A/N: And here's where a lot of explanations are unloaded.

Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: um.

Reginald couldn't help but suppress a shudder at the sight of Grace as she poured them tea.

This wasn't the one that had nearly killed the Academies back in the previous timeline, easily recognized by the fact that she still had both eyes and no manic twitch, but even so, it was hard not to find this iteration of the family android deeply unsettling. After all, in this new life, Reginald possessed all the memories of his previous iterations, and that included the moment when he'd reprogrammed Grace to let him die of a hearts attack. Even if he'd meant for that to happen, it was hard to look at her without remembering the vacuous smile that Grace had worn as she drifted away to post his prepared bribe to the coroner's office, oblivious to the rapidly expiring body behind her.

Of course, there was another reason why he was anxious about having Grace around again, though this was due entirely to the fact that she was now in the same postcode as Abigail, who knew nothing about what he'd been up to in the decades since her death and even less about the inspiration for the robotic assistant… or at least, he'd hoped. She'd already made it clear that she'd known more than he'd allowed, and if this conversation was turn towards Grace's origins, this would almost certainly end in tears.

By now, Reginald and Abigail were comfortably ensconced in their private drawing room, hidden deep in the bowels of the Hargreeves Tower's penthouse. It was exactly as luxurious as the lounge back at the Academy, but with technological conveniences that the old mansion had never possessed, with the added benefit of soundproofed walls and an armoured shell tough enough to withstand a nuclear blast. However, Reginald didn't feel relaxed in the slightest in here, because right now, it was plain to see that Abigail had somehow bypassed all the measures he'd taken to prevent her from finding out what was happening outside the penthouse, including the carefully edited replica of the Internet he'd provided her with. Whatever she'd learned, a very awkward conversation was imminent, and the only mitigating factor at hand was how much Abigail had learned.

Meanwhile, Abigail had already finished her first sip of tea and was ready to begin in earnest. "So," she said. "Is there anything you'd like to tell me before we start, or would you like me to fill in the blanks for myself?"

Reginald very carefully weighed his answer before answering. He didn't want to come across as too condescending, but at the same time, he didn't want to share anything with her unless he could get away with withholding some of it.

"You go first, my dear," he said. "I'm still not sure what we're talking about."

"Oh, where to begin? In the last three years, I've already learned almost everything you tried to keep from me: your discovery of the loophole portal, your creation of gifted children by Aurianic Particle impregnation, and your efforts to seize control of what lay beyond that portal. I know of both the Umbrella Academy and the Sparrow Academy, just as I know what you did to prepare them for the challenges they'd face, and what you planned to do with them once their work was complete."

Abigail's normally serene features split into a furious scowl. "I even extracted a few memories from Pogo and Grace, so I know how you trained these children you created: the psychological ruin you made of Viktor, the deaths you inflicted on Klaus, the neglect you heaped upon Luther, the corruption of Allison, and your deliberate efforts to turn the Sparrow Academy into the biggest monsters you could imagine… yes, I saw it all. Everything you did, just to sacrifice their lives and make your dreams come true."

Reginald swallowed, trying desperately to hide his fear. "Abigail, you have to understand that everything I did-"

"-was to bring me back from the grave," Abigail finished, her voice cold and pitiless. "Yes, I understand, Reginald, I know what you intended to do. But the question is, do you think I would want to be alive again once I'd seen what you had done to restore me? Do you think I'd be happy to see the measures you took to bring me back?"

"But-"

"Forty-three women suffered the fear, agony, stigma, and violation that came with virgin birth. Thirty-five children were left to suffer through the confusion and misery of lives without proper tuition in their powers, and as far as I could tell, almost all of them died from dysfunctions of their powers before they turned twenty-three. One child ended up in the hands of a psychopathic time traveller to be raised as an assassin. And, regardless of the timeline, seven more were raised in a loveless, abusive, monstrous household to be slaughtered like pigs when they were ready to fuel the Hotel Oblivion. Yes, I know everything. I even know what happened in the Jennifer Incident."

This time, Reginald couldn't bring himself to respond. The fear flooding him had strangled any hope of finding a rejoinder: all he could do was sit there, frozen in terror, as Abigail charged onwards, driving him back and back across the verbal battlefield. Why could he never explain himself to her? Why could he never defend himself from Abigail when she had reason to confront him? Why was his armour always useless around her?

