The screaming had been lasting for the past hour, now, and the woman's cursing and swearing and pleading to get rid of the new life she had made. Y/N was getting fed up with the obvious hate the addicted woman had for her own baby boy.
"Just one more push, Miranda," she urged, trying to ignore the woman's expletives and focus on making sure that the tiniest of full-term babies was okay.
Number Eight. "Y/N"
Y/N cradled the freshly washed newborn in her arms. He was bundled in blankets and crying and sweating with withdrawal he had no control over.
Y/N rocked him and shushed him. The TV was off in the little waiting room, but Y/N was more focused on caring for the nameless infant who had many long weeks ahead of him to get rid of the burden his mother had thrown him.
She started to sing for him, thinking of the name she would use for him. Sometimes, the doctors were allowed to name them if the mothers refused.
Ronda - a new nurse - entered the room. "Hey, Doc? Have you… seen the news?"
Y/N looked up from the child. "No. What's up?"
"Um...maybe let me take him for a moment?"
Y/N's heart sank to the first floor. She paled. What now?
"...Sure."
"Hello?"
Y/N clutched her duffel bag nervously behind her as Vanya and Pogo exited the library.
"Welcome, Miss Y/N," Pogo greeted and smiled. "I'm glad you've arrived. You're all here now."
Y/N set her bag down and stepped forward to embrace the primate. Then she turned to Vanya and they hugged. "Gosh, it's been a while," Y/N sighed as they pulled apart. She felt her right eye twitch and bile rose in her throat before she swallowed it back down. "I, uh, I read your book."
Vanya frowned apprehensively. "You did?"
"I'm sure we all did," Y/N tried to say reassuringly. "It was well-written, Vanya. I'm proud of you."
"Oh. Um, thanks."
"You're welcome."
"Oh my gosh, Y/N!" Klaus pranced down the stairs. "My favorite sister - no offense Vanya, I haven't seen this girl in years."
Y/N laughed as the tall lanky man lifted her off her feet and spun her before setting her down again. "Hi Klaus," she greeted. Then she looked him up and down in scrutiny. "What are you wearing."
Klaus looked down at himself. "You know, I don't remember getting dressed this morning? I think I look fabulous."
"You and I are going shopping," Y/N told him. "As soon as possible."
Klaus dramatically brought a hand to his heart in mock incredulity. "Are you saying I don't have a sense of style?"
"I'm saying it needs some help," Y/N suggested. "You look like a homeless druggie."
"I am a homeless druggie."
"You don't need to look like one, though," Y/N concluded. Diego was descending the stairs now and Y/N patted Klaus' shoulder before moving around him to go and greet him.
"Hot damn, Y/N," he raised his eyebrows. "You've grown up."
"I don't know if I can give you a hug anymore."
"Come 'ere," he held out his arms. Y/N rolled her eyes before wrapping her arms around him.
"Long time no see," Diego said as she stepped back. "I haven't seen you since, well, that. "
Didn't want you to see me, Y/N thought. She shrugged. "I'm a busy person. I'm a doctor. There's always more to do."
"Then how come I've never seen you? Patch sends me to the General every other week."
"I'm in Manhattan," she replied. "Been there the past three years."
"Oh, right," his expression scrunched up in something that Y/N couldn't name.
"Y/N, dear," Klaus joined them at the bottom of the stairs. "Excuse me so I can go change into something more stylish, please."
Diego raised an eyebrow at them both.
"Yeah, I'm going to follow you to make sure you don't get into anything you're not supposed to."
"Moi? I don't know what you're talking about. I'm an angel."
"Yeah, you two have fun with that," Diego stepped away from them. "I'm gonna head back up, I guess. No good company down here."
"Pogo and Vanya are -"
"Like I said." Diego turned and began up the stairs.
"Hey," Y/N reached out and grabbed his hand. Klaus continued all the way up and disappeared down the hall which led to the bedrooms. "Don't be that way. She didn't do anything wrong."
"Aside from telling the world everything about our family? Y/N, maybe you'd like to remind our sister where you got those scars," Diego tugged his hand away and touched the lumps of displaced flesh on either side of her right eye lightly. She couldn't help but startle, not expecting the contact. He dropped his hand and looked past Y/N's head at Vanya. "Nobody but this family knew about her eyes. Not before that book."
"Stop," Y/N said. She had to swallow down a sting in her throat. "Stop, okay? She didn't do it."
Diego glared still at Vanya. "Well, it wasn't you who took a knife to your eye to carve out the -"
"Master Diego, that's quite enough."
Pogo's voice was firm, condemning, and scolding. His gaze turned hard.
Diego looked at Y/N again. Her left eye watered, though she tried to keep it down.
Diego frowned. Y/N could see that he was sorry, but his jaw stiffened. "Why would you let her stay here? After everything she did to you?"
