1962

Vanya had been fairly certain after her…incident with the syrup that Luther was going to react somehow. That maybe her outburst would bring him up out of whatever vacant mood he'd been in since he came to in the alley. She had at least expected him to say something about it as they wandered Dallas, looking for a good place to rest and clean up. But so far, their entire conversation had consisted of debating whether or not to try and find a place to stay with the little money that Luther had on him.

They'd settled into something like banter after the first hour of wandering the downtown, and Vanya was surprised to find her anger slowly dimming of its own accord. Although that may have just been a welcome side effect of her soggy clothes drying out and the fact that Luther hadn't tried to pull any more "leader" shit.

Now, the two of them were standing in a slightly rundown motel parking lot in a smaller pocket of businesses a few hours' trek from downtown. Luther kept looking down at the bills in his hand and then back up again at the front door. Hesitating.

To be fair, so was Vanya. There was a reason they were debating this after all. She wanted to remind him that this was a bad idea, as she had when they'd briefly considered testing the "solitary" in the Plano Rooming House for Solitary Men just off the city center. But at the same time, she was all too aware that his limp from the church basement had become more pronounced, and he'd pretty much given up trying to move his left arm at all. So he was clearly in pain, and Vanya was pretty sure she'd just walked more in the last few hours than she had in her entire life collectively up to now. The humming, destructive energy from before was sizzling on low, and she wasn't sure she'd be able to call her powers forth fast enough to back Luther up—or fight him off—if need be.

In short, at this point, they didn't really have any other options.

Luther was biting his lip, and she already knew what he was going to ask. "The question is, how badly will this mess up the timeline?"

"Versus how much Five will be mad at us if we do this?"

"Right."

Vanya vaguely remembered a post-mission reprimand, years ago, about calculated risks. And while she'd mostly pretended like she didn't care and wasn't listening—one of the only benefits to not being a part of the team—she'd gotten the gist. And introducing 2019—or, in this case, 2016—bills into circulation during the '60s was probably a good example of one. It would be bad if someone noticed. But they also didn't have any other feasible options.

"I mean, we're already here." Vanya motioned to the parking lot around them. It was about half full of gleaming showboats in pastel colors. The sun—now much higher than when they'd left the church—gleamed off their flecked paint. She snuck a glance up and up and up to Luther's face. He was tall, much taller than she'd realized or remembered. "We haven't exactly kept to ourselves this far. If Five is going to chew us out, we might as well make it worth his while."

From her vantage point, one side of Luther's mouth cracked up into a smile. One more glance at the money in his hand and he nodded his agreement. And then they were both crossing the parking lot and entering the motel's mid-century lobby.

The concierge did not look thrilled to see them, and Vanya stayed in the background as Luther approached the counter. It might have been slightly comical to watch the man lean back in his seat a little in an attempt to meet Luther's lofty eyes. And even as he went about the business of paperwork and making change, the concierge's attention kept darting between them, probably taking in their mussed and stained clothing and the exhaustion of spending the last few hours trying to figure out a safe place to lay low and trying to work together in the process.

The two of them were out of place in his world, and they all knew it. For his part, Luther wasn't doing a good job of hiding it. "Yes…uh, thank you… Uh, can you tell me…" his stumbling speech and nervous shifting was pulling on the loose threads of Vanya's nerves, and again she wondered what Luther's plan was here. And hopefully it didn't involve having to play anything cool, because that had gone out the door when they'd come in.

Vanya had just extrapolated far enough into their morning adventures to wonder if maybe Luther was simply compartmentalizing what happened earlier until they'd ticked through the list of tasks he clearly had in his head when he turned and handed her a key. In his other hand, his left, he loosely clutched another one.

"What are you doing?" Vanya hissed after a moment when it had sunk in.

"I thought…you'd want your own room."

They stared at each other for a moment before Vanya finally shook her head. "We need to stick together." While they'd be able to get by on less money for longer than was possible in 2019, they were still stuck with a finite amount. They had to make it last. "Really," she added when Luther just blinked at her.

When she didn't reach out for the key, Luther turned without further comment and the process of papers and change and conversation started over.

