A/N: We're back!
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Disclaimer: Blah, blah.
For the fifth time in as many minutes, Allison checked her watch and tried with all her might not to scream.
3:05 AM.
Waking up at 3 was always the worst.
It meant that there were three more hours until Ray got out of bed and set about trying to make something of the day, three more hours until Allison could make her way back upstairs and get some sleep in her own bed. For now, she was still exiled to the living room couch, unable to get back to sleep, unable to escape her own guilt, and it was only going to get worse from here on.
3 AM was the one point in the day when all the illusions were gone, all the comforting rumours melted away into oblivion, and nothing remained but reality. It was at three o'clock that Allison knew without a shadow of a doubt that, somewhere along the line, she'd done the unforgiveable.
For the third time in her life, she'd gotten everything she'd wanted: a family, a home, security, comfort, and maybe even hope for a better tomorrow. This time around, it should have been better than ever: this time, she hadn't needed to worry about time paradoxes or being separated from her loved ones by different periods of history or whatever, because Reginald had rewritten the universe in her favour. She had Claire, she had Raymond, she had the house, and she'd even been granted executive protection so that nothing of the outside world could ever hurt her or her loved ones.
And for the third time in her life, it had all gone wrong.
This time, it hadn't been taken away from her, because Reginald had made sure that Ray and Claire couldn't be separated from her, regardless of whether someone tried to rip them from her arms or whether they tried to leave of their own accord. No, this time, she hadn't lost either her husband or her daughter or her home in the physical sense; all three were still here and always would be, but everything that she had loved about them was gone forever.
And perhaps the most damning thing of all was the fact that, for the second time in her life, it had all been her fault.
But where had the pain of their new existence really set in?
Had it all started on the night she'd left the Hotel Oblivion, when she'd arrived back in her home to find Claire and Ray waiting for her? Surely not. That had been their opportunity to begin a new life together, without her powers, without rumours, without lies to keep them apart. It couldn't have started there, not when there'd been so much promise and joy awaiting them. Yes, Ray had given her the odd suspicious look and Claire had been a little confused about the things that didn't match the world she'd known, but that didn't mean anything. It couldn't have meant anything, because back then neither of them had any reason to mistrust her.
No, the trouble must have started after they'd been brave enough to venture out of their home and in the world as Reginald Hargreeves had imagined it. She'd stepped out through the gates of their luxurious family home, and at once noticed the smog layering the skies beyond their edge of their property, the sulphurous stink with the faint hint of ever-burning crematoria. For some reason, their home had been completely separated from the pollution that had cursed the rest of the world, to the point that the filth hadn't been allowed to touch it or even become noticeable while the three of them were still inside the fence. And things had only gotten worse once they'd actually reached the city streets and seen the black-uniformed guards lurking just on the periphery of vision, the drones that cruised the skies in search of any hint of insurrection, the shadowy figures drifting through the crowds after anyone who'd spoken too loudly or too suspiciously, and the CCTV cameras always watching everything…
After that, Allison had forbidden Claire and Ray from leaving the house ever again. She'd seen how the uniformed men had looked at Claire: to them, she was a child who hadn't yet been indoctrinated into the worship of the Hargreeves corporations, either through the fuck-or-be-fucked world of private academies, the striver's public schools where the rank and file learned to excel or obey, or the orphanages where ready-made-slaves were churned out by the thousand every day and expended almost as quickly. She'd seen how the members of secret police had looked at Ray whenever he'd started talking too loudly about the rights of the individual to dignity and respect; she'd seen nothing more than one of Ray's trademarked foibles, but once she'd learned to recognize the plainclothes intelligence operatives that combed the city streets, she knew that they regarded him as a dissident and a traitor, to be re-educated or vaporized.
None of the guards had spared Allison a second glance, not because she'd been better behaved than Claire or Ray, but because all security forces on the planet were forbidden from pursuing her. By contrast, the child she'd known in one timeline and the husband she'd known in another were both fair game to Hargreeves security. So, she'd had no choice but to cloister them away inside the house, where they'd be safe.
Oh, but that had been the moment when it had all started falling apart from her, hadn't it? Not just because she'd imprisoned the two of them in her house, but because she'd called Ray's passions "foibles," as if his most fervent belief in equality and freedom had been nothing more than an annoying personality quirk, as if his work for civil rights had just a hobby.