More importantly, how in the hell did she know the details behind the Jennifer Incident? He hadn't mentioned what had happened to Pogo, he certainly hadn't spoken of it within earshot of Grace, and even Viktor's self-pitying autobiography only referred to it in the vaguest sense, if only because even the team's confession had left Number Seven vomiting every time he'd tried to recount it in print.

"I know what you're thinking, my dear. You think this is a bluff; you think I'm just challenging you to reveal what you know. Well, I'm afraid not: objects and people aren't the only things that have been tumbling through the rifts since they began to form; entire memories had flooded back through those holes in reality, some from the living, some from the dead. I've grown quite adept at receiving those memories whenever they appear – I always was gifted at psychic interception, if you recall. The truth of the Jennifer Incident, as it happened in the original timeline, is already known to me. And by truth, I mean the actual truth, not the nonsense you fed to the Umbrella Academy in the dreams you've been sending them. Or the lies you told the Umbrella Academy after the Incident."

Reginald said nothing. This was clearly bait, an attempt to get him to reveal how much he really knew by jabbing at any sense of guilt or ego he might feel about the event, but as painful as it was to know that Abigail had uncovered so much behind is back, he couldn't afford to respond. To speak up would be to admit that she was right; to admit that she was right could mean giving her an opening to leave him.

"You never took responsibility for that one, did you?" she continued airily, "You couldn't admit that your misjudgement of the situation cost Ben his life – and might have cost the lives of everyone in Moscow if Klaus hadn't intervened. Instead, you blamed the entire Academy, raked them over the coals at Ben's funeral and made them believe it was all their fault. Not so surprising, considering that you'd just shot your own masterplan in the foot: you'd already let Five slip through your fingers, and without Ben, Project Oblivion was dead in the water. That was what led to you pinning all your hopes on Five's time travel powers in the old timeline, wasn't it? That was what led to you committing suicide in the hopes the Academy could follow your post-mortem instructions in finding Five and getting him to travel back in time and ensure that the Academy retained a full complement of children – no doubt intending to guilt-trip them into "atoning for their failure to save Ben." I know you, Reginald: you never could accept blame when your greatest desires were on the line."

(As it happened, this was the one gap in Abigail's knowledge that Reginald could be thankful for: the plan to find Five and encourage him to turn back the clock had been Plan B, though Five had managed to enact it anyway without even meaning to. Plan A had been far less dependent on Five: once Klaus had summoned Reginald's ghost, he would have instructed them to unlock as much of their true potential as possible, then to track down the very last two surviving gifted children, then make their way to the Hotel Obsidian. Unfortunately, the plan had gone horribly awry in that first iteration of history: though all of them had excelled at mastering their powers to the point that even Klaus had been able to realize his immortality, Viktor had not been included in the séance at the start of the week, and nobody knew of his hidden powers, for Reginald had only instructed the Academy to bring him along for the ride to Oblivion "just in case." With none of the Academy watching over him, Viktor had rapidly fallen to the machinations of Harold Peabody, and when his siblings had belatedly attempted an intervention, a fight broke out – one that ended with Harold getting a sizable chunk of his skull ripped out, plus one prosthetic eye. Viktor's grief-stricken loss of control brought on the apocalypse, killing himself and the rest of the Academy in the process, including Klaus, though remaining dead had been his decision. In hindsight, it was just as well Five had went on to enact Plan B without even knowing it.)

"Even in your own horribly contrived and poorly-plotted dream narrative, you couldn't bear to admit you'd made a mistake," Abigail continued. "Even when it technically wasn't you who'd made that mistake. So, you wrote a new ending in which you murdered Ben and Jennifer yourself. At least that way, you'd be able to make Ben's death a deliberate outcome on your part rather than the colossal accident it was in real life. Besides, with the memories of your other counterpart rattling around in your head, I'm sure it proved quite cathartic to know that this meant that you'd followed up on this incident by getting the chance to verbally abuse your own children again."

"Abigail, I know this may seem hard to accept, given how much time I spent around them, but the Umbrella Academy and the Sparrow Academy are not, never have been, and never will be my children. They were simply a means to an end, and I tolerated their insulting character flaws and idiosyncrasies not because I was their father, but because without them, I never would have been able to bring you back or make this ideal world a reality."

Abigail just shook her head in disgust. "You've clearly forgotten the ancient creed of the Shepherds: 'what you usher into this world be your responsibility; if harm comes to it because of you, be it from malice or neglect, the consequences be on your head.' But putting that aside, your ideal world wasn't thought of until after the real one humiliated you too many times for your liking, Reginald. So in the end, all these atrocities and more were wrought all for the sake of bringing me back from the hereafter. So, let me ask you again: do you think I would have wanted any of that?"

