A/N: Happy New Year!

Sorry for the delay, but it took a while for me to finish this chapter what with the chaos on Christmas Day and beyond. We're on the home stretch, and while I've no doubt that the last few chapters will be a little bit on the short side, I'm hoping the ending will be every bit as weird and entertaining as everything I've posted so far. Hopefully, that can live up to the example of the show :)

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

Disclaimer: urgh.

Ben groaned and banged his head against the headrest of his recliner, wondering what had roused him.

Sighing furiously, he sat up and tried to recall what had woken him up. At one point, just before drifting back to sleep yet again, he'd been certain that he'd seen a light in the window, but when he'd been jolted awake, there'd been no sign of a single light outside. No, it was far more likely that what had woken him up was another furious dream of stabbing Singh through the eyeball in revenge for the wrench the bastard had just thrown in Ben's plan.

By now, the heist was over.

The crew had left the depository with their truck practically overflowing with loot, Singh had given everyone their cut, and Ben had walked away with full pockets and a foul mood. True, he had more than a year's worth of earnings stashed under his mattress at this very moment, but the winnings from tonight's heist meant that his big plan for a mutiny were officially dead in the water. Nobody would side with them after the payday they'd received, and trying to overthrow Singh now would just give the boss an excuse to get rid of him. Once again, Ben was stuck as mid-level muscle, watching Klaus get a bigger piece of the action than him… for now.

Realizing that the night had been a complete waste of time, he'd gone home to sleep his irritations away. For anyone else in the city, this would have been damn near impossible this deep into the curfew, but Mr Singh was a treasured business partner to the Red Hats, and the special privileges he earned from them were extended to the members of his crew if they toed the line – and that included the right to use the sewer passages that branched off from Red Level. For good measure, the hired guards who manned the gates that kept all the other riffraff at bay maintained a small fleet of high-powered golf carts as taxi service, so it took less than half an hour for Ben to arrive in the basement of the apartment block he'd called home for the last year or so.

And here he'd been ever since, dozing in his recliner, feet on the coffee table, too tired and too grumpy to even turn the TV on. Besides, it wasn't as if there was anything worth watching: TV in Reginald Hargreeves' paradise consisted almost entirely of things too inoffensive for the corporate censors to bother with, most of which were so mind-numbingly dull that Ben could barely stand to watch any of them.

Also, TJ Hooker for some reason.

The only reason why Ben even owned a TV at all was because Red Level occasionally offered black-market streaming services and contraband DVDs of things that mainstream networks would have never allowed to air without being censored all the way to hell. Anywhere else, that would have meant snuff films or worse, but here in this hellhole, it meant anything that remotely criticized the current political system – or anything that Reggie thought might be insulting him, and for a thin-skinned control freak, that meant a helluva lot: it meant Metropolis. It meant Blade Runner. It meant Aguirre: The Wrath of God. It meant American Psycho. It meant The City of Lost Children. It meant When The Wind Blows. It meant Joyeux Noel. It meant The Great Dictator. It meant Pan's Labyrinth. It meant fucking Brazil.

And right now, the only thing Ben wanted to watch was looped footage of Singh being disembowelled and throttled with his own intestines.

But just as Ben was staring down at his half-empty glass of scotch and thinking that a pre-emptive refill was in order, the doorbell rang.

Ben looked up in shock, hand immediately straying to the shotgun he kept on the end-table next to him. With curfew on and few daring to even leave their apartments for fear of being reported by a neighbour, nobody ever got visitors this early in the morning; this was either a disciplinary visit from Mr Singh, or someone on the Red Hats' payroll wanted a word. Either way, potentially dangerous, especially if someone had figured out that Ben wanted Singh dead.

Still, even if the door was locked, chained, and bolted, he couldn't just ignore the visitor, not if he wanted to keep this apartment. So, Ben rose from his seat with a grunt and made for the door, shotgun still hidden behind his back just in case the visitor turned out to be someone nastier.

As per usual, he snuck a quick look through the peephole before opening up, but as expected, the caller was standing just out of range. Obviously, this was going to be the nastier kind of surprise. Without unfastening the chain, he unbolted, unlocked, and unlatched the door, put the shotgun in his right hand, and then shouldered the door open as suddenly as he could – leaving both barrels aimed squarely at the visitor's skull.

