A/N: And now for part two of Allison's big chapter. Again, I'm honestly not trying to punish her, I'm just trying to create what will hopefully be a catharsis of sorts.

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

Disclaimer: Blrggfhhhh.

Also, fair warning, this is where things get even stranger...

For a minute or so, Allison could only kneel there in the dirt, trying to get her breathing under control and waiting for her tears to dry.

But as she lay there, the sounds of the carnival began to fade away, the gaudy lights of the shows slowly dimming, and even the ground beneath her turned featureless and smooth. In a matter of seconds, the carnival was gone, and Allison was left huddled at the centre of a tiny circle of pale light in the middle of a pitch-black void – quite literally caught in the spotlight.

Trembling, she got to her feet, trying to work out if there was anything that lay beyond the light, hoping against hope that there was a door hidden in the shadows, that she wasn't literally standing in nothingness. Unfortunately, she wasn't that lucky, and reality wasn't obliging enough to just give her a flashlight or turn on the lights, so all she could do was stand there, peering futilely into the darkness, and silently praying that the light wouldn't go out.

Perhaps a minute went by in silence, Allison too afraid to speak in case her subconscious did something even worse with reality. But in the end, the tension got too much for her, and she found herself calling out in desperation:

"Ray?" she whimpered. "Claire?"

There was a split-second pause, and as if in answering, there was a low, metallic creaking sound from somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. Then, there was a click, and another spotlight split the darkness, revealing… well, exactly who she'd called for.

Raymond was almost back to human form, except now he was wearing an Umbrella Academy uniform.

However, he was now pushing an extremely rusted wheelchair through the darkness ahead of him, and sitting in it, shrouded in the ruins of intravenous tubing and dressed only in a tattered white gown was…

Even though Allison knew that it couldn't be anyone else, Claire was barely recognizable: at more than ten thousand years of age, she'd shrivelled into a withered, skeletal husk without a single ounce of fat or muscle left on it, so contorted and warped that her body had seemingly shrunk to adolescent proportions, leaving only the enormously domed skull untouched. She looked like an ancient Egyptian mummy out of bandages, her papery skin now concrete grey and drawn so tightly over her bones it seemed as if the slightest movement might tear her open from head to toe; her head was almost completely bald except for a few brittle stark-white tufts of hair on the back of her skull; her mouth hung open ever-so-slightly, enough for Allison to see that she had no teeth left – and no gums either, just a petrified grey palate like a dried-up riverbed; worst of all were the eyes, for they looked to be the only part of her body that Claire could still move without herculean difficulty, milky-white with cataracts and blank with depression as they were. Only the faint rise and fall of the sunken chest proved that this emaciated fossil of a woman was even alive, and only a few subtle reactive turns of the head indicated that she was even capable of thought.

The horror must have shown on Allison's face, for Raymond said, "This ends whenever you want it to end, baby."

Allison hung her head in despair. "What am I supposed to do without the two of you?" she asked. "I'm up against a police state, and the rest of the family hates me. Without you, I've got nothing."

Raymond gave her a pitying look. "Do you really think you can't be forgiven in time? If there's one thing I know about the Umbrella Academy, it's that you're very good at forgiving each other, especially in a crisis. Just look at Viktor. Just look at what happened at the Sparrow Academy and how quickly Luther forgave you."

"It's not that simple, Ray. For one thing, there's no crisis."

"There will be. Trust me on that."

"But… but… but I'll never see you again! You'll be gone forever!"

Claire let out a low, hoarse, wheezing rattle as she came alive in the wheelchair. "That's… the price… you pay," she rasped, "for being… close… to anyone."

"If you love someone enough to keep them, you'll have to accept the fact that one day you'll lose them," agreed Ray. "And when you get right down to it, this is the only way you'll be free."

"Of you?"

"Of this place. This is a prison, Allison: from the moment Reggie wrote it into existence, he intended this house – this life – to keep you out of the way just in case the Umbrella Academy ever got its act together again. That's been his plan of attack with you and the others ever since you were kids: divide, isolate, dominate, indoctrinate. And the only way you'll ever be happy is if you can escape from it – all of it."

"And… we're… the first… step. Free us… and free… yourself."

Allison looked at the faces of her husband and daughter, wracking her brain for an argument that could spare her another minute of pain, trying to think of something, anything, that could spare her from having to say goodbye. But in the end, her imagination failed her, and all she had left was the Rumour, and trying that in any way that couldn't satisfy her subconscious would only end in another unstable reality warp. She had no choice, no way out, no more energy to resist the inevitable.

She just wanted it to be over.

"What do I have to do?" she asked, tonelessly. "No more riddles. No wordplay. Just give the orders, and I'll carry them out to the letter if that's what I have to do."

"Rumour… reality. One… at a time."

"I'll go first," said Ray, helpfully. "It might be easier if you start with me."

Allison turned to Ray, and even as she did so, she was already reaching for that tiny wellspring of power that made her rumours into Rumours, not thinking about what she was going to say next, only hoping that the grief would arrive all at once and be over with quickly, that it wouldn't be like what had happened back in the Sparrow Academy timeline where the pain had arrived in waves that never seemed to stop.

"I heard a Rumour that you could go home to Dallas," she said softly, voice echoing as she felt the familiar flex of power in her head.

But nothing happened.

For a moment, Allison considered repeating herself, but then Ray pointed at something behind her, and she turned to see that a long glowing hallway had inexplicably opened in the shadows, leading off into the horizon of the unreal world.

"That's my route home," said Raymond.

"You mean you're not going to just vanish?"

"Of course not. We both want a chance to say goodbye, don't we?"

As if for emphasis, he offered her an outstretched arm – as if they were going for a leisurely stroll through the park and not about to be separated forever all over again… and yet, Allison knew at once that, as much as she dreaded it, as much as she would have preferred to have Ray vanish and get the pain over with as quickly as possible, she really did want that chance to say goodbye.

