A/N: And we're back, now with more opportunities to give Allison a hard time!

First admission: this time, there's so much going on in the chapter that I had to split it down the middle, and believe me, we're on a subject that's been a long time incubating and desperately needs the space.

To put things in perspective, I started writing this mess back in the middle of August and didn't start posting the chapters until September 14th. Believe me, this absolute fustercluck of a chapter has been fermenting in my brain and on the page for a very long time.

Second admission: I may have gone a little bit Doom Patrol in this chapter. I'm not saying they don't share a very similar spirit, but it's still a bit crazy.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Urgh.

Allison couldn't say what had awoken her.

Had it been a door slamming upstairs? Had it been Claire finally stomping back to bed after her midnight snack? Had it been Ray pacing back and forth across the landing, silently raging once again? Had it been a nightmare? Or had it been from somewhere outside the house? Perhaps a branch from the oak tree on the lawn gently brushing against one of the windows, or maybe a sprinkle of rain from an incoming storm? Or maybe it had been a burglar creeping across the roof in search of an open shutter?

Of course, it was nothing to worry about, unfortunately: Allison's deal with Reginald guaranteed her safety, no matter how guilty she felt about it. On the rare occasions when she left the house, she had the protection of every single security firm loyal to old Reggie, and at all other times, the house was under whatever reality-warping spells that Reggie had worked on the place with the Hotel Oblivion's machines. Nothing could touch her in here. Even if it was a burglar, even if the storm turned out to be of bowling ball-sized hailstones, even if the tree came crashing down on the house, neither the house nor its occupants would be harmed.

Allison knew this for a fact because, among other things, it was distressingly common for dead burglars to turn up in the garden.

Apparently, the lack of guards and alarms made the place look like a soft target, at least compared to the depositories and other Hargreeves buildings that Ben enjoyed robbing these days. So, every few weeks, some fuckwit in a ski mask and climbing gear would sneak over the fence and try forcing a window open, but whenever they got that far, they'd simply die on the spot, often resulting in a shitload of banging and crashing as they fell from the roof. By now, Allison didn't mind the dead bodies in the garden, or the fact that Reggie didn't have measures in place to clean up the mess; frankly, she was just glad that burying the bodies gave her something to do during those long, hellishly pointless days – even if she still couldn't explain why the corpse pits had remained so intact after all these years, given the charming things that usually happened to decomposing bodies in shallow graves.

No matter what way you looked at it, she was safe unless Reginald had finally decided he didn't want their bargain upheld a moment longer.

Groaning, Allison rubbed her eyes, wishing that there could be another body in the garden, wishing more than anything else that she could have something to do in this endless early-morning hour. Actually, that wasn't quite true: burying bodies would still leave her awake to think about what she'd done and what she'd brought upon herself. What she really wanted was to sleep, to slip backwards into peace, dreamless slumber, or better still, to dream of a time before she'd fucked everything up. If only she could work out when that was, because as far as she could tell, she'd started at the age of four and hadn't stopped since then.

Screw it. It was time she went to bed: to hell with sleeping on the couch, she was going to sleep I the same bed as her husband, no matter how much he hated her. Frankly, Raymond's hatred of her would be so much better than tolerating another minute of her own self-loathing. At least he'd be inspired to yell at her loud enough to drown out the screams of her own guilt.

Just managing to stifle a yawn, Allison slowly got to her feet… but as she did so, something in her body seemed to shift and wobble, throwing her off balance. She was dimly aware, through the haze of sleep deprivation shrouding her brain, that something about her was different.

But it wasn't until she let out a hoarse, rasping cough tinged with luminous motes of golden light that she finally worked out what it was.

Her powers were back.

She could use her powers again… but on who? Could she try to convince Claire and Ray that she was genuinely sorry for what she'd done – because she was? Could she use it to get through to the rest of the Academy? Could she use it on Reggie, so he could undo what he'd done, or at least allow her to suffer like the rest of the Umbrella Academy suffered?

Or – and here, Allison's eyes lit up in desperate excitement – could she use it on herself? Was the only way she could correct her behaviour to Rumour herself? It was terrifying, and yet disturbingly enticing, to know that she could finally be freed from the endless cycle of cruelty and regret, but only if she was willing to alter her own brain. Maybe it'd be like lobotomizing herself, a blissful existence without thought or independent motivation; maybe she'd never have to think ever again, only act on the Rumour that she'd poured into her brain. Maybe she deserved it… but could she actually do it?

She was dimly aware of movement on the staircase nearby: above her, Ray and Claire were looking apprehensively down at her, as if sensing that her powers had returned. She could already tell what they were thinking: they were worried that she was going to Rumour them again. Well, she'd prove it to them. She'd Rumour herself for a change. She'd show them that she could be a good person – with her age-old catchphrase, too, none of the new tricks she'd picked up after what had happened to Harlan.

So, taking a deep breath, she focussed her will on the familiar energy that could twist wills in whatever direction she wished, and proclaimed "I heard a rumour…"

And realized with a jolt of horror and embarrassment, that she didn't know what to say next. Should she say that she was a good person, or that she'd never use her powers for selfish reasons ever again, or that she'd find a way to set Ray and Claire free no matter the cost, or that she wouldn't rest until she'd made amends for the deal with Reginald? She didn't know, she couldn't think of what to say. All she could do was stand there like an idiot, listening to the echoes of her last Rumour slowly dying away.

She tried again:

"I heard a rumour that…"

But once again, her imagination failed her.

And this time, as the echoes died away, all of reality flipped itself backwards through the air like a pancake and came crashing down with a shockwave that briefly turned night into day and made the corpses in the back garden sing barbershop.

Ray and Claire were flung from the staircase in opposite directions, but before Allison could panic or try to save them, the floor beneath them turned as viscous as syrup, leaving them to land unharmed, even as the liquid floor began forming tunnels that send them flowing away.

