’t even glance at him. Slowly, Klaus pulls his eyes towards his dead brother, and Ben looks at broken as the rest of them but he also looks scared. “Look up, Klaus,” Ben says breathlessly. “it’s too late. The Apocalypse is here.”
So Klaus looks up, and the sky is falling. “Guys,” he says faintly. “Guys.” He points, because none of them can bring themselves to look away from Vanya’s corpse, and they raise their heads to watch the moon tumble through the clouds.
Five scrambles together a plan and they grab each other’s hands, still on the ground. The words trust me get stuck in Five’s throat and he can’t bring himself to say them, because Vanya trusted him and he killed her, he killed his sister, his little sister, his favourite sister. Vanya’s still leaned against Allison’s chest, but as the wind whips up and the energy coming from Five’s hand picks up, her head slides down to become pillowed in Allison’s lap, and then out of her hold entirely and onto the floor.
Allison cries harder at the sight, and Diego can’t look at her, and Klaus can’t look away—little Number Seven, splayed across the ground, her white suit coated in red, her dark hair a halo around her head, unseeing eyes wide open. Five’s power takes them away, and they hold on to each other a little too tightly, all raw from horror and aching from loss.
(And Vanya, empty hands lain on the floor still reaching for her violin, isn’t dead.
She’s a few seconds away, probably, but she isn’t dead, and as her family circles around her to travel to the past, she gets taken along.)
Vanya opens her eyes to see a ceiling that hasn’t been hers in over a decade. She blinks. Then her hands fly up to her chest—no blood, no wound, no pain. But also… her brow furrows. She doesn’t feel right. She feels young. “What the hell?” She whispers to herself, and then flinches when a loud crash sounds from somewhere else in the Academy.
It sounds like someone just threw something over, or ran into a wall, or both. Almost at the same time, the unmistaken sound of a door slamming open rings out, and then another, and someone’s yelling, and there’s so much noise—there’s never this much noise at night in the Academy. What happened? Did something happen?
Vanya wracks her brain—she remembers being in pain, but numb to it, as though it were happening to someone else. She remembers the moon, for some reason. People’s hands on her. And before that, it’s all a haze. She had been playing violin, and the music had been so alive, and maybe there had been guns…? She can’t remember.
She knows her name is Vanya, and she plays in an orchestra, and her dad is dead, but the second she thinks about it, the thoughts slide away, as though they don’t want to be dwelt upon, and can’t decide whether or not to fade. She can remember a cage, and a man with knives in his chest, but all that happened yesterday was her siblings going on a mission while she was left to play violin in her room. She thinks she can remember someone crying.
Allison, she thinks, is Allison okay? Where am I? What happened? She doesn’t understand.
Her door explodes open, and Vanya jolts upright.
Klaus is standing in the doorway, his eyes wide open and manic, and Vanya feels a flash of fear she doesn’t understand. “Four?” She asks, confused, and she knows his name is Klaus but she knows his name is Four and there are two and a half consciences inside of her, muddling it all up.
“Vanya,” Klaus breathes out, visibly sagging in relief, and then he’s nothing but a flash of colour as he lurches forward and throws himself onto her bed, his arms around her in a hug with so much force that it sends her reeling backwards. Vanya, thinks Vanya, yes of course that’s her name, but wasn’t she also Number Seven?
Ben—or maybe Six—appears at her doorway only seconds afterwards, and chokes out an oh, Vanya that comes out all mangled, scrambling to join Klaus on the bed, wrapping his arms around Vanya’s waist and kissing her cheek as Klaus hides his face in her neck and adjusts his position so he’s curled around her, pretending that Vanya isn’t so much smaller and shorter than both of them. Vanya pats at their heads clumsily, strangely scared and also confusingly glad to see them.
“Thank god you’re okay,” says Ben, and Klaus laughs damply from where he’s still hiding his face against Vanya’s neck, "That's never going to happen again, never," and Vanya isn’t sure if she knows what Ben means, but she might.
Allison—Three—barrels into the room next, flying forward and leaping into Vanya’s arms with a sob. “Vanya, Vanya,” Allison wails, arms around Vanya’s neck, squeezing, and Vanya stammers.