Then he actually saw who was standing there.

Ben's mouth very slowly dropped open, his eyes widening in astonishment, the shotgun slowly falling from his limp hands to land with a thud on the carpet in front of him, his mind frantically reviewing the sight of the impossible face over and over again, unable to accept what his eyes were telling him. He could acknowledge the fact that the visitor was tall, slim, Asian, and dressed in a black leather jacket, and if pushed, he could even grudgingly admit that the visitor had the same height and build as him, but the moment he got to the finer details of stranger's face, his brain rebelled at the very idea. He couldn't be seeing what he was seeing; it simply didn't compute that this was real, for it couldn't be real.

For the visitor was not Mr Singh, nor was it any of the Red Hat Commission's representatives.

The visitor was…

…himself.

Ben could only boggle incredulously at the sight for the next thirty seconds, trying to think of a reason why this impossible sight had appeared before him, without much success.

Maybe tonight's cocaine had been cut with something really nasty.

Maybe he'd finally lost his mind after so many years of frustration.

Or maybe he was dead and he was in Hell as designed by David Lynch.

But then the impossible stranger raised an eyebrow and asked – in Ben's voice – "Would you mind letting me in? I know you're shocked, but it's a little cold out here and I'm pretty sure you'd rather get an explanation once you've had a chance to sit down: you look like you're gonna pass out."

As if hypnotized, Ben unchained the door and allowed his doppelganger to sidle past him into the living room.

"Nice place," he said. "I like the sketches. Especially the girl."

It was the remark about the sketches that finally yanked Ben back to reality, because they were one of the few things about the apartment that he genuinely treasured, especially since he'd drawn them himself – doubly so, in fact since the originals had been lost when the Kugelblitz had eaten the Sparrow Academy and he'd had to recreate all of them from memory.

Hastily retrieving the shotgun from where he'd dropped in, he pointed it squarely at his doppelganger's face and screamed, "Who the fuck are you?!"

"Keep your voice down, there are people trying to sleep next-door."

Ben muttered a few choice expletives in English, Korean, and a few near-incoherent combinations of the two, then tried again. "Who. The Fuck. Are you?" he demanded as quietly as he could manage.

"I'm you," said the doppelganger.

"What?"

"I'm Ben Hargreeves, just like you."

"Uh-huh. And are you gonna explain this to me or are you just here to get me relax before the orderlies arrive to give me a shot of Thorazine?"

The Other Ben sighed deeply. "I only learned the truth a few days ago, so bear with me, okay? You might want to have a seat for this one."

"What truth?"

"Ben, for the love of God, sit down before you fall down. Please?"

Grumbling impotently, Ben flopped down on the couch, while the other Ben sat down in one of the armchairs next to it, awkwardly swivelling it around on the spot until the two of them were eye to eye.

"Alright," the Other Ben continued, "you know the deal Alison made with Reginald?"

"How the fuck do you know about that?"

For the first time, the Other Ben looked genuinely annoyed. "Ben, do you want me to explain myself or do you want to nitpick everything until dawn? I'll get to that when I get to it, okay? Now could you please take a deep breath, calm down, and let me finish?"

Ben nodded, fuming silently

"Anyway, when Allison made a deal with Reginald, her main condition for helping him was that she wanted her brothers and sisters spared, and he agreed to it, though he didn't tell her that he'd be sparing them by giving them new lives in different bodies after he'd finished siphoning them to death. But that's not the point. Point is, while they were hashing things out, Allison made a lot of other requests; since she was drunk as a skunk, she probably doesn't remember most of them, but one of the bigger asks was that she wanted Ben back – the one she'd known growing up."

Ben blinked. "Oh fuck," he groaned. "You're the one the others keep bitching about, aren't you? The goddamn goody-two-shoes Klaus wishes I could be, am I right?"