Before Allison could think of what to do next, there was another shockwave, and with that, Allsion splashed forward into the rug, instantly disappearing into the Persian-patterned depths.

For a moment, there was a sensation like drowning.

Then, nothing at all.

"Allison? Allison, wake up, dear. It's time for your lessons."

"Mmmmmgwnfuckoff."

"That's really not appropriate language, is it, Miss Allison?"

Somewhere in the exhausted knot of thoughts that was currently standing in for Allison's brain, a few memories flared just brightly enough for her to recognize the voice. Letting out a strangled gasp of shock, she sat bolt upright and opened her eyes.

She was no longer sitting on the couch of her home. Instead, she was lying in a familiar looking bedroom, surrounded by décor that hadn't been updated since she'd left the place decades ago: a vanity clustered with cosmetics and jewellery she hadn't worn in years, a wall patchworked with posters and magazine covers from back when she'd been a teenager, a dresser full of clothes that didn't fit her anymore, and a boa she hadn't touched since Reginald's funeral in the old timeline. But for some reason, it all seemed a lot bigger than she recalled.

And standing over her were two figures she thought she'd never see again.

"Grace?" she whispered. "Pogo?"

The old ape nodded solemnly. For her part, Grace only offered a motheringly reassuring smile. Both were exactly as she'd remembered them: Pogo still grey-furred, wizened, and impeccably dressed in his butler's uniform; Grace still a 1950s fashion plate, her hair still perfectly groomed, her movements still uncannily graceful. However, for some reason, both seemed a lot taller than she remembered them.

"What… I mean… why am I back in the Academy?"

"You're not, Miss Allison," said Pogo. "You're still in your house."

"But-"

"Look out the window, dear," advised Grace. "It'll all make sense."

Trembling, Allison peered across the room at the open window – and immediately let out a gasp of shock.

By now, she was used to casual distortions of space and time.

After all, her home had been in California back in the old timeline, but Reginald had decided that it'd be better if she was within reach of his new capital, and so in the new timeline, her house was practically on the city's front doorstep.

But even all this experience hadn't been enough to prepare her for the fact that her room at the Umbrella Academy somehow had a bird's eye view of the home she'd shared with Ray and Claire for the last five years, except now the roof was spiralling off into Christ only knew where, eventually corkscrewing so that she could look down on it from above. Frantic, she peered down the corridor just past Pogo and Grace, trying to find something familiar to ground herself with, and saw that the hallway was corkscrewing out of shape as well, telescoping outwards beyond the limits of both the Academy and her house, doorways from both buildings and several she didn't recognize dotting every wall, ceiling and floor.

"What… what is this?" she demanded, her voice on the verge of hysteria.

"It's your home in California, of course," said Grace, gently. "But it's also your home just outside the City."

"And it's also the Umbrella Academy," added Pogo.

"And Ray's house in Dallas."

"Klaus' mansion."

"Eliott's appliance store."

"The Sparrow Academy."

"The Hotel Obsidian-"

"-and Oblivion."

"Travel far enough and you might even find your mother's old house."

"It's everywhere you've ever been.

"Everywhere you might one day be."

"And some places you'll never be."

"Infinite possibilities and outcomes."

"All here for you to learn from."

Allison looked from Pogo to Grace and back again, waiting for one of them to start making sense.

"Okay," she said at last. "My house has somehow merged with everywhere on the planet. That makes sense by my standards."

"Not everywhere, dear," said Grace. "Just the places that are important to you."

"But how did this even happen? I mean, how are you even here? I mean, after what happened with you and Reginald, I didn't think he'd want to bring you back in this world. And why are you so much… bigger than you used to be?"

Pogo shook his head. "He didn't, Miss Allison. In point of fact, neither of us are the real Pogo and Grace. And we're not bigger. You're smaller."

Unpleasant thoughts running through her head, Allison very slowly looked down at herself.

At first, she didn't think anything was different: her body was still that of an adult, not an ounce fatter or thinner than it had been that morning. In fact, the only thing about her that seemed out of place was the fact that she was wearing an Umbrella Academy uniform – blazer, blouse, skirt, everything except the mask. But then she looked closer, and realized with a jolt of shock that her feet no longer reached the edge of the bed; the pillows she was now sitting on were bigger than car tyres, the nearby floor mirror towering over the bed like a sheer cliff face, and as she leapt out of bed, she realized that she was barely tall enough to see over the edge of the vanity.

Somehow, without actually getting younger, she'd shrunk to the size of a five-year-old.

"How did this happen?!"

"The same way everything else in this house changed, Miss Allison," said Pogo, smiling down at her like King Kong's younger brother.

There was an expectant pause.

"Well? Don't leave me in suspense!"

"You know, Allison, dear," said Grace, patting her on the shoulder from on high.

"No, I don't! Stop talking in riddles!"

Pogo gave a long-suffering sigh. "Recall what happened just before you lost consciousness, Miss Allsion, and you will have your answer."

"I fell through the floor, so what? What does that have to do with anything?!"

Another long-suffering sigh. "Before then, Miss Allison: what did you say?"

Muttering a few choice expletives, she rewound the sequence of events inside her mind. "I said, 'I heard a rumour,' but I couldn't make up my mind about who I wanted to Rumour, and I didn't get a chance to try again before everything went crazy. But what does that have to do with it?"

"Everything, dear," said Grace. "You think you didn't get a chance to Rumour anyone, but you did. Your powers have grown, even more they did when you absorbed Harlan's Marigold: they've spent the last five years building in potency, and now that they've returned, you can affect so much more than people now."