"It wasn't my intention to burden you with that knowledge, my darling-"

"Evidently not, considering you've had me locked away in this building like a caged bird for the last five years. Quite a thing to do and assume I wouldn't be able to eventually learn of what was really going outside these walls, dear. But then, perhaps your use of the Oblivion machinery gave you a delusional sense of control: you had the power of a god at your fingertips, Reginald, bought with the lives of the children you'd raised and abused, and you used it to bring me back from the dead… after I told you very clearly that I wanted you to leave me behind. I wanted you to go to Earth and live the rest of your life without wasting another second of it on me, Reginald. Why didn't you listen?!"

And in the split-second that followed, Reginald's composure, stretched to breaking point by a long, miserable evening of failed attempts at psychic coercion and unwanted surprises, finally snapped.

"You don't understand, Abigail!" he burst out, his voice rising to a scream. "You don't understand how empty this world was without you! Every day I had to spend with these people with their ignorance, their violence, their superstitions, their primitive philosophies and archaic religions… every year I had to spend here in this benighted pit without you was torture! With you gone, I had nobody else that was even remotely my equal in all of creation! I had no-one else that was better than me! But more than that, you were the only woman I could ever love! How could I go on without you? Once I'd found the Oblivion, how could I possibly ignore the chance to bring you back? And as for keeping you here, how could I face the possibility of losing you again?! So yes, I did unspeakable things for the sake of restoring you, Abigail: I stole, I killed, I impregnated without consent, I took children from their mothers' arms, I raised them to be sacrificed in your name, and yes, I tortured them. But it was all for you, Abigail, don't you see? I did it for you!"

There was long a pause, as the echoes slowly died away.

And then Abigail sighed in the manner known to long-suffering wives everywhere. "If you expect me to believe you, I need to see your face, Reginald. Show me your true self – all of it.."

There was a moment of hesitation.

After almost a century of hiding his true self and almost never removing the skin suit except in moments where he was certain that nobody would intrude on his privacy, it wasn't easy to casually reveal himself even to someone who already knew what he was. Even in the days when he'd been alone in the Academy except for Pogo and Grace, it hadn't been easy to undress, even with Luther banished to the moon and the rest of the Academy willingly scattered to the four winds.

But in the end, it was only a moment and over in the blink of an eye.

So, Reginald stood up and unmasked. He doffed his monocle, took off his jacket, slipped out of his waistcoat, took off his shoes and sock, slowly unbuttoned his shirt, shed his trousers, and stepped out of his undergarments… and only then, when his human disguise was completely naked, did he finally peel away the one layer of synthetic skin that concealed his true self. At last, he stood naked before Abigail as his true self: tall, slender, dome-skulled, frilled-faced, his skin a vivid shade of aquamarine, his face clustered with a dozen glistening black eyes, his four arms blade-tipped tentacles, his legs a skirt of writhing tendrils, his form alien to anyone who looked upon it – to anyone except Abigail.

She unmasked with greater ease, but then again, she'd never had to deal with the secrecy and paranoia that Reginald had needed while posing as a human, and she was only wearing a simple white gown anyway. All she had to do was reach beneath the layers of cloth and part the skin at the navel, and the whole thing peeled away like a chrysalis, revealing her true beauty as only Reginald would know it: her colour was far deeper, sapphire to his aquamarine, the tentacles slender and more graceful, the torso augmented with a natural growth of silvery gemstones, the eyes a glittering burnished gold. She had always been more beautiful than him, always been more magnificent, always been better.

Cliché would demand that they talk of their homeworld, of Serephis-Daal, it's rolling gold meadows and flowering gardens, its gleaming silver oceans that flowed like molten platinum, its cities that were more forest than building, its technology that merged the organic with the synthetic, of the once-beloved Seredaal people that had long since spread out across the galaxy in their final acceptance of extinction, doomed to wait out the millennia as Shepherds for lesser civilizations until they finally died of old age.

But cliché would not avail them, and instead, they spoke of happier days.

"Do you remember when we first came to Earth, Reginald?" Abigail whispered, her voice an incandescent song to Reginald's true, unmasked senses.

"How could I forget? Our first step away from our Mentors and into independent study. You were always the most adventurous, too; I was the first to start recording memories while you went on exploring ahead of me."

