Dreaming Of Umbrellas

by Straightjacketed

Five years after Reginald's victory at the Hotel Oblivion, the Umbrella Academy are barely hanging on in the dystopia he's built... and yet all of them are experiencing strange dreams and nightmares that seem to be showing them the way to a better future. Is there a path to a future outside of Reggie's control here, or is something else in play?

18. The Unravelling

A/N: And now we reach the penultimate chapter!

Sorry for the delay - this took so much refining before I was absolutely satisfied with it, but even so, it's been an absolute blast to write... even if it did end up being easily the biggest chapter I've posted without first splitting it in half.

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

Disclaimer: blurgh.

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For the longest time, Reginald was convinced that the stalemate was beginning to tip in his favour.

The army of ghosts with the idiotic hippy couple at their head could kill his troops, glide through blasts from the most advanced weaponry in this iteration of history, rip the tank drivers and helicopters right out from their seats, and inspire such terror that entire platoons had simply dropped their guns and fled for their lives.

But they couldn't harm Reginald: by now, he was too layered in armour and etheric alterations generated by the machines of Hotel Oblivion for even a ghost to kill him. They could apply physical force, drive him backwards, even knock him over and offend his dignity if enough of them swarmed him at once, but they couldn't kill him.

Besides, he still had half a garrison of troops within the city, with legion after legion being shipped in from New York and Milwaukee to replace them, plus any deserters that had regained enough presence of mind to return to barracks in shame. With an entire air force of drones patrolling the skies and his reinforcements waiting to respond to the first alarm sounded, Reginald had been more than happy to pretend to retreat across the tower grounds while he waited for the Umbrella Academy to show themselves.

So, as long as the stalemate held, he'd led the ghosts on a merry chase around the Tower grounds, ordering his snipers and drones to keep an eye out for any sign of the Umbrella Academy. The ghosts would be shielding his adopted children from any enemy attack long enough for them to launch an all-out assault on Reginald, but of course, their hatred of him overwhelmed their tactical sense: they were even more powerful than ever before, but that didn't make them invincible. Enough explosive ordinance delivered without warning and the Umbrella Academy would be dead once and for all – all except for Klaus, of course, but with him temporarily dead, the army of ghosts would falter… and of course, a cement truck would be waiting to entomb Klaus for all time, preventing any further resurrections.

But then, just as he was certain that the tide was beginning to turn, the air around him suddenly rippled.

For the briefest of moments, the world itself seemed to eddy and tremble; skyscrapers bent and swayed like trees in a gale; neon signs bubbled and swirled in their frames and trickled down the sides of buildings; streetlights sprouted branches, which budded and suddenly blossomed into dozens of multihued paper lanterns; the fading moon seemed to flatten and fracture into countless gleaming facets like a disco ball, each facet reflecting a spotlight down on the Earth below.

And then, just as quickly as the vision had appeared, it was gone.

Reginald blinked and almost stumbled, looking around in confusion for the source of the distortion. It was as if he'd just been on the receiving end of an aftershock, a faint echo of something almost like an earthquake – and yet not. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was, not with so many ghosts still swarming after him, but whatever it was seemed uncannily familiar.

And then from somewhere overhead, he heard music.

Not just any music, though: it was a full orchestral rendition of The Show Must Go On, by the band Queen, circa 1991 – a piece of music that had been banned ever since it had been confirmed as societally disruptive. Shame, really: it was one of Mr Mercury's greatest works, certainly the very best from his final days… but why was it playing now and where was it playing from? And by whom?

For a moment, Reginald struggled to distinguish the source of the music, no easy task with an entire army bearing down on him… but then he felt the ripple in the air around once again, saw the bewildering cascade of visions begin anew, felt the ground beneath him heaving and yet not as reality itself convulsed under the onslaught. Even once it subsided, he knew at once that whatever was happening was leaving scars on the world around him, for weather patterns had distorted even further than ever before: by all observations, the sun was rising slower than usual through the smogs, dragging out the pre-dawn twilight than ever before.

And in that moment, two revelations hit him at once.

First, the music was playing directly above him, and if he recognized the source of those ripples in reality accurately enough, it was being played by none other than the Umbrella Academy, right at the top of his own tower.

Secondly, the nightmare that he'd been dreading all this time was finally coming true.

The Umbrella Academy were triggering the collapse of his constructed world. Whatever they were doing up there was destabilizing reality, encouraging the growth of fresh tears in the fabric of existence, and with every reality warp they enacted, the tears grew, converged, blossomed… and it would only be a matter of time before every single tear fused into a single rip large enough to consume any stable aspect of reality it hadn't already corrupted.

He didn't know how they'd gotten the idea to do so by playing a Queen power ballad, how they'd gotten inside the tower to do so, how they knew of alternate methods of entering the tower, why they'd gone to the top of the tower in the first place instead of attacking him as past habits suggested.

All that mattered was stopping them, now.

Once they were dead, he could activate his machines and stabilize the dissolution before it got any worse. In the meantime, he was going to have to make the quickest retreat possible.

Darting away from the surging crowd of ghosts still hot on his heels, he made a beeline for the nearest entrance to the tower foyer, less than a hundred feet away, frantically tapping his collar mic for attention as he did so. "I want all remaining forces to hold back the insurgent army on the double!" he barked. "These ghosts are not to follow me into the building; I cannot afford to have any interruption for my work inside!"

There was a crackle from the other end of the radio. "But sir, the ghosts can't be destroyed! The most we can do is buy time, and that'll mean-"

"I know what it'll mean, damn you!" shouted Reginald, sidestepping a pincer of oncoming ghosts. "Just get your troops in here now! The fate of the universe depends on it! And if that proves too difficult for you to comprehend, your lives depend on it – as do the lives of every friend and loved one you have ever had! Now get down here!"

From the other end, there a series of muffled orders, and then as if by magic, fresh troops began cascading down from above, rappelling in from helicopters high above the streets to land nimbly all about the tower. Within seconds, the streets were teeming with hundreds of soldiers, to joined by thousands more as security reinforcements poured in, and within seconds, they were firing at the ghosts. Of course, even with the hastily produced modifications that Reginald had provided at almost the last minute, their bullets couldn't actually kill ghosts, but they could definitely cause enough pain to debilitate, distract, and most importantly, delay.

As the ghosts surged towards the attackers in a rage, the drones swooped down from above and began strafing the ghosts from above, drawing more attention. Bit by bit, the pursuing horde thinned as more and more of the spectres threw themselves at the reinforcements, not realizing the strategy in play, and once a few squads of heavy infantry darted in between Reginald and the ghosts, the chase was all but over.

Reginald flung himself through the foyer doors with a crash, barely pausing long enough to allow the remaining four soldiers to follow him inside before slamming the doors shut, locking them behind him, and activating the energized security curtains.

With a single press of a button, every single plate glass window in the foyer was instantly shrouded in a glowing nimbus of energy, dense enough to keep out bullets, artillery shells, laser beams, pyroclastic flows, nuclear blasts… and with a little luck, ghosts.

True, he didn't expect them to keep out the ghosts forever: after all, the security curtains hadn't been intended to keep out all forms of energy and certainly not on a permanent basis. Enough wraiths hammering at the curtain in unison would probably be enough to bring it down after a few minutes of concerted hammering and battering, but by then, Reginald would be already out of reach. They wouldn't be able to follow him this way – so if Klaus intended to stop him with ghosts, the bohemian fool would have to summon them directly into the building, and as long as he was still maintaining the horde outside, that would cost him precious stamina.

Reginald turned to the four soldiers who'd joined him. "There are intruders in the penthouse," he said. "They are to be dealt with immediately. Now, follow me and do not ask questions."

The soldiers nodded obediently and began following Reginald through the foyer to the elevators. However, none of the doors opened when the call button was pushed, and closer examination revealed that it had been sabotaged – as had all the elevators. A few seconds later, one of the soldiers reported that the door to the stairs had been barricaded shut from the other side.

Five's doing, no doubt, thought Reginald.

But unfortunately for Five, there were always other options.

Proceeding to the end of the hall, Reginald found that his private elevator was still safely concealed behind the janitor's supply closet and still untouched. There was just enough room for the five of them to pile aboard, thankfully, and together, they began a rapid ascent towards the top floor.

This world is mine, Reginald thought furiously, as he hurtled skywards. This reality is mine. It took me a century of waiting, decades of humiliation, and two deaths to attain… and it will stay mine, no matter the cost. If these idiots think I'll hesitate to kill them out of some misbegotten paternal instinct, they're going to be very disappointed…

By the time the elevator rumbled to a stop, The Show Must Go On was over, and Radio Gaga was just wrapping up.

