A/N: Yeah, this was kind of inevitable.
Suffice it to say that I belong to a certain demographic of viewers who don't much like Season 4 or the ending: it wasn't quite as enraging as "well, we just had you cause the death of thousands for the sake of somebody the player doesn't care about so now we'll kill you", or "who has a better story than Bran the Bastardry?" but it was every bit as stupid and mean-spirited. So here I am with yet another exorcise-the-demons story: did one for Burial At Sea, another for Game Of Thrones, and here I am with Umbrella Academy, ready to put yet another stake through the heart of my own frustrations.
Feel free to furnish me with your opinions of this story, because no matter how negative they may be, they demonstrate more time and effort than season 4 did.
Anyway, without further ado, chapter one: read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Erm.
Viktor lurched upright, heart hammering as he clawed his way out of the nightmare and back into full wakefulness.
He'd been having a nightmare, he recalled… and yet, it had ended so happily, so optimistically. There'd been misery, humiliation, drudgery, fear, and terror in greater and greater degrees with every chapter of it, but it had somehow all ended in a park – in rolling green hills where children played without fear of the future, and smiling faces roamed the idyllic parkland for as far as the eye could see. It had been beautiful, enthralling, even, but it hadn't made any sense: it was a place outside of time, where familiar faces from across history were united in true happiness, with no explanation for how they'd come to be there or how this place existed. All Viktor knew was how to make this place a reality… or at least, he had, but like all dreams, the finer details were beginning to smudge and blur as he gradually left sleep behind.
It was a pity, really: if he'd known how to reach such a beautiful place or make it possible, he might have been tempted to follow the instructions. For anyone else, the idea would have been insane, but then again, Viktor Hargreeves hadn't exactly lived a normal life even by the standards of this reality. Given a choice between a paradise and the world where he now lived, he'd have gladly taken the former without a second thought.
It had been five years since Viktor had stepped out of the Hotel Oblivion to find that he and his siblings were powerless, minus a sister-in-law, down one trustworthy sibling, and trapped in a world that had been reborn in the twisted image of everyone's least favourite billionaire.
Since that awful night, things had been equal parts monstrous, wonderful, reassuring, nightmarish, and just plain depressing. Part of that was due to being left without powers barely two weeks after realizing that they even existed (for the second time around), but most of it was due to the world as their adoptive father had designed it.
Oh, they'd tried to set things right, for what little it was worth. Once they'd found their footing and recovered from everything that had been thrown at them in the meantime, Viktor, Diego, and Luther had found the Obsidian Hotel, exactly as it had been in the previous timeline, complete with Chet and his dog keeping watch over the front desk, and from there, it didn't take long for them to make their way back to the White Buffalo Suite. But this time, there was no secret door hidden inside, no portal into the Hotel Oblivion, only solid walls and a total lack of hidden entrances and exits. After a great deal of searching and correspondence with Five, they'd been forced to admit that Oblivion was no more: either Reginald had sealed off all access to it in this new world, or he'd simply written it out of existence entirely. And with that one chance to undo the nightmare that their adoptive father had created, they'd had no choice but to give up and live in it.
So, here they were for good.
He glanced out the window, peeking through the heavy mantle of the curtains at the stygian gloom of the street outside. It was 3 AM, so the curfew hadn't yet been lifted and the security forces were still on patrol: overhead, black-armoured enforcement drones glided high above the darkened streets, tirelessly sweeping the roads with their spotlights and pausing at every streetlight to scan for any sign of citizens caught outdoors. But even if you were quick enough to avoid their spotlights and stay ahead of their motion detectors, there would always be a follow-up team of Hargreeves Security operatives combing the streets for anyone who had evaded the drones, and their lustreless black uniforms had a nasty habit of blending into the shadows until they were within arm's reach of you, and by then, it was already too late to run.
And that was assuming you'd only encountered the average Hargreeves Security team. If you were really unfortunate, you might end up getting the attention of the distinguished representatives of the Hargreeves Foundation For Enhanced Enforcement – known to everyone else as the Secret Police. They didn't need to bother with black uniforms or lurking about in the shadows, because they wore plainclothes, operated under assumed names, and could easily fake the role of a terrified civilian just long enough to get an unsuspecting offender off-guard. After that, the black hood would be slipped over the victim's head and they'd be dragged screaming into the darkness, condemned to a quick a nasty execution if they were lucky, or to a long and gradually fatal interrogation if they weren't.
