A/N: And we're back!

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Disclaimer: Not mine.

"Ben? Ben? Ben? Oh Benarino?"

It was the last name that finally roused him. After all, that hateful nickname that Klaus so often called him by was the one thing that could easily get his attention, even if Klaus wasn't the one voicing it this time around.

Ben shot bolt upright, face smeared with the remains of his pizza – which he'd apparently been using as a pillow for the last couple of hours, judging by the anchovies in his hair. He immediately went through the usual post-awakening checks and remembered with a jolt of shock that he was lying on a metal desk in the back of a gigantic semitrailer closing in on the central depository vault of Hargreeves Financial.

"Argh!" he yelped, struggling for a grip on reality. "I'm awake! I'm awake! What time is it?"

Mr Singh looked down at him disapprovingly. "Just past three o'clock. Your brother came through with the details a couple of hours ago, so the heist is still on. Get your shotgun and stay sharp: we'll need all hands on deck for this, especially with the extra security. Now, get ready. Have a bump if you need it."

Ben sighed, mopped his face clean, ignored the offered of line of cocaine, shouldered his combat shotgun, and lined up at the doors of the semitruck with the rest of the away team. In total, there were about four gunmen, one demolitions expert, one hacker, one inside man (currently offsite), one getaway driver and Singh the team leader… and for what had to be the seventh or eighth heist in a row, Ben hadn't managed to get himself a single unique role on the team. He was just an ordinary gunman, muscle-for-hire, a thug, and not particularly spectacular one either.

Oh, he was good at his job, to be sure. After all, even without his powers, he still had more than fifteen years of combat experience and all the training that Reginald Hargreeves had bought for him in another timeline: he was a competent shot, a good hand-to-hand combatant, a decent knifeman, a dab hand with security, and almost gifted enough with computers to be a hacker. But in the end, he wasn't good enough to specialize, not skilled or talented enough to get the really big share of the heist money, only the same fair cut as all the other knuckleheads brought along the heist. He'd relied so much of his powers that he'd never bothered to really become an expert in martial arts, marksmanship, or any of the other trades that could have made him more valuable to Mr Singh.

Even Klaus was earning a bigger share than him, and that was only because Klaus had weaponized his own utter worthlessness: the guy was such an addled-looking bohemian that people assumed he spent his days too stoned to be a danger to anyone, even though he hadn't touched anything stronger than aspirin in the last five years, so his marks let their guard down around him and got careless. Keys, ID cards, compromising documents, valuables, and recorded conversations made their way from Klaus' parlour to Mr Singh's pocket, and more often than not, these formed the basis of his most profitable heists. It paid to keep Klaus in business.

In the end, Ben was good enough, but he wasn't great. And without powers, he'd never be great. Acceptability was the only thing he could hope for in this new existence, even in a life of bloodshed and crime.

But he could live with acceptability for now, as annoying as it was. For as much as Klaus was earning, he wasn't actually a member of Singh's gang, not like Ben: Ben had made his bones, gained a position of trust, secured a little insurance for himself just in case he ever got arrested, and made some alliances with the rest of the gang – enough to know that they were getting pissy about the latest heists. For the last three heists, they hadn't been stealing money or jewels or anything genuinely valuable that could be divided between them, but crate after crate of meaningless junk: magazines, novels, DVDs, VHS tapes, old film reels, newspaper clippings, diaries, toys, clothing, even kid's drawings.

Singh wouldn't any of them get close enough to see what was so important about the damn things, presumably because he didn't want any of them learning enough to pounce on the next samples they could find, and he kept the client's name hidden from the rest of the gang for the same reason. However, Ben could already guess that it was being gathered on behalf of some independent VIP with more dollars than sense. As for where this stuff had come from, all anyone knew was that certain companies in the Hargreeves corporate family had been finding this stuff lying all over the place, willy-nilly, and gathering them up in crates for god only knew what reason.

Whatever the case, the fact that the gang were getting significantly less from these hauls than their usual paydays meant that there was a lot of foul tempers among the gang. This morning's heist was an emergency effort to keep the rest of the gang satisfied, a proper raid on a real financial institution with real valuables on offer, but it would only work if each team-member walked away with enough loot to recoup the losses they'd suffered on the last few pathetic heists. If Singh couldn't give them what they wanted… well, it'd be Ben's time to make his move. He'd made friends with the rest of the gang over the last few months, enough to help them out when a few of them had gotten short on cash in the wake of the last few crappy raids, so he already had their loyalty secured.

