A/N: We're back!

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It was the click of a hammer being drawn back that awoke Five.

He'd been drowsing for the last few minutes, only stirring occasionally at the usual ripple of late-night noise from the neighbouring cellblocks: terrified screams were distressingly common, as were the angry shouts of fellow inmates telling the screamer to shut the fuck up, and if the hubbub was close enough to Five's cell, he might even hear the sounds of the guards dragging the offender out of their cell and pummelling the unfortunate inmate into a comatose heap of well-tenderized meat and bone. Tonight, it had been relatively quiet, so he'd needed little encouragement to doze once he'd awoken from the dream.

At one point, perhaps twenty minutes ago, he'd been roused by a bright light outside his cell, but it had faded so quickly that he hadn't been able to determine what it was or where it had come from before he'd drifted back into his usual slumber.

Then, that click had drawn him back to reality like a trout on the end of a hook.

After so many years of experience as the Commission's greatest assassin, he recognized the sound of a handgun being cocked on instinct. Had he been given a few more seconds, he would have been able to identify the model and condition of the handgun on the spot… but right now, all he knew was that someone was trying to kill him. The possibility had never been far away even for the best hitman in the time-space continuum, and he'd trained himself to respond to the threat of assassination on the spot.

Wrenching his eyes open, he rolled over on his bed, fists at the ready, and found himself staring up into the barrel of a silenced Walther PPK less than four feet from his head.

Behind the barred gate, two looming figures dressed in the black uniforms and black hats of secret police emissaries stood in silence, the first of them pointing the gun at him through the bars; neither of the two assassins said anything, but neither of them needed to. After all, they hadn't been hired for conversation, and Five knew everything he needed to know just by the sight of them, and it could all be summed up in a single sentence.

Reggie had finally decided to get rid of him and there was nothing Five could do about it.

After all, Five had no weapons, no room to manoeuvre, no way of reaching the assassin behind the bars, and no powers. The moment he tried to make a move for the gun or out of the line of fire, the assassin would shoot him virtually on instinct, and even if he could somehow dodge a bullet fired at almost point-blank range, the only direction he could go from there was straight ahead, right into the next bullet. And if by some miracle he managed to avoid that and try to wrestle the Walther out of the bastard's hand, there was a second assassin there just waiting to put a bullet in his brains while he was busy with the first man. And even if he beat the near-infinite odds against him in this struggle, Five knew for an incontrovertible fact that if the two assassins somehow failed, it would be the duty of the warden to order the guards to complete the hit – for after all, it was the who'd allowed them in to begin with.

Five was screwed.

And worst of all, Five knew at once that if Reggie had finally ordered his assassination, it was only a matter of time before his secret police went after the rest of the Umbrella Academy as well.

As if in slow motion, he saw the assassin's finger tightening on the trigger in minuscule increments that seemed to last a thousand years a millimetre, time dragging its heels a little further the closer the fatal shot crept.

And in that seemingly-infinite moment, Five remembered Reggie's advice all those years ago, back when he'd been willing to pose at being affable and still had guidance that wasn't guided entirely by self-interest and greed for what he'd lost. Five had listened to it exactly once and turned back time by a few precious seconds, at the one point in time when he'd had the opportunity to test the bare minimum of his power to time travel: it had saved their lives from the Handler… but he'd never found the need to use it again. After all, he hadn't wanted to risk endangering time any further after the emergence of the Kugelblitz – or finding them destabilized just as badly as the Commission's briefcases – and once the family had been locked safely away in the Hotel Oblivion, Five simply hadn't had the space to concentrate on anything other than immediate survival. True, he was pretty sure that his alternate incarnation had used the power to rewind time and stop Reggie once and for all, at the cost of losing faith in everything, but Five himself had never found the opportunity – and because of the loss of his powers, he never would.

A mad, desperate urge filled his brain, fuelled by all the strange half-remembered daydreams he'd experienced in the minutes leading up to now, and Five found himself trying to jump backwards through history for the last time in his entire life.

But too late, too late, for even if he'd somehow had the power back again, his time was already up and the trigger had already received the fatal squeeze. The Walther PPK's barrel flared with a suppressed eruption of gunpowder, the assassin's hand shuddered with the recoil, and Five swore for a moment that he could actually see the bullet surging towards him like a meteor flying through space-

And then, everything rumbled to a stop.