The moment the doors opened, the soldiers immediately piled out ahead of Reginald, only to be brought up short by a hail of gunfire. At once, the squad tried to find cover, but with the elevator having opened in a marble entrance hall between two grand staircases, there was none to be found, and so all they could do was try desperately to outgun their attackers – without much success: whenever the soldiers seemed to have drawn a bead on their target, it was moving again at a speed that beggared human reaction time, and worse still, every time it moved, a gout of flame tore through the entrance hall and forced the team to scatter in all directions. And worse still, the constant pyrotechnics and gunfire from non-smokeless cartridges and even the occasional grenade made it just about impossible to work out what the hell was firing at them.

In the end, Reginald ran out of patience long before their attackers ran out of ammunition. Lunging out of the elevator, he grabbed the nearest soldier by the scuff of the neck and all threw him out of formation, sending him skidding helplessly across the marble floor – where he was immediately shot six times by the assailants and scorched to a crisp with the flamethrower for good measure.

And as the assailants briefly struggled to decide on whether to attack Reginald or the soldiers that were already shooting back at them, Reginald finally got his first look at the Umbrella Academy's defenders.

On the left, leaping from staircase to staircase and swinging off the chandelier with a Desert Eagle in either hand, was none other than Pogo, still dressed in the butler's uniform he'd worn back in the original timeline – but now just as fit and nimble as he'd been in the Sparrow Academy's timeline. Vaulting across the balustrades and springing off the walls, he peppered the oncoming soldiers with heavy pistol fire, he was up against troops equipped with the best body armour money could buy, but with every shot that landed, his opponents were a little slower – and a little easier for Pogo's compatriot to ambush.

On the right, advancing slowly and merciless with a flamethrower in her hands, was Grace. She was still dressed in clothes that hadn't been fashionable since the 1950s, her hair and makeup still in the style of a Stepford Wife, as Allison had put it, only now she was carrying the weight of an entire arsenal on her back including the fuel tank for the flamethrower.

By now, the soldiers had already shot her at least a dozen times, but Grace's design wasn't so easily disabled, even in universes where she hadn't been designed to withstand a snapped neck. Even with her right arm blasted down to the endoskeleton, her ribcage torn open, the left side of her face nothing more than a gleaming metal skull, and her legs flayed by shrapnel from all the frag grenades, Grace was still marching relentlessly onwards even as soldiers packed and ran rather than face her head-on.

Within a matter of seconds, the soldiers were dead to the last man, either felled by a hailstorm of bullets or reduced to charred meat by a blazing cone of napalm. And in the silence that followed the end of Radio Gaga, the two defenders regarded Reginald with cold, unsympathetic eyes.

For his part, Reginald could only stare back, seething with rage at the betrayal that was being enacted.

"So, this is how I'm repaid for my generosity," he growled. "After everything I've done for them, my friend and creations side with a parcel of overgrown children who ruined their lives, destroyed the world, and killed them – twice – instead of the one living being that gave them everything: you wouldn't be able to think if it wasn't for me, Pogo, and you wouldn't even exist if I hadn't built you, Grace. You had gratitude once, as I recall."

"We were grateful, Sir Reginald," said Pogo, solemnly. "We never stopped loving you, even after everything you did to those in our care."

"But you also ordered us to protect the children," added Grace. "You let us form bonds with them, treat them as our children when you couldn't do the same, and then went on abusing them and forced us to agree to it."

"You made us complicit: you programmed Grace to comply with all orders and told me again and again that everything you did to the children was for their own good and the good of the world. But you lied – and I was so loyal to you that I didn't see through your lies until you told one too many."

"You wanted us to protect them: now we have to protect them from you."

And then, as One Vision began roaring to life just a few rooms away, the two darted back into motion and opened fire. Reginald was left stumbling backwards as a quintet of bullets hammered into him, slamming him against the opposite wall even as Grace took careful aim, raised the flamethrower's nozzle, and burned him alive in a sizzling beam of napalm.

But none of it had any effect on him. Reginald had augmented himself so thoroughly with the power of the Hotel Oblivion's machines that not even the scorching heat of the flamethrower could harm him, much less his skinsuit.

And as bad luck would have it, Grace had just reached the dregs of the flamethrower's tank, and Pogo's Desert Eagles were finally empty.

He allowed them a moment to toss aside their exhausted weapons and make a grab for their sidearms – Pogo a machete concealed in his jacket, Grace a combat shotgun strapped to her back.

Then, doffing his coat, he replied.

Tearing off his right glove, he let the artificial skin flop to the ground as the real him erupted forth in a vast bullwhip of muscle and sinew. Pogo had just enough time to dart out of the way before the tentacle crushed the balustrade that he'd been standing behind a moment ago, while Grace's defence programming took over, sending her on a perfectly calculated sidestep away from the rippling tentacle.

Then the two of them went on the offensive again, Pogo soaring in from above to hack at Reginald's shoulders, Grace hammering away at Reginald's undefended flank with bone-splintering blasts from her shotgun, and even though neither did the slightest bit of damage to his Oblivion-fuelled shielding, the two refused to relent. They simply attacked, pausing only to dodge the ripostes that tore oil paintings from the wall and reduced priceless vases to so much porcelain shrapnel, even as Reginald tore his other glove off and began lashing the room with a second tentacles

A moment later, Grace finally ran out of ammo, and Reginald lunged at her, dagger-tipped tentacles ready to shear her endoskeleton in half. Too late, he remembered that he'd built her with faster reaction times: not only did his attack miss her by a country mile, but by the time he'd noticed that his target was now up on the west staircase landing, Grace had flung aside her shotgun and was now armed with her next weapon.

He had just enough time to realize that she was taking aim at him with a shoulder mounted anti-tank weapon before the RPG hit him square in the chest, blasting him off his feet, smashing him into the opposite wall hard enough to leave a foot-deep crater in the marble, and bringing down a sizable chunk of the ceiling down on his head. And while none of it was enough to injure him, that didn't change the fact that every second of it hurt.

As if to add insult to injury, Pogo dealt him a vicious chop to the skull as he dove past.

No sooner had the dust from this barrage settled, Reginald felt reality shift again, the ground beneath him rippling violently as the sheer unbearable contradiction of the Umbrella Academy's existence at its most irritating threatened to tear Reginald's world apart. These two weren't trying to stop him or even kill him, he realized: they were just trying to delay him long enough for the Academy to finish destabilizing everything.

Snarling in rage, Reginald peeled himself out of the crater and all but tore the left glove of his skinsuit off. He'd have liked nothing more than to end the traitors the same way that Viktor had killed them, but alas, he didn't have time to bring the roof down on Grace's head and there weren't any antlers over the mantlepieces in the entrance hall to impale Pogo on.

So instead, he fell back on brutal practicality.

He waited until Grace was reloading and Pogo was moving towards the chandelier to swing across the entrance hall. Then he lashed out at the chandelier at whiplash speed, slicing through the chain anchoring it to the roof with one bladed tentacle and sending it thundering towards Pogo with the other. Caught in mid-leap, Pogo had no room to manoeuvre and no way to avoid it; the chandelier ploughed into him, knocking him out of the air and sending him on a death-dive towards the floor like a meteor. He hit the marble floor with a muffled crack, followed by a deafening crash of shattering crystal as the enormous chandelier landed across him, crushing Pogo's torso under its bulk.

Then, he took aim at Grace. She'd almost managed to load her second RPG when Reginald tore the upper tier of the chandelier from where it lay and threw it at her with all the strength of his tentacles. Grace sidestepped it, but the impact sent a shower of shrapnel raining down on her and she was forced to dodge that as well, and by the time she'd taken aim again, Reginald was already vaulting over the balustrade towards her.

One tentacle swatted the launcher out of her hand.

The other sliced neatly though her spine column just above her shoulders.

Then, he spun her around, and in one elegant pirouette, Grace's head and body silently parted ways.

In the pause that followed, the disembodied head looked up at Reginald from a puddle of oil and coolant.

"You've already lost," she whispered, struggling to speak as her critically damaged CPU slowly wound down, her voice growing slower and deeper with every word. "You lost… when you chose… not to move on…"

She fell silent, her expression freezing on a look of eerie serenity.

Reginald shook his head in disgust and made for the door…

…only for a machete to bounce off the back of his head.

Unbelievably enough, Pogo was still clinging to life, even with his internal organs pulped and half of his blood spurting out of his mouth. And in the last few seconds of consciousness, he had one final message for Reginald:

"I… resign," he spat.

Then, he died.

Reginald sighed as he left the entrance hall, briefly stricken by a sudden and terrible sense of loneliness. He'd no idea why, for he hadn't felt this way since those terrible decades before he'd met Pogo and Grace (the human Grace), but that had been because he'd been without Abigail. Now that he had her back, he'd no reason to feel such things.

Come to think of it, where was Abigail? All the chaos should have gotten her attention, so why hadn't she shown herself?

A vague and terrible implication flitted in and out of Reginald's mind, but he rejected it almost immediately with barely a semblance of a thought. Some things were too terrible to even consider.