"I hate my subconsciousness," she sighed.

But she took him by the arm anyway. And so, they began to walk, striding inexorably towards the portal hallway, the spotlight in hot pursuit.

For a moment, all she could see around them were the blank walls of the hallway leading off into oblivion.

But then, as the seconds ticked by, the walls begun to flush with colour, forming shapes, patterns, even recognizable image, until at last, she recognized a landscape – no, several landscapes, passing by them at several hundred miles an hour. She could see cities, towns, grassy plains, deserts, forests, and endless highways snaking across the land alongside them, broken only by gas stations and the ghostly ruins of roadside attractions. But they weren't just travelling across America, oh no: Allison could see the world around them changing in different ways, with buildings shrinking back into their scaffoldings as they passed, trees being un-felled and sinking back into saplings, even entire cities subtly contracting inwards as year after year trickled back up the proverbial hourglass. They were travelling backwards through time, bound for the 1960s, even as their path through space led them closer and closer to Dallas.

And all around them, voices rippled up from countless different media sources: livestreams, TV news reports, radio broadcasts, even live announcements, all of them blaring out a seemingly endless torrent of major headlines from the last five or six decades of history, all in reverse order.

"Busy time," Ray observed. "Hope I'm not being spoiled on anything too important."

"How can you be so casual about this?" Allison demanded wearily. "This isn't the real Dallas you're going back to: it's just another fantasy, and when the reality warp goes, you'll go with it. You're going to die, no matter how much subjective history passes for you until then. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"As a matter of fact, it does: it means I'll have had time to make a difference, take in all the history I never got to see, and have enough time to set my affairs in order before I fade away. All in all, pretty damn good as far as deaths go. And," he added ruefully, "you know I've been looking forward to a chance to see Dallas again for a while now."

A pause followed, as the din of history briefly rose to a crescendo, then fell again.

Allison sighed. "I'm sorry, Ray."

"For what?"

"Take your pick. For not leaving you alone; for not respecting your wishes; for making you a prisoner in my house; for taking this long to try to set things right. And I'm sorry for not saying sorry sooner. I'm sorry for all of it."

"Don't be. I knew how deeply you regretted it from the moment the reality warp hit. Besides, sometimes – just sometimes – all the delays and foot-dragging don't really matter. How long it takes to make amends isn't all that important; all that matters is that you do the right thing in the end. You were never a monster, Allison, no matter what you tell yourself at times; you were just desperate not to be hurt anymore. Take it from your own subconscious."

In spite of herself, Allison actually managed to choke out a laugh.

"And please," Ray added with a laugh of his own, "do not bother asking me any questions you think your subconsciousness might know. You don't need answers, believe me. So, no 'where do I go from here?' No 'how can I get the Academy to accept me again?' No 'is there any chance I could see you again?' And no 'how can I possibly go on without you?' You know as well as I do that you can get along perfectly well without me."

"You're really determined to be my pillar of strength one last time, aren't you?"

"Why not? You were my pillar of strength back in Dallas."

Around them, the blurring pattern of landscapes began to slow, as did the passage of years. Bit by bit, the chaos began to coalesce into a recognizable environment – a street, lined on all sides by old-fashioned shopfronts, lush with the familiar styles of the 1960s, practically aglow in the warm sunshine. Even if she hadn't been able to recognize the scenery, Allison had wandered down this street so many times that she practically knew it off-by heart. Five had even told her stories of how he'd seen the apocalypse play out across this very street, claiming to have seen Viktor blasting tank shells out off the sky, Klaus leading armies of the dead, even the sight of Allison bursting the skulls of a Russian platoon with a single Rumour – a ludicrous idea, or so Allison had thought at the time, though now she wasn't so sure. No, there was no mistaking this place.

This was Dallas, exactly as it had been before they'd left to save Harlan.

Here was the movie theatre.

Here was the diner where Allison had been turned away, where they'd later held the sit-in, and where Allison had shown off her powers.

Here was the alley where the Umbrella Academy had crash-landed over the years.

Here was Eliott's appliance store and home.

And as they drifted onwards and their pace through the streets slowed to a crawl, they finally found themselves standing outside the hair salon, where she and Ray first met all those years ago.

"Guess this is my stop," said Ray.

Opening the front door a tiny crack, he peered inside. "Looks like we're having another meeting," he mused. "I suppose things are carrying on as always."

"But all I said was that you'd go home to Dallas; what determines what's going to happen now that you're here?"

Ray just smiled and winked.

"Oh, right," Allison grumbled. "My subconscious. Of course. But how's history going to play out in this imaginary world? Is Kennedy going to die as he did in the original timeline, or is the visit going to go as planned? Does that mean you'll finally be able to get his attention?"

"I have no idea," said Ray, smiling wider than ever. "But it's going to be a lot of fun finding out."

By now, Allison had thought she'd finally managed to numb herself to the idea of saying goodbye forever after all the heartbreaking things she'd seen this evening, but even so, she found herself blinking away tears. "I'll… I'll try to give you as much time as you need."

"Time's relative here, remember? By the time you've finished saying your goodbyes to Claire, I could have lived through my entire lifetime twice in a row. You take as much time as you need."

In spite of herself, she smiled through her tears. "Sometimes, I honestly wish I could be as kind as you or believe in anything as sincerely as you do, Ray."

"You will, Allison. Sooner or later, you will. Sometimes, all it takes is a second chance." He held out his arms for a hug. "One last goodbye, for old time's sake?"

At this, Allison practically threw herself into his arms, kissing him fiercely and hugging him so tightly she feared he might simply evaporate through her arms like mist if she loosened her grip. For a moment, they just stood there, locked in their embrace, seemingly invisible to the pedestrians around them.