"Oh yes, I know. I vividly remember you were busy fascinating over Machiavelli and Michaelangelo while I was delving into the wilderness of rural Tuscany. I don't think I found a single thing to keep me anchored to one place until the violin was developed-"

"-and even then, not until the likes of Paganini came along. But even then, if I recall correctly, it was your love of Handel that brought us to England and made us citizens of that place."

"Do you remember how the others used to scoff at us when we finally returned home? How they laughed at us for creating these disguises, for using human names as if they were our own?"

"Only too well: my own grandsire demanded to know why I was wasting my time with Earth when our people had endured for far longer than theirs had and would endure longer than any earthly culture would think possible."

"What happened to him? I never found out, and I never had the opportunity to ask."

"Oh, he was one of the first casualties when the Great Coda ripped through the Crystaline Environs. That was about thirty years before you died, if memory serves." Reginald sighed. "He wasn't wrong, technically speaking: the Fugues had already been spreading for decades by the time the symptoms became obvious and lethal. We endured far longer than anyone on Earth could possibly imagine-"

"-and pretended that all was well for far longer than anyone on Earth could believe."

Reginald winced.

Back in the days before he'd donned the skinsuit full-time, he'd been one of those conservative voices who'd claimed that all was well, if only because he hadn't wanted to disagree with his grandsire and create any more disturbances within the family than was appropriate… and because he knew that scientists that dared warn of disaster in the face of profit-seeking would not win friends or funding. And more importantly, because he'd needed Grandsire Tzeuzarch's political connections to fund the research into those miraculous particles that they'd found on Earth.

And while Reginald theorized that these golden motes had been responsible for the birth of every hero or God of Earthly myth, and Abigail energized their collected particles and impregnated primitive non-sapients with them, more ambitious beings were hard at work on something far more established and far more valuable to the Hierarchs of Serephis-Daal. While Reginald was obsessing over the way the newly titled Aurianic Particles seemed drawn to a certain location on Earth and arranging for mechanized probes to investigate the site, their own world was destroying itself bit by bit, eroded away by the psi-harmonic harvests that the government had believed would be the key to their supremacy over their galaxy – and all the upstart neighbours that threatened their power.

Loss of control was inevitable, and so the psi-harmonic harvests had given birth to the first Fugues that had begun eroding away their planet and people one strip of land at a time, shattering the land into atoms and poisoning the survivors with esoteric radiation. It took decades for the government of Serephis-Daal to respond to the Fugues, for half were convinced that they could still win galactic domination through the increasingly futile harvests, and the other half believed that by the time the negative effects would become impossible to ignore, they'd all be dead and beyond repercussions. They'd both been wrong: within a century, the simple Fugues gave way to the Great Coda, wiping out a vast swathe of their cities and killing most of the Seredaal people before anyone could prepare.

Perhaps, if Reginald and Abigail had decided to change work schedules that week, none of the last century of change on Earth would have ever happened. But Reginald had stuck by their first timetable plan, so, he'd been working in the shielded lab at the time of the Coda and escaped the radiation of that apocalyptic shockwave by dint of timing. Abigail hadn't, and her demise had been measured in years.

With no idea what else to do with the time they had left on their dying planet, they'd busied themselves with one experiment after the next, pausing only to don their artificial skins and pose at being human, dreaming of all they could have had if only they'd never returned home from their first visit to Earth.

By the time their research into the Aurianic Particles had borne tangible results, the first refugee ships had already begun to leave Serephis-Daal, ready to send the survivors of their people to worlds where they could some meaning despite the loss of everything. Between the Fugues and the radiation, there weren't enough of their kind to repopulate the species, but in their dying days, the Seredaal had taken up the ancient Creed of the Shepherd: if they could not be saved, their knowledge and power would benefit the species who could.

Reginald had pulled a few strings and been granted a place of privilege aboard the great stellar convoys carrying the last of the Seredaal to their new homes, for unlike so many other worthy Shepherds, he'd been allowed to leave at a site of his choosing – so, of course, he'd chosen Earth. Abigail, sick, weak, dying, and only tolerated due to her mate's prominence, was to remain behind on the convoy as it spiralled back through space, watching the ships grow steadily emptier until she was alone amidst the stars – condemned either to die en route or back upon the decaying ruins of her home. Either way, she would die alone.

"The world needs you, Reggie," she'd told him, as the convoy had prepared to leave Earth. "Now go."

And so, he'd gone – but not before opening their lone jar of forty-three energized Aurianic Particles.