"You recall what you said when you returned to the house after Sir Reginald's death, when you explained to Master Luther the mistakes that you'd made with Patrick and Claire? 'I made a wish, and it came true, and I couldn't take it back.' A rather fanciful way of describing your powers, I thought at the time, but what if it were true?" Pogo smiled, exposing an impressive array of teeth. "What if, when you speak, the world listens?"

Allison could only boggle for a few moments. "You're saying I can control reality now?"

"Local reality, Miss Allison. You may notice that the City beyond the fence hasn't been affected by your powers."

"But why is everything so weird around here? I didn't say what the Rumour was-"

"Exactly. You didn't finish."

And all around them, Allison heard her own voice echo, the reverberation of her last Rumour bouncing off the walls and rippling down the corridors of the impossible house: I heard a rumour that, I heard a rumour that, I heard a rumour that, I heard a rumour that, I heard a rumour that, I heard a rumour that…

"You didn't finish the command," Pogo continued, "so your world is now waiting for you to make a decision on what to command, changing itself in response to your slightest impulse, and until you give it a decisive order, it will continue to warp out of shape… and warp you out of shape as well."

"Okay, I'll bite: what impulse turned me into this?" Allision indicated her shrunken body. "I mean, I'm pretty sure I never wanted to be shorter or anything like that. Why did reality decide that I wanted to be short enough to fit into this shitty uniform again?"

"Language."

"Sorry, Grace. But still..."

"You didn't want it per se, Miss Allison, but you've doubtlessly noticed that you don't exactly have a high opinion of yourself. Perhaps you're like this because you feel small and insignificant in comparison to Sir Reginald's world. Or perhaps the mistakes you've made in the past have made you feel immature, childish even, and you desperately need to grow up. You'll find your form will change along with reality until you have made your decision and gained control over your powers."

"How do you know that?"

Grace chuckled indulgently. "Because you brought us here. You wanted someone to help show you the way, because you don't trust yourself."

"Alright then, tell me: how do I fix this? How do I get control? What's the decision I have to make? What Rumour can make everything right? Come on, don't leave me in the dark all damn day! I need to find Ray and Claire and make sure they're alright!"

Suddenly, she was no longer standing in her bedroom. Instead, she was sitting in the middle of a makeshift classroom, surrounded by rows and rows of rickety wooden desks, all of them occupied by duplicates of the Umbrella Academy at various ages, all of them looking bored out of their skulls. Allison had a desk of her own, and it was just as uncomfortable as it had been back in the days when Reggie had bothered to teach them lessons in a classroom, and the fact that it still had a wad of Klaus' nicotine gum stuck to the undersize only made it more unpleasant mind. For good measure, standing by the blackboard were Grace and Pogo (who appeared to be wearing a mortarboard and robe for some reason).

"You see?" said Grace. "This place changes to your whims and will continue to change until you stabilize it: you want to be taught, so here we are in a classroom."

Allison thumped her head on the desk. "Well teach me! Stop dicking me around! I've got a husband and a daughter to find!"

Pogo shook his head, the tassel on his mortarboard flopping in all directions as he did so. "You don't actually want that, Miss Allison: your conscious mind is at war with your unconscious, hence why this classroom is so deliberately unnerving and uncomfortable. You don't feel you deserve to be given a straight answer, so you want to be given a more elaborate lesson, one where you must find the answer for yourself."

"We should know. We're elements of your unconscious mind."

And then reality warped again, and Allison found herself back in her bedroom, everything seemingly back to normal, or some semblance thereof.

"You'll have to find the answers for yourself, I'm afraid," Pogo continued. "The only way you can undo the reality distortion and master your newly expanded powers is by learning from what your own unconsciousness can tell you."

"And what's that?"

Grace offered an exasperated, slightly disapproving smile, the kind she'd worn whenever she'd caught Klaus rolling a joint or Five drawing calculations on the wall. "You'll have to see it for yourself, dear."

As one, they stepped aside, leaving the path to the open door clear. Neither of them said a word, but it was clear what was expected of her.

"Alright," Allison sighed. "Alright. If that's how my brain wants to do this, I guess I'll just have to play along. Just… tell me this has a happy ending at the end of it."

Grace smiled, infinitely compassionate, and said, "It has an ending."

Pogo nodded. "Whether it is happy or not depends entirely on you."

If the hallways of the house had looked strange from her room, they were nothing short of Daliesque once Allison started trying to navigate the damn things.

Corridors from the Umbrella Academy seamlessly merged with those of the Obsidian Hotel, the familiar fight-training posters abruptly giving way to the hotel wallpaper and doorways, then melted into the side-passages of a suburban Dallas house, before shifting back into the much-despised halls of her home, before a sudden turn of the corner abruptly led into the basement of the Sparrow Academy. Rooms fitted together without rhyme or reason, lounges backdooring into hotel rooms, swimming pools leading off into living rooms, auditoriums featuring stages that just happened to look like appliance stores, the glowing Oblivion control room abruptly giving way to Harold Peabody's attic.

By the fifth minute of walking, Allison realized that she didn't stand a chance in hell of finding her way through logic, especially since the fucking doors couldn't be relied upon the match the room beyond. In the end, she gave up and just started wandering at random, hoping against hope that her unconsciousness would show her the way sooner or later.

Admittedly, she would have felt more confident if her body and clothes hadn't kept changing with every single room she travelled through. One minute, she was in her Academy clothes and the size of a hobbit, then wearing Luther's old duds and so tall that her head was bouncing off the rafters. One second, she was in a technician's gear and descending a ladder into the metropolitan opera house's backstage area, the next she'd sprouted spider legs and started scuttling down the wall. At one point, she spent a full thirty minutes crossing a swimming pool in the form of a giant slug the size of an armoured car, before abruptly shrinking to the size of a doll and having to shimmy up the opposite wall of the pool like a miniature mountain climber. About the only plus to the whole thing was the fact that her clothes usually changed with, and if they didn't – and she shrank or grew out of them – then a new outfit would shimmer into place around her almost immediately afterwards, so she was only left naked for a couple of seconds.