"Nice to know they remember me," said Other Ben, airily. "Long story short, Reginald was supposed to have me replace you at the very moment you appeared outside the Hotel Oblivion in your new bodies, just like Luther did. But at the last minute, Allison got cold feet and killed Reginald before he could finish adding all the finer points of the new world, so a lot of little things were left unfinished: he didn't get to erase everyone's memories and implant new ones, he didn't get to edit you out of existence, and he didn't get to arrange for me to respawn with the others. Instead, I materialized at my default spawning location, exactly as Reginald's machines recorded back in 1989."

"You mean-"

"Yep. I was resurrected on a train in Seol – the exact same train you and me were born on."

"Fucking hell on a pogo stick."

"That's what I thought, too. I'd have probably stayed in Seol and lived out my days as an office drone in the financial district… if fate hadn't intervened."

Ben took a deep breath. "Okay," he said, wishing more than anything else that there was something alcoholic within reach. "You know all this shit, so either Reggie didn't have time to work on your memories, or… someone told you about all this. In which case, who?"

The other Ben offered an enigmatic smile. "A little bit of both," he said simply. "But in regards to the second, Abigail Hargreeves."

"That ghostly bimbo that's been haunting Hargreeves Tower?"

For the first time since they'd met, the other Ben looked genuinely surprised. "You're well-informed."

"Comes with the territory: the criminal enterprises that are in bed with the regime are always the best-connected, so news of what's been going on right at the top of the pyramid eventually slides downhill to the middlemen of the underworld and trickles down to lowlifes like me. It's the one advantage I've got over fucking Klaus, and that's only because Klaus doesn't want to know what's going on above his station: he's too busy trying to make up for lost time by being everyone's favourite brother – or uncle in the case of Diego's brat. Someone saw a weird chick in white haunting the penthouse suite of Reggie's palace, and the news eventually makes its way down the grapevine to me. Of course, it doesn't do anyone any real good to know, since there's not much they can do with it, so nobody in the security services gives a shit what we hear so long as it doesn't give us anything to work with."

"Fair enough."

"But why the hell would this Abigail tell you anything if she's part of Reggie's regime?"

That enigmatic smile again. "Because she thinks you could do better," said the Other Ben with a wink.

Ben rolled his eyes. "Of fucking course she does. Every fucker in this fucking family wants to tell me what I'm fucking doing wrong with my fucking life or how fucking badly I chose my fucking employer or how much fucking danger I'm fucking putting myself through, or how much better my fucking junkie adopted brother from another fucking timelne's doing than me, or whatever the fuck. It all boils down to the fact that they all think I should be on my fucking knees sucking Klaus's cock or pretending to be you."

"Well, I've either hit a nerve or you're trying to 'do better' by seeing if you can hit the world record for how many f-bombs you can use in the space of a paragraph."

"Fuck you and your mother," snapped Ben, belatedly realizing that he'd just insulted his own birth mother and hoping that the Other Ben wouldn't notice.

"But that's just the thing, isn't it?" said the Other Ben. "You haven't really changed in the last ten years or so: even now that the Sparrow Academy are all dead except for you and you've got a different family to support you and a different world to live in, you're still living out the same routine you had back when the Sparrow Academy was on top of the world – wait for the leader to show weakness, get the rest of your team on your side, and then seize the crown for yourself."

"Well, what the fuck do you want me to do?"

"Better."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?!"

The Other Ben sighed wearily. "It means that you're stuck in a rut and Klaus doesn't have the heart to tell you, because as much as he's changed, he's never really been able to force people to change. You could be doing so much more for yourself, for your family, for everyone else on the face of this planet, but instead, you're living out a fantasy that was pointless back when you were pitted against a fellow superhuman, and now that you're pitted against the crime lord equivalent of middle management, it's completely futile. You're half a man, and you have been ever since Reginald convinced you to learn the wrong lesson."

"…what are you talking about?"

"Jennifer Sawal."

"Who?"

The Other Ben sighed. "Not so surprising you haven't remembered the name. From the memories Abigail shared with me, you only remember her face. You didn't even react appropriately when the 'Jennifer Incident' was brought up back in your home timeline. But let me put it like this: do you remember how you got that scar?"

He pointed at the faded wound just under his left eye, as if Ben could have possibly forgotten where the hell it was.