Then, at last, they parted – not entirely willingly: the world was gradually winding up, drawing Allison away from the imaginary Dallas, either because her subconscious was in the pilot's chair or because Claire was calling her home. Either way, Allison found herself beginning to float into the air, levitating backwards into the sky, watching helplessly as Dallas slowly but surely drifted out of her orbit, picking up speed with every passing second.

"Goodbye, gorgeous," Ray said with a wink, as he receded into the distance. "And remember what I told you: sometimes all it takes is a second chance…"

Then, he was gone, vanishing off into the horizon as Dallas fell away from her.

Moments later, she found herself landing in the darkness of the reality-warped stage, once again in the spotlight. As expected, Claire was waiting for her, still an ancient mummy in a wheelchair, gazing up at her with clouded, near-sightless eyes.

She knew what she had to say next: Claire had already given her instructions on what to say and why, Allison knew it was the right thing to do, and she'd been told before that this was the only way out of the nightmare… and after five years of bitterness and depression, there was no denying that she'd been hoping for an escape from the misery she'd brought on herself.

And yet, she couldn't bring herself to say the words. By now, her throat was already beginning to tighten as the enormity of what she was about to do finally caught up with her, and the tears were beginning to flow anew. And yet, she tried.

"I heard a Rumour that…"

No; there'd been no power in the words, no telltale flex of reality warping, no sense of her own ability at work. She tried again.

"I heard a Rumour th-"

This time, she broke mid-sentence: she couldn't even finish the last word. For a moment, all she could do was stand there, struggling to breathe, hot tears streaming down her face.

But then Claire slowly reached out and took Allison's hand in hers. Her hand was withered, ancient, and clawlike, the knuckles agonizingly swollen with arthritis and the skin more like carapace than anything else… but even so, it was enough to ground her in the moment. The proverbial anchor in the storm.

"It'll be alright, Mom," Claire wheezed. "Whatever happens… I know… you'll make things right again."

Allison took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said the words that she'd been dreading ever since she realized she had the power to say them:

"I heard a Rumour that you were never born."

There was a terrible pause, as local reality began to shift and change to accommodate the terrible wish. Allison felt the power of the change settling over Claire and saturating her being, but she didn't vanish or fade away; indeed, all that changed was that Claire's laboured breathing seemed to ease ever-so-slightly, and a few fresh grey hairs began to sprout from the back of her almost-barren scalp.

And once again, another hallway in the fabric of reality opened ahead of them.

"Where does it lead?" Allison whispered.

"Home," said Claire, simply. Her voice was still ancient and halting, but the words were quicker now, the breaths less gasping. "Home and… infinite possibilities."

"What do you mean?"

"You'll see… Take me home, Mom."

As if on puppet strings, Allison began pushing the wheelchair through the open passageway ahead of her.

Once again, environments began flickering into view. At first, they were proceeding through the carnival again, marching along a veritable highway of brightly coloured tents with customers milling all around them, calliope music blaring at them from all angles, and every stage with a different show on display: acrobats, jugglers, clowns, and even the freaks. There were even a few rickety wooden bulletin boards layered with adverts for the best shows, with Claire "The Eternal Hag" having pride of place.

Then, time trickled backwards: the crowds of customers changed as the carnival moved across the land, the tents shrank as profits reversed themselves, the performers grew younger or replaced by different ones altogether. And all the while, Claire's outfit changed too: sometimes her clothes would simply melt and reshape themselves into something she'd worn earlier, sometimes she'd reach out and grab one out of the air and put it on over her own; sometimes they would grow too big for her and slide off her body to reveal a better fitting outfit underneath.

"They… weren't always horrible to me, you know," said Claire, as her tattered dress gave way to a sumptuous dressing gown.

Was it Allison's imagination, or were her eyes looking a little clearer than they had been?

"Who?" she asked, as they stepped into an even earlier iteration of the show.

"The carnival. It wasn't like The Elephant Man… some owners were that bad, sure… beating, starving, whipping, theft of wages, and even worse than that. But… it wasn't always that bad. Sometimes, we had a kind boss… one who gave us the wages we were owed and protected us from the worst of the customers. Sometimes, it was one of us freaks who ran the show… like Old Spider Johnson or the Briarcliffe Twins, and… then we'd see some real justice."

"You remember all this?"

"Of course," said Claire, as another iteration of the carnival passed them by. "That was what you wanted: to… give me a life worth remembering, not a life of imprisonment."

"How long were you with this carnival?"

"About… five hundred years. I… was their oldest exhibit."

The carnival shrank around, as the business grew less and less established and progressively poorer. Then, without warning, they were wandering through a colossal grassland, surrounded by enormous half-horse half-tapir-like beasts of burden laden-down with passengers and baggage, many of them towing cages full of screaming human captives.

"I didn't join them… willingly, though," Claire continued. "I was a slave, sold to them… by these people."

"You were what?"

As if for emphasis, a chain fastened itself around Claire's neck, and enormous cuffs manacled her arms and legs to the wheelchair, while her gown abruptly gave way to a tattered brown shift.

"Not… so surprising in this… possible future," she wheezed, seemingly unbothered. "At least they didn't expect me to do any work. I was… a curiosity slave, a novelty, traded to the slavers for the hope… of finding a collector. And before that…"

The landscape shifted dramatically, and Allison found herself wheeling Claire's wheelchair through a colossal, gilded throne room. Everything remotely inanimate around them was either made with gold, plated with it, or painted with it – the throne, the dais, the suits of armour standing on guard, the walls, the floors, the mighty domed ceiling (which was also studded with a luridly pornographic fresco made entirely of gemstones). Most of the people around them seemed to be wearing gold as well, most prominently the man sitting on the throne, who wore a gold silk robe, a golden mask, and a golden crown, and enough golden rings on his gold-plated fingers to make his hands sound like metal castanets whenever he applauded.