Eventually, her aimless wandering led her to a heavy airlock at the end of a Sparrow Academy corridor. Opening it with some difficulty, she found it lurching open onto a bleak rocky landscape dotted with craters and distant mountain ranges, all backdropped by the night sky.

Allison wasn't sure what to make of it at first, but then a spacesuit flickered into view around her now adult-sized body, and for a moment, she was certain that she was on the moon and any minute, Luther would bound into view in a spacesuit of his own. Perhaps that would be the key to this whole psychodrama – getting Luther to forgive her for what she'd done so that the rest of the Academy could follow.

But instead, she found herself watching a strange procession of enormous figures stilt-walking across the lunar landscape towards her. No less than nine feet tall, their skin was green as emeralds and every bit as multifaceted; their faces were abstract, near-featureless things with only glittering motes for eyes and faint slots for mouths; their limbs were impossibly long and then, the legs stretching dramatically upwards like palm trees, the arms lengthy enough to brush the ground as they walked.

And in the lead, dressed in a spacesuit of his own and talking animatedly between them in a language she couldn't understand, was Ray.

Immediately, Allison hopped over, bouncing across the lunar terrain with the kind of grace that only low gravity could offer. "Ray!" she shouted, a radio headset inside her helmet crackling loudly as she did so. "What happened to you? Who are these people?"

Ray looked up with something almost like resignation, as if he'd been expecting her to arrive hours ago. "As far as the second question goes, your guess is as good as mine," he said wearily. "I think they might be future humans. Or they could be some alien race that's native to the moon. Or they could be figments of my imagination – or yours. There's only so much sense I can get out of them, even now that I've learned their language, but I've been trying to encourage some basic civil liberties in their government… for what it's worth."

Allison's brow wrinkled. "Now that you've learned their language?" she echoed. "How long have you been here?"

"Oh, twenty-odd years. Time gets a little hard to measure when you don't age."

"But it's only been half an hour since I accidentally Rumoured the house!"

"So what? Reality's in flux, and it'll stay that way until you make a decision: time, distance, age, shape, even species are all up in the air. You're lucky I'm still human enough to speak to, Allison."

"Okay," said Allison, wearily. "How did you know that, and what decision am I supposed to be making?"

"Wrong question, baby: how could I not know that?"

Allison groaned and hid her head in her hands - or least tried, given that she was wearing a helmet. "Oh for the love of Christ, is everyone around here a goddamn Lewis Carrol character now? Can't anyone just give me a straight answer – for once?"

"You heard what Pogo said: the reality warp is responding to your subconscious thoughts, your self-loathing. You don't think you deserve a straight answer, so everything created by reality warp will talk in riddles."

"But you weren't created. You're a real person, Ray."

There was an awkward silence, as Ray gave her a pitying look.

"Aren't you?" asked Allison, suddenly unsure.

"You've got some idea of how the machinery in the Hotel Oblivion worked. It allowed Reginald to rebuild the universe in his image – it warped reality, just like your powers. So, think about this: Reggie didn't want any more complications with time travel, not after one big paradox had almost cost him everything. So, he didn't bother summoning your husband up from the 1960s and settling him here in the 21st century; he just gave you a facsimile, something that was like your husband in every way that mattered, right down to the memories."

"You mean-"

"I'm not real, Allison," said Ray. "I'm not Raymond Chestnut. I know that now: the reality warp's been playing so many games with my memories, it's exposed all the little secrets in my mind that Reginald wanted to hide. The real Ray died decades ago, and I'll never know how he went on fighting the good fight or even if he succeeded, because I was built to be as you knew me. My memories of Dallas end right after we said goodbye. I'm just a replica of the man you married, conjured up by Reginald's machines – and because I was made through reality warp, I'm just as sensitive to your subconsciousness as everyone you've conjured tonight, even if you weren't the one who created me."

He sighed. "And that's why I'm in this scenario: you're wondering what my life might be like if I turn out to be every bit as immortal as Reginald promised. You're hoping that I might be able to find a fulfilling life in whatever becomes of this world, but you don't believe that I will; so, here I am, trying to help people long after the human race has become extinct, trapped in a world I don't recognize and don't belong in."

At this, Allison gave up. She sat down on the lunar surface, crossed her arms, and gently banged her head against her knees; she knew this was going to make her look like a sulky kid, but right now, she was too tired to give a damn.

"Alright, Ray," she said wearily. "What do you want? What am I supposed to be doing with my powers to help you? Please, just tell me; no riddles, no fucking around, just give me an answer."

"You tell me: it's your emotions that are twisting things out of shape, and it'll stay that way until you can find a local reality you can be satisfied with. I don't want anything. How could I? I'm not real."

"Ray," growled Allison.

"I suppose the only thing I could really ask for was to have the same life as the real Raymond Chestnut: to be left behind in Dallas and go on fighting for civil rights, maybe look forward to seeing that bright future you'd told me all about. But you couldn't let me have that."

"What are you saying?"

Ray gave her a pitying look. "Have you ever heard the old saying, 'If you really love him, let him go'?"

And there it was: it had finally been said. The nightmare that Allison had feared from the moment she'd woken up in Reginald's utopia had been voiced at long last, the possibility that after everything she'd done to get him back, Ray would find a way to leave her for good. By rights, she shouldn't have been afraid, not with local reality under her subconscious control and the chance of making it conscious on the horizon, but all she could think of was the fact that the only way of finding her way out of the maze was by letting the nightmare come true. And if Raymond could leave her, then it would only be a matter of time before-

She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence, not even in the safety of her own mind, not while her subconsciousness was still calling the shots over her powers.