That had been the sign that the few days in the new timeline had worked a terrible alchemy on her: the old Allison – the one who'd won love and success by Rumouring her way through life, the one who had no fear of smothering the wills of others beneath her own desires – was back with a vengeance, crueller and shallower than ever before.
Had she thought that with the 1960s over and the worst excesses of Jim Crow banished from the public mindset, that Ray would have been willing to rest on his laurels? In a word, yes. This was a world where racism had been overshadowed by the hydra of corporate injustice, and Allison had honestly thought that nothing of the horrors visited upon ordinary citizens would matter to Ray because none of it was racially motivated. She'd sincerely believed that Ray wouldn't notice if oppression was being inflicted on people of a different skin colour, or if racism wasn't institutionalized anymore – as if by making it the domain of the embittered and the corrupt, it had become non-existent. But she'd been wrong, of course: Ray had been a tireless devotee of civil rights back in the sixties, and the fact that the oppression was now being delivered by Hargreeves Security instead of racist cops wasn't worth quibbling over, nor was the fact that the oppression was being inflicted on a multiracial lower class instead of African Americans. Tyranny was tyranny, no matter who inflicted it.
But it wasn't until their third or fourth month hiding behind the bars of their gilded cage that Allison had belatedly realized that even if there were no forms of oppression for Ray to rally against in his deliberately sober and dignified way, he still would have been deeply unhappy: he'd been plucked from his home and his cause and left to muddle through a reality he'd known nothing about, and worst of all, he'd been made to suffer this fate after Allison had agreed to leave him behind in the 60s. And there was no way of apologizing for this, no way of making amends for uprooting him without his consent: all at once, the trust she'd done so much to rebuild was broken all over again, and this time, it had ruined the love they shared along with it. When Raymond looked at her, now, he saw a stranger.
And the same went for Claire, too: she never stopped asking about her father, no matter how many times that Allison had told her than Raymond was her real father. She still remembered Patrick. And though she was too young to notice things like dystopia security measures, and Allison was careful to keep her from noticing the really nasty things that happened every day on the streets of Reginald Hargreeves' nightmarish capital city, Claire was bright enough to notice the contradictions about their new life. Given enough time, she even remembered that Patrick had taken her away from Allison – and worst of all, why. And just like Ray, all the love and trust she'd once seen were now gone from Claire's eyes, replaced with suspicion, fear, and hate.
Had Allison still possessed her powers, she would have been desperate enough to Rumour both of them into loving her again, just to find relief from the endless looks of resentment she got whenever Claire and Ray happened to make eye contact with her. But of course, her powers were long gone.
Instead, what she had should have been so much better than any Rumour she could tell, for Reggie's universal rewrite had made sure that her family would always be safe, always be provided for, and always be at her side. But in practice, all it meant was that they were imprisoned in the same house as her, unable to leave without Allison's permission, unable to even attempt escaping without being automatically teleported back to their bedrooms, and incapable of suffering even the most minor of injuries and ailments so long as they remained in the house… and that included aging.
In the last five years, Claire hadn't aged a single day. She was still the same tiny child that had been carried off in Patrick's arms all those years ago, at least in the physical sense, for her mind was now that of a much older girl with all the understanding and justified contempt for her mother that came with it.
Likewise, Ray was still at the same age he'd been when Allison had left him back in the 60s and would never age another day as long as he remained trapped in the house. His face would never change, and sadly, neither would the eternal expression of disappointment stamped on his face, which had been there ever since the new reality had become clear to him…
And the hell of it was that this had been exactly what Allison had wanted. Everything she had here was something she'd specifically asked for when she'd made that fateful deal with Reginald back at the hotel, another reality ago, probably while very, very drunk.
The fact that she'd killed Reginald before he could complete his work was incidental: the lion's share of the work had been done, so the new world had all the alterations she'd requested, and Reginald was brought back from the dead and given everything he'd wanted anyway, so as far as reality was concerned, the deal had been completed to the letter.
She'd wanted to ensure that Claire and Raymond could never be taken from her again, and that was exactly what she'd gotten.
She'd wanted to make sure that neither of them could be hurt, even if it meant that local reality had to change to accommodate it.
And she'd wanted to ensure that old age and death would never separate her from her husband or her daughter, so Reginald had given them immortality.
And yes, in that terrible moment of weakness at the hotel, she'd even specified that she hadn't wanted Claire to grow up and lose that wonderful sense of innocence and vitality that Allison had loved so much about her. She hadn't wanted to see Claire turn clumsy and petulant as older children did, or to see her become bitter and angst-ridden as she might be as a teenager or a despairing and directionless as she might be as an adult. Christ, the only reason why Allison hadn't just asked for Reginald to have Claire rewound all the way to infancy was because she'd liked her daughter best as a young child, in the final days before the divorce.