"Yeah," grumbled Ben. "Marcus kicked my ass, persuaded everyone once and for all that I wasn't fit to be Number One."

"And how did you get to the fight with him? What made you think you could beat Marcus?"

"Because he showed weakness."

"When?"

Ben opened his mouth to give a smartassed reply, only to realize he had nothing to say.

"You see? You don't remember the Jennifer incident, and the biggest reason for that is because Marcus defeating you rubbed out everything you could have learned from that day. True, you didn't call it the Jennifer Incident, because none of you ever really knew Jennifer Sawal's name." Ben coughed uncomfortably, and added, "Also, I'm pretty sure the day I came into being did some funny things to your memory, another result of Dear Old Dad not having the time to write everything he wanted into his new world, so you might have gotten your memories of the event mixed up with mine."

"Look," sighed Ben, "just fucking give me a straight answer: who is Jennifer Sawal? What was the Jennifer Incident? How did it happen for me, and how did it happen for you? And how does it all tie in with this Abigail bitch wanting me to be 'better' or whatever the fuck?"

"First of all, Jennifer was one of us: the odd one out, the one unadopted Marigold Child lucky enough to avoid overloading her powers before she turned twenty, but not 'lucky' enough to be adopted by Reginald Hargreeves. We both met her in separate timelines, and she defined the course of our lives… in a sense: for you, she made you drive away all your compassion until you couldn't even bring yourself to feel it for your own brothers and sisters. And as for me, well, she killed me."

The other Ben offered a rueful little smile.

"…what?"

"Look, it'll take too long to explain and I'm not expecting you to change your ways after almost twenty uninterrupted years of being a prick, least of all with your apartment being watched by a hitsquad. All we can do is-"

"WHAT?" Ben roared. "What you mean my apartment's being watched by a hitsquad?!"

"I'm pretty sure the meaning was self-contained, Ben: Reginald's trying to have you killed. Simple as that."

"WHY?"

"Because he thinks you're a threat to his power. Trouble is, he doesn't know that you're not capable of being a threat without me."

There was a deathly silence.

"Okay," said Ben, icily. "Explain why I'm not a threat to him without you, you self-righteous self-important self-sucking sack of shit. Let's hear it all: no holding back this time, no dancing around the truth. Just fucking tell me."

The Other Ben smirked ever-so-slightly. "Because you aren't interested in saving the world," he said, matter-of-factly. "Because you aren't interested in saving the lives of your friends or your family. Truth be told, I'm not even sure if you give a damn about saving yourself: you haven't cared since the aftermath of the Jennifer Incident, because ever since you had and lost the chance to be the top dog of the Sparrow Academy, the only consistent thing you've been is bitter, hateful, and ambitious. And it's for that reason why you won't realize the golden opportunity that's landed in your lap, because you just can't imagine getting anything better than killing your boss and taking his place."

"WHAT FUCKING OPPORTUNITY?!"

"Why should I tell you, Ben? You wouldn't know what to do with it if I told you. All the others realized what they had and made the most of it once they understood their full potential. You'd just butcher your way to the top of the totem pole: Singh, the Red Hat Commission, the Chairman of the Hargreeves Foundation, and eventually Reginald himself. And after that, you'd be ruling the world, and you'd just as bad as Reginald, and it'd never even occur to you that you could be anything other than king shit."

Ben fumed for a moment or so. As much as he hated to admit it, the Other Ben had a point: he would be fighting his way to the top of the pyramid if he got the chance, even if he didn't know what this 'golden opportunity' really was. And, looking back, he had to admit that he'd spent a lot of time hunting for the top job with no idea of what the hell he was supposed to do once he got there.

"Alright," he growled. "How am I supposed to take this opportunity, whatever the fuck it is? What's going to save me from being killed by the Hargreeves hit squad? What's supposed to change my ways now?"

"Symbiosis."

"What?"