"No," she said firmly.

"Honey, you know I can't be happy like this-"

"Well then it doesn't have to be this way!" Allison snapped, and as she did so, she felt something inside her brain ripple.

Suddenly, the aliens that had been flanking Ray were gone, and the lunar landscape around them was starting to soften and warp ever-so-slightly. Even the stars were starting to go out, even as the sky itself began changing colour.

"If I can control local reality," she continued, "then I can make everything exactly the way you want it! I just need time to figure out how it works! And as long as reality's in flux, then time doesn't matter, so I can take as long as I want. No matter what happens, I'll figure out a way to make this a place where you can be happy."

"You already know how to do that. You know the words you have to say to create a conscious reality warp and undo all this chaos. The trick isn't technique, Allison: it's willingness. You have to be willing to settle on a reality where you can be satisfied-"

"Fine! I'll do that!"

"But that means settling on a reality where you know I'm happy… and that means letting me go."

"You don't know what you're talking about!"

Suddenly, they were no longer standing on the moon, but in the middle of a psych ward: sterile white walls had materialized around them, followed closely by barred gates, enclosed cell doors, gleaming steel carts loaded down with bottles of antipsychotics, and the grim, imposing figures of brutish-looking orderlies. Now, Allison was dressed in the white coat of a stereotypical doctor and flanked by staff members awaiting her word, while Ray was dressed a patient's scrubs, complete with a straitjacket.

"You know I won't be happy trapped in a world I don't belong in, Allison," said Patient Ray.

"That's enough," snarled Dr Allison.

"The real Ray had a purpose in Dallas, a cause to devote himself to, a reason to live. Most of all, he had a wife who understood him, who cared enough about him to respect his wishes and his cause even when she had the power to make him her puppet." Ray eyed her sharply, his dark eyes still piercing even through a haze of tranquilizers. "What do you think happened to her?"

"Stop it!"

A few of the orderlies vanished. A door became a wall. The gates began to flow like water.

"Why did you want me back, Allison? Was it nostalgia for a time when you were genuinely happy? Was it because you'd backslid so far that you couldn't see me as a person with wishes of their own?"

Allison blinked furiously, already feeling tears burning in the corner of her eyes. "Ray, listen to me-"

"Did you really have Reginald alter reality so I could be your husband or to be your pet?"

"Ray-"

"Or your slave?"

"It was nothing like that!"

"Really? Let's see what happens the next time reality shifts, then: if I'm in chains and you're holding a whip, we'll know for sure, won't we?"

"STOP IT!" Allison screamed – and then with another uncontrollable flex of her power, reality shot into the air and flipped itself on its head like a pancake.

The sprawling mental hospital suddenly contracted inwards, the white walls and polished floors giving way to the filthy concrete interior of a garage, the floor befouled with oil and grease, the workbenches crowded with tools and bits of old machinery. Even the wheelchair gave way to yet another workbench in the middle of the garage.

And as reality changed, so did Allison and Ray: Allison shot up in height, her formal white coat and conservative business clothes merging and reshaping themselves into a filthy coverall; she was even holding a wrench and a screwdriver. Meanwhile, Ray shrank down to about four feet tall, his clothes fusing to his body in a crude plastic mimicry of real clothing, his skin turning glossy and synthetic, his stomach splitting open into a gaping hatchway – revealing clockwork innards, ready to be repaired.

"You can't stop me from saying things you don't like, Allison," said the Ray-bot, his gears clicking and whirring with every word. "I'm acting on your impulses now: there's no wind-up key for your subconsciousness."

"Stop it!" Allison hissed. "Just stop it! I just want everyone to be happy! Is that so wrong?"

"You want yourself to be happy first and foremost, Allison. Let's be honest about that. If you really wanted everyone to be happy, you'd have wondered how the real Ray would feel about being dragged away from his home, his friends, his reason for living."

"I was drunk when I made that agreement, okay? I didn't think it through!"

"Doesn't change the fact that you made it, does it? And it certainly doesn't change the fact that you were happy about it up until Claire and I started reacting like human beings instead of life-size dolls."

"For Christ's sake, I never treated you like that!"

"Oh really? Then let me try to stand up on my own."

The Ray-bot began to clumsily haul himself upright. But as he did so, gears and other delicate mechanisms began to spill out of his open torso as he did so, and in a blind panic, Allison darted forward and grabbed him by the shoulders, trying to force him back down onto the bench, where he'd be safe-

And just like that, reality gave another spectacular somersault.

The room shrank even smaller, the rough walls and greasy concrete floors giving way to candyfloss-pink wallpaper and thick cream-coloured carpet, the workbenches dissolving into white-painted shelves, the bench that Allison had been trying to press Ray down against suddenly ballooning into a plush bed complete with a pink duvet.

And just when Allison was starting to think that the bed looked like it'd be the right size to belong to a child, she began to shrink as well, her body dwindling away to childish proportions until the room towered over her, her clothes erupting into a ludicrous pink dress that looked like it had escaped from a storybook about spoiled kids.

Ray shrank with her, growing even smaller than ever before; his clothes looked real this time, though now they looked more like something Little Lord Fauntleroy would wear, and though he'd lost the hole in his chest, his skin looked more like porcelain.

"So much for that," sighed Ray the doll.

"I was trying to help you!" wailed Allison, acutely aware of how infantile she sounded. "I thought your guts were about to fall out! I wouldn't have done it if I'd known I was hurting you!"

"Like you did back at the Hotel Oblivion, or at the Sparrow Academy, or back when you were still married to Patrick? You knew that consent mattered then. That was just as important, wasn't it? And yet you went ahead with it, even when you knew your decisions could do worse than hurt."

