A/N: And we're back with more aggressive exorcisms of my own personal misgivings!
Without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: argh.
Luther was lifting weights when he saw the lights outside.
It was a stupid thing to do, really: it wasn't going to make sleep any easier, and it wasn't as if doing it was going to get him any closer to the level of strength he'd had before Oblivion, but he did it anyway. Exercise seemed to be the one thing that could really blot out unwanted thoughts for a while. If he worked out hard enough and painfully enough, he'd be too busy focussing on his screaming muscles to think about his regrets, his loneliness, or how desperately he needed a drink of something numbing…
The lights didn't disturb him or even distract him from pumping iron, truth be told. As long as he was awake and preoccupied, there wasn't much that could drive him to distraction, and after five years of watching everything from abductions to summary executions play out from his grimy old window, a faint light in the street wasn't much to write home about. So, he went on wearily hauling the barbell up and down, trying not to think of how easier this had used to be, trying not to think of how he'd taken his powers for granted, trying not to follow the trail of regrets all the way back to the three fatal words (I miss Sloane) and failing every step of the way.
And he was still doing his best to work away from the three fatal words when he saw the light again, this time much brighter and much closer to the bedroom window than before, bright enough to cast harsh shadows on the opposite window.
Luther froze on the spot, barbell suspended over his chest, briefly convinced that someone was shining a spotlight at his window. Was someone watching him outside? Was this the prelude to a secret police raid? Could he hear footsteps outside? Was someone about to break the door down and arrest him… or had he been singled out for an execution? Would these be his last few minutes before the inevitable bullet to the head?
For the next twelve seconds, he was left lying there, hoisting the barbell in the air like an idiot and praying that he wasn't going to be shot in this pose, if only because being found dead and pinned under a barbell in his underwear would be humiliating even by his lofty standards.
But after the thirteenth second had passed and no sounds were heard from outside the apartment or from down the corridor, Luther was forced to admit that he'd been imagining things. Letting out the breath he'd been holding, he belatedly realized that his biceps were screaming in pain, along with every other muscle in his body, and began carefully lowering the barbell back into position-
-and then a tiny mote of light shot through his bedroom window, passing clean through the glass, zipping across the bed, over the clothes-strewn floor, and burying itself in Luther's chest. The impact was completely painless – in fact, the only thing Luther felt at all was a sudden warmth in his collarbone – but it was enough to shock him into losing his grip on the barbell.
Down it plunged, sending the bar on a collision course with Luther's undefended chest; in the split-second before it came crashing down on his ribcage, he braced himself for the worst, knowing that the weights he'd loaded onto it would be enough to crack his sternum like a nut.
But instead, the barbell landed like a falling pillow, gently bouncing off his breastbone and thudding to the floor without leaving so much as a bruise. Astonished, Luther sat up, half-expecting his ribcage to snap in half the moment he tried, but once again found himself completely unharmed. A quick glance at the fallen barbell revealed that it was now sporting a massive dent shaped uncannily like Luther's pectorals. He reached out to pick it up, half-expecting to meet resistance and have to once again strain himself to lift the damn thing…
…only to find that the barbell was now somehow so light that Luther didn't even notice the weight. It seemed so light to him that he could lift it with one finger, literally wrap one index finger around it and hoist the entire thing into the air without so much as a ghost of pain. For a moment, he could only stare in astonishment at the sight; then, feeling a bit devil-may-care, he threw the barbell up into the air, passing it to his left hand and expecting to feel the jolt of his muscles rebelling, but once again, he felt nothing.
Bewildered, he stood up, crossed to the gigantic and horribly unwashed lump that was his bed, reached below the mattress to the heavy wood-and-metal frame supporting it, and lifted the whole thing – frame, mattress, bedspread, pillows, the barbells he'd left on the mattress – a full six feet into the air. And in a fit of absolute whimsy, he let it go…
…and caught the bed in one hand.
And as he did so, something inside his tired old brain lit up like a Christmas tree in full December festive fury. For a split-second, something flashed before his eyes, a vision of a woman dressed all in white, a stranger to him and yet inexplicably familiar.
"Find me," she whispered.
Then the vision passed, and he was back in reality as he set the bed back down on the ground without so much as a grunt. Only then did the realization that had been waiting for him finally reach his tired old brain:
His powers had returned. It had taken almost three minutes for the obvious to occur to him, but now there was no denying it: somehow, his strength and resilience were back with a vengeance, and now the usual effort of summoning them up seemed even easier than ever before. He could juggle every single barbell and dumbbell in his collection if he wanted to. Hell on wheels, he could probably bench press a car without breaking a sweat.