Of course, the particles couldn't build up enough power to conduct the necessary impregnations for many years yet, so Reginald had been content to wait for it in the comfort of the home he'd built for himself on Earth. In the meantime, he'd investigated the portal that his mechanized probes had uncovered, bankrolled the development of a city around it to discourage questions, built the Obsidian Hotel so that it could be reached by a simple flight of stairs, and engineered the White Buffalo Suite to access it. As expected, the realm on the other side of the portal had mimicked the world that contained it, right down to the newest renovations to the hotel… but beneath that, the divine machines were there, just waiting for organic life seeded with Aurianic Particles to fuel its ultimate power. His probes had confirmed their function and how he could use them to his own ends. All he had to do was wait for the moment when the particles he'd released were finally strong enough to begin seeking out human hosts as programmed.

His efforts had paid off.

Or so it had seemed.

As if sensing this line of thought, Abigail remarked, "The one thing I don't understand, Reginald, is why you used the power of the gods themselves to bring back me but not our planet."

Reginald rolled his eyes. "And allow them to repeat their mistakes all over again? The psi-harmonic harvests had been in progress for millennia before our birth, my dear. Even I'm not sure when they began, but I know for a fact that being reborn as they were would not discourage the corrupt Hierarchs from poisoning our world again in search of profit. So you see, if I brought the world as we'd known it back from the grave, I would only be bringing in a tide that would eventually go out again. Besides, I'm sure that other Shepherds of our kind would be more than happy to busy themselves with cloning or mass fertility or whatever they believed would restore our species to its former numbers, and they're welcome to try. I, as Shepherd of this planet, chose something greater than any of them."

"Oh, Reginald, you always were a romantic, but I'm reasonably sure you aren't just talking about me. After all, I'm reasonably sure that the world didn't look like that before you used the Hotel Oblivion's machines." She gestured out the window at the vast metropolis of skyscrapers and smokestacks that lay beyond.

"Well, my duty as a Shepherd is to ensure that the world I have adopted as my own reaches its full potential. By now, I'm sure you've read some of the more dated history books in our collections, so I shouldn't need to tell you about the governments of the past: greedy city-states clashing against each other with mercenary armies, absolute monarchs destroying their own administrations through inherited madness, fascist dictators trampling science and culture in the name of their own narcissistic ideologies, democracies trapped in endless loops without progress thanks to the efforts of dissenting voices, and don't even get me started on all those attempts to build a so-called society of equals; even if they weren't determined to bog down progress with their efforts to build a worker's paradise, the only way they can restore efficiency is by embracing despotism. In the end, a corpocratic police state is the only government that has the potential to outlast all the others: it doesn't merely offer its citizens food, shelter, and ideals to aspire to, but offers to satisfy their desires for wealth and power where others would simply have tried to appeal to their patriotism. In the old timelines, corporations and wealthy business owners already commanded the allegiances of entire nations – as I know from personal experience – so I'm simply taking things a step further. Besides," he added smugly, "you can't pretend that this isn't what they all want."

"And the black hoods? The show trials? The meat-grinder orphanages? The work camps? The enabled organized crime? The secret police? Tell me, Reginald, where does that appear in the average corporation's vision of global governance, much less that of the average citizen's?"

"I have a world to run, Abigail! Harsh penalties are the only way we can maintain order, and besides, corporate life is the one compensation for brute force governance that can keep the population in line. The only way they can appreciate the violence is because they know that raises and promotions and amenities aplenty will be granted to them in exchange for their hard work and ambition, and the only way they can appreciate the corporation's amenities is by the violence meted out for disobedience. There is a balance to it all, a balance that inherently appeals to the human psyche: they want this, Abigail, otherwise they'd have never invented the concept of a corporation in the first place."

"So says the man who only made this world work through reality-altering machinery. Machinery which you brought with you, I might add."

"I'm sure I have no idea what you mean."

"Please don't insult my intelligence, darling: I saw the machinery concealed in the walls of your office. When you rewrote reality, you made certain that you'd write some of the Hotel Oblivion's miraculous gadgetry with you – the hypertechnological equivalent of wishing for infinite wishes, if I'm not mistaken. That's the only reason why your corpocratic regime has remained in power as long as it has, isn't it? If a logical consequence comes along – an economic crisis, a labour dispute, a bureaucratic failure – you simply sneak upstairs to your office, twiddle a few switches, and scrub the entire thing out of existence. All well and good, I'm sure, up until you find a loophole."

Reginald chuckled, trying to sound reassuring instead of condescending. "I use the machinery as sparingly as possible, my dear. I have only the barest need of it. As I said, this is a society that human beings want more than anything else."