Y/N swiped at her eye to wipe away the moisture gathering there. "It wasn't her," she repeated, forcing the uncertainty out of her voice. "She's part of this family, Diego. She has as many rights to be here as any of us."
They stared at each other for a moment.
"Diego -"
"Don't you have to help our junkie brother play dress up?"
He turned and marched back up the steps just as Luther and Allison appeared at the top of them.
"Hey, where are you going? We're gonna talk about Dad's funeral now."
Diego brushed past them both. "Getting the junkie," he grumbled and disappeared down the hall Klaus had gone down before.
"Seriously, who spit in his coffee this morning?" Allison came down to Y/N. "Hey, are you okay?"
"Fine," Y/N smiled. "Hi, Allison. Hey, Luther. I missed you guys."
Y/N seated herself next to Vanya to assure her sister that she didn't hate her. Not anymore, anyway.
"Is that my skirt?"
Y/N finally saw what Klaus had decided to change into.
Really saw.
"Breathy on the...bits." He plopped down next to Y/N with his horrendous concoction of alcohol and a cigarette.
"You know, this isn't what I had in mind at all. Maybe jeans. A hoodie. T-shirt and vans."
"Well, I think -"
"Klaus, put that out. You know Dad didn't allow smoking in here."
"Dad's dead," Diego stated. "Let's just get on with this."
Luther frowned but proceeded to explain what he wanted.
"Who cares about a stupid monocle?"
"Exactly…"
"And I know you don't like to do it, but I need you to conjure Dad."
Y/N frowned. "To ask him how he died?"
"Yeah, it's not like I can just call Dad in the afterlife and say, 'Hey, Dad. Could you just… quit playing tennis with Hitler for a minute and take a quick call?"
"Why not?"
"I'm not in the right… state of mind."
"You're high?"
"Yeah!"
"Dad did have a lot of enemies," Y/N allowed. "But if any of them got away with this, they would be boasting about it."
"The last time I talked to Dad, he told me to be careful who to trust."
Y/N sunk slightly in her seat as the conversation proceeded.
"Isn't it obvious, Klaus?" Diego looked Luther in the eye. "He thinks one of us killed Dad."
The room erupted. Luther stuttered exasperatedly as they all rose. Y/N noticed Luther's eyes sticking to her most of all. Her heart sank when she realized she was one of his primary suspects. With her power, it might've made sense. She wouldn't have left a trace. She clenched her teeth and followed after the others.
"Hey, Y/N, I didn't- Klaus!"
"Hold on, I'm just going to go kill Mom really quick. I'll be right back."
Y/N didn't really know where she was going until her feet had brought her to the family's personal infirmary.
She did not want to be in there.
She stared at the pathetic excuse for a bed in the center with its pristine white sheets. The dressers and cabinets full of all kinds of medical and scientific supplies. Y/N shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, thinking about the last time she was in this room. The last time she was in this house .
The countless times she and her adopted siblings had been in that bed, on the brink of death or otherwise. The broken bones, burns, wounds, infections, colds, and other bizarre afflictions that had been treated there.
Y/N turned to one of the cabinets in the back. Her feet with still a mind of their own brought her closer to it. She opened one finely carved wood door. And there. Still after all these years, was an entire shelf dedicated to little corked bottles of transparent liquid, each labeled with numbers. One through eighteen point eight. Multiple glass vials with varied levels of fullness. On the edge of the shelf was a faded sticker that read,
Number Eight's hallucinogens. For research and emergencies only. Handle with caution.
Y/N felt a laugh slip past her lips. The old man had kept them. Kept her most powerful weapon. Kept the evidence of her life's greatest cause of pain.
Her tears.
Hargreeves didn't care about his so-called children. Just their powers. He didn't care about Y/N. Just her tears, the most undiluted part of her power. No matter how strong-willed or mentally stable the person, no one could resist her tampering of their conscious mind when touched by even one stray drop.
Y/N felt anger well up in her chest.
She grabbed two handfuls of bottles and threw them at the wall with a scream. They shattered against the wall, shards of glass and years-old tears rained on the ground and stuck to the wall.
"Shit!" she yelled immediately after. She got on her hands and knees to try to clean up the mess. If anyone got a drop of it on them, they'd be out for the rest of the day, off in dreamland where the smallest shift in Y/N's mood determined the good or evil of the imagination. But she was careless and a stray shard sliced open her palm. She swore again as she dropped the pieces and sat back on her legs so she could sob.
Y/N hated this house. She hated her father. All the things he did to her. She hated that stupid book of Vanya's. And while she was at it, she hated Vanya too, for writing it. And Luther, Allison, Klaus, Diego. Those bastards at the bar. The months she had spent in their addicted, perverted, traumatizing hands. She hated her life.