In fact, the only thing in the room that wasn't gold was the filthy cushion just behind the throne, a threadbare mass draped in rusted shackles. Claire pointed at it with a trembling hand, her movements much smoother than before.

"That was mine," she explained. "I was a curiosity slave of the Omnipotent Emperors of the Americas… up until Donnel XXIV tired of my presence and sold me to the slavers. I imagine… he regretted that once he figured out that the court took the loss of the oldest courtier as a bad omen, but I doubt… he had the time: by the time I'd been bought by the carnival, he was overthrown and his line… collapsed back into the New-Medieval mud. Stupid chinless bastard."

"You said 'Emperors' plural, though," said Allison. "How many of them did you see?"

"All of them."

"Really?"

"Five thousand years, six hundred emperors, and nineteen different royal dynasties, all at varying levels of tech. Just look at my wheelchair."

Sure enough, Claire's wheelchair was changing rapidly, a gold-plated monstrosity for one of the imperial masters, a barely functional mass of rusted scrap metal for another; sometimes it was motorized, sometimes it was muscle-powered, and sometimes, Allison found that the wheels had been replaced with lumbering bear-like quadrupeds towing Claire like she was on a sedan chair.

And all the while, the throne room around them transformed little by little: the armour and weaponry on display grew smaller and less impressive, the gilding peeled back, the throne shifted from gold to iron to stone to wood, the reigning emperor's gear shifted into simpler garb and even into practical armour, until at last, the throne room was just a bare stone chamber and the throne was just a plank draped in a sheet of velvet.

Then, the room was gone, and they were travelling through open fields again, wild grasslands interrupted only by tiny villages of scrap metal houses or wattle-and-daub huts. However, in the distance, Allison could clearly see the distant silhouettes of ruined cities across the horizon, broken down to the husks of the tallest buildings and shrouded in a thick blanket of greenery. Obviously, whatever apocalypse had occurred in this imaginary version of history, it had happened centuries ago at the very least.

"They caught me out here, you know," said Claire. "The barbarian tribe that became the Omnipotent Empire, they found me wandering between villages, begging for food. Sometimes, the people I met were kind enough to give me a bed for the night, even fix the wheelchair; sometimes, they even took me in, worshipped me as a "voice of the ancient world"; but mostly, they thought I was cursed turned me away – or tried to kill me. Not that they could, which was how the barbarians learned about me. But that's all in the future…"

By now, she barely needed to pause for breath, and her voice sounded more like that of an old woman instead of a living fossil, though she still looked the part.

"But where were you before this?" asked Allison, almost afraid to ask after everything she'd seen so far. "Where did it all begin?"

"Oh, about five-hundred-odd years ago."

The grassland gave way to a vast forest, enormous redwood-like trees stretching skywards – most with the rusted husks of derelict cars crushed beneath their roots. Then, the forest suddenly unplanted itself around them, shrinking back down to reveal a scrap-metal citadel beneath a smog-clouded sky, its rusting walls patrolled by soldiers with crudely made armour and antique rifles, the roads outside swarmed with ancient semi-functional cars that were more rust than engine. Then the citadel divided itself into a dozen small towns, each one dwindling away into paltry little encampments before vanishing altogether.

Then, Claire's reverse journey led them into one of the ruined cities, the roads overgrown with weeds, the remaining skyscrapers thick with vines, and trees already beginning to tear the fallen buildings to pieces. Then the city was flooded and mostly underwater, the canyons between skyscrapers so inundated that even the freeways were a good ten feet below sea level, forcing Allison to steer the wheelchair along the flotilla of abandoned ships strewn across the waterways until time shifted again. Now the city was newly ruined and still on fire, the sky black with smoke, the streets studded with craters and crowded with fleeing civilians, all trying to ignore the fact that most of them would not survive, that their frontmost ranks were already dead of smoke inhalation and being trampled to mulch by those behind them…

...and everywhere Allison looked, abandoned newsstands declared the headline of "A METEOR STRIKE, A NUCLEAR MISFIRE, AND A COSMIC DISASTER: IS THIS THE END?"

Then-

They were in a hospital.

At first, it was a shadowy labyrinth of corridors lit only by the hellish red emergency lights, the floors strewn with bodies, the air thick with the smell of smoke.

"Hell of a job to get out of here with the power out and the backups failing," Claire remarked, as her shift gave way to a hospital gown. "Must have taken me about five hours just to get as far as the exit and find a wheelchair that didn't require a battery."

Then, time wound back a little further, and suddenly, all the lights were on and everything was as functional as it had been before the apocalypse – more than that: indeed, the place looked impossibly futuristic, with wheelless gurneys hovering through the corridors and teleporters in place of elevators, and every single inch of wall, floor, and ceiling so spotlessly white that it seemed to glow. All around them, doctors, nurses, and orderlies rushed to and fro in an unending stream, ferrying patients to surgery, delivering vital drugs to the rooms, and occasionally subduing the occasional rowdy visitor. Nothing about the building gave the slightest hint as to the apocalypse that was to take place, not even in the newspapers some patients were reading.

Allison's path eventually led her through an airlock door and into a sealed-off wing of the hospital, where every single room was locked with a passkey and the doctors never entered without first donning hazmat suits. It was in one of these sterile, near-featureless rooms that Allison finally found her path through history trundling to a stop: it wasn't much to speak of – just a bed, a chair, a small coffee table, and an en-suite bathroom – but somehow, Allison knew that this was where the next chapter of Claire's story began (or rather, ended).

"Help me into bed, please?" Claire sighed.

It took some effort, but eventually, Allison was able to haul her daughter's ancient body out of the wheelchair, up onto the bed, and under the covers. As she did so, a whole host of intravenous tubes snaked down from the ceiling and began burrowing into Claire's body, all the necessary medical equipment deploying from the ceiling to monitor her.

