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❛ ᴡᴀsᴛᴇʟᴀɴᴅs ᴏғ ᴛɪᴍᴇ. ❜ ° . ༄
- ͙۪۪˚ ▎❛ 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐄𝐍 ❜ ▎˚ ͙۪۪̥◌
»»————- ꒰ ᴋɪʟʟᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ sᴘᴏʀᴛ ꒱
❝ IF WE KILL YOU, DO WE
GET OUR BEN BACK? ❞
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Lila was yelling furiously at Diego as Five and Dolores inspected the Pachinko machine. It hadn't changed from when she'd last seen it and there seemed to be nothing special about it at all. The boy turned to face his brother first. "Congratulations, you're both mildly terrible parents. Can we focus? Come on. How did this thing open before?" He looked over at her. "Dol?"
She shook her head. "I dunno, sorry. It probably opened after we left."
Diego backed her up: "it was already kinda open."
Five sighed. "'Already kinda open?'" He repeated. "Diego, you should've been an engineer. It's a lost opportunity."
"Maybe there's a secret lever or something," the brunette suggested. "Hidden passageways always have that sort of thing." She moved forward to try one of the controls.
Her husband immediately caught her wrist as he gave her a firm look. "Don't go pushing buttons when you don't know what they do."
"But we do know what they do: they open that door!"
"Why'd you want to go in there anyway?" Lila asked frantically— though a part of that could've been a result of her continued search for Stan. "It's just sushi and death!"
The boy gestured to the door. "When we met future me in the Commission bunker, I warned myself about Oblivion. Now, Pogo told me—"
Diego stopped looking around the room to cut him off: "wait. Whoa, whoa! Pogo's alive?"
"Different Pogo, but yes."
"A worse Pogo, you mean," Dolores corrected him.
"Anyway," Five continued pointedly, "the monkey said that Dad spent years training the Sparrows for some kind of super-secret mission into. . ."
"Oblivion?" Lila finished.
He clapped his hands together and walked towards the door. "So, we come back here and find that you two sentient STDs have actually been in there. Everything's leading to Oblivion, so we have to go in there." Then, he looked over at Dolores. "Not you, though. You can stand guard—"
"What? No way! I can fight now—"
"No, he's right," Diego agreed with his brother. "While three days of my epic training can put you on the leaderboard for a bar fight, you're no match for whatever that thing was." He held up his injured hand. "I didn't get this by giving a mummy a hand job, alright? You are not ready to face that."
Dolores huffed and crossed her arms. "None of you have any faith in me."
Unfortunately, she didn't get any support from Lila, either. "Look, Diego might be ninety percent moron and ten percent pelvic thrusts but he's right about Oblivion, okay? We're not just gonna waltz back in there because you say so."
Before Five could come up with a rebuttal, Luther and the fifth Sparrow— Dolores hadn't learned her name yet— entered the room. "Good. Because you're coming with us."
✧✧✧
Grace held out a plate of cookies as the assembled adults sat in the living room of the now-Sparrow Academy. Lila took almost all of them with hardly a word except: "lovely to meet you."
There was a clear divide between the two Academies with Diego, Lila, Five and Dolores on one side of the table. Allison sat separately from them but on their side of the room. Luther was the exception: he stood with the Sparrows.
"Welcome," Fei greeted them as she entered the room. "Please make yourselves at home." A raven followed behind her and cawed to announce her presence.
Allison didn't take kindly to her words. "Bitch, this is our home."
"Excuse me?"
In an effort to prevent an argument from breaking out, Luther reached forward and picked up a bowl. "Jellybean?"
Almost in unison, both Doloreses reached for the candy. "Yes, thanks." They gave each other suspicious looks and carefully avoided having their hands touch as they took some Jellybeans from the bowl.
"Where the hell are Viktor and Klaus?" Diego asked.
"With our luck, probably Kugelblitzed by now."
"You're a dark little dude sometimes."
Fei leaned towards him with interest. "Ooh, what happened to your hand?"
Ben clapped his hands together to get their attention. "We don't have time for idle chitchat. Everyone, sit down."
"A please would be nice," Diego grumbled, but they all did as he said.