"Please, just stop." She was crying now, too distraught to care that it only made her look and sound even more pathetic than she currently was. "Please, this is cruel, this is sadistic-"

"I'm not doing anything, Allison! This is your reality, so it's your own subconsciousness punishing you: if this hurts you, it's because you know you're doing something wrong. You know it was wrong to betray your family, you know that siding with Reginald was a mistake, and you regret bringing us here; now that you have the power to change things, deep down, you know that you should just set us free. So with your own mind twisting the knife every time you ignore the call, why can't you do the right thing?"

"Because I'm tired of losing!" Allison roared, anger briefly overwhelming her grief. "I try and try and try to do the right thing, but I keep losing people I love! I keep getting hurt! I tried to do the right thing by Patrick and Claire, and all it did was leave me lonely, and I was forced to leave them to die in the first apocalypse. I tried to do right by Viktor, and he nearly cut my throat. I tried to do right by your cause-"

"My cause? So suddenly, you don't care anymore?"

"YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN! I tried to stand up for our movement, and it got you locked up! I tried to be nonviolent, tried not to use my powers until I had no other choice, and it cost me your trust! And when you told me you wanted to stay behind instead of going to the future with me, I respected your wishes, and it left me in a world where I didn't belong: no husband, no daughter, and no chance to get any of it back! And yes, I know it was wrong of me to blame Viktor and to side with Reggie, but… haven't I earned a break? Don't I deserve just a little while without loss and pain? For just a little while?"

"You got one, Allison," said the Raymond doll, sadly. "What do you think the last five years were all about?"

"But… you both hated me for all of it."

"Yes. And that was another logical consequence, just like the one you're experiencing right now: you can't be happy knowing your happiness is founded on someone else's misery."

Allison opened her mouth to argue, to insist on how unfair it was, to find a loophole to debate that could somehow keep Ray and Claire by her side, but nothing sprung to mind. In the end, all she could do was slowly curl herself into a ball, unable to make eye contact, too upset to speak.

Slowly, Raymond the doll toddled over to her on clumsy porcelain feet and hugged her left arm. "I know it hurts," he said. "But you know you can't keep this up forever, not if you ever really want to be happy. Sooner or later, you're going to have to find something that won't leave you endlessly guilt-ridden, break the cycle Klaus told you about. And the only way to do that is to accept that we don't belong with you, that the best thing you can do for yourself and for us is to let us g-"

Allison's composure, barely sewn back together again, snapped. "I told you I wanted a break!" she screamed. "Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it!"

"Allion-"

"I heard a Rumour that I can make you happy!"

She hadn't meant to say it, not really. She just wanted him to stop talking, for them to both be happy, and in the moment of instinct, Rumouring a way to make him happy had sounded better than just Rumouring him into being happy. But of course, her own mind wouldn't accept that, nor could the reality distortion she'd stirred up.

So, once again, her subconscious rebelled, and reality gave another somersault.

The room around her grew, as did she and Raymond, though Ray was once again smaller than her. The wallpaper flaked away into bare metal walls, the door became a heavy airlock, the bed shrank into a paltry cot bolted the floor, and the light bled away lumen by lumen until the room was barely illuminated by a lone bulb dangling in the air. But it wasn't until Ray looked up at her that Allison realized where they were and what was happening.

Ray was no longer Ray.

Ray was Viktor, just as he had been on that day when Reginald had made Allison Rumour him into normality: four years old, in full uniform, sitting on the cot and looking up at her in fear and confusion.

And yet Allison wasn't looking down at him from where she'd stood all those years ago. Instead, she was standing in the doorway of the cell, looking down at Viktor and her younger self, and now she towered over them – not only the two children in the cell, but over Pogo, even over Grace.

There was only one person in this memory she could be.

But Allison couldn't look down at herself to confirm it. She couldn't speak. She couldn't even meet Viktor's gaze.

Instead, she turned and ran.

Allison didn't know how long she ran or where she went: time had no presence here in the world gone mad, and by then, she was running blindly, eyes shut to stifle the tears and to make sure no other subconscious reminders of her own mistakes could ever reach her.

Eventually, she hit a wall and slumped to the ground, too exhausted to get up and go on running. For a moment or so, she sat there, eyes clenched shut, afraid to open them for fear of what she'd see next, even as she grappled with everything she'd already seen and done. More than anything else, she wanted to switch off, to turn her brain off and be numb to everything that had happened in the last five years, and in a moment of desperate whimsy, wondered if she could Rumour up a bottle of vodka.

But as she sat there, shivering, whimpering, and trying not to cry, she became aware that she wasn't sitting on the floor of the warped house as expected, but on a muddy lawn. Once again, her home had given way to the outside, and she could already hear the muted sound of birdsong and distant crowds rumbling away, along with an oddly familiar music that she couldn't quite place. More distinct were the smells, the mingled odours of buttered popcorn, fresh candyfloss, broiling hotdogs, ice cream in a few dozen different flavours, rancid sweat, moonshine, and the all-too distinctive smell of animal shit. More to the point, she wasn't slumped against a wall, but against canvas. It was a tent, she realized, a very large one by the feel of things. But even with all the evidence piling up around her, it wasn't until the calliope music rose in volume and the first hollers of a barker began ringing out nearby that she finally realized where she was.

Somehow, she'd found herself in a circus – or perhaps a carnival, whatever the fuck difference it made.

Also, for some reason, her spacesuit had morphed into a stylish white dress.

Question was, what did this psychodrama mean? She'd never been to a circus or carnival or funfair at any point in her entire life, and as far as she knew, there didn't seem to be any logical connection between her troubles and this place. So why was she here? If the reality shifts were really under the control of her subconscious, then there had to be a reason for her being here.