"Or a merger, if you like. Reginald wanted to delete you to make for me, but because he couldn't finish, we now we exist as anomalies. And that means that we can… coexist as one." He offered a slightly apologetic smile, and added, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I think it might be for the best; I mean, ever since Reginald got his hooks into you, you've been half a man: acceptance, trust, hope, love, all the emotions that make up the best part of a human being were driven out of you long ago. If you'll let me, I can bring them back and allow you to hope for something other than temporary power, but it'll mean that the two of us will become one."

"You could have just said 'fusion' instead of a pussy business-school term like 'merger,' you know? Alright, alright: what's going to happen if I do let the two of us fuse together? What'll it cost me?"

"You'll become part of me," said Other Ben, simply. "Just as I'll become part of you. Our feelings will become as one, and the same goes for memories and eventually thoughts as well. We'll be able to think independently at first and share control of a single body, but in time, the differences between us will dwindle to nothing and we'll become a single personality. Bit by bit, the old you will die and the old me will die."

Ben's brow wrinkled. "Not exactly the best sell, Other Me."

"It's the truth. Haven't you wanted to do something better with your life but never known what it was? Haven't you always been unhappy with yourself for never living up to your full potential and never known what that even was?"

"Yes, but… the two of us slowly dying to make way for someone else is better than just, you know, living?"

"Depending on your outlook, our old selves die every time we change our minds and rethink our lives."

"Oh fuck off, Buddha."

"You'll live, Ben: your mind won't just blink out of existence. You'll just find yourself thinking slightly differently a little bit a time. You'll still be you; you'll just a bit of my personality there to act when your anger and your ambitions fail you."

Ben opened his mouth to snarl out a reply – and at that very moment, there was a muffled crunch of splintering wood from somewhere worryingly close by, followed closely by the sound of booted feet rushing up the stairs.

"It's now or never, Ben," said the Other Ben. "You can merge with me now, be everything Reginald kept from you, and maybe do something more important than you've ever done in your entire life… or you can be gunned down by the secret police. Your choice, champ."

He stretched out a hand towards him, as if expecting Ben to take it. For three seconds that seemed to last as long as an hour, Ben could only stare at the outstretched hand, wondering if his life really had come down to a decision between a handshake and an extremely death.

But then he heard another crash from even closer than the first and realized with a jolt of shock that a second team of assassins were breaking in from above. His escape plan was already dead in the water, and now any hope of improvising by jumping to the building nextdoor was equally screwed. Right now, there was only one way out, and hopefully whatever Other Ben was proposing would give them the edge against the secret police, because otherwise they were both fucked.

With no choice left, Ben reached out and grabbed his doppelganger's hand-

-and in the split-second that followed, he saw Other Ben's flesh ooze off his bones and begin pouring itself into him, saw his eyes melt and pour themselves into Ben's waiting sockets, saw his clothes fuse perfectly with his other selve's attire, and as the Other Ben's skull cracked open, he saw knowledge begin pouring itself into his own brain just as his knowledge began pouring into Other Ben's.

And as he fell to the ground as a writhing heap of squirming flesh and far too many limbs, Ben finally understood – and remembered.

Across the timelines, Jennifer had been one of the forty-three gifted children.

But she'd never been noticed by Reginald Hargreeves: she'd been born under the radar, her parents hiding the nature of her birth from the media and their neighbours. Under normal circumstances, she would have died before she'd reached the age of twenty, just like all the other gifted children that Reginald had declined to adopt, overwhelmed by the magnitude of her powers without the training and conditioning to control them.

Instead, when her power to distort the human body by willpower became apparent, fate intervened: the Russian Mafiya took notice and offered her terrified parents a generous sum for their troubled daughter, and though they bullied and threatened, Jennifer's mother and father had already buckled under the strain of the little girl's powers. Smuggling Jennifer out of the country by night, they took her to a hidden base north of Moscow and there, in the gargantuan storeroom of what had once been a fallout bunker, they groomed her to become a weapon.

Through the sacrifice of thousands of expendable debtors and traitors and even political prisoners donated by the government, they slowly taught her the art of consciously wielding her powers. Through the efforts of ex-KGB agents and professional killers who'd been active since the death of Vladimir Lenin, she learned how to use her powers as an assassin, stepping unnoticed through the corridors of power, summoning up lethal tumours and aneurysms with the lightest touch. Through carefully applied doses morphine, heroin, and a dozen other addictive drugs, she was taught to obey orders and take pleasure in a kill. And finally, alongside the dishonourable discharges and disgraces of the army, she was taught to use her power at range in bloody battle. And so, by the age of sixteen, Jennifer had become the weapon that her keepers had so gleefully coveted.