Luther hesitated between the two Academies until he decided to stand. He cleared his throat nervously. "So, uh. . . this is kinda nice, right? All of us here together. One big happy family." He leaned towards Sloane. "I feel like I'm sweaty. Am I sweaty?"
"No, you're fine," she whispered back.
The second Sparrow took over for him: "look, I know there's been bad blood between us. Whatever. Bygones, right?" Diego raised his hand. "Question?"
"Yeah. If I kill you, do we get our Ben back?" Fei snickered with amusement at his suggestion. "Hypothetically. . ."
"Keep talking and your hand won't be the only thing bleeding."
Five didn't give his brother a chance to argue further. "Okay, if the testosterone twins are done, I'd like to get back to a plan."
Viktor finally made his appearance then. Without hesitation, he demanded: "where is he?"
"Viktor," Allison said slowly.
The short man turned to look at the Hargreeves that surrounded him. "What did you do to Harlan?"
"They didn't do anything. I did. I killed Harlan," she announced calmly.
"What—?" It took a moment for him to process the news. "I. . . I don't. . . I don't understand. Why?"
"Because he didn't deserve to live."
Ben came over to sit on the couch with a container of cheese puffs while the Sparrow's Dolores followed to stand behind him. She leaned against the back of the sofa as she watched the brewing argument with interest. The Umbrella's Dolores had chosen to stand on Five's side of the couch as she felt rather out of place amongst the superpowered siblings. Taking a seat as Ben had requested felt like she was putting herself on the same playing field when she clearly wasn't.
Viktor stared at his sister with betrayal clearly on his face. "What? Because they said so? You don't have to listen to them! They don't get to tell us what to do."
The second Sparrow leaned towards Five. "Twenty bucks on the little one."
"I'll take that action," the boy agreed.
"You coulda. . . you coulda talked to me. We could've figured out something else," the brunet continued fiercely.
Allison wasn't having any of it. "What, so you could lie to all of us again and take his side?"
"That not what happened."
"Oh, no, that's exactly what happened." She leaned forward menacingly and her voice dropped. "I know Harlan killed all of our mothers."
There were exclamations of shock amongst the Umbrellas. Lila gave them an interested look as she ate some licorice. "Bloody plot twist."
"Who told you that?" Viktor asked.
"Harlan. After you lied about it to my face," Allison snarled through gritted teeth.
Diego watched his brother carefully. "Is that true, Viktor? Harlan started all of this?"
The man glanced down to avoid meeting anyone's eyes. "Yeah, but he didn't mean to hurt anyone. He—"
"How do you know?" Five spoke up for the first time.
While Dolores hadn't been affected by Harlan's actions, she still felt for the siblings that she considered her family. They'd never gotten to meet their mothers in the original timeline and now they never would. She hadn't always gotten along with her mother, but she didn't even want to know what it would be like if something that tragic happened to her. The brunette reached down and gently grasped her husband's hand to give it a reassuring squeeze. He returned the gesture almost instantly. After a moment's pause, she tightened her grip on his hand three more times, consecutively, to give him a silent message of support.
Viktor looked over at the boy. "Because I knew him, and he was sweet and kind until I made him like us. Okay? So I screwed him up. And if you need someone to blame, I'm right here—"
"What makes you think I don't?" Allison cut him off coldly.
"This wasn't about saving the world. This was about hurting me. Payback for—"
The brunette stood as she stared him down. She approached her brother with slow, measured steps until she towered over him. "Go on. Say her name."
Luther quickly stood up to intervene. "You know what? Maybe we should all just take a minute. . ." His sister held up her hand, causing him to sit back down. "Okay."
"Did killing Harlan bring Claire back?"
"Did protecting him bring Sissy back? Because it was just as personal for you—"
"I didn't kill anyone!" Viktor protested loudly.
Allison countered him with equal volume: "but you risked everyone! Do you know what that felt like? Watching you fight harder to protect the man who helped destroy my daughter than you ever did to bring her back?"
The short man shook his head. "I don't know how to bring Claire back. Okay? No one does. But I was there for you. I tried. I was—"
"To what? Help me grieve? God, this whole family is so quick to tell me to suck up my pain and so worried about fixing yours! Someone had to pay because you never seem to. Destroy the world, kill Pogo, almost kill me, and for what? So we can all run around and clean up your mess? I'm sick of it."