And then one of the barkers started up, a boisterous roar from a metallic throat, complete with the faint clicks and whirrs of an automaton: "Roll up, roll up! Ladies and gentlemen, step inside and see the marvel of the freakshow: the girl who could never grow up! The eternal child! The immortal brat! She who has been alive since the 21st century, she who lived through the fall of civilizations, she who witnessed the rise and fall of empires, she who is still alive today in the 31st century! Roll up and see her immortality proven, from photographic evidence to real proof of regeneration! Six shekels to watch us bleed the immortal child, twelve shekels to make the cut yourself! Roll up, roll up! Come and see the freak! Her name is Claire, but we just call her Little Miss Eternal!"

The bottom dropped out of Allison's stomach.

Wrenching her eyes open, she paused just long enough to recognize her surroundings, from the enormous white-and-red striped tent that stood before her, to the small metropolis of caravans and smaller tents surrounding her, with the Big Top towering over all and sundry. Then, she hurried inside the central freakshow tent.

What lay beyond was a simple exhibit without an arena or even seating of any kind, just a stage barely three inches off the ground with a single room inside the barred enclosure. All around it, a small collection of artefacts stood in glass cases, all proof of the exhibit's longevity: locks of hair, articles of decomposing clothing from every century, even the occasional amputated organ or limb from eons past, jarred and preserved in formaldehyde. Most startling of all was the visual history of the exhibit: ancient photographs of Claire as a baby, as a toddler, and finally as a small child, right before Allison's request to have her brought back from a dead timeline had frozen her at the tender age of four… and after that, a progressively more recent series of snapshots of Claire down the ages – being driven through a futuristic cityscape in a flying car, getting piggyback ride through a post-nuclear wilderness, sitting on the altar of a 35th-century Greco-Roman temple with a stunned-looking priest in the background, rising from the carnage of a 50th-century battlefield surrounded by awestruck soldiers, but always with the same expression on her face, that same look of utter desolation and loneliness.

And there, half-asleep in an armchair right at the heart of the exhibit, in a room that looked uncannily similar to the plush pink bedchamber that Allison had shared with Raymond the doll a few moments ago, sat Claire herself, six thousand six hundred years old and every bit as young as she'd been on the day that Allison had dragged her back from a timeline that no longer existed.

Only the dispirited, slightly dead look in Claire's eyes gave the slightest hint as to the time to all the millennia that had passed since then. That, and the bloodstains on the back and sleeves of her pyjamas – for as Allison had learned during that fateful mission to the Volgograd Colosseum, the arms and the torso were pride of place for people who liked to exhibit wounds: someone had been showing off the full extent of Claire's longevity the only way they knew how – violently.

"Hi, mom," said Claire, her voice impossibly tired.

Allison opened her mouth to reply, only to realize that there was absolutely nothing she could possibly say that could make this better. Instead, she very slowly fell to her knees, collapsed onto her side, and folded up.

"You've seen Ray already, haven't you?" Claire asked. "I'd be more shocked if you hadn't."

Allison nodded silently, not trusting herself to speak.

"He's already told you what you need to do, hasn't he?"

Again, Allison nodded. This time, though, she just about managed to croak out, "I don't know if I can keep doing this, Claire."

"What, making mistakes? Trying to make amends? Or just living in general?"

"All three. When I'm not screwing up, I'm hurting someone; when I'm not hurting someone, I'm screwing up, and in the middle, I'm always piling on more suffering for myself. I don't know where it ends."

"You heard what Uncle Klaus said: you need to break the cycle."

"Easy for you to say, kiddo, you're voicing my own subconscious."

"That's because you wouldn't believe it if you told yourself that things would eventually get better – if you could stop chasing what you'd lost and live for the future."

It was almost jarring to hear her speak like this, with such experience and articulation, but she'd already seen the beginnings of that over the last five years; over the years, she'd matured in mind, if not body, and thanks to all the books she kept borrowing from Ray, she'd often ended up speaking more like a moody teenager instead of a four-year-old. Now, having experienced thousands of years of history, she sounded even more mature, even though none of it was real.

"Even if I could do that," said Allison at last, "I'm not sure I'd believe things can get better. Not just because we're living in Reggie's idea of a perfect world, but because we keep screwing things up and causing the end of the world. I mean, the first timeline, Dallas, the Kugelblitz… we're racking up quite a tally. What's to say that it won't carry on even if I try to do the right?"

The immortal Claire gave her a look of distinctly un-childlike suspicion. "And what gave you that idea, mom?"

Allison sighed. "I was having the most wonderful dream tonight: I was dreaming that I hadn't told Reggie to make you immortal; you were all grown up and almost happy, even with Klaus living in our basement. I'd squared things with the Academy, found a halfway-contented life in a world that hadn't gone to hell, even got allowed in at a birthday party for Diego's daughter. And even when there was still so much wrong with the world and the Earth was always doomed because of us, the Academy set things right in the end: we sacrificed ourselves, made it so we'd never been born, just so we could end the cycle of apocalypses and make a perfect world, a beautiful world where nobody suffered because of us – a park where everyone we ever knew was happy and contented under the sun. We even found a loophole that could let you and Diego's kids live on without us. And when I woke up, I couldn't shake the feeling that I could make it real, if I just… took myself out of the equation."

"If something seems too good to be true, it probably is," said Claire, softly. "You used to say that. You'd learned it from personal experience. So why is the dream any different?"

"I… I don't know."

"Maybe it's because the dream didn't come from your mind. Maybe it's because someone wants you to think that the world would be better off without you." Claire shrugged and smiled for the first time in a while. "Just a little helpful warning from your subconscious," she added cheekily.

"What gave you that idea?"

"You've already considered it, deep down: you know that the dream of the park was too good to be true, but someone wants to bury the idea under your own self-loathing and depression, so you can't even think of the idea. So, now that your mind's pulling the strings around here, you let me say it instead."