Another ripple in reality abruptly shattered his reverie, and Reginald immediately broke into a run, and by the time he'd reached the ballroom doors, he'd already forgotten what had worried him.

---

They were just starting Under Pressure when the ballroom doors crashed open, disgorging a furious-looking Reginald Hargreeves, his monocle an opaque white disc set in one glaring eye socket.

He'd disposed of his coat and jacket at some point in the carnage outside, and though he still wore his splendid burgundy waistcoat, streamlined trousers, and gleamingly polished brogues, he'd rolled his shirtsleeves all the way to his elbows… and he'd done the same for the gloves of his skin-suit, for in place of arms, he had only impossibly long, dagger-tipped tentacles.

He paused for a split-second, clearly trying to decide which of them to eliminate first. Even from here, Viktor could tell that he couldn't work out which of them was most responsible for the current disaster, for his eyes were flitting across the ballroom at an absolute manic speed, struggling to find a target to focus on.

For their part, the Umbrella Academy could only keep playing, not just because they needed to stick to the plan for once, but because – in spite of everything they'd seen and done, in spite of all the power they'd gained, they couldn't quite smother their fear at the sight of Sir Reginald's enraged expression. Luther looked to be the worst-afflicted, his face pale, his enormous hands shaking as they tried to continue drumming, and frankly, Viktor couldn't blame him. After all, the last time they'd been in the same room together in body as well as spirit, Reginald had murdered him.

Reggie was the first the break the stalemate: either having reached a decision or just having given out in desperation, he drew his arm and sent his right tentacle surging towards the orchestra – right at Klaus.

A split-second later, their conductor's head exploded, sending eyeballs and chunks of bone and pulped brains flying in all directions as the tentacle raced through the gaping hole in Klaus' skull for a good three feet before withdrawing.

There was a pause, as Klaus crashed to the floor, now missing everything from the neck upwards. For a moment, the orchestra of ghosts faltered without their conductor and medium to guide them.

And then, Klaus jumped to his feet, his head back in one piece, hands once again darting through the motions of Under Pressure, and the orchestra roared to life with renewed vigour.

"I bet you wish you hadn't trained me to do that, don't you, ya shitheel?" he cackled.

Reginald let out a strangled snarl of fury and lunged across the room, propelled by one almighty flex of his tentacles – but before he could reach the orchestra, Luther vaulted over the front seats and tackled him out of the air, bringing him crashing to the ground.

For a few seconds, they grappled, Luther crushing him with all his superhuman strength, every muscle bugling and clenching as he did his best to pulp Reggie's very skeleton. But whatever the old bastard had done to enhance himself, it was obviously tough enough to withstand even Luther, because Reginald didn't even seem to be having trouble breathing despite the bear hug. Instead, he lashed out with both tentacles in a blurry flurry of limbs, slicing deep into whatever flesh he could reach, lacerating Luther's face, chest, back, arms – only to find too late that Luther's enhanced powers made him almost as unyielding as Reggie himself.

"Of course you'd be the first annoyance of the morning, Number One," the old man hissed. "You never had enough imagination to understand how disappointed I was that you stayed when more promising students left!"

Luther rolled his eyes and cuffed him across the back of his head with enough force to concuss a humpback whale. Then he hoisted the startled Reggie into the air, raising him high above his head even as he extended his knee beneath him, ready to bring Reginald thundering down spine-first.

But at the last minute, Reginald somehow managed to kick one of his shoes off, tearing the skin-sock away and exposing a bouquet of tentacles that immediately surged outwards at Luther's face. Caught off-guard, Luther dropped Reggie – giving him just enough time to wriggle out of reach and go on the offensive again, now aiming at Luther's undefended eyes.

And it was at that point that Sloane dropped her oboe and hit Reggie with a gravitational vortex that sent him spinning helplessly into the roof. Reggie's defences immediately restored themselves and his tentacles hauled him back to the ground, but Sloane was still on the warpath: her gravitational powers batted him across the room like a tennis ball, smacking him into the wall violently enough to leave craters, swatting him up into the room and slam-dunking him back to the ground with such force that the ballroom floor cracked under the onslaught. And when Reggie finally rose again, it was to a haymaker from Luther, spinning him around on the spot and leaving him open to an uppercut that bounced his head against the ceiling.

As he flopped to the floor, Reginald kicked another shoe off, exposing another bundle of tentacles, and sent all of his tentacles racing across the ground towards Luther and Sloane.

Diego, who was still thrashing out Under Pressure on the bass guitar, reached out with his powers and sent a hurricane of debris racing towards Reginald: chairs, tables, disused music stands, Diego's knives, Reggie's shoes, even the chunks of masonry that had already collected on the floor over the course of the battle so far gathered themselves into the air and threw themselves at Reginald, battering him backwards and leaving Luther and Sloane free to continue attacking.

And then, as if to rub salt in the wound, Lila stopped drumming just long enough to touch Diego on the shoulder and re-enact the barrage on Reginald again.

"I might have known you'd be more annoying together than apart," Reggie snarled.

"What, no more smartass remarks about me being a wannabe hero?" Diego shot back cheerily. "You're runnin' outta material, old fart."

"I prefer to let actions speak louder than words…"

Suddenly, Reginald seemed to be drawing even more tentacles out of his skinsuit: at first, there only seemed to be two for his arms and perhaps four for each leg, but as his suit ripped further with every impact, more tentacles seemed to burst into view. Before long, Luther was struggling to wrestle a quintet of tendrils into submission, Sloane was just barely holding eight of them at bay with her powers, and Diego and Lila were just barely using their growing collection of knives to lacerate any tentacles that got within reach.

For a moment, Viktor – who'd been trying to keep playing and keep reality destabilizing up until then – wondered if he should join the fray just to make sure Reginald's bladed limbs didn't get close enough to endanger Helen and the others at the heart of the orchestra, but even with all the space in the ballroom, there was still too much of a risk of collateral damage.

But then, Ben stepped away from his keyboard.

Of course, he didn't stop playing, a cluster of his own tentacles sliding out of his chest and dancing elegantly across the keys, even as he sprinted towards Reggie.

More tentacles burst from his chest, wrapping themselves around Reginald's own tentacles and crushing them flat against the floor. He couldn't damage them, but he could definitely keep them from harming the rest of the team… and as more tentacles emerged to suppress Reggie, the Academy advanced, Luther darting in with one earthshattering jab after another, Sloane pressing him flat against the wall, Diego and Lila bombarding him with every bladed item in reach, and even Klaus joined in, the ghosts of countless murdered office workers rising up from the floor to tear into Reggie's defenceless limbs, even as a telekinetic frenzy from Klaus himself carved him up like the proverbial Thanksgiving turkey.

And as Klaus' frenzied conducting reached a crescendo with the coda of Under Pressure, reality began to flex and warp again…

With an apoplectic howl, Reginald's body began to writhe and bulge under the remains of his skin suit, and too late, Viktor realized he still had one tentacle free: he was cutting himself out of the suit from the inside. With one almighty rip, his waistcoat, shirt, trousers, and the skin beneath ripped apart to reveal the real Reginald Hargreeves – tall, slender, blue, tentacled, and improbable graceful.

All that was left of his disguise was his mask, the van dyke beard and handlebar moustache still perfectly groomed, the monocle still in place, and the fact that this was now perched on top of a thoroughly alien body only made the whole thing look even weirder.

But it wasn't Reggie's face that caught their attention, but the pulsing golden light over his chest: it wasn't warm or invigorating like Marigold, but like the displays they'd seen in the Hotel Oblivion – cold, harsh, and artificial. He was still carrying around a piece of the tech he'd stolen from there, just as Abigail said he was, and with one flex of his alien sinews, he activated it.

Before anyone had time to react, a shockwave rippled across the ballroom, sending Luther and Sloane tumbling helplessly away, slapping Ben's tentacles aside, forcing Diego and Lila to duck a hurricane of debris flowing back towards them, and catapulting Klaus face-first into the wall with a wet crunch, killing him instantly.

Fortunately, the song was over by then and he was back on his feet in seconds, leading the orchestra (and any members of the Academy still playing) through A Kind of Magic.

But now, the Academy was once again on the backfoot: Reginald was now striding across the ballroom on his tentacled feet, blasting Luther and Sloane with beams of harsh gold light that Luther could barely withstand and Sloane could only just levitate herself away from in time. Diego and Lila were doing their best to retaliate with a hail of blades while still playing, but the blasts of energy were already driving them into a slow but inevitable retreat across the ballroom. Ben was locked in combat with Reggie's tentacles, but even with the sheer strength of his tentacles, he'd never been pitted against anyone who could match him in experience; Reginald was a duellist at heart, countering every wild eruption of tentacles with an elegant riposte that left Ben staggering away with a fresh cut to the shoulder, and that was when Reginald wasn't just forcing him back with blasts from the Oblivion tech. And no matter how many ghosts Klaus conjured up, they simply couldn't hurt Reginald.