Yes, Allison had asked for those things largely on a whim, out of fear of losing what she might get back, but that didn't change the fact that she'd asked for them.
She'd wanted it to be this way.
Now she had to suffer for it.
Somewhere nearby, Allison heard shuffling footsteps and looked up to see Claire making her way across the living room towards the kitchen, presumably in search of a midnight snack.
"Claire?" Allison whispered.
Claire ignored her, but she could already see the tightening of her jaw and the barely suppressed scowl on her face as she marched onwards, pausing only to fetch a chair from the dinner table and drag it after into the kitchen.
And yet, Allison tried again, as she always did. She had to keep trying, otherwise what was the point in even being here? She needed to convince Ray and Claire that she could still make their lives here worthwhile, and though neither of them believed her, that wouldn't stop her from trying. If she hadn't thought it was worth trying, she would have let them leave her years ago, so here they still were, until such time as Allison could figure out a way to get them to love her again.
Because that's the only thing you have left, a nasty little voice in the back of her head snarled. Because you didn't think you needed anything other than their love, and now that you've lost it, you don't have family, friends, or even a job to keep yourself stable. You need to get them to love you again, otherwise you might as well already be dead, am I right?
Furiously shaking the thought out of her head, Allison tried again:
"Claire, let me get something for you, honey. You don't need to try to reach everything for yourself. You're not tall enough to reach the top shelf for yourself, you know-"
Claire's face visibly twitched with the effort of holding back her anger and grief, but already her eyes were glistening with tears.
"You're right," she said wearily. "I'm not. And I never well be. Thanks a lot, Mom."
And with that, she stormed off, still dragging the chair after her.
"No, Claire, I didn't mean it like that-"
The kitchen door slammed shut after her, instantly ending the conversation.
And in the ringing silence that followed, Allison buried her face in her hands and wondered why she couldn't make anything right. She'd fought so hard to get this opportunity for a third shot at happiness, and she'd tried even harder to make it work, but nothing she did was enough. Even when she finally admitted the full depth of her mistake, nobody paid any attention to it; she'd already done the unforgivable in their eyes.
Even her siblings couldn't spare her a moment of their time.
Two years ago, she'd ventured out into the city to find the rest of the Umbrella Academy, and managed to get hold of their phone numbers and addresses with the help of a few accommodating secret police – the secret police were always accommodating with Allison, because they knew that their boss had given her special privileges. But when she'd finally called them, she'd been met only with silence, a click, and a dial tone. And when she'd grown desperate enough to meet them in person, she'd been given a very chilly reception indeed.
Viktor hadn't said a single word to her, not even when Allison broke down and apologized, not just for allying with Reginald, but for what she'd done to Harlan, and what she'd almost done to Viktor himself – until at last he'd quietly shut the door in her face, too tired to spare her another minute.
Ben had told her to get fucked, and frankly, that had been the friendliest greeting she'd gotten, if only because Ben hadn't trusted her enough to feel hurt by her betrayal.
Five had been so disgusted by the sight of her that he'd ordered his armed chaperones to prevent her from following him.
Klaus had been too busy to see her, so Allison had been forced to delay the meeting until later.
Diego had politely ordered her out of his apartment, and that in itself was terrifying: being quiet and courteous with her could only mean that he didn't even consider her worthy of an angry outburst.
Lila had just flipped her off.
And Luther…
Luther had stared at her for a moment, his face a mask of anger, disgust, and… fear?
Then he'd slammed the door in her face.
It wasn't until later that she'd realized that Luther hadn't realized that she was as powerless as the rest of the family.
He'd thought she was going to Rumour him again.
In desperation, Allison had made an appointment to see Klaus, even buying some heroin in the hope of sweetening the meeting.
It hadn't taken long for the whole thing to go downhill. He'd been shocked to see her, especially since she'd made the appointment under an assumed name, and though his predictably mellow face hadn't shown any sign of anger or distrust like the others, it was clear that he was immediately hesitant around her.
He'd taken one look at the heroin and given it right back to her with a look of barely disguised irritation. "I've been clean for five years, Allison," he'd said wearily.