Once he was certain that they were ready to turn on Singh at a moment's notice, he'd put a couple of rounds through the fat fuck's kneecaps and let the rest of the team finish him off as his first gift to the guys as the new head of the gang.

That was what nobody else would understand about his position: they honestly thought that he was planning on enjoying the benefits of being a mid-level cog in Singh's money-making machine. They didn't understand the benefits of angling for promotion the old-fashioned way – the way he might have done with Marcus if only he could have found another gifted kid to be added to the Sparrow Academy's ranks. Nobody else but him had the guts to look for that kind of opportunity.

Everyone had given him shit for picking this job once he'd revealed it to them. No surprises there: everyone thought he was still the Ben they'd known back in their home timeline, the sweet-natured nerd that everyone wanted to be around, and the idea of him becoming a gangster simply couldn't enter their tiny minds. Viktor had boggled in confusion and tried to talk him out of it; Five, irritable from trying to remove his ankle monitor, had given him a trademarked "too old for this shit" look and demanded to know if he thought a life of crime was anything like being a superhero; Klaus had eyed him with a mixture of pity and exasperation, clearly thinking himself clever for being a con artist instead of a gangster; Allison had still been nowhere to be found; Diego had rolled his eyes and gone back to showing off mundane knife tricks to his infant daughter; and Luther… well, that had been before he'd been packed off to rehab, so he'd hit the booze even harder than usual.

Lila had been the most annoying of them all, for once her baby had finally nodded off in her arms, she had said, "Ben, Mr Singh is a fucking maniac: he's not just robbing the other gangs anymore, but Hargreeves-owned businesses. That's going to bring down the secret police on your little gang. I mean, for Chrissakes, if you want violence, why don't you just join the security forces? There's always a chance to beat the living shit out of innocent bystanders there."

Fucking bitch.

She hadn't understood: Hargreeves Security, the military, the elite guard, the secret police, they all required lockstep discipline, absolute uniformity, and most disgusting of all, loyalty to Reginald goddamn Hargreeves. Ben had long since had enough of being number two, and he'd had enough of being old Reggie's puppet in the days before that; a life of crime was the only chance he'd have for action and prestige without making himself somebody's slave, the only shot at the ghost of the rockstar lifestyle he'd had back in the Sparrow Academy. That was why he'd chosen this line of work in the first place, why, after far too many months of dead-end jobs and stern dismissals, he'd had Klaus introduce him to one of the crime lords that let him operate in the Red Level.

And after that, the rest was history.

And of course, so were his chances at standing out, but at least the money put a nice roof over his head and food on the table. Until the day that he could finally get enough of the guys on his side to kill Singh and take over the gang, it was all he could hope for in this new life…

Or was it?

He'd been dreaming of something before Singh had woken him up, something important, something… familiar. There'd been a face in that dream, the face of someone he'd once known many years ago, though he couldn't say from where. Maybe the face had been much younger when he'd known it, for every time he tried to focus on it, he found himself stumbling into a tangle of memories from years and years past, half-scoured away by a decade of determined forgetting, combined with several months of recreational cocaine use.

The last clear recollection he had of that forgotten time in his life was of a massive warehouse, surrounded by the blasted wreckage of drug-pumping machinery and the shredded bodies of the workers, with three unrecognizable figures lying in twitching heaps around him, clawing at their eyes, their skin, their rapidly distorting skulls. And at the centre of it all, Ben knelt with a young teenage girl's lifeless body in his arms, weeping. God only knew how long ago that had to be if he'd been weak enough to cry over it.

And the hell of it was that Ben was sure he'd been able to remember the event clearly just a couple of weeks ago. In fact, someone had mentioned something exactly like this years ago, something that drawn his attention and left him demanding to know more, but he couldn't recall who or when or how. And the event itself was all wound up with another memory of the same event, tangled up and lodged in his brain like razor wire. The more he tried to focus on what had happened and when, the more he found himself getting it muddled up with a completely different sequence.