"Claire, what is this?" asked Allison. "What were you even doing in a hospital if you're immortal?"

"This is the research wing. Once people figured out that I wasn't going to die of old age or misadventure, they sent me here so they could learn the secrets of my immortality. They obviously hoped they'd be able to replicate it, maybe turn it into a drug and mass-market it for a pretty penny, but they never could manage it. Not that it stopped them from trying: no matter how many researchers I outlived, no matter how many blood samples they took, they never gave up."

"How long were you here, though?"

"Four thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight years."

The bottom dropped out of Allison's stomach. "God, Claire, I am so sorry-"

"Don't be. There are worse places to be immortal than a hospital: at least here, I had enough anaesthesia to numb the arthritis, not to mention the odd bit of friendly company. Plus, I got to see how technology developed over all those millennia. Only downside was all the bone marrow testing and the godawful food. Also, this was around the time my toilet arrangements became really embarrassing. After the apocalypse, I could just clamber out of the wheelchair and take a dump anywhere, but here-"

"You don't need to tell me everything, Claire."

In spite of herself, the ancient manifestation of her daughter smiled. At least she had a few of her old teeth back by now. "That's just the way parents and children work: when they're young, kids gross out their parents; when they're older, parents embarrass their kids."

"Oh well, it's only fair, given how much of an embarrassment I was."

"Hey, I thought you were going to start forgiving yourself for that. Besides, like I said before, it's not all bad. Time just flies by when you're on as many drugs as I was on…"

And sure enough, the hospital blurred around them as the centuries lurched backwards through history. Doctors came and went in reverse, machinery grew more primitive, new pieces of equipment appeared around the bed to connect themselves to Claire, and the glow slowly faded from the hospital walls.

And as the hospital changed, so did Claire: hair erupted across her near-barren scalp, until a healthy crop of stark-white blossomed; the cataracts melted away, leaving her eyes clear for the first time in millennia; her cracked grey skin flushed with colour as dead blood vessels renewed themselves, the ancient carapace softening to recognizable flesh as the years fell away; as body fat crept back onto her frame, she seemed to reinflate, as if someone had finally managed to patch up an old tyre and pump it back to a semblance of its old shape – a very wrinkly, dumpy, matronly shape, but a shape nonetheless.

By the end of it, she looked more like an ordinary old woman instead of the fossilized husk she'd been a few moments ago. She even had most of her old teeth back by now.

Groaning, she rose from the bed. "Don't think I needed the wheelchair before the hospital," she wheezed. "Spending fifty centuries in bed doesn't do much for the spine, who knew? But I think you'll need to help me to my feet... er, and to help me get dressed."

By then, a neatly folded pile of clothes had materialized at the foot of the bed, so with a little bit of awkwardness, Allison was able to help Claire out of her surgical gown and into a tracksuit and joggers. Then, they were off again down the corridor, Allison carefully holding Claire by the arm as they made their way out through the wildly blurring hospital.

Next thing she knew, they were hobbling through the dowdy, badly wallpapered corridors of a nursing home. Around them, pensioners busied themselves with reading, bingo, and rudimentary exercises, all while new faces abruptly appeared among their number as members of the elderly population un-died and started getting younger. Family visitors came and went, all of them getting younger with every appearance, with grandkids shrinking down from twenty-something professionals to snot-nosed toddlers. Every so often, one of the residents would get so young they simply got up and left, eventually being replaced by another old geezer fresh out of the grave.

"Ah, Twilight Acres," said Claire, with a note of nostalgia. "This was where I was staying from the moment I retired right up to the day people finally figured out that I wasn't going to die. Must have been here for… maybe over a century."

A few of the wrinkles around her face began to vanish.

"I was the only one who was expecting immortality," she continued. "Everyone else was caught completely off-guard… including my son."

She pointed to an anxious-looking figure that had begun continuously reappearing by her side in the blurring stream of reversed time: tall, swarthy, dapper, and probably in his seventies by now, he looked more like Claire's younger brother than anything else, but it was clear from the way that she fussed over him at high speed with every appearance that he was indeed her child.

"Meet Nicholas," said Claire, beaming with pride over the well-dressed old man as he appeared and reappeared before them, growing younger with every visit. "My brilliant little boy; he grew up to be an executive at Cornucopia Banking, reformed the entire company, cleared out the speculators and the profiteers, made it ethical and fair for ordinary people once again. He's never missed a single visit, and ever since he's realized that I'll outlive him by millennia, he's always worrying what will happen to me when he's gone. But he won't have to worry forever."

Nicholas grew a little younger, and now he was showing Claire the photos of his daughter's latest success at work, even as Claire waxed rhapsodic over her clever granddaughter, darling Alicia. Now he was sharing her college graduation photos. Now he was bringing her to visit as a teenager. Now, in his forties, he was showing Claire the way out of the nursing home, with a high-school-age Alicia by his side.

Claire, at seventy, was looking better by the second: all the wrinkles in her face were being smoothed away, like an invisible sculptor was removing them from the clay of her body. She stood straighter, her hair went from white to grey, and her body once again seemed to subtly reinflate as gravity seemed to press down a little lighter on her.

She was now living in a house of her own, regularly visited by her son and grandchild as she went about her business writing papers for her university. And around her, the world flowed in reverse even faster than ever before: Alicia the granddaughter went from a highschooler to a kindergartener in a matter of visits, while Nicholas went from a middle-aged company executive to a young middle manager. Eventually, Nicholas had to stop visiting with work busier than ever before, so now it was just his wife Lena and the toddler-aged Alicia paying her visits, even as Alicia's ability to walk dwindled away and she sank back into infancy. Then one day, time carried them to another hospital, where a newborn Alicia went in one door and what emerged was a heavily pregnant Lena.