The gunshot paused in mid-air, the assassin froze in the act of adjusting his aim for a second shot, and his comrade was left halfway through drawing his own pistol for a potential coup de grace; behind them, a cockroach stopped halfway through scuttling along the floor, a spider darted from the wall to its hidey hole, and most impressively of all, a tiny droplet of water from a leak in the roof hung in the air perhaps three feet off the ground.

Time had stopped.

Five blinked.

For one horrible moment, he was certain that the Handler would appear behind the two assassins with briefcase in hand, leering down at him and remarking at how much he'd grown since they'd last met. But after at least twenty seconds of relative time, nothing of the Commission appeared, and Five could breathe again in the knowledge that the bitch was still dead.

Still, time freezing had definitely not been on the agenda for the evening… nor had the feeling rippling its way across his body at this very moment: it felt just like the surge of exhilaration that had shuddered through his veins whenever he'd teleported, but at the same time, it also felt like the astronomically heavy weight that had descended on him when he'd turned back time to undo the Handler's surprise attack. It was odd to feel both exuberant joy and herculean effort in the moment, but that was beside the point.

He had his powers back, somehow, and while they'd been gone, they'd been enhanced. Now he was capable of doing things that only the rarest and most precious of all the Commission's briefcases had ever done: he'd gone from merely rewinding time to stopping it entirely… and what about the other realms of his powers? Could he turn back time with greater ease now? Could he teleport further, with greater speed and stamina? What else was possible now?

Come to think of it, what was he supposed to do now?

Shivering, Five got to his feet, instinctively stepping as far out of the bullet's path as he could in the cramped cell… but then he remembered himself, and for the first time in five long, miserable years, he teleported.

With one almighty forward lunge, he darted in and out of spatial reality, emerging on the other side of the bars, right behind the two assassins. The door beyond had been left ajar, and with a victorious thrill, he all but flung it open.

But before he left, he doubled back, yanked the gun out of the second assassin's hand, pressed it squarely against the bastard's temple, and fired three times into his head. Five was immediately rewarded with a satisfying pop of bursting skull and a vibrant spray of blood that frozen in the air, so he did the same to the other assassin. They'd never know that they'd been shot, not even when time returned to normal; they'd just fall to the ground like marionettes without strings, all thought instantly extinguished by the bullets in their brains.

Good riddance, Five thought, and stalked off without so much as a backward glance, tucking the Walther into an improvised pocket of his jumpsuit as he departed.

Flush with victory as he was, he almost walked headlong into a figure standing in the corridor just outside his cell, and the near-impact caught him so thoroughly off-guard that he briefly went for the Walther before he recovered his senses and realized that he hadn't been brought up short by a guard, an assassin, the warden, or anyone else he might be interested in murdering.

Instead, the stranger was a woman dressed in a pristine white robe that looked uncannily like a burial shroud. As far as Five could see, beneath the hood of the robe, she was handsome, middled-aged, blonde, and refined of feature; indeed, there was something almost aristocratic about her bearing, something that reminded him of Reggie. Even her smile, far kinder and far readier than Reggie's, had more than a hint of Sir Reginald's enigmatic smirk to it.

"Feeling better?" she asked. "It takes a little while to adjust to the reintroduction of Aurianic particles to a nervous system deprived of them for so long, even one that was built and shaped by them from the very beginning. One or two of your siblings have experienced teething troubles with their returned powers, but that's to be expected, given the nature of their gifts. You seem to be adjusting quickly."

"Who the hell are you?" Five demanded. "And how are you moving? Time still hasn't restarted yet!"

"The second half I can answer easily enough: I'm not really here. I've projected myself directly into your mind via the Aurianic particles that were reintroduced to your body while you slept. Think of this as a living email, and your perceptions of reality as the inbox."

Five's brow wrinkled. "Clear and concise. Acceptable enough by my standards."

"Why thank you."

"I take it that you returned my powers. And I can already guess that you didn't give them back out of the goodness of your heart: you want something out of me… and I get the distinct impression that it's connected to the fact that you still haven't told me your name."

The woman chuckled indulgently. "Reginald was right when he surmised that you were the cleverest of the Academy."

"And that's another thing I can easily guess: if you're handling the same particles that gave us our powers to begin with, reasonable assumption is that you're connected with Reginald Hargreeves in some way. Now, unless the crazy old bastard's running some insanely convoluted plan right out of Game of Thrones Season 7, then he probably didn't send you to head off his own assassination attempt on us. You're an associate of his, but you're here without his permission or knowledge. Am I right?"

"Do you actually want to hear what I have to say, or are you just going to surmise everything in advance?"