Abigail sighed wearily. "You say that as if you believe in it, Reginald, but I know you better than that: I know full well that the one thing that thrills you more than the prospect of success, even more than being proved right, is the chance to punish those who have wounded you. I mean, just look at what you did to the members of Majestic Twelve."

"Nobody has wounded me, Abigail."

"Oh really? In one timeline, the public washed its hands of you after the Jennifer Incident, ceased to take you seriously and left you gathering dust as a recluse in the Academy mansion, to the point that they wouldn't even accept your offers to buy another gifted child in the aftermath of Ben's death, and in the end, even the Umbrella Academy abandoned you. And in another timeline, the Sparrow Academy abused and humiliated from the moment they were old enough to say no to you, dragged you down to the level of a weak-willed old man and forced you to give up everything you loved for the sake of their own desires. I know you, Reginald: you wouldn't accept the former as a logical consequence of letting a child in your care die, and you wouldn't accept the latter as an inevitable consequence of tormenting the Sparrows for their entire lives. All you'd think of was how to punish those who'd dared to humiliate you so monstrously, be it the Umbrella Academy, the Sparrow Academy, or the entire human race."

"Nonsense," said Reginald, but without conviction.

"Is it? Is it really? Why else would you have granted Allison's request for her and her siblings to live on in your new world, if not for the opportunity to leave them powerless and humiliated – just as you were in the previous timeline? I mean, why else would you have accepted the risk of potentially spoiling your newfound paradise?" Abigail smiled despite herself. "And thus, the world as you desired it: you have a government that bows to your every whim, you have revenge against the people who refused to accept your ideas, revenge against the Academies that humiliated you, and you have me. For all eternity… or at least, as long as your alterations to reality will last."

Reginald opened his mouth to correct her, but Abigail held up a silencing hand at whiplash speed. "Please don't attempt to deny it, Reginald, dear: there's no hiding the fact that your creation is full of holes. Grace's presence here is proof of that."

Grace smiled vacantly, baring eerily phosphorescent teeth.

"It is true," Reginald admitted. "This world isn't as stable as I'd intended: items from previous timelines keep filtering through to this one through rifts in reality, and I've had to institute collection policies to make sure they're confiscated before anyone gets any ideas about the nature of the real world."

"And you've also been very quick to silence anyone who might have gotten said ideas. Hence the Thibedeaus, yes?"

"How did you know about them?"

"I have my little ways," said Abigail, smirking. "For one, I've charmed a few employees who'd be willing to earn a promotion or two by doing the bidding of the CEO's wife – an enterprising young man in Information Retrieval here, a plucky young lady in Esoteric Acquisitions there. But the point remains the same: your efforts aren't working."

"Abigail-"

"Let me finish! I've seen you at work on your machines these past few weeks: the rifts continue to form in your new reality and editing them out isn't working. They've already been disgorging items that threaten the status quo, and now they disgorge people that do much the same thing. How long until the rifts grow large enough to begin drawing objects in instead of out? You know as well as I do from Mentor-era studies that such things are possible with reality rifts. So, ask yourself, Reginald: how long before the holes in your paradise grow large enough to swallow it whole?"

"That won't happen," Reginald hissed, anger suddenly flaring in the back of his mind. "I've already discovered the cause of this disruption, and I am taking steps to eliminate it."

"Yes, and I'm sure that the fact that the source of this potentially apocalyptic disruption is your own Umbrella Academy hasn't left your ego a bloody mess. All that work to build a world you could be happy with, and it fails because you left behind a piece of the world you worked so hard to erase. Now it grows like a tumour, getting bigger and bigger with every new arrival. It must be nothing short of agony, especially given tonight's failed efforts to eliminate the problem. But I must ask, Reginald: why try to make them commit suicide? Why not use your machines to erase them from existence? Why not just have your secret police eliminate them?"

"Because the problem isn't just the Umbrella Academy's continued existence, Abigail! The problem is the fact that they refuse to slip backwards into my design and be assimilated into the pattern I made. I can't edit them out of existence because I made them part of this reality from the very beginning of it, so the best alternative is self-annihilation: if they could just accept the fact that their lives are worth nothing and take appropriate steps to end them, then the world that I have created could finally be made stable at long last! If I have to have them killed, I'll do it, but the best thing for all parties concerned is for them to die at their own hands!"

"All parties?" echoed Abigail. "Speak entirely for yourself, dear."