Allison holds her close and Vanya holds her sister back, because when she blinks too fast she can imagine a thin line of red that turns into a fountain, marring Allison’s smooth throat, and feels fear like she’s never felt and shrinks from instinctively.
“Three? Are you okay?” Allison blinks up at her blearily, and nods, and her eyes tear up again alarmingly quickly.
Five, Two (Diego), and One (Luther) join the meetup in Vanya’s room with various expressions, just as desperate as the others. Luther looks relieved and a bit constipated, Diego looks relieved and afraid, and Five looks terrified out of his mind and trying not to show it.
“What’s going on?” Asks Vanya, who is Seven, who is twenty-nine and thirteen at once.
“Vanya,” says Five, and makes his way over to her as though in a daze, his hands twitching. Vanya helps him by sitting up, dislodging Allison in the process, because he just looks so scared and she doesn’t know why. She hasn’t seen him in so long—he tried to kill her—she saw him just yesterday at dinner with Dad.
Five pulls her into a rough hug, his eyes tightly shut, and Vanya’s hands come to rest delicately on his back, even with Klaus and Ben still wrapped around her waist.
“I’m sorry,” chokes Five, “I’m sorry.”
Vanya’s brow furrows. “Five?” He shakes his head and doesn’t answer, just squeezes tighter. Vanya wants to hug him harder; Vanya wants to run away. Diego makes his way to the bed and smiles wetly, then reaches out and cups Vanya’s cheek in his palm. She stares at him, confused, and he leans forward to press a bruising kiss against her forehead.
“Vanya,” he mumbles, cradling the back of her head like she might break, keeping her close. “You’re okay.” He smiles.
“I—” says Vanya. “Did something happen?” Yes, she thinks. You know what. But she doesn’t. Yes, she thinks. The moon. I remember the moon. I remember someone crying.
Five holds her impossibly tighter, and Klaus presses his face against her side. Allison smooths Vanya’s hair out of her face and behind her ears. Diego kisses her forehead again, and Ben twists his fingers into her pyjama shirt.
Vanya makes eye contact with Luther.
“Don’t worry,” he says quietly. “You’re safe.”
That’s not an answer, and Vanya doesn’t believe it, but she doesn’t know why not, and she trusts him and she hates him. Vanya says, “alright,” and lets Five and Allison cry onto her shoulders, listening to Ben and Diego whisper together and wrap each other in a hug, watching Klaus and Luther watch all the others.
(In the morning, Grace searches for her children. Numbers One through Six are not in their beds. She doesn’t want to worry, but she was built to care, and then she opens Seven’s door and can’t help but smile. The children are all bundled up together.
Three’s head rests on Seven’s shoulder on the corner of the bed facing the room, and Seven’s head is pillowed on Six’s chest, all three of them a bit propped up against the wall to make room for everyone else. Six has his arms draped loosely over Seven, and Four is lying over them both so he can hug Seven’s waist, his body squished between Seven and Six, mouth open as he mumbles in his sleep: no, never again, I’ll protect you.
Two sits at Six’s other side, pushed up against the wall, his face shoved into Six’s shoulder and his fingers curled loosely around Seven’s sleeve. Five is lying a bit separate from the others but still squeezed onto Seven’s tiny bed, and Grace can see Seven holding his hand, their fingers curled loosely together even in sleep.
One is the only of Grace’s children not shoved between the others on the bed, instead leaning against the wall and sitting on the floor with his head leaning against Seven’s mattress and his hair brushing Three’s legs, as though wary to upset the balance of six bodies in one bed but still always looking to protect them.
Grace pauses, and tilts her head to take it all in. She was not built to feel regret, but if she could, she would regret how Seven is so often pushed away by her father and her siblings. It is for the best, Grace knows, or so Reginald Hargeeves tells her, which is why Grace takes extra care to stay close to Seven—not so that she can subdue and monitor the girl, as Hargeeves believes, but so her daughter can feel valued by someone, even if that someone was originally built to control her.
Looking at the children now, all curled around Seven as close as they can get, Grace thinks Hargreeves clearly knows less about this house than he likes to think.
Grace smiles, and closes the door again. She can give them a few minutes longer, at least.