Five rolled his eyes. "Well, apart from breaking out of here, I'm out of ideas, so if you've got something important to say, I suggest you get on with it. Just walk and talk, okay? I've got a prison to escape from, in case you haven't noticed, and I don't know how much longer I can hold this time freeze."

"Very well then. We'll walk and talk. Well, you'll walk, or at the very least teleport. I-"

"-don't need to walk," Five finished, irritably. "Rub it in. Now, get talking…"

Five managed to hold the time freeze until he was out of the cellblock, past at least three heavy duty gates, a password-locked door, an airlock with a DNA-encoded lock, and into one of the shadowy hallways just outside the guard barracks. Few security cameras could be found out here and even fewer guards; after all, if an inmate succeeded in breaking out, the last place they'd want to go was the guards' sleeping quarters.

Here, Five was able to duck down in the gloom of a stairwell while he caught his breath, and the mystery woman explained herself.

"In life," she began, "I went by the name of Abigail Hargreeves."

"Never heard of you."

"Hardly surprising, given that I spent the last century dead. Reginald never spoke of me if he could help it: he was in mourning for most of his time on Earth, and for the rest of it, he wouldn't lower himself to be vulnerable around humans." Abigail eyed him curiously, and remarked, "That doesn't seem to surprise you."

"Lady, I spent most of my life half-convinced that the old bastard wasn't human, and the last time I saw him in person, I proved myself correct the moment I got a good look at the colour of his blood. I am beyond being surprised when it comes to the motherfucker."

"Fair enough. Long story short, I was the main reason why he arranged for your birth and the births of all your brothers and sisters across the world, though of course, his motivations grew more complicated over the decades. Five years ago, his machinations bore fruit, he brought me back to life, and as compensation for the suffering he felt that he'd endured, built this police state as his new reality."

"Did you contact me just to talk about how petty and vindictive Reginald is?" Five sighed. "Because I'm pretty sure I got that around the time he adopted a different bunch of children just so he wouldn't have to put up with us."

With that, he teleported to the top of the stairwell, up into a long corridor leading to the main security office.

A moment later, Abigail materialized next to him, looking subtly disappointed at Five's blasé response.

"Look," Five continued, "it's nice to know the exact reason why the old man did the heinous things he did, but frankly, it's a little redundant now. So, let's cut to the chase: what the hell do you want? Why have you returned our powers, and what are you hoping to get out of it? And why did you decide to talk to me about it instead of anyone else in the family?"

"Technically, I've talked to everyone in your family by now," aid Abigail, mysteriously. "With the aid of the few tricks and arcane machinery I have at my command, I've been able to restore their powers, connect them with the people capable of steering them away from anything counterproductive… and of course, I've sent them an instruction that they can't help but follow, even if they aren't aware that they're doing so. However, you're different, Five; i could tell I needed to be less enigmatic with you, so I opted for a much more open approach – something that would appeal to your scepticism."

"Scepticism?" echoed Five.

"Of course. From everything I've seen of you, you're a cynical soul, and besides, I very much doubt you'd be willing to take my promises at face value after what happened at the Hotel Oblivion."

"Fair enough. Hold that thought…"

By then, he'd reached the door to the security office, which had been understandably left unlocked and open, courtesy of a technician bringing back coffee from the breakroom. Irritating from a professional's perspective, but not so surprising considering the setting: after all, there'd been so many gates and patrols between this room and the nearest cellblock that none of the technicians on duty had been expecting a visit from any of the inmates. In a world where all paranormal power existed in the hands of Reginald Hargreeves, these numbnuts could hardly be blamed for not expecting someone to literally teleport their way past all the layers of security.

So, stepping from the shadows, Five raised a silenced pistol and fired a single bullet into the unsuspecting face of the nearest technician, teleported behind the other one even as he scrambled for a weapon, and snapped his neck with one almighty twist to the right.

"Now," Five continued, over the meaty thud of the body slumping to the floor, "What is your big plan for bypassing my scepticism? I'm assuming that you didn't just return our powers out of the goodness of your heart; you want something, and we're the only ones who can give it to you. Am I right?"

Abigail nodded. "You always were the most perceptive of them," she chuckled. "But supposing, just for the sake of argument, that I wasn't asking anything of you and you were free to do literally anything you wanted. If that were the case, what would you do?"

"Find the rest of the Academy, take them on a trip to somewhere in the wilderness, kill anyone who comes after us, get them sheltered in whatever underground bunker or treehouse fort we find first, and make sure they're hidden and fully supplied for whatever happens next."