And so, when Sir Reginald Hargreeves realized that there was a child that might live long enough to become a threat to his plans, he sent his Academies after her. Not that he told either of them what she really was, of course: that would have prompted too much empathy from them, for both the Umbrellas and the Sparrows were still children, still innocent in their own way – even after Five's disappearance had left the Umbrella Academy labouring under the hammer of Reginald's disgust and disappointment. So, he told them that Jennifer was a dangerous weapon, and technically he was being honest… but his intention was for her to be destroyed along with the bunker warehouse, ideally buried in the rubble long before the Academy could even realize what they were up against.

His mistake was that Jennifer wouldn't have been able to harness the full extent of her abilities under the tuition of Mafiosi. In this, he was wrong – dead wrong: the powers of the two Academies were subject to the effects of Jennifer's abilities like any other bodily process, and both of them suffered for it in their own way.

In that moment, Ben finally saw the event that he'd forgotten after so many years of bitter dismissal and dimensional confusion: they'd caught the Mafiya by surprise, with Marcus leading a seemingly unstoppable charge through the warehouse with Alphonse, Fei, and Christopher at his back, with Sloane, Jayme, and Ben as support to take out any mobsters the charge had missed. Realizing that escape was impossible and that none of them would survive the battle, the Mafiya had unleashed Jennifer, giving her full permission to use her powers entirely without restriction. And because the Sparrow Academy had been expecting to be destroying a prototype WMD, the appearance of Jennifer caught them completely off-guard.

Her first attack left Marcus paralysed before he could even react to her presence.

When Fei had summoned her crows, Jennifer took control of her nervous system and turned the birds against her; within moments, Fei's eyes had been pecked and clawed beyond repair or replacement, leaving her a bloodied heap on the floor next to Marcus.

When Alphonse tried to reflect Jennifer's attacks back on her, she'd simply waved a hand and seized control of his body, leaving his skin so blistered and calloused that he simply couldn't move for the pain; Alphonse's power-related condition was inborn and shouldn't have become crippling until his fifties at the very least, but at the touch of Jennifer's powers, it was made manifest early – soon to take over his life from then on.

As for Chris, his body had contorted in on itself before he could even take aim, his psychocrystalline-based powers consuming his skin and warping his bones into a tortured cube of dissolving bone and blossoming crystal. He would never walk again, nor touch or hear or see or speak as a human.

All this had happened in less than fifteen seconds.

Witnessing this horror, the three remaining members of the Sparrow Academy were left in a disorganized rout: Jayme panicked, too afraid of what her own hallucinogens might do to her to face Jennifer; Sloane was too busy trying to rescue her fallen teammates to focus on ending the threat; and in the end, it was Ben who stepped up.

Attacking from behind, he wrapped his tentacles around her throat and squeezed until she couldn't focus her powers anywhere near him. By rights, he shouldn't have made eye contact, much less looked at her face, but he did: she saw her eyes widening in panic as she struggled to breath, saw her face contorting with bewilderment as she tried and failed to force the tentacles away, too frightened to concentrate and too baffled by this display of power to understand it's biology.

Ben hadn't known this at the time, of course; all he knew was that he was face to face with the weapon he'd been sent after and he needed to destroy it before anyone else got hurt; so, without flinching from Jennifer's terrified stare, he squeezed and throttled and slowly crushed the life out of her. It wasn't the first time he'd killed, of course: under Reggie's tutelage, he'd killed hundreds of criminals and terrorists and had felt the distinctive jab of pain and remorse ripple through his heart with every death, but always a little lesser every time. This the first time he'd killed anyone his age, and as Jennifer went still at last, he felt the familiar stab of grief and regret one last time – enough to weep over her body.

He never felt it again.