Of course, that just left him with a couple of questions – three, really. First of all, how had this happened? The light was almost certainly responsible, but that didn't tell him anything about what it was. This could have been anything from Reginald Hargreeves playing some new trick on him to a freak accident. For all he knew, Five had somehow managed to find a loophole in this new world and given the family powers again.
Secondly, had the rest of the Umbrella Academy regained their powers as well? It certainly sounded plausible, especially if Five was up to his usual behind-the-scenes trickery. For all he knew, everyone from Diego to Viktor had their powers back and were raising hell all over the city; come to think of it, if Luther's strength had been enhanced and improved by whatever had happened, then maybe the others were enjoying a power boost as well. It briefly brought a smile to his face, imagining Klaus being even more immortal than usual – up until he wondered what this would mean for Allison and started worrying all over again.
Thirdly, now that he had his powers back… what was he supposed to do now?
And no sooner had the thought crossed his mind, there was a muffled screech of brakes from outside, followed closely by booted feet making their way down the road towards him. Dropping the barbell, Luther hurried to the window, but he already knew that there was only one kind of driver licenced for after-curfew travel that'd be making so much noise this late at night.
Sure enough, three stories below him, there was an Armoured Personnel Carrier parked in the street, every inch of its bodywork pitch black, its windows tinted too dark to see the driver. Not that it mattered. After all, the point of these black trucks wasn't to disguise the driver or passengers or even the owner's livery; after all, nobody usually saw the secret police until it was too late, so if they were tooling around in APCs and visible to anyone who cared to look out the window, then they expected to be noticed. And if they expected to be noticed, then they weren't here to carry out arrests or even a summary execution. They were here to assassinate someone, and more importantly, they were here to kill anyone between them and their target.
Luther had only seen this happen once in the five years he'd spent in this hellhole, and then only from across the street, but it was more than enough to leave an impression – enough to send a chill down his spine and give his thirst a new, desperate edge. It was possible that they were here for someone else, maybe for some other unlucky dissenter and Luther was just collateral damage… but something told him that this visit and the return of his powers weren't coincidental. Reginald wanted him dead before he could put his strength to good use.
For a moment, Luther briefly considered just running for it, that there might be enough time to slip out the back door before the entire block was surrounded, assuming it wasn't already. Once he was out, he could make his way to one of the many closed liquor stores on en route to the Red Level, break in, drink whatever he needed to smother the anxiety and find some focus, and work out a plan of what to do next. All he needed to do was stay ahead of the cops just long enough to get a drink-
No. He needed to stay calm. He needed to keep hope in mind. He didn't need to start drinking again, not really. "Sloane is still out there," he reminded himself. "Just because you haven't found her yet doesn't mean she's gone."
And more importantly… why did he feel the need to run at all? He was still operating on civilian instincts, still believing deep down that he was vulnerable, and that Hargreeves Security could outmuscle and outgun him without so much as a flex of effort.
But that wasn't the case at all, was it?
His strength was back.
His resilience was back.
And he didn't need to worry about being menaced by armed thugs ever again.
Hastily slipping on a pair of jeans, he made his way out of his apartment, along the corridor, and down the stairs that led to the front door. Already, he could hear the secret police getting ready to hammer it off its hinges; there was probably a second team already getting ready to descend into the building from the stairwell. once they were inside, standard approach was to send the advance team to the target's room while the rest of the team covered the exits. Any residents trying to leave would be gunned down on the spot; anyone trying to leave via a window or by the fire escape would be sniped; anyone trying to leave by sewer access would be met by the hit squad's reinforcements and mowed down in short order. Once the target's room had been cleared, the advance team would move from room to room, killing every living thing between them and the exits, regardless of whether they'd found the target or not, and they wouldn't stop until they were certain that everyone in the building – including the target – was dead.
And if they couldn't find the target in the right location, rumour had it that the hit-squads occasionally took their business next-door. And supposedly, that was just in the case of standard assassination targets; in the case of ones who might be able to fight back, then they might just blast in from the windows as well.
Right now, Luther couldn't care less if the rumours were true or not. All that mattered was making sure that these people didn't get any further than the front hall. True, he didn't know anyone in this building – hadn't really taken the time to know anyone more than he knew his own weight set – but he wasn't prepared to see them suffer the same things the house across the road had suffered.
So, he took his position at the far end of the hall, squared up, and waited for the hammer to fall.
A moment later, the hit-squad's battering ram struck the door with pneumatically powered force, tearing it clean off its hinges and sending it flying down the hallway towards Luther, clattering to the floor and sliding to a halt less than two feet from him. Immediately, the Hargreeves hit-squad poured in, a living tide of black-clad brutes in ski masks and night vision goggles, bristling with assault rifles and clustered with a brutal-looking assortment of knives, grenades, and god only knew what else.