"And then?"

"Then, as soon as I'm sure they're safe, I go back to the city and start launching raids on the Old Man's infrastructure, shut down as much of his business as possible, ruin every aspect of his empire that I can, and once I'm certain that he doesn't have some countermeasure for teleportation up his sleeve, I kill him. Without Reggie holding it all together, what's left of his empire falls apart, a civilian government can take over, and the Umbrella Academy live what's left of our pathetic lives in peace."

Once again, Abigail looked disappointed. "That's all?"

"What the hell else do I need to do? Shut up a minute, I need to get a good look at the building schematics…"

To her credit, Abigail gave him exactly a minute of clacking away at the keyboard and scanning the numerous monitors for exits before interrupting his reverie.

"Five, have you ever considered that one of the Umbrella Academy's greatest weaknesses is its tendency to split up and bugger about with its own pursuits when they should be focussing on tackling the problem as a team?"

"I have, unfortunately," grumbled Five. "If you were making a point about unity, then that tends to be the Umbrella Academy's kryptonite: we've had exactly one moment of unified victory in the last decade, and that still led to the kid we rescued setting the stage for yet another apocalypse. At all other times, the Umbrella Academy's united front ends up directly causing the apocalypse, or at the very least helping it along! Well, I'm not playing along with this bullshit a moment longer. My family might be dysfunctional when acting alone, but when we're united, we're a walking trigger for the end of days. And if there's anything that last trip to the Commission's headquarters taught me, going solo sure as hell isn't my weakness: I'm handling this myself."

That wearied look of matriarchal disappointment again. "And here I was, hoping you weren't taking any cues from the dreams of attaining paradise that Reginald had been sending you."

Five just barely hid a smirk. He'd known all that the dreams of being merged into a blob monster composed of Ben and some girl had been complete horseshit from beginning to end – after all, he'd learned to recognize subliminal projections and oneiric conditioning in his days with the Commission – but he wasn't going to let himself get sidetracked by gloating over it or asking why Reggie would bother sending him dreams in the first place. He needed to focus on finding a way out of the prison.

"I'm not," he said curtly. "I'm just very confident in my own abilities."

"Has it ever occurred to you," said Abigail, "that there might be a very good reason why the Umbrella Academy always seems to bring about disaster and cataclysm – especially when united?"

"The right mixture of incompetence and emotional dysfunction, I'd imagine."

"Come on, Five, focus! The Umbrella Academy was met with unbridled success in its earliest years, even though most of your opponents were mundane criminals like bank robbers, smugglers, arms dealers, crime syndicates, and maybe the occasional terrorist. Why would any ordinary gang continue to operate in the same city as the Umbrella Academy after you'd so casually trounced their predecessors?"

"It wasn't just bank robbers," said Five, a little more defensively than he'd have liked. "There were a few more serious threats in the weeks before I left, like that time someone tried to turn City Hall into a giant robot, and that incident with Dr Terminal – Allison almost lost a hand to that guy-"

"And what happened after you left?"

"You're asking the wrong person, Abigail, because I wasn't there, in case you forgot. Ben died, and then the team fell apart bit by bit."

"Yes. Funny thing, though: if you ever gain access to the records of that lost timeline and compare the crime rates in the city, you'll notice them dropping every time another member of the family departs; same goes for terrorism, global unrest, space-time distortions, paranormal incursions, and anything else the Academy might have been called upon to stop. By the time Luther went to the moon, the Umbrella Academy was so redundant that the world had forgotten all about it."

Abigail paused for effect, and then added, "And then Reginald summoned and united you with the excuse that something might be about to end the world, and for some reason, probability tilted the world towards an apocalypse from that moment onwards."

Five looked up from the monitors, eyes narrowing. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that Reginald needed a way to justify his position as your legal guardian, just as he eventually needed a way to convince you that Project Oblivion could save the world. But there was only so much crime in the city, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the gangs learned their lesson and gave up, leaving him with nothing to keep the journalists and CPS at bay. So, he made a small but powerful addition to your unique physiologies, a nanoscopic probability enhancer designed to subtly encourage chaos and destruction in your presence, using the other members of the Academy as signal boosters: the more of you were together, the greater the results… and Reginald also predicted that the effects would be amplified as you matured and aged – enough to eventually trigger a disaster of apocalyptic proportions, enough to get you to play along with Project Oblivion."

"That's insane."