"Where'd you get that? The army?" The concierge handed over a different key, motioning to Luther's left arm, which he immediately tucked at his side out of view of the counter. Vanya caught sight of the faded black outline of an umbrella encapsulated in a circle.

"Uh, group inside joke?" Luther gave him a stiff wave and motioned for Vanya to follow him back outside to go to their room.

"Damn hippies…" the man was muttering to himself, just on the edge of Vanya's hearing as the door closed behind her. It made her both want to laugh and sharpen his words into little energy spikes to hurl at the glass in their wake. Her powers were beginning to clumsily find their legs in response to his increasingly bad attitude. Instinctively, she tamped down on the feelings, summoning up an approximation of the neutral, nothing feeling she'd spent most of her life enveloped in. But it didn't help much.

Their room was ten doors down from the office on the ground level, and the quiet clicking of Luther inserting the key into the lock, twisting the handle, and pushing the door open almost sent Vanya's powers ripping out of her. Even those small noises were physically painful for her to resist as she followed him inside and very, very softly closed and locked the door.

She had to get it together.

000

1961

Allison didn't sleep much her first few nights in 1961.

Odessa had given her a sparse room in the attic of her house, standing with her hands on her hips at the top of the stairs, explaining, "It's the coolest place in the house during the spring and summer. And you'll have a little more privacy up here."

She hadn't commented when Allison had only been able to offer her a teary smile in acknowledgement.

It was the first time in a long time that Allison felt like someone was actually actively seeking to take care of her. She loved being a mother—more than she'd ever anticipated—but the knowledge that someone else was there if she needed anything, that she didn't have to stand in the middle of an earthquake alone and keep her balance, made her want to cry.

And she did. A lot.

000

First, Allison cried about Claire, because of course. Allison wanted her baby girl, and it was funny in a morbid, awful sort of way to think back on how much she'd hated being on the other side of the country from her child just a few days ago. And now… Now the clock had been turned back to a time before Claire existed, before Allison herself did, and she hadn't been able to even speak to her daughter before it happened, let alone protect her from it.

Allison hadn't been able to avoid thinking about those few moments before they jumped for long. And now, when she wasn't acutely missing Claire with literally every nerve-ending, she was trying to soothe the vicious, deadly images in her mind. Of course, they didn't actually know what happened when the broken chunks of the moon made it to the surface of the earth, and Allison's mind had no problem creating image after image of destruction to fill in the gaps.

And right in the middle of it all, was her sweet, beautiful daughter.

She kept crying.

000

The first thing Odessa did in the morning was ask about her tattoo.

A dumb decision when I was younger. Allison wrote back. Which was true. She'd been young, and it had been Dad's dumb decision.

"Family?" Odessa asked over her steaming cup. She had quaint little indigo mugs that she liked to put her hands around while her tea steeped.

In New York.

Odessa hummed. "And you decided to come to Dallas?"

Allison bit her lip, moving the words around in her mind and swapping them out occasionally until she finally settled on the closest version of the truth she could tell. My siblings wanted to come here. We were separated. I'm looking for them.

Now, Odessa's eyes were heavy, serious. "Were you all running? Were you trying to get out of trouble?"

The truth was probably ambiguous enough. Yes.

"Because of that?" Odessa dipped her head once at the fresh bandage. But it was already obvious what she meant.

Allison had never been good at twenty questions, and she very much wished Odessa hadn't set this conversation to "hard mode" right off the bat. She wasn't quite sure what to say other than It was an accident.

Odessa hummed again, fixing her with a look that said she didn't believe Allison. That Allison could tell her; she was safe. And Allison wished she could tell her. The only thing she missed more than being able to speak was being around people who knew who she was and weren't constantly trying to search out the reasons why her life was such a mess. Not that Odessa knew that was what she was really asking.

I'm looking for them. Allison circled the words and tapped them, repeating herself. She stared the other woman down, praying that Odessa would drop it.

"Alright, well, I guess we'll see what we can do," she finally nodded.

000

Next, Allison's thoughts shifted to Vanya. So much was up in the air after what had happened at the theater, and the only thing that stressed her out more than the idea of never seeing Claire again was the thought that Vanya might, at this very moment, be in any amount of danger with no one there to help her.