More than once, Viktor had nearly gotten arrested after delaying his journey home from the concert hall, and only by sheer dumb luck had he made it through the narrow back alleys without being seen either by the drones, Hargreeves Security, or the secret police. A fellow musician on the same evening journey hadn't been so lucky, and while they'd let him off with a warning, their idea of a 'warning' consisted of the cops breaking the unlucky percussionist's hands.
Nobody at the orchestra had protested. Nobody dared lodge a complaint against this private security firm, not when everyone knew who owned it.
Needless to say, the city streets were pitch-black except for the distant lights of the drones on patrol: the streetlights were out, the windows were shuttered and curtained, billboards had been left in darkness, and even the central business district was left dark and lifeless for the evening, a sight that would have been unthinkable a few timelines ago. Across the entire city, there was only one solitary point on the map that still had working lights on outside, and that stood at the very heart of the metropolis, soaring high over all the darkened streets and crooked alleyways and overshadowing every other skyscraper within the city's boundaries. In the night, it glowed a hellish red against its black walls, the illuminated windows of the penthouse suite glaring down upon the city like glowing eyes, at once a monument to the city's most powerful resident and a reminder to all that he was always watching.
"Hargreeves Tower never sleeps," or so the saying went.
However, unless Viktor was imagining things, he could have sworn that there were a few new faces among the patrols below: small teams of figures armed with luminous goggles and metal detectors – or what looked like metal detectors from this distance, anyway. For good measure, it looked as if some of the drones were equipped with the same detectors, through what they expected to find was a mystery to Viktor. After all, Hargreeves Security operatives only needed a working pair of eyes and a flashlight for the patrols, not to mention a steel baton, a taser, and a Desert Eagle.
As he watched, there was a flicker of golden light somewhere just beyond the neighbouring row of buildings, as if from a spotlight. Instantly, the goggled figures among the patrols took off at a brisk jog, barking orders into collar mikes as they charged through alleyways towards the source of the light. And for some reason, there was another group following them, dressed in overalls and carrying empty boxes.
Realizing he wasn't going to get any answers out of this tonight, Viktor closed the curtains, lay back down in bed, and tried to force himself to relax. He couldn't afford to think about this, not when he had practice first thing in the morning. Oh yes, even now that reality had been rewritten so that Reginald Hargreeves was ruling the world and the entire city danced to his dystopian tune, life went on as it always had… and in Viktor's case, most of that life seemed to involve music.
He'd never thought he'd ever play the violin again, much less find himself in the same orchestra under the same conductor. After what happened in his original timeline, he thought he'd never be comfortable with playing a single note ever again, not even for fun… but then again, he'd lost his powers to Reginald's grand rewrite, so it wasn't as if he was at risk of starting another apocalypse this time around. Even so, it had taken three months of anxiety, nightmares, and procrastination before he'd been willing to take up the bow again, and not just because the hazy memories of his last concert kept coming back to haunt him. The role of a musician had belonged to another life, one that he'd spent feeling perpetually uncomfortable in his own skin, always anxious, always depressed, always feeling out of place, always feeling like he was in the wrong body – because he was. Going back to that had felt like backsliding into the same joyless lifestyle, like being forced to climb inside someone else's skin.
It wasn't until that he'd learned to change his style of play that he'd started to feel more comfortable being a musician. He wasn't the waifish, stammering wallflower who could barely be trusted to play a bar without getting self-conscious, and he wasn't the near-mystical prodigy who'd enchanted the conductor and blown up the moon. He was Mr Dependable now, Mr Reliable, the guy who was always on time and always on pitch, a guy you could have a beer with after work, a guy you could trust to keep secrets from the cops. It was a professional persona, in many ways – after all, he couldn't tell people that he'd ended one world, barely saved another, and handed what was left of a third over to a corporate dictator – but it was a persona he was comfortable with.