"Is it? Think about all the things you accomplished by yourself, all the things your siblings did on their own – writing a book, forming a cult, falling in love, becoming first chair violin, turning vigilante, making it big as a bareknuckle boxer, sobering up, falling in love again, becoming a babysitter to a child that nobody else could connect with – and think about how quickly things went wrong the moment you started banding together. Take Dallas, for instance: things started falling to pieces the moment you started forming a group again, from Allison's sit-in to Luther's last match. And after that, when you needed the Academy to arrive at a rendezvous point so you could all escape via the briefcase, Viktor was arrested, Klaus ended up in a tug-of-war with Ben for control of his body, Allison was attacked by the Swedes, and Diego got captured by Lila. What are the odds?"

Five took a deep breath. "Alright," he grumbled. "Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that I believe you and that the old man really did sabotage probability just so we'd end up causing the apocalypse. Even if that's the case, and I'm not saying I do believe you, you're not exactly disproving my point: why shouldn't I try to tackle this entire situation on my own?"

"For one thing, that modification hasn't followed you into this new reality. After all, Reginald wouldn't want the apocalypse from playing out with every family reunion you held, not after he'd gotten everything he'd wanted. So, while writing the new world into existence, he made sure that the modification wasn't included in your new bodies."

"Well, that's great and all, but that doesn't change the fact that I'd rather keep them safe and out of trouble while I take the necessary steps. What's my incentive for putting them all in danger when, even without probability mods, they'd still find a way of screwing things up?"

"Because what you want is to defeat Reginald's empire. Uniting the Umbrella Academy one last time is the only way you'll be able to make sure that Reginald's empire will have never been."

That got Five's attention.

"What are you talking about?"

"Reginald's creation is flawed, Five. I suspect Allison killed him before he could write in all the necessary clauses and subclauses into the new reality, though he'd never openly admit to such a failure, but one way or another, your family's existence has become the Achilles Heel of his perfect world. The longer you stay alive, the harder it is for him to maintain its stability, and the more you resist his efforts to set things right, the more cataclysmic the dissolution. If you can fight him as one, focus your efforts on the most vulnerable aspects of his world, the eight – excuse me, nine – of you might just be able to destroy Reginald's utopia and revert it to the world it was before."

Five eyed her suspiciously. "There's a catch to this, I can already tell."

"Cynic."

"Realist. So, get on with it: what's the price we have to pay for playing along with your little plan?"

By now, Five was used to being jerked around by employers and mentors alike, so he wasn't expecting Abigail to tell him anything, not until it was too late to disagree or at the very least, not until he'd figured out the caveats of whatever scheme she was planning.

So, it came as something of a surprise when Abigail looked him straight in the eye and said, "There's every possibility that it'll kill you – without any chance of resurrection or afterlife."

"What?"

"Reginald told me that if this world falls, the machinery he looted from the Hotel Oblivion will restore it from a previous template. Depending on how far the machines' backup goes, that could mean restoring the world you knew, as it was before the lunar asteroid took flight for Earth… or it could mean restoring the world of the Sparrow Academy, a world in which you never existed – and this time, there'll be no Umbrella Academy returning from Dallas."

Five considered this, hastily reviewing everything he knew of temporal restoration and the arcane machinery of the Hotel. "And without comparable iterations," he said at last, "there'll be no way of us to migrate to the new reality."

"Exactly. If this is the case, you'll simply cease to exist."

"But even if that's not the case," said Five, "even if there is a template of the original timeline saved to the Oblivion hard drive… well, we won't be the same Umbrella Academy, so we might not be compatible enough for transmigration. We'll die along with this reality, and a completely different version of the family will go on as if nothing happened."

"That's why you have to risk death," said Abigail, solemnly. "If you can get me close enough to the machinery for me to make adjustments, I might be able to tilt things in your favour if I can work out how to adjust the machines… but even so, there's no guarantee that I'll be able to get it right. Even if everything goes well in my plan, there's every possibility that you and your family will die anyway."

Five took a deep breath. "And what do you want out of this, Abigail? What's the big goal that you're hoping to achieve by having us sacrifice ourselves?"

"The undoing of everything my husband made possible with the Hotel Oblivion, including my resurrection."

"What."