So, with that accidental insult over and done with, Allison had gotten straight to the point and started begging: she'd plead with all her might for Klaus to send word to the rest of the family, just to let them know that she was on their side.
"I messed up, Klaus," she'd explained. "I know that now: I sold the Academy out, I almost got everyone killed, and I haven't been there for any of you these last few years, but I'm here now. I know I made a terrible mistake, and I know I might never be forgiven for it, but I just want the opportunity to set things right. You can tell them that, right?"
Klaus sighed deeply. "You know, 'messed up' doesn't really get to the nub of things, and I'm not just talking about what happened at the hotel: that's just the finish line – there's still a mile's worth of bastardry spent getting there. You killed someone, Allison. I mean, Viktor might have been willing to give you a pass on that what with him being guilty over everything that happened to Sissy and Harlan because of him, but now you've pretty much topped his record. Now it's murder, assault, betrayal, and bringing about all this shit."
"I saved everyone, didn't I? I stopped Reginald from killing the others-"
"And then you went and pushed the button! When everyone in the room was telling you not to do it, you pressed the button! In case you forgot, I'm supposed to be the member of this family who does the dumb, contrarian shit, not you, and you gave Reggie everything he wanted when everyone was telling you not to! I mean, what do you do for an encore, stick your finger in a light socket?"
"But they're alive, aren't they?"
"That's one word for it, sister dearest. We're living in the anus of cyberpunk right now and you made it happen. Some things you can't just apologize for: only experience I ever had with that was that time I tried to steal floral arrangements from a funeral home in broad daylight, but murder, assault, betrayal, and making the planet look like a Paul Verhoven/Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? Yeah, you're not making that go away anytime soon."
At this, some long-buried vein of resentment had broken ground somewhere in the back of Allison's head, and before she could stop herself, she'd snapped, "So once again, everyone's giving Viktor all the second chances in the world, while I get none. He gets to accidentally end the world and kill anyone he likes, but I kill one autistic mass-murderer and help bring the world back, everyone hates me for it."
She'd immediately regretted it, wished she could draw the words back into her mouth like smoke rings and somehow un-say them, but too late, too fucking late. Klaus hadn't just looked shocked and alarmed by the outburst, but for a moment, there'd been a look on his face she'd never seen on his face before: outrage.
"Could you please not do this?" he asked. "Please? When it comes to lectures on bad behaviour, I'd much rather leave it to Pogo, he was always better at it than me. Five, too, come to think of it, but that's just his little old man brain working overtime. Don't make me get preachy, that's all I ask. Got it?"
And though Allison had clapped a hand to her mouth a moment ago in horror at what she said, she couldn't help but mutter, "I'm just saying-"
"Allison, you're making me get preachy."
"But-"
"Do you actually want me to get peachy, Allison? Because I'll do it: I'll tell you right now that this has nothing to do with Viktor. Viktor was out of his fucking mind back in our timeline, and he would have been okay if every living member of the Umbrella Academy hadn't shat the bed every step of the way from the moment we came back for the funeral: me, you, Luther, Diego, Five, and yeah, even Viktor. All the apocalypses that have happened so far were down to stupid mistakes, spur-of-the-moment shit, stuff that got out of control once we screwed up too many times in a row, and out and out cray-cray. What you did… not so much. You weren't crazy, you weren't making a mistake: what happened because you wanted it to happen. Same goes for what you did to Luther."
"Nothing happened to Luther!" Allison had screamed, unable to hide the shame in her voice as she remembered the look of horror playing out across Luther's eyes as his body had helplessly advanced on her. "It stopped before it went any further, okay? I didn't do anything to him, and I didn't mean to hurt him! I just… lashed out."
"It's the same deal, though. Believe it or not, Luther might have been up to forgetting all that stuff, no surprises there – if you'd hadn't sold out the family. And now that we're all living in Reggie's world gone ga-ga, nobody's going to be looking the other way for you anymore. I mean, why do you think he even told me about that? Long story short, there's going to be a lot of mistrust from now on. Sorry, but that's just the way it is."
"I'm not asking to be forgiven, Klaus, I'm just asking for a second chance. I mean, you understand what that's like, don't you? You've always wanted to be given a clean slate and taken seriously by the rest of the family, and no-one ever gave it to you, not even when you got clean. Couldn't you at least-"
Klaus had held up a hand, revealing a total lack of tattoos. "I could," he said gently. "I could. If it's really that important to you and you're genuinely serious about this, then yeah, I could do that the next time we all meet up. I'm not saying that things have changed that much between us, or that people are hanging off every word I say, especially after what happened the last time I vouched for a family member that everyone was on bad terms with… but I've been adding to the family finances for the last couple of years, so I think I've earned a chance to hold the conch or cock or whatever it is."
