I do not own Umbrella Academy, hence this season 2 AU.

Just a heads up: this will start more chronological than the second season does, so each section or chapter will be labelled with the year. Gotta get that self-actualization and sibling bonding in before Five comes to yell at them.

1960

Was it sunny? Or was the world on fire around him? Sun? Fire? Sun? Blazing, deadly fire?

His voice was raspy, trying to move and breathe through the pain blooming all over his back and arms and legs but needing to fill the sudden, swollen silence. "That was…"

"…exhilarating…" Ben's soft voice came from somewhere next to him as Klaus painfully eased himself up. Ow, ow, ow. And then, "Where's Five?"

Ben, the little shit, was already standing and seemed to be having the exact opposite reaction to falling out of the sky (they'd been standing on the stage, how the hell had they ended up in the air?) and wiping out on hard concrete.

Despite the growing pain, Klaus was on his feet faster than usual. He was still adjusting to his reflexes, namely having them and having them as fast as this. They'd come rushing back in with a vengeance in the aftermath of the drugs and the boozing and the glorious, wonderful numbing…

It sucked and he hated it. Pretty soon, the ghosts would be bleeding out of the buildings… Oh, buildings. It was sunny. And actually pretty fricking hot. But not being roasted in an inferno hot, at least, as he spun, looked up at the pulsing blue above their heads.

"Five! Diego! Allison! Where is everybody?" The glowing portal bullshit shrunk and winked out. Much like his patience. In its place, a soft blue sky, fluffy wisps of clouds and everything. A sky that was clearly a million miles from the end of the world.

"…they're gone. They're gone like a fart in the wind…" There really wasn't much of a choice as far as direction, and Klaus followed Ben further out of the alley and into the sunlight, absently hearing himself talking as they rounded the corner. "So where the hell are we…"

This was…wrong. Klaus didn't even know why, at first. He could just feel it. He knew the world around them was wrong, that the street, the cars, the people looked unexpectedly off. But his brain was still spinning from Five's wormhole thing. All he managed to choke out, faltering down an unfamiliar street like he could outrun this, was, "Are hats back?"

"I think the question is, when are we?" Ben called after him, filling in the gap Klaus had been circling in confusion.

The two of them shifted around each other like normal, Klaus taking the lead at first and trying unsuccessfully to get a third opinion from yet another hatted gentleman in the street as Ben walked on.

"Look," Ben was saying when Klaus joined him a few seconds later, motioning to a discarded magazine with a solid six on the cover of it.

"Yeah, I mean he's pretty my type but I'd have to see him from the shoulders down…"

"The date," Ben sighed, "you idiot."

"Oh, yeah." This was why Klaus had secretly named Ben his personal assistant. "February 11, 1960?" A pause as his tired, apocalypse-drama-riddled brain tried one more time to put those last four numbers in an order that made sense. "1960."

Ben got it at the same time he did. "Shit."

000

1961

If nothing else followed her through the portal, the ache in her throat did. It transitioned smoothly from point A to point B, a steady through line even as Allison felt the world fall away in a blinding rush.

Then she was hitting solid ground, and every movement was painful, a rip across her vocal cords, tugging them, fraying them. And as she instinctively picked herself up, swaying to her feet and looking up to watch as the portal swallowed itself in the black sky above her, Allison didn't want to move.

Wherever she was, she knew she was alone in the darkness. If it hadn't been for the heat and the streetlights hovering at the edges of her darting vision, Allison might have mistaken it for the theater for a moment. But the air was too balmy. It was more akin to shooting that mini series in Mexico. The one about the flood that spent too much screen time on the gratuitous love tringle with Antonio Banderas.

Right after she'd started dating Patrick…

So Five had moved them somewhere else. Rather, moved her. Her and her aching throat and the void of loneliness that she'd been used to. Until eight days ago when all of her siblings—all of them—were back in some form or another. Allison had never thought that having a full Academy would ever feel as good as it had. And even though she had an endless handkerchief of sides to her personality up her sleeve, Allison had just started letting them start to get tangled up in each other, integrating again. For the first time in years.