As soon as they saw Luther, they immediately shouldered their rifles and took aim: they didn't stop to check if he was the target they were looking for, they didn't consult their files, and they didn't bother to ask questions. They just opened fire, the darkened corridor instantly lit up by an eye-searing procession of flashes and suppressed gunshots.
But by then, Luther had already braced himself for the impact, and the storm of lead simply bounced off him, pinging harmlessly off his arms, his chest, his head without even breaking the skin. It hurt, but Reginald's first tests of his powers had hurt more: the final exam for that one had involved Luther being hit by a Buick Riviera at eighty miles an hour. Next to that, a hailstorm of bullets felt more like Diego pelting him with rubber bands.
There was a pause, as the echoes died away and the hit-squad belatedly realized that the barrage had done absolutely nothing to their target. As one, they began subtly backing away, even as they hurriedly reloaded, but by then, Luther was already in motion. Swatting a few flattened bullets off his skin, he began jogging towards the waiting gunmen, picking up speed as he crossed the thirty feet between him and the hit-squad, and by the time he'd broken into a run, the squad was already doing the same.
The more disciplined of the gunmen were still trying to reload and take aim even as they backed away, but they were in the minority; after all, none of them had ever encountered a target that couldn't be eliminated with a brisk shower of lead. The rest of the squad were frantically stumbling away, dropping magazines and fumbling rifles and doing every short of outright panicking, all except for the canny few who realized that they didn't stand a chance: they were already running for their lives.
Seconds later, Luther ploughed into the frontmost ranks of the hit-squad with the force of a runaway train, sending at least four of them flying headlong into the walls behind them with bone-pulping force, some sliding down with a tortured squeal of meat on plaster, others crashing clean through the brickwork and ending up contorted like pretzels around the craters they'd left in the wall. Either way, they didn't get up again.
The remaining three gunmen in the front rank lashed out with rifle-butts and bayonets, frantically battering and slicing and tenderizing and dicing away at whatever they could reach; but the rifle-butts cracked in two on impact with Luther's notoriously thick skull, and the bayonets simply shattered into glittering shards against his jugular. Luther's riposte struck the first of them so hard that it sent him flying out the door, across the street, and through the window of the neighbouring building, the gunman's scream almost dampening the muffled snap of breaking ribs. And while the other two were struggling to work out what to do next, Luther grabbed them by the scruffs of their necks and slammed the two men together with skull-crumpling force. Down they went.
The remainder of the hit squad had already retreated to the street and found cover behind anything that looked solid enough to shield them from the advancing Luther – stone steps, mailboxes, cars, their own APC – and were now taking aim for a second barrage, many of them switching to what looked like armour-piercing ammo. As one, they opened fire again, pelting Luther with everything they had, even throwing a few grenades into the mix – though all that did was sting Luther with a blizzard of shrapnel and leave him hidden behind a thick cloud of dust.
Luther calmly strode through the cloud, grabbed the nearest streetlight, wrenched it out of the ground with a shower of sparks, and brought the colossal thing thundering down on the closest gunman – fifteen feet away. Belatedly realizing that the target now had the advantage in reach, the hit-squad took to their heels and started running again, only for Luther to wheel around and begin scything through the fleeing ranks with wide, vicious swings of the streetlight, swatting them left and right across the street and hammering them senseless.
The remaining gunmen, realizing that they were outmatched, fled for the APC. A moment later, a turret opened in the roof of the truck, instantly disgorging a long-barrelled heavy machine cannon – an autocannon, as they called it. And by the looks of things, there was a small missile launcher squatting just behind the cannon, ready to fire.
This is going to hurt, Luther thought absently, wondering if he was resilient enough to withstand a rocket to the face yet.
But just as he was bracing himself for impact once again, there was a ripple in the air, and a moment later, the APC began to rise from its rear axle, tilting the autocannon towards the gun and leaving Luther firmly out its line of fire. From inside the APC there was a terrible commotion as the gunmen struggled to regain control of their suddenly diagonal truck and its now-useless gun; a few tried to escape by the rear, but all the ended up doing was opening the doors a few inches before sliding back down the incline into the cab. There were screams, desperate calls for help over the radio, and then a hurricane of expletives as the hit squad's armoury levitated out through the rear doors and scattered itself across the street, generously distributing a wealth of guns, bullets, grenades, and military-class equipment to the entire neighbourhood.
Then, the entire APC flipped backwards through the air, somersaulting in a brutal spiral across the street and into the sky – landing a good three blocks away with an earsplitting crash that could be heard for miles around.
In the ringing silence that followed, Luther belatedly noticed the figure standing just behind where the APC had stood. She was pale, rubber-legged, barefoot, and dressed only in a backless surgical gown, but there was no mistaking her face, not after all the years he'd spent looking for it.
"Sloane?" he gasped.
The figure looked up at him in astonishment.
"Luther?"