At this, Allison had almost collapsed with relief. "Thank you," she whispered, too breathless to speak louder than a gasp.
"But I gotta warn you," Klaus plunged on. "It's not going to be easy. Like I said, trust isn't going to come easily to any of them. I mean, let's not forget that you helped Reggie turn the world into something out of a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie and we're all having to deal with death squads and killer drones and curfews without our powers. Nobody's going to just ignore that, especially once it turns out you've been living in Pleasantville with Ray and Claire all this time and Reggie made that possible. I mean, even if I can spin it nicely enough for the others and get them to maybe consider forgiving you, you're going to be taking an awful lot of shit. In case they didn't tell you, some of the others are a little sore over you pulling a Claude Rains up until this month, especially after the other big disappearance."
Allison blinked in confusion at this. "Who disappeared?" she'd asked, feeling the first inklings of dread creeping into the pit of her stomach as she did so.
"Sloane. The moment we got out of the hotel, she was gone. Five thinks that she might have been edited out of reality or something like that, and Luther's still in mourning. He'll probably be back in rehab next month because of it: he always starts drinking again when the wedding anniversary rolls around."
Allison's heart had sunk.
"She wasn't," she'd whispered.
"Scuzzi?"
"Sloane wasn't edited out of reality. She was just… displaced: she's still out there somewhere, but she can't remember Luther or anything about the two academies. She's just an ordinary citizen of this world now, I guess."
Klaus' eyes had narrowed into a distinctly un-Klaus-like look of suspicion.
"And how the hell do you know that?" he'd asked.
"Because it was part of the deal I made with Reginald."
A deathly silence had followed, as Klaus stared at her in utter incredulity.
"It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, okay?" Allison had explained, a bit more defensively than she'd liked. "It was a moment of weakness! I was drunk, I was upset over losing Claire and Ray, and Sloane and Luther were getting together, so I… I guess you could say I relapsed. Or regressed, or whatever you want to call it. I'd started using my powers on impulse like I had in the bad old days, so my attitude followed the same pattern: I got jealous, irrationally jealous, and… well, when I made the bargain with Reginald, I told him that I wanted Sloane and Luther to be… separated."
Klaus' expression had quickly turned to horror, so Allison hastily backtracked: "I wasn't trying to make it so that I could be with Luther again!" she'd added. "I… I think I just wanted to hurt him."
"That's really not much of an improvement."
"I said I was drunk, okay? I wasn't myself!"
"Speaking as someone who's been in and out of rehab even more than Luther, that's not how being drunk works, Allison. You don't magically transform into a different person when you're drunk: you just tackle things like someone's took the brakes off your car. And if that's the thought you had when you drove brakes-free, it's not looking good for you. And my memory's not always the best, but I'm pretty sure you were a fuckload more sober at the wedding than anyone else in the hotel, especially Five."
Klaus had shaken his head in dismay. "Look, nevermind all that: where's Sloane now?"
"I don't know! I didn't specify – I just said I wanted her to be as far away from Luther as possible. She could be anywhere!"
At this, Klaus had briefly closed his eyes, massaging his temples with both hands.
"Okay," he groaned. "Pretty sure I'm getting a migraine now; I am no damn good at this 'reasonable member of the family' bullshit. But let me get this straight: Luther is still in mourning for Sloane, he's one missed therapy session away from drinking himself to death, and as part of your big pitch to be accepted back into the family, you want me to tell him that his wife is still alive, but you don't know where she is, and even if we somehow do find her, she won't remember anything about him. And just to put the cherry on the shit sundae, it's all because you told Reggie that you didn't want the two of them to be happy."
"Well-"
"And ever since then, you've been living with your husband and your daughter without ever having to worry about real life in the world you helped Reggie build, and it's only now that you feel like reaching out to us. Call me pessimistic, but something tells me this isn't gonna fly, Allison. I don't think Luther can forgive you for this… and I don't know if I can either."
"But-"
"I think you should leave."
"WHAT?"
"You heard me. Go. Disappear. Vanish."