"Bye, Alicia," whispered Claire, as Lena's pregnancy shrank back out of existence.

"She just-"

"Yep. Ceased to exist. Just as I will in a few minutes." Seeing Allison's mournful expression, she patted her hand reassuringly, even as Nicholas and Lena unmarried, dated in reverse, and parted ways forever at their first meeting. "It's not as bad as it sounds, Mom," she explained. "It's not like dying; it's not even like being Kugelblitzed. It's more like… well, being recycled."

"You're gonna have to explain that one for me, because I still don't see how you vanishing into nothingness is a good thing."

Claire smiled, her body firming slightly as she re-entered her early fifties and a much younger Nicholas moved back into the house.

"It's good enough that I have a chance to relieve the history you subconsciously gave me. Oh sure, there's been heartbreaks aplenty: seeing Nicholas die of old age and losing Alicia to a car crash, living long enough to become the slave of a new empire… but even so, I've been witness to things that nobody could imagine, known living legends of the post-apocalyptic world, even found a halfway-happy place at the carnival. And long before then, I had a life worth living: I had a job I excelled at, a family that I could be proud of, even a man I loved." She held a ring finger by way of evidence, allowing Allison to see the well-worn golden band across it.

She paused, ducked behind a screen, and re-emerged wearing a business suit. Around her, the world shifted between her study desk and the podium of a lecture hall.

"But even with all the life I've lived with your help," she continued, scrawling helpful diagrams on the blackboard, "I'm just a possibility that Reginald made real. And when you think about it, chaining a possibility to a life it never really had a chance to begin is… cruel."

Claire sighed, casting off even more wrinkles as she went from a professor to an assistant lecturer. Sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, a teenage Nicholas waved and applauded.

"Think about all the things I could have been from the moment I was born – or even better, all the different variants of your child I could have been. That's what all possibilities get to enjoy before they're born: a multiverse of potential futures, an infinity of adventures to dream of and look forward to until the day when they're finally born and can start living them. Reggie took that chance away from me: he forced my potential into a mould and condemned me to live without growth or change, always four years old, always unfulfilled. It's not just that I could never grow up, but that I remember what it was like to have infinite potential and then be condemned to never be anything outside of Reggie's design."

A jolt of shame rippled through Allison. "I know should never have-"

"Shhh. I don't blame you for the deal you made; besides, you're making up for you did right now. You've given me the best substitute you could: in this last walkthrough of my imagined life, you've given me a career, a family, an adventure… you've even given me a husband."

She pointed up at the seat next to the much younger Nicholas, where a debonaire-looking gentleman with a wedding ring on his hand was applauding her lecture.

"Michael," Claire explained. "He dies of cancer barely a few years into my tenure as professor; it's good to see him again for what little time we have – the candlelit dinners, the reassuring hugs when my prospects failed, the games of poker, the scholarly challenges, the amazing sex, all of it. He's just one of the things you've given me in this history, but in the end, it's still a life I never had a chance to live in the real world. So, the only happy ending to this is for me to be unborn and unconceived and live forever as mere potential, dreaming of possible futures until I have the chance to exist again in one form or another."

"You make it sound like Heaven. Is that what it's actually like?"

Around them the lecture hall changed to a simple classroom, Claire now a teacher at age thirty. At the back of the room, a five-year-old Nicholas clapped his hands in delight and made a few clumsy cartwheels, showing off for his mother as a laughing Michael tried to corral him.

"It could be," said Claire. "Or maybe, since I'm taking cues from your subconscious, maybe I'm lying to you just so you won't feel bad when I finally vanish. Or maybe," she added teasingly, "what I just said was a lie, because you still don't expect anything positive out of life and you wouldn't believe me if I honestly told you the happy truth behind reality."

"Wonderful: my daughter's a figment of my imagination, a university lecturer, a possible liar, and a life coach."

"Or I may simply be a single drop of rain. But I will remain."

"What?"

For the first time, Claire (who was now in her late twenties and back to being a substitute teacher as she worked on her degrees) looked genuinely disappointed. "Come on," she grumbled. "You can't have missed that song, not with the life you've lived in the real world: it's a classic!"

"What song?"

A barely-toddler-aged Nicholas shrieked with laughter.

"Highwayman!" Claire exploded, waving her hands around in Kermitesque exasperation. "Written by Jimmy Webb? Most famously sung by Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Johnny goddamn Cash?! Jeez. And I thought Uncle Luther was supposed to be the sheltered one."

"Yeah, I think we can add 'smartass' to your list of qualifications."

"Like mother like daughter. Oh, speaking of which, hang on a minute. This is where things get a little complicated. Nicky, sweetie? Come to Mommy!"

Nicholas toddled over, stepping out of his suddenly oversized clothes to reveal an infant's onesie; as he did so, his walk grew slower and clumsier until he fell forward onto all fours and crawled the rest of the way, Claire finally gathering him up in her arms as a baby. Before Allison's eyes, Claire's work clothes were replaced by the sleep-creased round-the-house clothes of a new mother as Baby Nicholas shrank a little further with every passing second. Then, the world around them shifted into a hospital once again, and in the wild haze of colours and shapes that followed, Nicholas disappeared.

Claire was now heavily pregnant, walking with some difficulty as she made her way back through the house.

"Best not to imagine how that went behind closed doors," she remarked cheerily, as her swollen belly began to deflate. "He's gone back to being potential now: he can be anything, any sex, any profession, any future. And perhaps, one day, if all goes well, I might be born again and might one day have a chance to conceive him again, and he'll have a chance to live one of those futures."

She patted her shrinking belly as Nick's body was slowly absorbed back into her own, until her stomach was completely flat once again.

"Wouldn't that mean I have to meet Patrick all over again?" asked Allison.