And besides, the confidence he'd learned in the days since he'd had a different name made a lot of difference to the orchestra: he'd made first chair by now, the conductor liked him, the oddly-familiar woman who'd been auditioning for the part alongside him seemed in awe, and even his prospective students were a little more eager for his tuition than they'd been back in the old timeline. On the face of things, even in this hellish dystopia, he'd somehow found himself on stable ground, maybe even found something akin to a worthwhile life.
But even with all the improvements on the old life, he was still living in the same bleak little apartment, hoping that the next big concert would bring in enough money to find somewhere better, and hoping that the next-door neighbour's cat didn't go missing again or he'd never hear the end of it.
And even after all the years that had passed since the Hotel Oblivion, some regrets still haunted him. Sissy, of course – how could Viktor ever forget leaving her in the naïve belief that she'd be okay on her own? Harlan, too, from the ruin he'd made of the poor guy's life to his murder at the hands of Allison. The secrets he'd kept from the rest of the family. And yes, the end of his friendship with Allison – the end of everyone's friendship with Allison, really.
Maybe, just maybe, if Viktor had been a little less reticent with her about Harlan, if he'd been there for her when she'd started losing hope, if he had been a little less trusting with her around the time she'd made her alliance with Reginald… maybe they could have stopped Reginald from building this hell, and the daily atrocities committed in the name of preserving his perfect world would have been averted.
They'd never know now.
Sissy was long gone in this reality: archived newspapers revealed that she'd shot herself shortly after gunning down Carl as he'd tried to flee their house; the exact motives were uncertain, but testimony of neighbours suggested that Sissy had been extremely bitter with her husband for pressuring her into sending Harlan away to an institution, and his attempt to coerce her into "giving him a better son" had proved to be the final straw. Harlan was still alive, but now required 24-hour care after the torturous "therapy" he'd suffered during his stay at the institution; not only was he still incapable of speech, but between the impact of botched ECT and beatings from the orderlies, he wasn't able to walk either.
Was this a consequence of reality being rewritten, or would Sissy and Harlan have always ended up this way, even if Viktor hadn't gotten involved in their lives?
He didn't know… and he certainly didn't have the energy to figure it out now, for of course, he still needed to sleep.
Groaning, Viktor flopped back into bed and hid his head under the covers, hoping that sleep would be waiting for him the moment he closed his eyes, hoping that by the time he woke up, the curfew would be over, there'd be time to put on a pot of coffee, and he'd be ready for the walk to the concert hall.
Maybe, he thought, if I dream again, I'll find out how to reach the park this time.
Some distance away, Sir Reginald Hargreeves looked down at the vast array of eldritch control panels that surrounded him, his face curling into a snarl of frustration as he realized that the induced stimuli had not taken hold.
"Damn it," he muttered. "Not quite strong enough."
Still, just because Number Seven hadn't reacted as intended, that didn't mean that all of them would be immune to the process.
He would continue broadcasting for as long as the night went on. Hopefully, the results would be worth a second try…
A/N: This chapter tackles two specific gripes I had about season 4.
First, Viktor's unsatisfying progression - was turning him into a barkeep and a heartbreaker really the best they could do for him? - and the total lack of care and concern for everything that happened to him in the previous season. I mean, I will sometimes give Diego shit for forgetting about Eudora, but then again, Eudora didn't have two seasons of involvement in the show and sure as hell wasn't murdered by a member of the family who went on to commit premeditated betrayal and get away with it. And this season just kept raising questions about how Reggie's new reality fit together - did Harlan and Sissy ever exist? Oh, and I guess Harlan doesn't get a happy ending in the paradise reality, unlike the Handler. Grrrrr.
Second, the nature of the world as Reginald designed it. The Season 3 finale made it look like this was going to be a corpocratic dystopia with Reggie as the main villain... only for Season 4 to forget all of that and just say, "yeah, the world designed by the alien child abuser is actually quite nice and blandly acceptable, and the only reason these losers aren't adjusting to it is because they are abominations who should have killed themselves ages ago." Fucking spectacular.
So, I went with the dystopia concept.
Care to guess what happens next?