"I'm trying to set things right, Klaus!" Allison had screamed. "I'm trying to make amends-"
"Oh, I get that," said Klaus, deathly calm. "But that was what you wanted to do with Claire the first time around: you wanted to make amends for Rumouring her and get her back. Then, when you messed things up with Ray in the 60s, you wanted to make amends for that as well, so you could get him back. Then when you lost both Ray and Claire, you sold us up the river so you could get both of them back. And now you want to make amends for that and get us back, even though there's no point because the world's gone to hell and everyone's suffering for it, and this time there's nothing we can do to change things." He sighed. "I know you're probably hoping for something funnier, like that time I told you about the frog and the scorpion, but right now I'm as far from comedy as I'm likely to get. So, all I've got for you is this: it takes an addict to know an addict, Allison. If you ever really want to set things right, the first thing you're going to have to do is stop chasing your fix, because from where I'm sitting, it looks like you're stuck in a loop."
He'd paused for breath, and in the silence that followed, Allison had realized that his eyes were full of tears.
"Now get the fuck out," he'd said.
Frankly, Allison would have felt better if he'd screamed those words at her.
After that, the world of her siblings had been a closed book to her.
Just like the world of her husband and daughter, really.
For the next few years, she'd sleepwalked through life, trying desperately to get Ray and Claire to understand why she'd done the thing she'd done, occasionally writing letters to Reginald in the dim hopes that their bargain might give her some room to negotiate, if only to make the world a tiny bit better. Neither worked, but she kept trying, not because she expected to meet any success, but because she had nothing better to do. She had no job in this world, only an aimless, luxurious purgatory that nothing could escape for long, and without something – anything – to distract from her family's miseries, she would go insane.
And for a while, she'd thought that was the most she could ever hope for.
But then the dream had arrived, jolting her out of her snooze on the couch and leaving her with a haunting ending that she couldn't help but recall despite forgetting everything else about it. She didn't know what it meant, or even how she'd been inspired to dream of the things she remembered seeing, but that ending stuck in her mind: a park, beautiful and green, where peace flourished and the horrors of the real world were not to be found, and in the midst of it all, Claire played – finally allowed to grow up, finally allowed to be happy.
The strangest thing of all was the notion that the only way to reach this paradise was by killing herself, which made no sense even to Allison's sleep-deprived brain. Why would she want to die? More importantly, why would she even think of killing herself when she still had obligations to face?
After all, she had a family of her own to care for.
Even if they despised her, even if they couldn't understand her reasons, she couldn't just leave them alone in the world, not when neither of them had any place in it nor any understanding of it.
As horrible as her life was, she didn't have any choice but to live in it.
Besides, that dream was worth living for, if only so she could experience it again, even if everything else in the waking world was lost.
Reginald sighed deeply and adjusted his instruments.
Another signal too weak to get through.
Allison had come close to idealization, but not quite close enough. Still, it was at least comforting to know that the true resisters of the process were outliers, limited to the most intelligent and the most idiotic of the bunch.
In the meantime, there were still results from the next two candidates to process. Perhaps, if the dream could appropriately target their emotional foibles, Diego and Lila could be the catalyst that could start a chain reaction…
A/N: Yeah, I really wasn't a fan of what the show did with Allison in the final season. Part of it was due to the rushed format, along with the fact that her betrayal was downplayed by essentially retconning the dystopian vision of Reginald's perfect world in the final shot of season 3.
Not only do we never really see Allison receive any real comeuppance for the betrayal apart from having a bratty daughter and an embarrassing career, but the strongest condemnation she gets for anything is from Klaus, and it's forgotten by the time they meet again.
And then there's the attempted rape and the utterly pointless murder of Harlan last season, which might as well have fallen victim to SCP-style amnestics.
Even Allison being reunited with the family after years of offscreen estrangement (which might as well have never happened) doesn't warm the heart much, because she never mends fences with Viktor and ends her life on politely chilly terms with everyone except Klaus. There's no attempts at redemption, no serious efforts to reconnect, no self-reflection. No real effort to do anything except get bounced around by the plot, because this season is defined almost entirely by the plot pushing people around and not actually doing shit on their own initiative - to the point that even Five just gives up.
Meanwhile, I also tried to deal with what happened to Sloane. I'm not sure what the original intent behind Sloane's disappearance was, but you've got to admit that it does look a bit suspicious in light of what Allison got out of that particular finale.
So really, this whole chapter might seem like a massive shit on Allison, but really, I'm just trying to stir some character development. There will be good things on the horizon for Allison... but it's going to be a long uphill slog.
Anyway, rant over.
Up next - Number Two and Lila!