So she cried. Tears fell from just her left eye. Blood fell from her right hand.
And then she heard the music. Tiffany.
That took her back. Back and away from the room she was in. To the courtyard during their half-hours of free time on Saturdays. Playing tag and hide-and-seek. Piano with Vanya while she practiced violin. Reading marathons with Ben. Dress-up with Klaus and Allison. Drawing with just Klaus. Darts, marbles, and talking with Diego, who had always been her favorite. Catch with Luther - they both loved baseball. Chess and Risk with Five - he generally one, but she came the closest at beating him.
All of them sneaking to Griddy's. Hiding in the basement with a movie at three in the morning. Dancing in their bedrooms' hall to one of Luther's old record collection before Dad could scold them.
Y/N sniffed and stood, wiping the tear track from her cheek. She rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck. She stretched her arms and felt her anger draining away as she loosened up. Remembered their mother's cooking. Pogo helping her get through her first college exams when she was seventeen. Dancing with Diego in his room. Or hers. She remembered laughing with Ben. Poking fun at Five's seriousness until even he had to crack a smile. Pogo taking her outside into the sun for the first time in almost a year.
She breathed away the tears and just let herself dance; jumping and swinging her arms, ignoring the sting in her palm and the glass on the floor and just moving freely.
A violent shudder sent her stumbling to maintain balance. A wind had started to howl against the window up into the courtyard. The glass left in the cabinet rattled.
Y/N's heart stuttered in fear. Someone was attacking the house? She ran to the cabinet shelf full of her remaining bottled up tears and grabbed one with '18.8'written on it. Then she bolted up the stairs to join the others staring at the... thing swirling above the ground.
Surely she, of all people, wasn't hallucinating?
"Yeah, get behind us."
So she wasn't going crazy. Everyone else saw it too.
And then her long lost brother, little Number Five, fell from the tear in the courtyard, looking exactly like he had when he'd disappeared so very long ago.
Five seemed completely unaffected by the fact that he was still thirteen-years-old and had reappeared from a large blue swirling vortex.
He just continued making his peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich - his favorite snack, if Y/N remembered correctly.
Y/N wasn't sure why, but ever since Five fell back into the present, she felt dizzy. She sat between Diego and Luther for no good reason other than to avoid much confrontation. Her head hurt. Especially after Five's eloquent and vocab-heavy explanation as to his arrival.
Diego and Luther sat down when Five told them how long he'd been in the future.
Y/N forced herself to study the boy. Certainly, he didn't look like he was fifty-eight. And it seemed like he acted the same as when they were young; serious and self-assured. But there was also something about him that seemed definitely older. His eyes were aged and more troubled. He was hiding something, Y/N was sure, but she wasn't positive what. His posture, the way he held himself, that was different too.
"No, my consciousness if fifty-eight. My body seems to be thirteen again."
Eight? Number eight? Get up! Get up and take me away from this! Make it go away! I don't want to be here. Please, take me away!
Y/N blinked and clutched the table. Five was walking out of the room. "What else is there to say? Circle of life."
Diego poked Y/N's shoulder. "Hey, you okay?"
"Yeah...Be right back.
Standing so quickly from the table wasn't helping her headache, but she hurried after Five anyway.
"Five. Hey, Five, wait!"
He stopped in the hall with an exasperated sigh. "What is it... Y/N?" The named seemed uncomfortable to him. He had known them all only by their numbers.
"I - uh -"
"Look, Y/N, I know you've always been the most sentimental of us, but if you have nothing important to say -"
"You told me to take you away from... this place. To make it go away."
Five blinked. His eyes narrowed. "I didn't tell you anything."
"I heard you. Sort of. In the kitchen. I...missed the conversation and heard you yelling. Why?"
Five's jaw tightened. He contemplated her for a moment. "Well, you certainly haven't changed. Would've thought age would've matured you and made you smarter. You always had the potential for intellectual greatness. Apparently, that was squandered. Looks like you're still just a child. I didn't tell you anything like I said. And here I was thinking your hallucinogens didn't work on you." He turned and made his way away from her.
That stung.
Y/N caught up with him again. "Listen, Five, I don't know what all happened to you, but I know trauma when I see it. I've...had my fair share of it. If you want to be mad at someone for everything that happened to you, I'm the most logical choice. Too...sentimental to do anything about it. But don't be taking your emotions out on the others, okay? They don't deserve it any more than you do.
"I know you missed us, Five. More than we missed you, and we did miss you. Don't push away your family now you've just got them back."
Before he could reply, Y/N hugged him and kissed his cheek. "And for the record, I'm willing to bet you don't have two PhDs. These days, that makes me more intelligent than you."
Five simply frowned at her, perhaps at a loss for words, so she smiled softly, carefully. "Welcome home, Five. See you in an hour."