Five years ago, she'd awoken to find herself wandering the city streets perhaps fifteen miles from the Hotel Oblivion's exit, unable to account for her bruises and unable to remember her life before that day.
Oh, her skills remained intact, for she could still walk, talk, read, write, drive a car, and calculate gravitational variables to a degree that lecturers in physics would find challenging, but the memory of how she'd learned those things was gone, as was every single recollection of who she'd once been – save for her name. More specifically, her first name.
With no memory, no ID, and nothing to explain why she was on the streets in the middle of a curfew, Hargreeves Security had picked her up within minutes. Convinced that she was a drug addict, they'd been all set to lock her away in the cells for a thorough going-over before she could sober up, with her future beyond the next twenty-four hours limited to a very brief trial, a few trumped-up charges, a brutal stay in a labour camp outside the city limits, and a shallow grave… assuming of course that she survived her time in the cells.
However, at the last minute, the call had come down from on high: Reginald Hargreeves himself wanted her transferred to a private mental institution on the outskirts of the city. He didn't explain why, of course, or anything else that might have revealed the truth of the matter to Sloane; all he said, as Sloane had heard from her cell next to the office, was that Sloane's survival was to be guaranteed if possible and maintained under strict laboratory conditions.
Grumbling, the security goons had packed her into an ambulance and whisked her off to a world of whitewashed walls and sterile white tiles, where nurses were forever watching their charges for any sign of rebellion and orderlies were armed with tasers and extendible steel batons. There were no televisions here, no books except on special occasions, no links to the outside world, and no opportunity for any kind of escape – not even into fiction, for the hospital's unique drug regimen guaranteed deep and dreamless slumber at night and mindless drooling stupor during the day. The only moments where lucid thought became possible were the intervals between dosages, and then
The patients here were all delusional schizophrenics and dreams of the kind that the Hargreeves corporations strongly disapproved of, though the two were so similar that any attempt at discerning the difference was made impossible, though that could have just been the morphine talking. Either way, they all seemed to believe the same thing: that the world had once been different. Nobody could exactly explain how, but they remembered things that didn't exist in the paradise of Reginald Hargreeves: the Kennedy Six, the foiled robbery of the Capital West Bank, billboards of stern figures demanding obedience, even the funeral of Reginald Hargreeves.
More lucid souls would have ended up executed by the secret police, but for these easily confused souls with only the most fragmentary memories of timelines that no longer existed, the institutional life was the next best thing.
And strangest of all, when some of these bewildered patients had seen Sloane drifting through the corridors in her own drugged-up haze, those rare few had gasped in astonishment and tried to tell her things, mumbling forth indecipherable sentences in what seemed like reverence. They'd been shepherded away by the orderlies before they could fully explain themselves, but not before grabbing at Sloane's ring finger and pointing at it – as if something should have been there.
Sloane might very well have become just like them over the course of her stay in the institute, a husk kept motivated through the ruthless pharmacology of the corpocratic state and destined to wither away into her own kind of oblivion… had Reginald Hargreeves not visited one hazy afternoon perhaps a year ago. By rights, Sloane shouldn't have been able to remember any of it: all residents of the institute were to be kept asleep for the duration of his visit, for nobody wanted their Lord and Master pestered by the deranged ramblings of the delusional… but as bad luck would have had it, the doctors had mistimed her medication, leaving her paralysed instead of unconscious – and so when Reginald had inspected her with his instruments and dictaphone and endless private monologue, Sloane had heard everything.
By the end of that visit, she knew she had brothers and sisters, just as she knew that she'd once been a hero, and then a villain, and then something in between. She knew that her sister-in-law, drunk and miserable and mourning, had been tricked into becoming a turncoat, but despite her miseries and petty cruelties, Allison had still wanted Sloane to live on. She even knew that her adopted father had betrayed them all, just as he'd betrayed the entire world in his avarice and covetousness. But most importantly of all, Sloane knew that she'd once been married.
Within days of hearing this, the first fragmentary memories of her old life had begun to trickle back. Sloane had mentioned nothing of it, of course, keeping every recalled memory a secret from the doctors and nurses and never mentioning them in any of her therapy sessions, least of all the fact that she'd begun artfully palming her medication. For any other patient, it would have been impossible, but Sloane had been a model patient, if only because she hadn't had any memories to make her rebellious as the other inmates-in-all-but-name. So, nobody noticed that the medication she normally took without complaint now ended up being tipped down the drain.
Two months ago, Abigail Hargreeves had called with arrangements for an escape plan.
One hour ago, a clever ape in a van had arrived and delivered her to freedom with instructions on where to find Luther.
And fifteen minutes ago, Sloane's powers had been restored.
Now, Luther and Sloane were together again.
Now, nothing could stop them.
A/N: Up next... guess!