In that moment, Viktor made his move: rising out of his spot, he floated towards Reginald on a sonic updraft, the sheer force of the music around him gathering itself into weapons – blades, fists, hammers, bullets, whips, a colossal buzzsaw of sheer forces tsunami-ing towards Reginald. This the best he could do without risking the lives of the others, but it was enough to send Reggie flying backward across the room, body contorting under the onslaught, the golden light around him flickering wildly as it absorbed each impact.

Growling in a voice that no longer sounded human, Reginald peeled himself off the wall and began to rise into the air, propelled by the Oblivion tech woven into his body, and struck Viktor with an energy blast of his own. But Viktor was ready for it: the battle with Lila in Dallas had taught him how to create a sonic forcefield the hard way, and the incoming blast was harmlessly absorbed by a glowing blue sphere of energy shrouding him.

And then Viktor replied with a blast of his own, sculpting it into a tentacle of his own – just like the ones he'd used against the Academy in the first apocalypse he could remember – and wrapping it around Reggie's middle. But the tendril couldn't penetrate his shield, nor could it drain Reginald's life; it simply withstood it.

"You're up against the technologies of the gods, Number Seven," chuckled Reggie. "You'll exhaust yourself long before my enhancements will."

Viktor blasted him again, piling on as much raw strength as he could without hurting any of the others, but Reggie simply soaked that one up as well.

This time, he replied with a gout of searing golden flames that rippled across Viktor's shield, and though they couldn't break through it, Viktor could feel the heat even through the sonic barrier, slowly singing his clothes and hair, forcing him back across the ballroom. Any hotter, and Reggie wouldn't need to breach the shield: he'd just roast Viktor inside it.

The fire blossomed, washing over the shield and threatening to reach the rest of the Academy. Immediately, everyone who'd been making a recovery from the assault began edging away from the flames, all except Klaus, who promptly burst into flames and was left trying to conduct the orchestra as best as he could with increasingly frenzied motions until he finally collapsed in a charred heap of limbs.

And then, just as Klaus was returning to life yet again and Viktor was damn near certain that they were outmatched, just when he thought that the time they were buying for Five and Abigail was about to run out, Allison suddenly flitted into view.

She'd spent the last few minutes supplying sound effects and the rhythm section to the orchestra with her powers, but now, with a single well-placed Rumour, she was on the opposite end of the room, right behind Reginald. "I heard a rumour," she remarked, "that those fires went out."

Instantly, the flames that had been licking greedily at Viktor's shield and the floor around it instantly extinguished themselves.

Reginald blinked in astonishment, suddenly realizing that Allison was no longer on the other side of the ballroom. Belatedly realizing what had just happened, he spun around with one tentacle raised like a stinger, but Allison was ready for him:

"I heard a rumour you couldn't fly," she said.

Suddenly no longer capable of levitating, Reginald dropped out of the air and fell a good six feet to the floor, landing heavily with some decidedly ungentlemanly language. Growling, he once again raised the tentacle to strike, but too slow to make any difference, because the next Rumour was already being spoken.

"I heard a rumour you were heavier than this building," Allison told him.

There was a pause, Reginald's eyes widening in horror as the implications trickled into place. Then, the floor beneath him began to crumble, dozens of tiny cracks racing out across the gleamingly polished floor as the weight of more than half a million tonnes of compressed weight began slowly driving Reginald downwards through stone that was too soft and too ornamental to support the weight of a super-skyscraper. Then a three-foot-wide fissure yawned open beneath him, sending Reginald plunging headlong through the floor with a scream; a split-second later, Reginald hit the floor below and crashed clean through it, then through the floor below that, and below that, as well.

Within a matter of seconds, Reginald was ploughing downwards through the floors of the own tower at an incredible speed, picking up more momentum with every passing floor and falling ever faster, his screams growing increasingly distant as he plunged towards ground floor.

In the ringing silence that followed, Allison remarked, "I heard a rumour this hole in the floor was fixed."

Instantly, the gaping crater torn in the floor sealed itself shut.

And in the silence that followed, Allison cheerily remarked, "I had to make myself useful sooner or later. Come on, let's get back in position: from everything I've seen of them, my reality warps don't last forever – he'll probably be back here in a few minutes…"

---

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, shit, shitty ballsacks, shitfuck, fuck…"

"Language."

"Abigail, I'm currently trying to wrangle controls designed by the eldritch beings who designed our reality. If now isn't the time for cussing a bloody streak, there won't be one ever-a-fucking-gain. Why isn't this working?"

"You're being too general. Try to focus on the time period you want and the specifics on what you need rewritten, and the fundamentals will assert themselves."

"How the hell do you know that?"

"Let's just say that Reginald isn't as good at being surreptitious as he thinks."

"That's true enough, but even with the rough translation I've been working on, half these controls are damn near incomprehensible. How the hell would Reggie have been able to work out all the necessary commands without having some kind of cipher on hand? I mean, his memory's good, but not that good."

"Maybe he just had a wealth of experience in translating the commands – he had sole access to the Hotel Oblivion for close to a century, don't forget."

"No, no, it still wouldn't explain how easy he made it look: he didn't even pause to consult anything – and it's not like the damn things were written in his native script or anything like that. Oh for Chrissakes, this is going to take forever!"

"Five, stay calm."

"Easy for you to say! If we don't get these commands keyed in before the others have finished destabilizing reality, the resulting error could either send us to a universe where we don't exist or kill everyone for good! Try to take this seriously!"

"I'm keying in commands as fast as you are, believe me."

"It's not a matter of not believing you, it's… oh no."

"Oh no?"

"Incoming…"

---

Reginald was, not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely livid.

It was bad enough that his deal with Allison had allowed these aberrations to unbalance the fabric of his perfect world; now, rebelling against their bargain, she had proven to be an even bigger nuisance than ever before. By the time her Rumour had worn off, Reginald plunged below the sub-basement and into the cavernous depths of the Tower's emergency storage vault before he'd finally managed to arrest his descent.

But as luck would have it, that was where he stored the other samples from the Hotel Oblivion, the tech too powerful and too unstable to be used in public. Hidden behind countless layers of DNA-coded security, it had been gathering dust for the last five years, only be used in the event that large-scale collateral damage and widespread destruction of property were deemed acceptable sacrifices… and now, only the greatest sacrifices of all could preserve his utopia.

Gathering as much of the semi-tangible to himself as he could, Reginald layered his body with it, forming a glittering carapace over his tendrils and thorax, and casting a golden halo above his brow. It still wasn't the full extent of Project Oblivion's reality-warping power, for that was hidden in his study behind layers of security that only he could operate, but it would be enough.

Letting out an earsplitting howl, he flung himself out of the crater he'd left in his fall and soared skywards towards the penthouse floor at a speed that would have left a sonic boom in his wake if he hadn't been casually breaking all the laws of physics already. Once again, he was ploughing through floor after floor, albeit this time from the opposite direction, but for once he was too enraged to care about property damage.

A moment later, as Gimme The Prize began to thunder across the building, he erupted back into the ballroom with a crash, sending chunks of marble floor and building insulation flying in all directions. But before the cloud of debris had a moment to clear, the Academy were once again upon him, even as they darted back and forth between their instruments in a madcap dance around the ruins of the ballroom.

But this time, the additional technology gave him all the strength he needed to counter the assault. A blast of energy swatted Viktor from the sky and into the wall before he could ready a force-field, a second blast only narrowly missing him (and accidentally blasting the roof off one of the neighbouring buildings); a counter-gravitonic pulse flipped Sloane upside down and bounced her shoulder-first into the ceiling, and only a diving save from Luther saved her from cracking her skull on the floor; Diego and Lila found the objects they threw twisting around in mid-air and attacking them; Ben's tentacles hiss and bubbled as a disintegrating field of energy swept over him, forcing him away from the brutal melee; an invisible blade the thickness of an atom sheared the skin from the Klaus' body.

"I heard a rumour the ceiling punched you in the face!"

A colossal fist lunged down from above and delt Reginald a stunning right cross to the forehead, sending him tumbling to his knees in a dazed heap.

"I heard a rumour the floor under you turned to acid!"

Too punch-drunk to react in time, Reginald shot into the air with a yowl of pain as the sulphuric acid bored into him, unable to leave any real damage but more than capable of leaving him in incomparable agony.

"I heard a rumour every pane of glass in the room cut your throat!"

Reginald had just enough time to turn brace himself for impact before every single window in the room simultaneously shattered into a million glittering shards and flung themselves at him all at once. Had it actually been able to harm him, it would have flayed him almost as thoroughly as Klaus had just been. Fortunately, all it amounted to was a really nasty paper cut, but that was bad enough.