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"

"Alright then," said Claire with a smirk, "let's try to beat that record. What if the Umbrella Academy wasn't accidentally causing apocalypses just by existing? What if something else went out of their way to twist probability against you, just so that the disasters you were up against just got worse and worse, until there was only one option you could rely on? Who do you think would benefit from that? Who do you think benefits from you triggering the apocalypse, and who do you think benefits from turning you suicidal?"

Allison very slowly unfolded herself and stared in bewilderment at Claire, trying to think of some clever one-liner that could banish the idea from her head, but nothing seemed workable. In the end, all she could say was, "I really wish we'd had talks like these in the last five years, even if you are taking cues from my own brain."

"It's not so bad. I'm still my own person, just as I'm whatever you need me to be. Of course, you won't believe that first part, but that's another story. So, I guess the only question left to ask is this: are you ready to do the right thing for us and for yourself?"

"What, send you away? Rumour you into leaving me for good?"

"Not exactly: Ray would want you to send him off into an imaginary world where he can live his life as he did in the 1960s until you finish fixing reality, so he can fade away along with all the other subrealities created here."

Allison stared. "He wants to die?"

"Nope. He wants to live with purpose; he wants to continue the work that was so important to him until his life reaches its natural end."

"And what do you want, Claire? I can't send you back to Patrick, because I'm not even sure he even exists in this world. I don't know how powerful this new ability is: I don't know if I can-"

"You do, you can't, and you don't have to."

"What?"

Claire sighed deeply, and for the first time in quite a while, Allison couldn't help but see the familial resemblance: Lord only knew she'd worn that long-suffering look of exasperation while trying to deal with Klaus and Five.

"You do know how powerful this ability is," she explained, "subconsciously. You can't send me back to be with Dad. And you don't have to. All you have to do is set me free."

"…I don't understand."

"I'm not real, Mom."

"Yeah, I got that from Ray, too."

"It's not the same thing: I wasn't copied from someone who actually existed and died. I'm the idea of your daughter, the potential of her that was left behind when the original timeline was cancelled. I'm just a possibility that Reggie plucked out of nothingness and made real; he gave me a birthdate, memories, made sure they all matched up with what you remembered from the old timeline, but that doesn't change the fact that none of it actually happened. I was never born. So… why not make it official?"

Something in Allison's heart went cold. "You want to die," she said quietly.

"Like I said, I was never born. I'm not really living, Mom. I'm just living out your idea of it: I'll never grow up, never have children of my own, never achieve anything for myself, never regain the life I had back in the old timeline, never be anything other than what you wanted me to be. Immortality's nice if you know you can do something good with it, but when you know that this is all you're going to be, maybe going back to being nothing isn't so bad after all."

"It doesn't have to be that way, though," Allison insisted, trying not to sound too desperate. "I can fix this, give you and Ray everything you could ever want without having to lose either of you. I could give you worlds of your own-"

"You're not that powerful, Mom. You can play games with local reality, but you can't build entire worlds: it doesn't work like that. The only reason why things have gotten as crazy as they have is because you've broken reality, and you'll have to fix it sooner or later if you ever want to leave."

"Then there has to be another way! I mean, I can make it so you can grow up! I mean, as long as we're still in the middle of a reality warp, I can make it happen just by thinking about it. How about that? What if I think about you being able to age again and-"

Her eyes widened in horror as she realized what she'd just said. "No, no, no, no, no, wait, WAIT!"

But once again, her mind had already given the telltale flex and reality around her was reshaping itself to her whims. Claire let out a low groan of pain as her body began to stretch and grow, bones cracking and reknitting, clothes remodelling themselves around her, proportions shifting wildly as her "real" age finally began catching up with her. For a moment, she was a young girl, then an adolescent, then a teenager, then a woman – and it didn't stop, because there were still millennia in this imagined history, and Claire had lived through all of them. Behind the wildly flailing limbs, Allison could see her daughter's hair turning grey, then white before finally flaking away into nothingness, her skin drying and wrinkling like old paper, her hands gnarling into arthritis-riddled talons, even hear her voice growing hoarser and hoarser… and even though she had to be in her nineties or even her hundreds by now, she still hadn't stopped getting older.

Allison tried to stop it, to try and will the transformation to stop before it got any worse, but she couldn't concentrate. All she could do was look around the tent, trying to focus on anything other than the horror unfolding at the heart of the exhibit, for as Claire changed, so did the setting: now the photographs no longer showed her as an eternal child, but as an impossibly old woman in a custom-made wheelchair, too frail to move under her own power; now the bedroom was a sterile white hospital room clustered with life support systems, all food strictly intravenous – for by now, Claire's bones were too fragile to even move her jaw and her teeth were long gone.

And in the distance, the mechanized carnival barker had changed his tune: "Roll up, roll up! Ladies and gentlemen, step inside and see the marvel of the freakshow: a woman too old to die! She's been alive all these millennia, and now the Living Fossil is here before you today! How she wishes that she could die, how she wishes that she could finally rest in peace without the endless pain in her bones, but alas, nothing on Earth can kill her! Step inside this tend and behold the Eternal Hag!"

In the end, Allison's composure broke long before the speech was finished. Taking to her heels, she ran for the exit as fast as she could, gorge rising with every step, but she only just managed to get as far as the maze of caravans outside before she finally fell to her knees and threw up.

And there she lay, sobbing, wishing more than anything else that she could wake up from this nightmare, that she'd be back in the Hotel Obsidian, sharing a room with Viktor and still treasuring a tiny atom of hope for the future - and of course, she couldn't.

With all the power she'd gained and all the mastery she could achieve, she was helpless.

A/N: Up next - part 2! Can you guess what will play out? Let me know!