In this version of events, he'd been lying face-up in the middle of the same warehouse, screaming in pain as his own tentacles turned traitor, each of them ripping into him with vicious abandon, plucking his limbs away one by one even as he'd screamed for mercy. All around him, people collapsed in agony – some gasping for breath, some paralysed by their own contorted muscles, some with their hands clasped over their eyes. And above him, that same teenage girl with the beautiful face looked down at him without pity, slowly watching as Ben died.

Then, without warning, a dark-haired boy with bloodshot eyes and hands twitching from delirium tremens had crept up behind the girl and slit her throat.

But what about the dream?

What had happened after he'd seen that face again in his dream? There'd been something about a horribly distorted body consuming him, drowning him under a wave of flesh, but on the other side of all that horror had been a lush green park, a beautiful place where no trace of the dreadful city could be found. There were no cameras scanning the pathways, no secret police tailing civilians with black hoods and tasers at the ready, no Hargreeves security snipers, and none of the smog and pollution the city spewed over its real parks.

It was a ridiculous dream, the kind that Ben had made fun of Sloane for sharing back in the day. But Sloane was gone, now, and now Ben had to take solace in those dreams, for as silly as it was, he had to admit that it was inviting sight compared to the mediocrity of his life. And the strangest thing of all, he got the impression that, as crazy as it sounded, there was actually a chance to make that place a reality.

But he'd woken up before he could find out how.

Once this heist was over, he'd get some more sleep and dream again. Maybe he'd find out how he could reach the park… and pigs would fly in formation like fucking B52s, as well, or so he'd have said in saner universes. Again, he couldn't explain why, but it seemed so very logical that the park could one day be real if only dreamed how to make it so.

In the meantime, there was a bank to rob.

There was a jolt, as the semi finally shuddered to a stop. For a moment, there was a muffled argument outside as a Hargreeves security stuffed shirt demanded to know what the hell the truck was doing in the company parking lot, blissfully oblivious to the fact that Mr Singh had already started the five-second countdown.

Then the rear doors shot open and all four gunmen flung themselves out of the truck, guns at the ready, all the usual cliches being shouted at full volume. One security guard who clearly hadn't gotten the memo made a grab for his holster, but Ben just took careful aim and gave him both barrels through the head, popping his skull like a grape.

The other security guards, realizing they were outgunned and down a man, immediately raised their hands in surrender – and as disappointing as his life had become without his powers, Ben couldn't help but let a smile creep across his face: for the sheer rush of adrenaline and endorphins, there was no beating the sight of armed men surrendering in terror.

It was almost enough to make him forget the dream.

Almost.

Reginald muttered a few less-than-visionary words as he reviewed his instruments. Number Six – or the Alternate Number Two, depending on the way you looked at it…

He cursed again, pinching the bridge of his nose as he struggled to control his recollections: Reginald had inherited all the memories of his alternate self, as had been his intention from the moment he'd completed his work on this new world, and as advantageous as it was to know the survivors of both Academies off by heart, it sometimes resulted in confusion if he didn't ground himself in the present first.

Regardless of his number, Ben was not receptive. His mind was too violent, too fixated on notions of excitement and supremacy to accept the emotional aspect of the therapy: his thoughts actively rejected the new patterns the induced stimuli should have encouraged. And there was something else about him, something Reginald hadn't anticipated: a secondary set of memories running contrary to Ben's experiences, one inextricably tied with the content of the dream he'd been sent. This could only have been the result of exposure to the rifts in reality, the same source of the items that Ben and his employer had been heisting, but as long as this confusion existed, he couldn't process the entire plot of Reginald's carefully directed narrative.

Five would have to show results, though. Based on everything that Reginald and his merged alternates had observed, Five's trauma and self-isolating tendencies would make him exceptionally susceptible to the therapy… especially after everything he'd suffered in this new reality.

Yes, Five would be perfect…

A/N: Suffice it to say I was not a fan of what season 4 did to explain it, given how many questions were raised in the process - why the hell would you send the Umbrella Academy after Jennifer when allowing her to touch any of them could end the world? Why didn't Ben ask questions about his death? etc. So, I decided to hint at something a little less apocalyptically stupid in Ben's tangled memories, one from the perspective of Umbrella Ben, one from Sparrow Ben's perspective.

I won't be explaining literally everything just yet, so I can only hint at this new and rethought Jennifer Incident.

Meanwhile, up next... guess who.