Once the wounded members of the Academy had been loaded onto the jet and ferried back to the mansion, Ben had been lauded as the saviour of the day, sincerely praised by Sir Reginald for the first time in his entire life. And no sooner had Ben started to enjoy the euphoria of Reggie being genuinely proud of him, he'd been informed that this could be the gateway to bigger and better things: Marcus had failed in his duties as Number One, and Ben would be the one to replace him.

And little by little, the death of Jennifer was almost completely forgotten in Ben's meteoric rise to power, all of it wallpapered over by the exhilaration of everything he'd achieved. Even the cause of Fei's blinding, Alphonse's skin condition, and Christopher's mutilation gradually slipped Ben's mind in the months that followed – to the point that he even forgot to show the slightest bit of care for how they were adjusting to their new lives.

In hindsight, that was why the new Number One had ultimately failed: he was too caught up in his own hype to care about the rest of the team, and unlike Marcus, he didn't have the charisma or the menace to make the team forgive his flaws.

Marcus could be both feared and loved.

Ben could only be hated.

When Ben finally fucked up one mission too many, Marcus was there to challenge him for the role of Number One, and even with the power of his tentacles, Ben couldn't stand against him. The slick bastard ducked and weaved and pirouetted his way through a jungle of tentacles with inhuman grace, broke both his legs with a single kick, shattered his ribcage, crushed both his hands, rang his head like a bell until Ben couldn't focus on using his powers a moment longer, and as a final reminder of his failure, left him with That Scar courtesy of the spurs on his boots. And while Ben lay there bleeding, the entire team had cheered the victor and Sir Reginald had gladly reinstated Marcus as Number One.

Ben had spent the next five months in the mansion's infirmary, alone except for Grace and Pogo, quietly seething in bitterness. Little by little, the bitterness took over his life, and by the time he was fit enough to rejoin the team, he'd forgotten all about Jennifer – all except for her face and lingering sense of inexplicable regret.

For the Umbrella Academy, it had happened a little differently.

Once again, they were told that they needed to destroy a dangerous weapon, but instead of leading a charge as Marcus had, Luther decided to scout the bunker as he'd been taught, intending to plant a bomb at the heart of the facility and then leave. Of course, Diego was already starting to chafe under Luther's leadership, so the team split up and spread out across the complex – Other Ben teaming up with Klaus to keep him out of trouble

Because of this less aggressive approach, Jennifer's Mafiya handlers didn't know they were under attack for quite a while. So, when Jennifer found Other Ben and Klaus wandering around, she didn't go on the offensive. Instead, curious at meeting boys her age for the first time in her life, she approached and introduced herself to them, the unstoppable flesh-distorting weapon briefly stammering and blushing like the teenage girl she was.

And to Klaus' amusement, the Other Ben responded in kind, tongue-tied and stuttering. It was almost like watching Sloane and Luther's relationship play out all over again, except they hadn't started out by fighting, and this time they had a slightly hungover Klaus spectating. For a while, the two lovebirds were simply chatting about themselves, Jennifer too smitten to realize that she was talking to a group of intruders, Other Ben not realizing that he was talking to the weapon he'd been sent to kill.

But eventually, the rest of the Academy found them – and in the confusion that followed, a guard heard the noise and sounded the alarm. The Mafiya handlers were on the scene within seconds, activating Jennifer's programming and ordering her to kill the Umbrella Academy – and with her conditioning, Jennifer couldn't resist a direct order.

The Academy put up an impressive fight, but despite their best efforts, Jennifer defeated them in barely forty seconds, only just barely keeping herself from killing them outright: Diego's eyes stopped working, Allison's lungs withered until she couldn't even speak, and Klaus was left pinned to the floor by Luther's paralysed body, struggling to crawl to freedom.

Other Ben tried to get through to Jennifer, tried with all his might to reach her through her conditioning and get her to see that she was being manipulated, even promising her friendship and family if she would just stand down… but before she could even consider it, her handlers hit an override switch, and Jennifer turned all her power against Ben – and in this version of history, she'd had more than enough time to get to know how his powers worked. Hs own tentacles turned traitor, grabbing him by the arms and legs and slowly tearing him apart.

And then Klaus, forgotten by everyone, made his move.