Reginald felt the blood rushing to his head. "Abigail," he growled, "do not question my judgement: I have been managing this reality for five years. I know what I'm talking about."

"And by extension, I don't. You've gotten very used to listening to your own counsel, Reginald. Pogo said as much. I can only assume that the possibility of taking responsibility for the Academy hasn't occurred to you? This is a monster of your own creation, after all: your failure to treat them as anything other than pawns ruined your plan the first time around, forced you into the position of having to bargain with Allison in the second timeline, and you're still not considering responsibility for-"

"I am taking responsibility for them! I am ensuring that their continued existence doesn't jeopardize our perfect world!"

"There you go again, speaking entirely for yourself."

Reginald let out a strangled snarl of frustration. "Abigail, do you know what will happen if the rifts in the fabric of existence do swallow my world?" he thundered. "Reality as we know it will be reset again, this time to a world as close to the original template as possible – Oblivion's emergency backup system, as I understand it. Do you understand what that means? You'll be dead again! The world will be plunged back into anarchy, the steps I took to build a lasting peace will be undone, and everything I did to bring you back from the dead will have been for nothing! I can't lose you again! You don't know what it was like to be without you, Abigail! I can't go back to that hell again!"

And for the first time since she'd returned from the dead, Abigail seemed genuinely disappointed in him. "But it wasn't a hell, Reginald," she said, her voice eerily flat. "The fact that you loved Grace enough to memorialize her as a robot is proof enough of that."

Reginald froze, blood suddenly chilled to ice.

"Yes, I saw even that, dear."

"Abigail, there was nothing real between me and Grace. She was just a distraction, a means of passing the time while I waited for the Aurianic Particles to bear fruit! I mean, if you'd already been forced to wait for more than fifty years for your Holy Grail to appear and didn't know how long it would take for your efforts to pay off, perhaps you would do the same as me."

"Perhaps I would," Abigail conceded. "But Grace was more than just a distraction for you, Reginald. You were in love with her."

"That is utter-"

"Please don't lie to me, Reginald. I've seen the history of that timeline: you were in love with Grace. You almost opened up and shared everything with the woman; you almost moved on with your life and built something worth living for on Earth. But in the end, you chose me over her and let her slip away when she finally lost trust in you. And that's the worst part of all: you made the decision to obsess over a frozen corpse on the dark side of the moon rather than a live woman on Earth who could have helped you move on. You chose to make yourself miserable – over and over and over again until even the thought of bringing me back was forced to march alongside your thoughts of revenge on the entire planet. And in the end, you're still miserable, still gambling on the one chance to have everything as you wanted, and still facing the prospect of losing everything you'd worked for."

Once again, that long-suffering sigh. "Don't you think it's time you accepted the inevitable, my love?" she asked gently. "Ever since you brought me back, I've known no music other than my own, no people other than your employees, no real experiences other than what I've seen in these few purloined memories, and all the world is as cold and artless as clockwork. I have no place in your utopia, and you've only guaranteed it by keeping me locked up in this penthouse, and neither of us are any happier for it. Maybe it's for the best that reality will revert to normal. At least this way, you get to have a life of your own – without me, as it should have been. At least this way, the children you abused for the sake of dragging me back to the land of the living can have a chance at happiness. And at least this way, I'll sleep in peace this ti-"

"Never," Reginald snapped.

There was silence in the drawing room now.

"I'm not going back to that," he snarled. "I'm not letting them have the last word after all the time and suffering they cost me, and I'm not letting you go again, and that's final."

A tentacle shot out and snatched the fallen synthetic skin off the floor and began fastening it over Reginald's frame, slipping himself back into his disguise, even as the other tentacles and tendrils went about helping himself back into human clothes.

"The Umbrella Academy will be dealt with before the night is through," he continued briskly. "Regardless of whether it requires assisted suicide or assassins, they will be gone by sunrise. This reality will be stabilized, the rifts will be sealed, and you and I can live our lives as we always should: together for all eternity, with no outside interference, because in the end, the only thing we've ever needed is each other."

And with that, he stormed out, pausing only to fasten his monocle over one eye of his mask as he glided back into the shadows of the penthouse suite.

A ringing silence followed, as Abigail slid back into her human skinsuit, brushing a few errant tears away from her artificial eyes as she did so.