"I shouldn't be alive right now," said Abigail, and Five almost recoiled at the weariness in her voice in that moment. "I was at peace when I died over a century ago: I told Reginald to go on without me, shepherd humanity in whatever way he could, do what our people could not. Instead, he ruined untold thousands of lives just for the chance of bringing me back from the grave, and along the way, he opted to turn the world into a dystopia out of revenge for humiliating him. And even after I tried to bring him to his senses, he still refused to let the past die and his grudges along with them. So, I place my hopes with you instead, hoping that you can do the right thing, even knowing what it will cost you."

Five hesitated.

"Very well then," he said, his voice lowered almost below a whisper. "Thank you for being honest with me."

"After everything my husband did, it's quite literally the least I can do. But that's not the point: you've gotten too accustomed to flying solo, even if it's in the interests of your family. You've fooled yourself into thinking that your example is the only one worth following, even if that example happens to be a dying amputee and the founder of the organization that helped make your life a living hell."

She sighed. "As much as I hate to quote Reginald, he had a point in his earliest lessons: 'As much as you must strive for individual greatness, and strive you must, for it won't come to you of its own accord — you must also remember that there is no individual stronger than the collective. The ties that bind you together make you stronger than you are alone.' Well, of course, that was his method of guaranteeing the apocalypse in his own way, but have you ever considered what the Umbrella Academy could be capable of if they ever united without that probability mods?"

"What are you saying?"

"I'm just saying it might be time for you to stop facing your problems as a solitary hero, as you've done whenever your family and allies disappoint you – because the only way you'll ever be able to set things right is to recognize that you are a part of something greater."

"I have, more than once. How exactly is falling back into a superhero team that can barely agree on leadership positions supposed to save the day, especially here?"

"Whoever said anything about superhero teams? You all have to be more than that if you want to undo what Reginald did. Did the French revolution get off the ground with just one lone dissenting voice and a guillotine? Did George Washington win independence for the American colonies all by himself? Think about that, Five: without a unified force, without an army, you might as well be just another lone protester."

She winked. "Find me at Hargreeves Tower when you've figured out what I mean."

And with that, Abigail vanished.

Five was left silently mulling over everything he'd just heard, even as he absently surveyed the monitors for an escape route.

This room was the override point for every single security control room in the prison: in the event the inmates were to ever take control of a cellblock's control room, this office would be the warden's only means of closing any door they opened and shutting any system they tried to hijack. From here, Five could easily pinpoint the nearest exit, unlock it, and be out of here before anyone noticed that his cell was vacant and a door to the outside world had been left open.

And yet…

Had Abigail just been criticizing his behaviour? Or was this an honest-to-god method of undoing Reginald's control?

It was true that he'd taken the solo route to saving the day, and yes, that could be counterproductive if the probability mods had been real and were finally disabled… but could he really just slot himself into a functioning team of superheroes turned revolutionaries when he knew just how incompetent they were?

Luther was an alcoholic, a lovesick dope, and so desperate to atone for his failure in stopping the first apocalypse that he was more than happy to shrink down his brain to golden retriever proportions. Diego was a gloryhound with a saviour complex and a sense of testicle-scratching machismo that not even parenthood could dampen. Allison had been a neurotic bundle of selfishness and guilt even before she'd betrayed the family. Klaus was a hedonistic eccentric with a mouth that never failed to get him into trouble, and that was when he wasn't fucked up on drugs. Ben was a seething, brutish, self-important douche-canoe that had never forgiven the world for letting anyone on the planet be stronger, smarter, or happier than him. Viktor was bent double under the weight of his own regrets and probably still pining after the hausfrau he'd left behind in the 60s. How could he possibly be expected to start a revolution with these people alone?

But maybe he didn't have to.

After all, he was standing in the middle of the biggest prison in Reginald's personal paradise, a hellish depository for any who dared to criticize the regime too loudly or write too eloquently against it.

Real criminals didn't go to jail in this world; instead, they ruled the Red Level while bohemians and critics rotted in prison, with the really incorrigible cases beaten to death and incinerated… and all of those artists, bleeding hearts, dissenters, and disreputables would be out for revenge if ever given the chance. Maybe, just maybe, the revolution that could begin unmaking Reginald's utopia could start right here, with his help.

Smiling, Five reached for the controls, his fingers dancing nimbly across the keypads as he disabled the alarms, switched off the CCTV cameras, and began opening the cellblocks one after another.

Viva la revolution!

A/N: Yeah, I had to explain why apocalypses kept getting kicked off around the Umbrella Academy, along with their abysmal luck in general, and I wasn't satisfied by that last-second load of crap we got from season 4.

Tune in next chapter, in which I reveal THE TRUTH BEHIND THE JENNIFER INCIDENT!