"Whoever said it had to be that simple? Dad was a wonderful man, but I don't necessarily need him to be your daughter: the potential for me exists in all the children you might have. All possibilities merge and change – like blending coloured paints. And there are so many possibilities…"

Around her, the world shifted into Claire's wedding day, her maternity clothes suddenly blossoming into a glorious wedding dress.

"Infinite possibilities and infinite alternatives," she continued. "That's what Nicholas can enjoy now. Don't you see how much better it is to have never been born than to exist without the chance to grow and be happy?"

"You're making this sound like an assisted suicide," grumbled Allison, as confetti rained down from on high and the newlyweds exchanged kisses.

"Nothing of the sort." The wedding ring vanished from Claire's finger. "It's more like the return to sleep at the end of a long and extremely disappointing day, perchance to dream and one day awake to make the dream real."

The relationship between Claire and Michael un-blossomed before Allison's eyes, a long series of discreet assignations in hotel rooms, restaurant dates, movie nights, and awkward early encounters, until one day, the two said hello for the first time and never saw each other again.

Allison watched him go, feeling at once sad yet curiously detached.

"I'll never know how important these people were to you," she said quietly, "Not really. I'm only seeing the synopsis of all the time you spent together. I'm not even glimpsing what made you love them the most."

"Of course not," said Claire, as she charged backwards through her earliest university days in a haze of cheap campus food, terrible dorms, and bewildering friends. "But that's not what matters, is it? What matters is that I had had a chance to enjoy those moments for myself, to know and love all those people; what matters – to you as much as me – is that I had a life."

She paused, hovering at age twenty, resplendent in her jeans and denim jacket. She looked uncannily like Allison had at that age: tall, slender, graceful, her hair a magnificent mane of curly black hair, her eyes sparking with wit and exuberance, every line of her expression proclaiming total confidence in the future. For a moment, he stayed this way, as if Allison's subconscious wanted to preserve this moment in her memory.

Then she whispered, "My turn now."

An absurdly terrible-looking school uniform materialized around her as she hurtled backwards through time, back through her high-school graduation, in which Allison finding herself smiling for the cameras alongside her as photographs were un-taken. As she un-took her exams one by one and un-attended classes, she began to shrink, her growth spurts reversing herself and shrivelling her back into a gawky teenager, her once-graceful limbs thinning to scrawny bones, teeth gleaming with braces, acne popping up all over her face like mushrooms. And every time she grew too small for the uniform, another, better-fitting one was waiting under it as the old one slid off, like snakeskin.

"You're lucky you didn't get to see all this up close," she squeaked. "All the late-night arguments, all the annoying boy bands, all the first period anxiety…"

She shrank a little further, and suddenly she was on the opposite side of puberty, twelve years old and showing no signs of slowing down, her clothes once again growing enormous on her before sloughing off to reveal childish, gaudy clothes underneath – for now she was out of high school and back in grade school. She had to be losing a year every ten seconds, and Allison's heart sank as she realized that Claire's life could be measured in minutes at best.

"But where am I in all this?" said Allison, trying not to let the tears fall again. "I haven't seen me anywhere: I haven't seen me at your wedding or your graduation or even driving you to school. Where am I supposed to be in this incredible life you've lived?"

A ten-year-old Claire smiled gently at her. "Right beside me, where I've always needed you," she piped. "Where you've always been. What do you think's been happening for the last ten thousand years?"

She winked and lost another year.

"You've always been there for me, Mommy," she said, her voice growing simpler and more childish even as her vocabulary remained just as adult as ever. "It's the way you'd have wanted it, but you never had the chance to make it so the first time around. This way, your wish finally comes true."

And then, just when Allison thought the situation couldn't get any more heart-wrenching, Patrick appeared, smiling and happy as he'd always been before the awful truth of Allison's Rumours had hit him. He didn't see Allison clearly – he evidently knew that she was there and that she had a role to play in what was left of this strange drama, but he didn't acknowledge the final days of their history together or sense that there was anything odd about her. All he did was take hold of Claire's left hand, Claire took hold of Allison's left hand, and together, they carried on through the remaining years of the imaginary timeline.

The surroundings grew simpler and simpler as Claire drifted back into the earliest years of grade school, and from there, back into kindergarten. Before long, Claire's energy began to falter as her muscles began their final regression back into infantile proportions, forcing Allison to hoist her into her arms, and there, she grew even smaller still.

But it was at the very moment that Claire hit four years of age – the exact age when Allison had last seen her back in the original timeline – that Allison's resolve briefly failed her. She knew what had to be done, she'd already made the decision to set things right, and she knew that it couldn't be stopped now that she'd Rumoured reality, but even so, she found herself tearing up, her throat tightening until she could barely breath – until she stumbled to a halt, unable to take another step.

"Please, don't make me do this, Claire," she whimpered, all dignity lost. "Let me pause things here. I know you said this was the only way to end this, but… I…"

"Shhhh," soothed Claire. "It's okay, Mommy. This way, we'll both be free."

She shrank a little further, and as she smiled, Allison could see her baby teeth slowly withdrawing into her gums.

"You thtill have a fam'ly," she lisped childishly. "They'll thtill be there for you, no matter what. And if you're there for them, then maybe we'll thee each other again…"

"But what if that never happens? What if the possibility of you never comes true ever again?"

Claire's now-tiny hand reached out and gently squeezed Allison's thumb. "Then juth know, I was alwayth the happietht being your daughter."

She yawned, and then shrank all the way down into infancy, her form melting and transforming into a tiny plump baby sleeping into Allison's arms. Then, there was a blur of colours around them as the house gave way to a hospital yet again, and then she was gone, Allison suddenly holding nothing but empty air, her belly now swollen with a nine-month pregnancy.

For a few precious seconds, Allison felt Claire kicking inside her.