Drawing a switchblade from his belt with trembling hands, he stepped behind Jennifer and slit her throat.

And as she bled out, the Mafiya fled for their lives, and the surviving members of the Umbrella Academy recovered, Klaus collapsed to his knees, looked from Jennifer's cooling body to the shredded corpse of the brother he'd been closest to, and began to sob.

It was the Jennifer incident, as they later called it, that proved to be the final downfall of the Umbrella Academy as Reginald had envisioned it. Five's departure had put Project Oblivion in jeopardy, but Reggie had always hoped Five might return one day; now that one of the power sources for the Hotel was dead and the public no longer trusted the Umbrella Academy to provide reasonable safety for its students, Project Oblivion was all but unattainable except for a few increasingly desperate Plan Bs, Cs, and Ds.

In turn, without Other Ben's compassion and stability holding the team together, it was only a matter of time before the Academy simply fell apart, its members trickling away little by little: Diego struck out on his own out of disgust for Reginald, Allison gave up on being a hero and started chasing her ambitions, Klaus plunged deeper and deeper into addiction until he simply left to follow his heroin dealer all the way to fucking Florida of all places. Unnoticed by the others, Ben's ghost followed him.

But that wasn't the only thing there was to learn.

The Other Ben hadn't let his death change who he was: he was still compassionate, still reasonable, still doing his best to help Klaus even as his growing need to smother his pain slowly destroyed him. He hadn't let bitterness turn him into a monster. He hadn't learned to hate his siblings, and even as they'd changed for the worse, they never hated him: even Klaus, at his lowest, loved Other Ben in his own bizarre way. And when the Other Ben had found the opportunity, he'd sacrificed everything he had left to save Viktor and faded away in his arms.

For the first time, Ben understood why the Academy loved the Other Ben so much.

And for the first time since his fifteenth birthday, Ben wished that he could be like someone else.

And as if by magic, he heard the Other Ben's voice echoing across the tangle of memories that his mind had become: You can be, Ben, you can be. You just have to learn from me – just as I learn from you. Let the memories flow freely…

Ben took a deep breath, and almost without hesitation, opened his mind to everything.

And in the instant that followed, a voice said, "Find me."

Moments later, the hitsquad kicked the door down.

What met them was a tsunami of tentacles, bundled together so thickly that there no hope of avoiding it, no chance of firing a single shot at its source – because the target was practically invisible behind the solid writhing wave of glistening sinuous tendrils that now swept them off their feet and slammed them against the opposite wall. One or two recovered enough to raise their guns and take aim even as the tentacles pressed down on them, but another wave erupted from the source, pressing them flat against the wall until their bodies crumpled to bloody mulch under the onslaught.

More gunmen poured up the stairs with rifles in readiness, only to be snatched up and flung right back down the stairwell with bone-shattering force by even more tentacles. Secret police operatives at the bottom of the stairs, suddenly realizing they were outmatched, frantically called for their backup to bring in explosives – the ultimate last resort for an already ruthless assassination – only for a tentacle as dense as a tree truck to wrap itself around the staircase right above them and bring the whole thing crashing down on top of them.

The backup, who had no idea what the hell was going on, had just enough time to look up at the building in confusion as this last radio message died away – before the window of Ben's apartment suddenly exploded open, disgorging the couch, coffee table, and TV, followed closely by the next wave of tentacles. Those of the assassins who were fortunate enough not to be crushed by falling furniture found themselves snatched up and ripped to pieces.

Within two minutes, the entire hitsquad was dead or running for their lives.

And at the heart of the chaos, Ben stood alone – and yet not.

Now he knew what it was like to be as loved as the Other Ben had been. Now he knew what should have been

He still had so much left to learn, but he'd already made so much progress: as self-centred as he'd been, he never would have had the hope to realize that his powers had returned in his sleep if the Other Ben hadn't been there to show him the way. And could sense that the Other Ben needed his anger to show him the way, too, to give him the edge to fight where once he had been the most reluctant.

By uniting, they would help each other.

By uniting, they would help their family.

By uniting, they would save the world.

A/N: Up next, our lucky number seven!