Five tried to calm their fight. "Take it easy, Allison." Ben shushed him, too involved in watching the drama unfold.
"Okay, I—"
Allison's eyes glowed a bright yellow-orange as she completely lost her temper. Rings of power echoed from her lips with her next words: "SHUT YOUR MOUTH!"
Viktor's lips snapped closed upon command. He began to choke as he was unable to breathe except through his nose. Luther shot out of his seat. "Allison!"
"Every time I build a new life for myself, you end the world and TAKE IT FROM ME!" she screamed in her brother's face.
The boy leaned forward with concern. "How are you doing that without saying 'I heard a rumor?'"
"Just a little residual gift from Harlan," she answered evenly.
The larger man finally stood up for the brunet. "Alright, that's it. Knock off the power shit, Allison. It's not okay!"
Allison released Viktor from her hold and he took a deep breath. He coughed several times and he leaned his hands on his knees to recover from his closed mouth. The woman leaned down to his bent level to whisper in his ear: "we should have left you in the basement."
Her words were met with immediate and heated protest from her siblings. Dolores' eyes widened at how intense their disagreement had gotten. Her heart tugged with sympathy for Viktor; even before all of this had happened, back when she'd first gotten to the original 2019, he'd always been kind to her. He had accepted her without question and now, most recently, he had confirmed her place in the Hargreeves family. While some of their current predicament was caused by him, it wasn't solely his fault and he certainly didn't deserve Allison's treatment.
In retaliation, the man straightened violently from his bent position and used surprise to his advantage to smack his sister across the face. Allison went reeling backwards from the force of his hit— it had been so strong that her nose had left a trail of blood on her face. Defeated, Viktor turned and left the room.
With her recent "punch-first" attitude as Five had described it— and her loyalty towards the seventh sibling— Dolores found that she couldn't stay out of it. Although it was probably not the path her husband would've preferred her to take, she spoke up in Viktor's defense.
"What the hell, Allison?" the brunette moved from her spot next to Five to stand in front of the other woman. Her hands were on her hips as she stared at the fourth Hargreeves with an outraged expression. "Look, we all know you've had it rough in this timeline but your grief doesn't give you the right to be a bully!"
"Someone needs to take the fault," she replied indifferently. "I don't know why you're taking his side; he's the one that put you in this position in the first place. If anything, you should feel as angry as I do—"
"Don't tell me how I'm supposed to feel. What's more is that I would never handle my grief the way you have. I've lost people too, Allison. We all have. You're the only one who's acting like a child who can't have their favorite toy."
Her eyes narrowed dangerously. "Are you trying to belittle my feelings? Because how I'm feeling right now is very real."
"Of course I'm not," Dolores told her in a deceptively even tone. "I'm only saying that the way you're handling your emotions is childish."
Allison didn't take kindly to that. She took several steps forward so that she could tower over the teen. Her gaze became more intense as she snarled out: "yeah? Well, you've never had a child. You don't know what it's like to lose the one person that you love most in the world. There's no way you could ever understand what I'm feeling."
The brunette remained unruffled by the other woman's attempt at intimidation. "That's true," she agreed. "But I was a child once, until the apocalypse took that away. Even if you don't have Claire in this timeline at least you got to give her a childhood. She had a loving family and a good home."
She earned a scoff in response for her words. "What? Is that supposed to make me feel better? Is it supposed to make amends for the fact that my daughter is gone? My god, you're so annoying. I've never liked you—"
"Yeah, that was pretty obvious from the start." The girl spoke with such frustrating amiability that Allison let out an actual growl of fury.
"You don't deserve the Hargreeves name," she continued in a low, dark voice as if there hadn't been an interruption. "You don't deserve to be a part of this family. I will never see you as one of us and you'll certainly never be my sister. In fact, there are some days where I wish you'd. . ." the woman trailed off for a moment to give the teen a once-over of pure distaste. "Just drop dead."
Dolores Hargreeves' eyes turned white. In the next second, she collapsed on the ground.