"I heard a rumour that-"

But by then, Reginald was ready for Allison's fourth salvo: his tentacles short out and wrapped themselves around her mouth, silencing her and leaving him in the perfect position to squish he head like a grape.

And then Lila dropped from above, grabbed Allison by the shoulder, and finished: "-that the walls were trying to eat you!"

Next thing Reginald knew, every single wall sprouted a gnashing pair of fanged jaws and began stretching across the room, their jagged teeth dripping with slobber as they zeroed in on him. Reginald backed away, trying to think of what the Oblivion tech could conjure against them-

-only to walk right into Luther's fist, hurtling towards him like an ICBM.

"That was for Sloane," snarled Luther, as Reginald's skull bounced off the floor.

Growling, Reginald poured all the raw power of the Oblivion tech into a devastating barrage of attacks: he seared him with fire powerful enough to melt led, he crushed him under abyssopelagic pressure, he brought down chunks of the roof on his head, he even tried to turn the very cells of Luther's own body against him.

But nothing worked: back in the original timeline, Luther had been effectively bulletproof so long as he was concentrating and had time to brace himself for the worst; now, with his powers amplified for gods only knew what reason, he was all but indestructible while hunkered down.

And then, as Reginald was panting for breath and trying to figure out what to try next, a still-smouldering Luther reached out and grabbed him by the arms, spinning him around like an Olympic-class hammer thrower, slowly building up to a colossal swing before finally launching him clean through the open windows and out into the sky.

"NOW YOU GO TO THE MOON, ASSHOLE!" Luther shouted after him.

---

There was a pause, as the Umbrella Academy slowly picked themselves up and began marshalling what was left of their stamina, even as a newly resurrected Klaus struggled to think of what to try next.

"Guys," Viktor panted, "something's wrong: I'm not feeling reality destabilizing anymore. We're getting close to the end, but whatever we're doing, it's not enough to get us over the finish line."

Diego sagged like a deflating balloon. "We just did half of Queen's discography!"

"And we just played etch-a-sketch with the laws of physics," chimed in Allison. "What's 'not enough' about that?"

"Maybe it's not quite us just yet," suggested Lila. "Remember, we're meant to be destabilizing this reality by being as much like ourselves as possible: maybe we've got to try something that's just right the mixture of crazy, silly, and screw-up-y."

"Well, we're just barely keeping Reginald on the ropes," said Luther. "What could be more screw-up-y than that?"

There was a pause, as they considered this. Then, Klaus' eyes lit up. "Maybe there is something we can do that can finish destabilizing this!" he said excitedly. "In fact, it's something we all do really well, something we've been doing almost every year since the old bastard died the first time. All we gotta do is-"

Thunk.

A length of metal seemed to sprout from Klaus' skull.

It was an old TV antenna, flung through the air like a javelin so quickly and so accurately that it might as well have been teleported, piercing the left side of the conductor's skull and punching clean through the opposite side with a spray of blood and bone chips.

Klaus swayed on the spot, wobbling drunken back and forth for a moment as he struggled to process the fact that he now had a fifteen-inch length of metal embedded in his skull. Then he let out a mutter of "oh menudo," and very gently doubled over onto his hands and knees, sighing like a deflating balloon as he fell.

With one almighty gurgle, he vomited up a massive spout of grey-green vomit onto the battered marble floor, then collapsed face first into the ensuing puddle.

A couple of seconds later, he was back on his feet.

"I'm okay!" he yelled. "I'm okay!"

There was a pause, as several realizations hit the Umbrella Academy at once.

"Klaus," said Viktor, "there's an antenna in your head."

"Is there? I can't feel anything. Little bit weird right now. Head's gone all fuzzy. Like the first time I tried pot."

Viktor looked from the vomit-streaked Klaus to the nonplussed looking ghosts, none of whom had so much as flickered since their conductor had taken a spear to the head.

"So, you didn't just die?" he said at last.

"Guess not. I think it's just stuck in there. I don't even feel it anymore! Guys, do we know when Dad's gonna be back? Because I don't wanna go back to the cemetery. I wanna stay up here with you guys." He hiccoughed, voice briefly dissolving into incomprehensible mumbling, and when he finally recovered his speech, his voice was acquiring a distinctively boneless slur. "We should stay together. Bad things happen less when we're together. We don't go to bad places when we're not apart, y'know?"

"Klaus? Klaus?! You were gonna tell us something important?"

"Hey," slurred Klaus, the antenna lodged in his skull wobbling violently as he struggled to make eye contact. "You're not allowed to shout at me like that! You're being mean! Mom! Mooooom! You tell them they're being mean!"

Diego helpfully reached out to wrench the antenna out of Klaus' brain, only for another energy blast to send him flying across the ballroom, leaving their conductor to stumble drunkenly away towards the orchestra, trying his best to rally the horrified ghosts.

And in the horrified silence that followed, a familiar voice purred, "I should have made use of this looted Oblivion tech hours ago."

A moment later, Reginald hovered into view from above, incandescent with energies and grinning like a death's head.

"That was the one question I couldn't conquer," he chuckled, nodding at the wildly flailing Klaus. "How to kill an immortal. So, I chose not to kill him at all. Admittedly, it took a little probability manipulation to hit him the right way, but even these fractal variants of Oblivion machinery can work miracles."

Luther dived at him, only to be brutally swatted aside with all four of Reggie's tentacles, sending him crashing to the floor hard enough to shake dust from what little was left of the ceiling.

"As I was saying," said Reginald, "the ghosts won't be able to help Klaus without his conscious direction and he won't be able to make them tangible without effort and thought. Once I've dealt with the rest of you, he can be buried in concrete until such time as I've devised a means of keeping him dead on a permanent basis. In the meantime…"

Lightning split the air in a thousand scarlet and gold bolts, tearing through the Umbrella Academy's ranks and blasting them to the floor.

Allison was the only one who hadn't been hit, either due to a lucky sidestep or the quickest Rumour she'd ever uttered. "I heard a rumour," she growled, "that you f-"

But Reginald was quicker, interrupting Allison with a wave of his hand. The Rumour ended with a sharp intake of breath, and for a moment, Viktor thought that he'd simply paralysed her vocal cords, but then she began to gasp and wheeze, mouth flapping helplessly as her knees began to buckle beneath her, and with a jolt of horror, Viktor realized that Reggie had removed all the oxygen from Allison's vicinity.

Meanwhile, Luther had recovered enough to haul himself upright and was squaring off with Reggie as best as he could, but even with his superhuman resilience, there was only so much he could do.

Viktor, now in full crescendo but without an orchestral backing, did his best to bring as much of the penthouse down on Reginald's head as possible without endangering Five, but the Reggie beat him to the punch: the lightning storm of energies slipped under his shield before he could finish conjuring it and burrowed deep into his undefended flesh. Down he went, instinctively curling into a ball even as his clothes began to smoulder. In the agony that followed, he was dimly aware of Helen doing her best to drag him out of the line of fire.

Another blast of lightning rent the air, this one aimed at Sloane – who was still struggling to rise – and as she crashed back to the floor in paroxysms of agony, Viktor realized that Reginald wasn't just trying to kill them anymore. After all, now that the music had ground to a halt and the reality shifts had stopped along with them, he could afford to take his time.

He could afford to torture them.

---

Up in the study, Five had given up on swearing in English and had started uttering some particularly inventive profanities in Russian and Greek, both of which made more sense than the glittering display of alien symbols hovering in the air around them.

"None of this is adding up!" he exploded, throwing his toolkit at the wall.

"Well, stop time again!"

"I'm trying to ration my stamina, goddammit! Besides, with literal hours on my side, this translation is still going nowhere. We need whatever cipher your husband was using. Have you had any luck cracking the save file recall function?"

"None. No sign of a key to the codes, either."

Five thumped the console with the one mallet he hadn't thrown out the window. "Well what else would Reginald have used?! What else have you seen him touching or reading before entering this room? And in case you haven't been checking the security feed, I recommend you talk fast, preferably before your husband stops torturing my siblings and decides to just kill them!"

"As far as I can remember, he wasn't carrying anything that he could use to decipher this language at any point when I saw him operating these machines. Why are you asking me? You were there when he operated the machinery at the Hotel Oblivion, don't forget!"

"He didn't need anything then!" Five screamed. "He just knew how to operate the controls! Somehow, he just knew!"

"Well, we both know that's not possible: he wouldn't have been able to access the machinery without being attacked by the Hotel guardians on any of his previous visits, so he wouldn't have learned the language on his own, ergo he must have had something with him that could allow him to decode the precursor language."

"He didn't have anything! All he had was his stupid fucking tailored suits, his skinsuit, and that ridiculous goddamn… monocle."

Five hesitated. "How long has he owned that monocle?" he asked quietly. "And where did he get it from?"