So, it had come to this: after everything they'd been through together, they were now enemies, though Reginald didn't recognize it yet. He'd grown too used to treating her as a treasure sealed inside an airtight casket in the past century. He'd forgotten the fiery debates and ferocious disagreements they'd experienced in their younger days, especially when it came to his reluctant support of the harvesters back on their homeworld. He'd lost sight of just how far she was prepared to go for the sake of her own desires, and most importantly of all, he didn't realize that she might be able to make sacrifices as well.

Perhaps he suspected something now that she'd fought with him over his decisions, but judging by the fact that the security presence in the penthouse hadn't increased in the slightest, he thought that keeping her comfortably caged up here would be enough to keep her in line. But once again, he'd completely failed to realize that her reach was not limited to ghosts and memories… or that her connections with the staff now extended to the items that Reginald had wanted confiscated from the world below his palace.

In a way, it was a pity he'd been so busy trying to drive the Umbrella Academy to suicide. If he'd been paying more attention to the latest acquisitions from the rifts, he might have found perhaps the most valuable item in the multiverse.

"Grace?" she whispered.

"Yes, Mistress?"

"We have work to do. Have Pogo contact the girl: her file should still be in Reginald's archives. Have him direct her to Luther's address, and make sure she gets there soon. Then make sure Number Six is ready to begin fusion."

"At once, Mistress."

And as the robot darted away, she reached under the coffee table, and held out the one thing that could tilt the balance of power out of Reginald's favour. She'd been intending to bring it to him if he'd ever made the choice to let go of his perfect world, with the intent of opening it together once he'd accepted the inevitable.

Now, it seemed she had to do it alone.

Pausing only to hide the object in the folds of her gown, she strode out onto the penthouse balcony, anxiously glancing over her shoulder to make sure that no cameras or security guards could see what she was about to do. For good measure, she double-checked, just in case Reginald had decided to keep an eye on her.

Only then, once she was certain that she was alone, did she bring out the jar, casting a haunting golden glow upon the balcony.

Jean and Gene Thibedeau had been the ones to uncover this item, having found it tumbling through a rift not far from the park where the Hotel Oblivion had deposited its final guests. Neither of them had known what it was, of course, but that hadn't stopped the secret police from killing them on Reginald's command, before they could share their findings with Klaus. But unfortunately for Reginald, he'd gravely underestimated the corruption that his dystopia had allowed: through a few discreet flexes of influence, Abigail had made sure that the jar had been rerouted from the disposal facility to the penthouse of Hargreeves Tower and delivered to her. But even now that it was safe, it still needed to be returned to its original owners.

She tapped the jar, watching as the forty-three golden motes inside buzzed and throbbed inside, larger and far brighter than they'd been back in 1989.

Yes, these were Aurianic Particles – Marigold, as Harlan Cooper had called them in another timeline, and Abigail had to admit the term had a certain charm to it. However, these were not just any Aurianic Particles. These were the ones that had been bonded to the forty-three children from the moment of their conception, and they had matured alongside them, growing stronger and more potent for every year they'd been part of their lives, until they had almost attained a life of their own.

You couldn't use these particles to impregnate another twoscore of unsuspecting women: the matured power output alone would incinerate them from the inside out before the foetus had a time to finish gestating. Nor could you use this batch of Marigold to give anyone else powers, for the result would only be an uncontrollable collapse into fatal mutations. No, these particles were far too bonded and far too specific for that.

These existed only to be returned those they'd given life to, to be fused with their beings and feel their warmth again, just as they had from the moment they'd been born. Reginald had torn them apart to fuel his machines, left the children empty and powerless without their other halves, and left the ghosts of the particles tumbling out of existence… until, by chance, a rift had drawn them back from the beyond.

Now it was Abigail's task to set things right.

Taking one last deep breath, she unscrewed the jar. For a moment, the motes of golden light inside flickered, as if not sure how to respond to their newfound freedom; perhaps it was Abigail's imagination, but she swore she could see the little particles acting out the mannerisms of their former hosts, right down to Klaus's Marigold ricocheting wildly around the inside of the jar.

"Go on home, now," Abigail whispered. "Your friends are waiting for you. Seek them out, make them whole, and bring them my message."

There was a pause.

Then, almost in perfect unison, the contents of the jar erupted outwards, a miniature blizzard of tiny golden motes soaring out into the night sky, surging like comets towards the ground as they sought out their hosts, ready to restore them once more to the state they'd known, despised, treasured, and accepted from the moment they'd been born.

And so it begins, Abigail thought. Hopefully, they'll reach the children before the secret police do. Otherwise, this could get a little more interesting than intended…

A/N: Up next... guess.