"Just remember the song," Claire's voice whispered in Allison's mind, sounding at once old and young, childish and ancient at the same time. "Perhaps I may become a highwayman again. Or I may simply be a single drop of rain. But I will remain. And I'll be back again and again and again and again and again…"

And then, the kicking subsided as Claire began to shrink further still, finally taking her mind with it, the words fading away as she drifted back into prenatal slumber and eventual oblivion.

The echoes died away.

The world went dark.

And in the darkness, a woman appeared before her, dressed all in white. For one impossible moment, Allison thought that Claire had reappeared to her in a new incarnation, but no, she didn't recognize this woman at all… and yet, she couldn't help but feel that there was something oddly familiar about her.

"Find me," the stranger whispered.

Then, she was gone.

It took about a minute for Allison to finally stop crying. After all, even grief couldn't last forever, not with time slowly returning to normal.

Eventually, Allison looked up from her now-flat stomach, eyes still wet with tears – and found that she was alone. At some point, Patrick had vanished, as had the hospital, leaving her alone in what had once been the master bedroom of the house she'd once called her own.

Now that her Rumour had been carried through to completion, reality was restoring itself and no longer responding to her slightest whims: already, the house was back to normal – inasmuch as a house that had been on a different coastline before Reggie had nailed it to the outskirts of his corporate capital could be called normal. Of course, that meant that Allison was now alone in a cold and empty house, but all tears aside, that didn't matter anymore: without Raymond or Claire, she wasn't interested in staying here one more second than necessary.

For the longest time, she seriously considered testing the new scope of her powers, wondering if she could bring back another version of Claire and Raymond, if only to be rid of the terrible sense of loss that was eating away at her. But in the end, she knew it would be pointless; even if she was capable of doing such a thing so soon after this power boost, which she probably wasn't, it would only mean reliving the same miserable adventure all over again sooner or later.. So, drying her eyes on her sleeves, she made her way to the front door, trying to think of anything other than what she'd just experienced.

In the end, her mind settled on the fact that she now had the power to Rumour reality itself, probably nowhere near as impressively as she had to begin with, but probably enough to give her a few useful tricks: perhaps she could turn wine into water, turn a metal door into air, or bring a statue to life. She still had the power to Rumour people… but the more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea of playing games with reality, if only because it meant hurting fewer people. Reality wasn't like the human mind: there was no consent to violate, no awful realization that you'd done the unforgivable, no gnawing, tearing, burrowing guilt. She'd be happy convincing doors to open or combinations to solve themselves or-

"What the fuck is going on with this house?!"

Allison blinked.

Voices from outside. And along with them, a low, rhythmic, metallic thudding sound: someone was beating someone to pulp, someone not too far outside the front door by the sounds of things. Curious, she tiptoed closer.

"Talk, you fuck, TALK!"

There was a muffled crunch, and someone screamed. A semi-incoherent voice let out a few whimpered protests, interspersed with weeping, desperate pleas for mercy, suddenly cut off by a growl from the first voice.

"We've just watched this house turn into Escher's wet dream, the scouts still haven't reported back, we've been seeing glowing blue people from one end of this road to the next, and you're the only sign of life that's showed up in the last fifteen minutes, so you're the only suspect – or, depending on how pleasantly you want your trial to go, the only witness. Now, unless you want my friend to break your other wrist, then tell us what the hell is going on."

There was a choked sob in the negative.

"Wrong answer, shithead."

By now, Allison was within reach of the door, and through the front windows, she could finally see the source of the clamour: just outside the front gate, two secret police operatives had dragged a nightworker off his streetsweeper and were now in the process of kicking the living bejesus out of him.

More worryingly, the only reason why Allison knew that these were secret police was the fact that they were wearing ski masks and body armour under their coats. If any of Reggie's secret police had made themselves so visible, it was because they didn't care who saw them at work: they were here to assassinate someone… and if they were asking about what had been happening to Allison's house, then she didn't need to place any bets on who their target was. Naturally, a whole host of questions occurred to her in the moment, all of them asking why the hell Reggie would want to kill her now after accepting the terms of their agreement for so long, but none of them mattered. After all, she'd spent too much time musing over the results of their little contract already; it was time she did something worthwhile…

Flinging the front door open, she let out a roar of "HEY!"

As one, the two secret police officers spun around, silenced handguns at the ready, but Allison beat them to the punch: she had no idea if this next tactic would work, or even if she'd reached the level of skill that had allowed it to work in Five's vision of the future. All she knew was that it was time to put this power to good use.

"I heard a Rumour," she said, focussing all her attention on the two secret police goons, "that I blew your minds."

There was a muffled gasp.

A loud, wet pop.

A thud, as two bodies slumped to the ground in perfect unison.

And then silence.

The streetsweeper got to his feet, wiped a few errant bits of brain off his shoulders, muttered a thank-you, and then ran like hell.

In the echoing silence that followed, Allison finally released the breath she'd been holding in for the last few seconds – or the last five years, depending on your perspective. She wasn't sure why, but it seemed as if this small moment of heroism had been enough to help her push the grief out of focus, if not completely out of her mind; it was still there, still aching like a healing wound, but not as fresh and sharp as it had been when she'd first faced the possibility of losing Claire and Ray again – not even as sharp as it had been when she'd lost them the first time around in fact.

Claire had been right: she'd not only freed them, but herself.

Now, at last, she was free of this terrible house, this prison that Reggie had helped build for her, and free of the guilt she'd built up around herself with every crime against free will she'd committed over the years. Now, she could finally do something worthwhile with her powers – with her life.

She still didn't know if she believed what Claire had told her about possibilities being reborn one day, but frankly, it didn't really matter right now.

What was important was that she still had a family.

A/N: Up next... check the numbers, see who we're up to! Lend me your speculation!