"Well," said Abigail thoughtfully, "as far as I can remember, he's owned it since we left our homeworld for the last time, and as far as I can tell, he built it for himself. Something about detecting esoteric patterns expressed only through the energies of Aurianic Particles."

"Patterns that might just take the form of language!" Five took a deep breath. "Abigail, hold the fort while I'm gone, would you?"

"Where are you going?"

"To do something exceptionally stupid…"

---

Total chaos reigned across the ballroom.

Luther was currently in the middle of a dramatic but largely futile battle royale with Reggie's tentacles, furiously tackling each one to the ground and trying with all his might to rip them in half, even as Reggie did his equally futile best to fry the indestructible man to a crisp.

Ben was lying on the floor in a screaming heap, having somehow been tied up with his own tentacles.

Sloane was floating upside down in a corner of the ceiling, still twitching in pain from an energy blast to the back.

Diego and Lila were barely holding the line, pelting Reggie with anything remotely bladed that they could find, keeping him so preoccupied with the effort of throwing it right back at them that he couldn't concentrate on blasting anyone with lightning.

Allison had barely regained consciousness and was breathlessly gasping out Rumours, trying with all her might to find a reality warp that could overcome Reggie's defences.

Viktor and Helen were furiously digging under the ruins of the ceiling in search for their violins, assisted by several hapless ghosts, Viktor pausing only to fling a sonic burst in Reginald's direction.

And in the midst of the carnage, Klaus was still tottering around the makeshift stage like a drunk, the antenna through his brain wobbling dramatically as he tried to lead the orchestra through the next song in a frenzied attempt to destabilize reality again, without much success.

With his brain now host to a badly tarnished length of metal, his repertoire of songs was all over the place: one minute, the orchestra was merrily proceeding through Yellow Submarine, the next, they had taken a hard left turn into I Can't Decide; just when it looked like they'd found their feet in the William Tell Overture, they then shifted tempo and somehow wound up in the middle of I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles). Viktor, having just managed to retrieve the white violin from under the rubble, saw a glint of hope on the horizon when Klaus launched into the Phantom Of The Opera, and joined in with renewed vigour… only for the poor bastard to lose his train of thought again and drag them screaming through Sympathy For The Devil, stumble into The Liberty Bell, lead the ghostly substitute pianist through The Entertainer, before the entire orchestra chicaned into The Room Where It Happens.

Diego made another helpful attempt to rip the antenna out of Klaus' head, only to be flung forward by a surprise attack from Reggie, accidentally driving the damn thing even deeper into the conductor's skull. Next thing the orchestra knew, Klaus was taking them on a wild lurch from Katy Perry's Firework to It's A Long Way To The Top, and there was nothing they could do to help, because while he could easily make them visible and audible, he couldn't make them tangible without concentrating.

Then, with Wrecking Ball having segued into Mars, The Bringer Of Jollity, just when the Academy was damn sure that the situation couldn't get any crazier, Gracie suddenly appeared on the scene.

She'd been sent away the moment they'd heard Reggie approaching the ballroom, shooed hastily out through a side-door towards the study where it'd be safe. Obviously, she'd been watching the whole thing play out, and now that everyone was distracted with trying to fight off Reginald, she saw her opportunity to help.

In hindsight, it wasn't so surprising: she was Diego's daughter, after all.

However, nobody was expecting her to charge headlong into the ballroom, climb a chair, vault onto Klaus' shoulders, and before the horrified eyes of her parents, try to force the antenna out of her uncle's skull with her bare hands.

And then, because she was determined to be as helpful as possible in between attempts at amateur brain surgery, she began frantically waving her arms in an unintentional parody of Klaus' effortless conducting, trying to get the orchestra in motion again. And when that didn't work, she just grabbed Klaus' arms by the sleeves and began puppeteering him about like a marionette, spurring on the orchestra as best as she could, even as she determinedly kicked at the antenna still in his skull.

Unfortunately, Gracie's repertoire was a tad limited: quite apart from the fact that she was barely five years old, she'd been born into a dystopian hellhole where all the best music was censored, banned, or had simply never been written, so she didn't know too many decent songs, or their names for that matter. So, when she had the opportunity to whisper a song choice into Klaus' ears, she had only one request.

"Baby shark! Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo! Baby shark…"

And the bewildered ghost orchestra could only try their best to follow along.

For a few precious seconds, everyone in the ballroom was staring at them. Even Reggie paused in the act of trying to throttle Ben long enough to stare in bewilderment at the musical anarchy playing out across the back of the ballroom. So far, it didn't seem to be destabilizing reality any further, but it was certainly diverting.

And then, just as Reggie was readying an energy blast at Ben's face, Five suddenly appeared behind him.

"Good morning, you old bastard," he said pleasantly.

Startled, Reginald turned around – just in time for Five's left foot to deal him a stunning blow to the cheek. Caught completely off-guard by the impact, he hurtled backwards, tentacles flailing in all directions, and as he fell, time seemed to slow to a crawl; he was still moving, still falling towards the ballroom floor, but it was if he was falling through water, every movement slowed to a glacial crawl.

And in the midst of the slomo plunge, Five was teleporting all around him, darting back and forth with dazzling flashes of light to kick and punch and stab at him, every attack aimed squarely at Reginald's face. None of it seemed to be leaving any permanent damage, but that didn't seem to be Five's plan, because he seemed to be trying to remove something – but was it the mask that hid Reggie's true face, or just part of the artificial skin? Viktor couldn't tell for sure, for Five was still moving too fast for any of them to recognize what he was doing.

Then, without warning, Five brought a mallet crashing down on Reginald's face from the side, hammering him cheekfirst into the tiles in slow motion – and in that moment, something soared loose from Reggie's face, bouncing across the floor and rolling along the floor.

It was a monocle – the same one that Diego had dumped in the bay in the first timeline, the same one that had gone unnoticed and ignored for every moment of the Sparrow Academy's timeline, the same one that Reggie had never been able to part with no matter what reality he was in.

As the tiny gold-rimmed lens rolled to a halt, Five teleported over to it, snatched it up, and fitted the monocle into his left eye socket before Reggie could recover enough to stop him. A look of savage triumph flitted across his face, eyes glittering with newfound knowledge.

"How's that for skin off your nose, you prick?" he cackled and then vanished.

A moment later, he reappeared next to Gracie and Klaus. "You might want to try using this on his head," he said helpfully, handing Gracie the mallet.

"Let's go hunt! Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo – thanks, Uncle Five – let's go hunt! Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo!"

Then, Five was gone again, leaving Reggie to finish bouncing off the floor at normal speed. He was back on his tentacles again in seconds, looking around for any sign of his attacker – only for Luther to deal him a haymaker that sent him cartwheeling across the skyline. He recovered quickly in mid-air circling around in a deadly arc to attack the penthouse from the opposite side, only for Diego, Lila, and Sloane to counter his advance with a hail of debris.

And in the confusion, nobody noticed Gracie hammering the antenna out of Klaus' head in between stanzas…

---

"Got it!" Five whooped. "I got it!"

Abigail looked from the hovering viewscreens loaded with incomprehensible symbols to the gleaming monocle fitted to Five's left eye. "Is it working?" she asked. Can you understand what you're seeing?"

"Christ, it's like having an entire linguistic lexicon pouring through one eye – and that's just one function of it. I can understand every single symbol here – I don't even need to consciously translate, it's instinctual! I mean, programmed correctly, this thing could identify all kinds of energy signatures – for all I know this damn monocle was how he found the seven of us in the first place!"

"Then let's get to work, quickly! Now that he knows you're somewhere up here as well, it won't be long before Reginald tries to leave the ballroom and look for you – and with his monocle gone, it's only a matter of time before he figures out what we're up to!"

Five made for the floating keyboard and began hammering buttons, entering a long sequence of commands to view and access the Oblivion machines' system database. "I'm more worried about the destabilization efforts," he remarked, without taking his eyes off the viewscreen. "For the moment, it looks like the others are stalled at the 50% destabilization and don't know how to progress it any further. If Reggie kills the others before they can merge all the rifts in reality, our work here won't even matter – he'll just scrub away all the errors and have the entire dimension to himself!"

"I wouldn't worry too much about that," said Abigail, cheerily.

"Why not?"

"Just take a look at the security monitors…"

---

Reginald wheeze with exhaustion, bent double with the effort of forcing his quaternary lungs into overtime. Even with all the dissected technology of the Hotel Oblivion on his side, he still needed a moment to replenish his stamina after everything the Academy had thrown at him, especially if he wanted to outfight them ahead of the rapidly approaching sunrise.

Still, at least the Academy were just as tired as he was: all around him, the team was gasping fro breath, struggling to stay upright, and many of them hastily bandaging the wounds they'd acquired in the last few minutes. All he needed to do was wear them down a little longer, give the instability a chance to ebb away, and then kill them… and then find out where the hell Five had taken his monocle, because seeing the rifts was a lot trickier without the lens in its appropriate place. Actually, he'd be happier just knowing where Five was and why he'd been absent for the entire battle so far.