Allison was used to feeling guilty. Her rumors were damaged things, already half-rotten by the time they made it out of her mouth. She'd lived most of her life cycling through using her powers and then regretting it. But the thought that any one of her actions in the last few days may have immediate, terrible consequences for her sister was almost too acute for even her calloused, abused feelings.

She'd been so eager, head in the clouds astride her high horse as she finally reached the point, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine where she remembered that she had a sister with any degree of happiness. Her life in California was falling apart like a mirror shattering in slow motion, and suddenly she was back home again and her sister was there! And her other siblings! And she didn't have anywhere she needed to be; she could just exist. And Five looked like he hadn't aged a day since the last time she'd seen him, despite his acidic, unfeeling façade.

She'd been lulled into a false sense of comfort. Not to mention unfettered and ill-considered excitement at having someone else to bond with and maybe, just a little, take care of in the form of Vanya. None of which had lived long in the shape-shifting shadow of Harold Jenkins. Not that it would have survived much longer even in his absence.

If there was anything Allison did know with any amount of certainty, it was that she was a really bad sister.

000

Almost as an after-effect of jumping, it felt like time had fragmented itself, refracting at odd angles before Allison's eyes. The disjointed hours of her last days in 2019 seemed to have also followed on her heels here.

And with her lack of sleep and the constant ache in her throat from eating and breathing and existing, Allison's world shrunk down into a tunnel, the end of which she couldn't see. At the moment, she didn't really want to.

She didn't know where Odessa went those first few days, leaving Allison with the house to herself during the day, but soon her mid-night crying spilled over into the sunlit hours. So she'd sit on an unfamiliar couch in an unfamiliar living room and silently sob until it felt like the force of it would split her apart.

She felt like a terrible houseguest, that first week. But even stronger than that, Allison couldn't bring herself up out of her grief enough to care.

000

And, lastly, as per usual, her mind finally found its way into the forested wilds of thinking about Luther.

Their relationship was complicated and unfinished, and Allison had spent most of her adult life trying to convince herself that she didn't still think about the what ifs.

Then Dad died. Then she'd told Luther about Claire, and he was back to being her confidant. He'd done what he'd always done and supported her and loved her into the brokenness. Then he'd talked to her daughter for her.

She still wasn't happy with him for bulldozing her after Vanya had returned to the house and his continuous refusals afterward to see reason. But it was more of an immediate anger. One that she wished she had the luxury of feeling rather than the gaping worry that lurked underneath. Luther was so strong, he'd never had an accurate perception of just how fragile he really was. Selfishly, Allison had used to like that about him; it made her more confident in the moments when she'd give him a look that meant something a little more than friends. Now, she was unaccountably terrified that, wherever he was, it was going to somehow get him killed.

000

By the time her second week in 1961 ended, Allison had shifted from fear to determination. And while Odessa was gone, she cleaned the house and did the laundry and took stock of what was in the pantry. Dinner was always waiting when the other woman returned home.

"If you're feeling up to it," Odessa said over their roasted chicken breasts with baby carrots and potatoes on the sixteenth night, "why don't you come down to the salon with me tomorrow? You need some new clothes too. My friends can help with that."

I appreciate it. Allison slid the note over to her.

Odessa just scoffed as she always did at Allison's fervent thank yous and started in on some neighborly gossip she'd heard at work. She was sweet and welcoming and the more Allison tried to smother her feelings against her chest, the more the other woman stood back, waiting. Odessa was making a clear show of giving Allison space, and the more Allison's heart broke at having to keep up the charade, the more desperate she felt to make good on what she could do for Odessa.

Because Allison was still scared. She was still in pain. But she was also angry. As soon as she got her voice back, the moment the broken breaths turned back into speech, she was striding into that police station and fixing this.

The lack of questions that the 1960s characters ask really bothers me. Don't get me wrong, I'm trash for the miscommunication trope. But it's going to be harder for the siblings to blend in with no questions asked in this AU.

Katie beta-ed this. Thanks be unto her.