It was freezing and raining outside when they all settled into the courtyard for the funeral. And it might've been funny that they couldn't find enough umbrellas for them all in the Umbrella Academy. Except for the fact that the rain added to the deep bone-cold.
Diego and Luther, ever the gentlemen they were not otherwise outside of competition, offered to go without. Y/N shared with Pogo, one arm looped through his which was holding the umbrella for them both. She felt like she was getting more out of it than he was. He was always warm.
Luther dumped their father's ashes on the ground. Mostly, they landed in one place on the ground.
"Probably would've been better with some wind," Luther stated.
Y/N clutched Pogo's arm tighter.
"Does anyone wish to speak?"
Y/N sighed, looking around at their miserably cold family. No one made any attempt to pretend like they wanted to speak, not even Luther. A rebellious lump of sorrow and mourning formed in her throat. Her father had been a poor parent, but at least he had given all of them a home. Y/N thought of all the nameless, parentless, homeless babies in the nursery back in Manhattan. Yes, at least they all had a home.
But she still couldn't bring any words to her tongue.
Pogo began to talk, instead, and Y/N felt his sadness hanging over his head like the rain clouds above them all, drenching her in its wake.
"He was a monster," Diego interrupted. "He was a bad person and a worse father. If you're going to talk about him, at least be honest about the kind of man he was."
"Diego, don't," Y/N tried softly.
That's not my name," he was clearly getting frustrated now. "My name is Number Two. You know why? Cause Dad couldn't be bothered to give us actual names. He had Mom do that."
The second Luther stepped forward, Y/N sensed a fight coming on. "Guys, this isn't the time. Please-"
And then Luther was swinging one humongous fist.
"Boys, stop this at once," Pogo demanded. They ignored him and continued to fight.
"Hit him!" Klaus cheered.
"I don't have time for this," Five disappeared.
Y/N let go of Pogo's arm and stepped out of the protection of the umbrella.
"Miss Y/N-"
"It's okay, Pogo. I got it."
Y/N approached her brawlers carefully, dodging out of the way of fists. Neither of them was fighting full out, thank goodness, but it was still a foolish thing.
She tried to make contact with either of their skin, but they were both near covered completely. She was only just able to graze Luther's ear just as he punched out Ben's statue, their brother's severed head skidding away. Y/N swallowed stiffly at the sight, then turned around.
Diego had ducked out of Luther's range, but the giant looked dazed now that Y/N had gotten contact with him. Her fingers were slick with rain now, however. Her control wouldn't last long, so she jumped at Diego, but he'd already pulled out a knife and thrown it.
For Y/N, time slowed down. It turned back. Turned back over three years. A knife coming at her face. Her pleading and screaming and sobbing for it to stop. She was naked and covered in blood and sweat and tears and rough repulsive hands held her down and then-
The knife arced around her head and sliced through Luther's arm as the brief haze left his eyes. He hurried inside, Allison following after him. Y/N was suddenly crouched on the ground with her fingers touching the scars on her eye, eyes wide with terror at Diego, but unseeing.
And then Pogo took her arm and gently pulled her to her feet. She flinched, blinking and waking up from the memory that had overtaken her. "Come on inside, dear," Pogo murmured gently. He guided her past Diego, making sure to walk as a barricade between them. And then they went into the house.
"You never know when to stop, do you?"
Pogo led Y/N to her old bedroom. Sitting beside her black comforter bed was her duffle bag of clothes and other necessities she'd packed for the week.
She sat on the bed and put her head in her hands and Pogo sat beside her with a hand gently on her back.
"It's not supposed to happen anymore," she mumbled. Her heart was disobeying her requests to calm. "I thought I had it under control."
"Miss Y/N, what you went through was a tremendously scarring ordeal. It doesn't simply go away. It's only been three years, dear."
Y/N sighed and straightened up. Her room hadn't changed since she'd left when she was eighteen. Turquoise walls, black bed, a black and white bookcase filled every inch with books and notebooks. Black dresser and mirror, a gray bean bag chair in the corner by her books. One wall was all black and splattered with paint and doodles of all colors - Klaus and she had spent weeks of free time decorating it.
She turned to Pogo. "Why am I here?"
Pogo's hand moved from her back to her cheek. "You are here because you have the biggest heart I've ever known. It would have made you miserable to not be here for your family. For your father."
Y/N leaned into his hand. "For you."
Pogo chuckled. "Don't tell that to Master Klaus. You have him believing he's your favorite."
"Pogo, you were more of a father to me than Dad was. I love you and you mean so much to me, and I hope you know that."
Some sort of conflict passed over his face. Then he smiled softly, removing his hand from her head and standing. "As much as you mean to me, my dear."
And then he left.