But just as he was about to prepare another salvo of blasts, there was a clank from the head of the orchestra, followed closely by a loud, wet squishing sound, followed by the distinctive thud of a body hitting the floor – and then the trademarked gasp for breath as Klaus shot back to life again.

Reginald turned just in time to see Klaus – now missing the antenna – being helped to his feet by Diego's brat. "Thanks, Gracie," he murmured.

"No problem, Uncle Klaus." She even issued a salute, which Klaus laughingly returned.

There was a pause, as Klaus realized that everyone was looking at him, including Reginald. He hesitated for a moment, before issuing a series of whispered commands to the ghosts, summoning up new members of the orchestra – a new base player and a vocalist by the looks of things. A moment later, the musicians roared back to life, but this time, the fully orchestrated pop song was ever-so-slightly different: for one thing, Reginald couldn't recognize the composition at first, and for another, Klaus wasn't conducting.

Instead, he was dancing, gliding and swaying gracelessly across the ballroom floor like an ice-skating scarecrow, waving his hands in front of his face in bewilderingly dramatic gestures, as if he was trying to show off the tattoos that hadn't marked his palms for the last five years. Before long he was levitating as well, somehow managing to keep up the baffling dace moves even as he floated into the air like a badly-dressed soap bubble.

But it wasn't until the vocalist began cooing out the lyrics that Reginald finally recognized the song: I Think We're Alone Now, as sung by Tiffany.

"Children behave/that's what they say when we're together…"

"Dance!" shouted Klaus, without stopping his demented swoop across the ballroom. "Everyone dance! That's what I was trying to tell you earlier!"

And Reginald was left staring in bewilderment as the Umbrella Academy launched in an impromptu dance sequence: Viktor and Helen performing a ridiculously casual Batusi with their violins, Ben cartwheeling and pirouetting elegantly about the ballroom aided by his tentacles, Klaus doing some baffling variant of the Thriller, Allison strutting and high-kicking as she had in the days when the team was united, Diego and Lila matching each other with one impossibly acrobatic dance move after another, Luther and Sloane were quite literally dancing on the ceiling, tangoing their way around what was left of the partially collapsed roof in gleefully defiance of gravity. Even Gracie was joining in.

And then, just as Reginald was starting to wonder what the fuck anyone hoped to accomplish with this farce…

…reality gave another almighty ripple.

Too late, Reginald finally understood what they were trying to do: acting in defiance of established reality, exploiting their disruptive aspects as weak points of this reality, exercising their own aberrant natures to the point that the world he'd built could not contain them any longer.

And while it was a little difficult to recognize the full scope of the expanding reality tears without his monocle, he could just about recognize enough of the expanding distortion to determine an instability rating of at least 65% – and rising.

Reality gave another juddering shiver. Suddenly galvanized by blind panic, Reginald threw himself at the nearest of the dancers within reach – in this case, Diego – hoping against hope that the destabilization would cease even if only one of them stopped their farcical dance. After all, Diego wasn't even paying attention to anything outside his own elaborate dance moves, and Reginald raised his tentacles to strike, trusting that he would meet no resistance-

-and then the heel of a well-polished shoe cannoned into the side of Reginald's skull with meteoric force, pitching him sidelong to the ground. Rolling over, he looked up just in time to see a familiar face glaring down at him, at once patrician and straight from a street brawl.

"Marcus?" he whispered in disbelief.

The ghost of the Sparrow Academy's Number One scoffed contemptuously, and with one elegant foot-pedalling motion, flung Reginald up into the air, only to bring him crashing down with a flying piston-kick. He landed heavily, every last atom of breath knocked out of him...

…and that was when the ghost of Fei reached down and grabbed him by the lapels, a dozen spectral crows hopping along her shoulders to peck at Reginald's undefended eyes, talons and beaks raking his flesh even as Fei slammed a bony fist into his face and flung him to the next Sparrow in line. Reginald barely had a chance to brace himself for impact before Alphonse barrelled into him, slamming a knee into his belly and headbutting him so hard in the skull that entire galaxies exploded behind his eyes. Heavily scarred hands spun him around and catapulted him into a flurry of punches and kicks from Jayme – and then, just as Reginald thought it was over, his erstwhile Number Six reared back and spat a plume of hallucinogenic sputum right in his eyes.

Thanks to Reginald's Oblivion tech defences, it wasn't quite enough to trigger a full-blown hallucinogenic fit on the spot, but unfortunately, it was more than enough to leave him reeling on the spot as he tried to clear the stinging toxin from his eyes, phantoms and eidolons creeping in from all angles as he struggled to resist the effects.

And then Chris swooped in from above, shrieking incomprehensible war cries as he blasted him with the full force of powers, a crackling beam of energies driving Reginald screaming to his knees… then onto his belly.

He hadn't been prepared for any of it: he hadn't been able to calibrate any of his defences for the Sparrows' powers – because, as far as he'd known, the Sparrow Academy hadn't just been killed but erased from existence altogether by both Kugelblitz and the power of the Hotel Oblivion. There should have been no chance to for Klaus to bring them back, nowhere to bring them back from… but here they were. Had Reginald completely misunderstood the nature of the Afterlife? Was Klaus so powerful that his abilities reached beyond the barrier of literal non-existence?

As the music reached a crescendo, the beam of energy from Chris suddenly ceased – and then Marcus kicked him again, sending him tumbling across the floor.

"He's all yours, Vik!" Marcus shouted.

Next thing Reginald knew, he was staring up into the pitiless face of Viktor, violin in hand and playing with all his skill and talent as the orchestra cruised merrily through an encore performance. Reginald lashed out wildly with every bladed tentacle and every sinuous tendril of his body, trying to slit Viktor's throat, to knock the violin out of his hands, to crush his bones, to do anything to stop the song before it was too late. It shouldn't have been possible for Viktor to defend himself at such close range, but he did it anyway, swatting aside every single limb with the full force of I Think We're Alone Now's melody and hoisting Reginald into the air.

Too fatigued to fight back, Reginald fell back on the one option he had left, if only to buy enough time to recover: shameless flattery.

"I… I was wrong about you, Number Seven," he gasped. "You… truly are so much more special than I thought. I should have let you shine; I should have let the others know you belonged among them, that you were more powerful than any of them. You should have been my trusted right hand all along."

The expected rush of heartfelt emotion did not materialize on Number Seven's face, nor did he appear to acknowledge the long-awaited for validation. If anything, he seemed unimpressed, even bored. And then Reginald felt a solid fist of compressed sound enclose him, slowly constricting his body like the coils of a python, neatly ending all attempts at recovery and dealing a few more broken bones for good measure.

"Once upon a time, that would've meant something to me, dad," said Viktor, his voice practically glacial. "But back then, I thought you could care; I even asked Pogo if you'd read my book long after I should have given up on you. Now I know you only ever wanted us as fuel, so why should I give a shit what you think?"

And before Reginald could reflect that he was out of practice at flattery, Viktor's sonic riposte hit him head-on, all the moon-shattering strength of his full potential hammering into him with force that not even the Oblivion tech defences could withstand. Pressed against a force field, the sonic force literally squished Reginald flat, crushing and compacting him down so thoroughly that if it hadn't been for the sustaining power of the Oblivion tech, he would have died instantly. As it was, he found himself reduced to a fleshy hubcap pulsating on the floor tiles, unable to move or speak while his technological augmentations hastily reassembled him molecule by molecule.

He would be back on his feet shortly… but with the song hurtling towards its coda and reality hurtling towards total collapse, it was impossible to tell if he would have enough time to save anything before it was too late.

And then, just when he thought things couldn't possibly get any worse, Five suddenly materialized on the scene.

"Finished!" he shouted, almost manic with uncharacteristic joy. "It worked! Now we've just got to finish giving this universe a swan song!"

"Well, don't hold back, old timer!" laughed Diego, still in mid-dance. "Let's see your moves!"

Five just rolled his eyes, turned around, and executed a perfect Moonwalk, concluding with a petulant middle finger hoisted at Reginald's clumsily-reassembling body.

Reality rippled again. They were at 85% instability and climbing by the second.

"I think we're alone now," Klaus crooned along with the vocalist. "Doesn't seem to be anyone around…"

90%.

"I think we're alone now," the entire Academy chorused, even as they danced across the room. "The beating of our hearts is the only sound…"

95%.

And now it wasn't just the Academy that was singing, but the ghosts as well – the orchestra, the Sparrow Academy, all the victims of Reginald's regime and all the bystanders the Umbrella Academy had met over the course of their exploits, all of them were singing the final refrains of the song with all their might, no matter how out-of-tune or off-tempo they might have been.

100%.