Then she'd messed up. Again. And everything went so sideways… How could she have been so stupid?

Now she was alone again and totally unprepared for it.

There were voices. Really, really loud voices. After all of the shooting and the energy surges and the single gunshot, right next to her sister's ear, and then the muted roar of Five's powers wrapping themselves around them, rippling through Allison's body, rearranging, picking up, putting back together, it felt like she'd fallen into a dead-silent void.

But now there were sounds again. And despite everything that her ability had done to her, that she'd enabled it to do to her life, Allison was relieved to hear loud, angry voices. It was comforting to hear sound again in the world, even if its lapse had been brief. Even if she, herself, was helplessly mute.

So it was really stupid, but Allison stumbled out of the alleyway and set off in search of the source.

000

1962

The moments before dropping out of the portal felt like shuffling a deck of cards, a succession of transitions that happened too quickly for Luther to wrap his head around. Then he was freefalling down onto his left arm. Hard. Enough to break the tight grip he'd been unconsciously holding. The warmth of the body that he'd encapsulated against his chest fell away, rolling a few feet to an ungraceful stop.

It was…it was raining. A heavy, miserable rain that made it hard for his blinking eyes to focus.

The vertigo hit him next, even though Luther hadn't done so much as raise his head. He was used to having dizzy spells—a byproduct of having a foreign substance injected into his bloodstream that bulked him up disproportionately, not to mention spending four years with negligible gravity on the moon—and his head was doing its normal spinning. Except this time he hadn't stood up too fast or tried to jump too far from one gray moon boulder to another.

Now, his brain throbbed, probably expanding outward and putting pressure on his skull. Like a concussion. Ugh, probably. Shit. Of course this would happen now as he was scrabbling, trying to make his oversized limbs do his bidding as they quivered like Jell-O. Unreliable and unhelpful.

And here came the nausea. Great.

Luther paused for a moment to rest and regain his bearings, eyeing Vanya's slim white form. She'd tumbled away when he hit the ground. And when the soaked and stained coat didn't move after half a second of breathing in time to the driving rain and his pounding skull, Luther sighed out. Caught between relief and concern.

He knew he needed to get up, check Vanya, pick her back up, and get them to safety. Somehow. She needed him to protect her…wherever they were.

But the longer he waited for his vision to clear, the more his body was drifting downward, spreading on the gravelly concrete like runny pancake batter. It was painful. Almost more painful than feeling the life energy being sucked out of his chest. Watching as Vanya…well, Vanya did exactly what he'd thought she'd do when he sat next to Allison's unconscious side in the infirmary.

It was his question to Five, "Wait, should we be taking her?" that echoed through his head as the last of his strength left. Luther felt it the moment his powers—the one part of him that still felt like him—gave out, and then he drifted.

000

September 1, 1963

Mom always chided Diego about thinking before he acted, not being so reckless about throwing himself into the thick of things. But after barely sticking the landing into a nondescript alley and watching as Five's portal disappeared seconds later and plunged him into a deep darkness, he was nothing short of relieved to hear someone yelling for help.

The whole unexciting episode took maybe fifteen seconds. His training kicked in unbidden, and Diego was running out into the street and curving a knife without a conscious thought, sticking the petty burglar to a light post.

His adrenaline was short-lived and almost embarrassing as he handed the woman's purse back. The usual euphoria of stepping in and righting a situation gone wrong was missing. And he stared dumbly at her back as she resumed her course down the street. The creeping feeling of unsettlement was still there, and he realized too late that he should have asked the woman what day it was. Where he was.

Because Diego was used to successfully navigating in strange places, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he'd never been on this street before.

That was when we heard it.

The television in the store window was familiar enough, even if the business sign above it wasn't. But when he got close enough to see what was going on, to blink and blink and stare and stare until he was absolutely sure that this wasn't a dream, Diego felt the last of the adrenaline draining from his body like water.

"…Ask not what your country can do for you…"

Oh, this was bad.

"…ask what you can do for your country."

Really, really bad.

Damn it, Five.

All the thanks to Katie for introducing me to the show and beta-ing for me!

Thanks so much for reading!