And with that, as the sun finally began to rise above the smog clouds and the first tendrils of dawn began making their way across the city, reality began to fracture. Reginald, his reassembly complete, hauled himself back into shape with a nerve-jangling series of cracks and pops, just in time to see the beginning of the end:

A massive rift in the fabric of the universe was now tearing its way across the horizon, the very sky ripping open like worn cloth stretched to its limit. It had to be at least a hundred miles across, a mile high, and half a mile thick in total. To the eyes of anyone looking up at it on the city streets below, it would have been nothing short of bewildering, for it seemed at once two dimensional and yet not, a constantly widening and flattening distortion in local space-time.

Beyond it lay only light, dazzling, blinding radiance that threatened to outshine the sun, even as the rift spread and slowly but surely began to swallow everything in its path. From one angle, it began to consume everything beyond city limits, the gaping wound in the universe gorging itself on fields, roads, mountains small towns, the cities that lay beyond the heart of Reginald's dominion: even from here, Reginald could clearly see the distant shapes of far-off buildings stretching out of their positions and corkscrewing away into the depths of the rift… even as Reginald's own capital began to bow and sway towards the light, before finally vanishing into it one city block at a time – inching closer and closer to the tower with every passing second.

Reginald could only stare in disbelief for a moment, briefly transfixed by the sight of the End hurtling towards him, unable to accept that it could have gone so badly so quickly. Then, with a berserk howl, he flung himself towards his study, even as his blade-tipped limbs erupted towards the still-dancing figures of the Academy, caught neatly between the need to kill the aberrations and preserve what little he could with the Oblivion machines.

He'd barely made it seven steps across the ballroom before someone grabbed him from behind, seizing him by the shoulders and dragging back towards the windows. Reginald tried to struggle free, but whoever had attacked him had a grip even stronger than Luther's and couldn't be dislodged; for a moment, he could only wonder who it was, for the Umbrella Academy was still dancing and he could tell that the hands that had seized him didn't belong to a ghost.

It wasn't until he happened to notice the curiously familiar grip that he realized that it wasn't hands that held him, but tentacles. And since Ben was still backflipping merrily around the room, there was only one possible culprit.

"Abigail," he hissed. "You did this."

His captor shifted their grip slightly, and Abigail slid into view: like him, she'd cast off all but her mask, so there was no mistaking the all-too-human look of utter unrepentance on her face. "I did," she said softly. "I found their extracted Marigold, I returned it to them, and I guided them here. They did the rest, fought the traumas you gave them and overcame them despite your best efforts to drive them to suicide. But yes, in the end, I am to blame."

"Why?!"

"You know why, Reginald: I shouldn't be alive; I died contented with what we'd made, and you couldn't let me rest… and worse, you abused our discovery, you abused the children born from it, and you abused the world you should have shepherded. This paradise of yours shouldn't exist, not with all the alterations you made just to twist it to your liking. I'm simply restoring things to the way they were."

"No! No, no, no! I set things right once, I'll set things right again! I'll show you this reality can be better, so much better than even my original designs: I'm still shepherding this world, I'll prove it to you! You'll see how these children don't matter, how the prosperity of Earth was always my first and foremost priority once I'd brought you back! You just have to let me go! Just let me fix this! JUST LET ME FIX THIS!"

But Abigail's grip could not be escaped. "No, Reginald," she sighed. "It's too late for that, now, and you know it: the Unravelling can't be stopped now, not even with the power of Project Oblivion. All you can do is stay here with me until the end, just as you did the first time."

The light was racing across the city now: the rich hilltop districts, the slums that Viktor and Luther called home, Red Level, the industrial district, the mighty prisons on the outskirts, and even city hall itself were all being swept into the maw of the rift and dissolved into the blinding radiance. They had couple of minutes at the most, but Abigail refused to tremble in the face of it, and the Umbrella Academy simply went on dancing even as the ghosts began to flicker out of view.

Reginald tried one last time to fight his way out of Abgail's grasp, but all that accomplished was tangling himself up in a final embrace that left him all but cradled against her shoulder.

"Abigail," he begged. "Please… don't make me go through this again…"

"Nothing lasts forever, my darling: you can't cheat the universe indefinitely. Sooner or later, we would be forced to say goodbye. At least this way, I can hopefully set you on a better path."

"But-"

"Shh… just say with me. Just listen to my voice." Abigail laughed, in spite of herself. "You remember how much I loved the artists of this planet when we first visited Earth? You were addicted to Homer and Ovid and all the other poets that had died long before our arrival, but I couldn't get enough of Shakespeare. Funny thing, though, I don't think I ever shared my favourite monologue with you – there were so many, after all. But in the end, act four of The Tempest triumphs over all…"

"Abigail-"

The light blossomed, shaking the tower to its core. By now, the sun was barely visible in a sky as white and featureless as Antarctic snow, the city around them had been reduced to a bare handful of rapidly fading silhouettes on the horizon, and the rift was barely a few blocks from the tower.

"Our revels now are ended," proclaimed Abigail. "These, our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air."

With a tentacle, she gestured at the rapidly fading figures of the Umbrella Academy, almost invisible amidst the blinding light.

"And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind."

As she spoke, the tower swayed and shook as the rift began to swallow it whole from the ground up, rapidly taking the last of the city skyline with it and rendering the horizon blank and pale as paper.

The light was all around them now. Reginald could feel the ballroom disintegrating beneath his feet, even as the Hotel Oblivion's machinery began automatically roaring to life somewhere just above their heads, immune to total dissolution as only the greatest masterpieces of the Creators could be. But all the rest was gone, and Reginald knew that he and Abigail were soon to follow.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on…" Abigail paused and smiled at Reginald one last time. "And our little life is rounded with a sleep."

Then the light took them, and Reginald fell, Abigail's voice echoing in his ears as he plummeted into the blinding void.

---

By now, Reginald and Abigail were hidden from view by the growing veil of light from all around them. All that remained of the ballroom was a rapidly shrinking circle of floor on which the Umbrella Academy stood, looking out in astonishment as their world fell apart around them.

"So," said Luther, trying to look casual despite the encroaching void. "I guess this is it. What happens now?"

"Well, if Abigail and I edited the save file correctly, we end up back before Reggie could start Project Oblivion, before the Kugelblitz even. Wherever we go, we end up with a second shot at making the world a better place."

"Could you be a little more specific, old man, or is that not on the agenda right now?" asked Diego.

"Even with the monocle, there's only so much I can be sure of: the save file we picked was a little difficult to comprehend, but I know it's one where we'll exist and where we have an opportunity to keep the world at peace. Abigail and I programmed in as many failsafes to make sure Reggie can't fuck with reality ever again and the apocalypse won't happen the way he wanted it, but as for what happens to us… well, all I know is that we'll be alive."

"And?" demanded Lila, pointedly. "What else is there?"

"Well, all that we lost can be found again. Gracie will be born again in the future, Helen and Viktor will meet again, and we won't forget what we've learned in this timeline."

"Not so bad, really," said Klaus. He was smiling cheerily, even as he hastily stepped back to stay ahead of the floor vanishing beneath his feet. "Almost like reincarnation when you think about it. I always wondered what that'd be like."

"Probably really embarrassing," said Ben airily. "Knowing our luck, that's probably what'll happen to us."

"What did I tell you?" laughed Helen. "I thought this was going to end with us dying and being reincarnated, but I definitely didn't see it happening like this." She poked Viktor playfully in the chest. "You just remember what I said, lover boy: when we're reborn, you'd better find me sooner or later – I'd hate tonight to be the only extraordinary thing that happened in my lives."

Now it was Viktor's turn to laugh. "After everything we've done together, I wouldn't miss it for the world."

"What's left of it," Diego muttered.

There was a pause, as the room vanished a little further into nothingness.

Allison coughed nervously. "In case something goes wrong," she began, voice wobbling, "and I don't get to say it later-"

Sloane patted her on the shoulder. "Hey, we've already forgiven you, sis, you don't have to apologise again."

"No, no, it's… I just want everyone to know it's been incredible being part of this family, and even after everything that went wrong, I'm just so glad to be a part of it again in the end."

"Don't get mushy on us, Allison," Lila warned. "We've got a world to save wherever we wind up. Now, let's go out like skydivers."

"What, hitting the ground?"

"Joining hands, smartarse."

Chuckling, the Umbrella Academy and their allies linked hands for what seemed like the very last time, even as their final circle of floor began to evaporate into nothingness.

"Mommy?" Gracie whispered, as she clambered onto Diego's shoulders. "Daddy? What happens now?"

"Easily answered, kiddo," said Diego with a grin. "Now, we fly."

Lila leaned over and kissed Gracie one last time on the forehead. "See you soon, sweetie," she whispered.

Then the light swallowed the ground beneath their feet, and they were falling, plunging infinitely into the all-consuming light.

---

A/N: THE END.

Nah, just kidding! We've still got our epilogue...