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in-tua-deep · 5 years

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Au where Reggie finds a way to turn the power-suppressing stuff in Vanya’s pills into a serum or something to use as a punishment for the others? Like if Five decides to do something to take the attention off of his siblings again (I love that idea which I’m pretty sure you came up with) and as a punishment Reggie uses that for a while? Or maybe just to keep them from escaping punishment? Or if a villain got their hands on the serum to use against them?

coming back up here after writing and a general disclaimer because somehow i managed to twist this prompt into badass Vanya and exploring Five’s influence on Vanya in this au it’s wild okay but what I wrote -

OKAY oh man this is Awful and i hate it you have a wonderful evil mind

here’s the thing: there’s nothing that scares a superpowered person more than being powerless. I have atla on my mind thanks to my last couple of posts but like, take for example when the gaang was on the run from Azula in her tank - she had Ty Lee with her, a chiblocker, who scared the pants off of them precisely because she could take away their bending, their power.

And Reggie having something he could take away their power with?? oof. Their power is like,,, another limb to them. Something inherent and natural. Cutting them off from their power is to carve out a piece of themselves - Vanya was essentially drugged her entire life because to cut off her power he had to cut off her emotions like daMN

so Reggie has this serum that can temporarily make the kids what they fear most: it can make them ordinary

(Vanya is held up as an example all their lives about what happens if you’re ordinary, if they aren’t good enough, Vanya is at the bottom of the pecking order and scrapes by for survival in their house ignored and for the most part alone. All of the siblings fear sharing her fate)

the only one who would welcome it are Klaus and Ben, who have always feared their own powers. Klaus is the one Reginald would never give it to, because when all else fails you can be assured that he will never make life easy for Klaus. Ben probably has only had it used sparingly, if Reginald was afraid that Ben was out of control or about to injure/kill one of his siblings.

The others though? Terrified. Luther without his strength, Diego without his supernatural ability to curve knives, Three without her rumors, and Five without his jumps - and I honestly think Five would be the most frightened of all

Five is the one we see who uses his powers the most in the show I believe. He doesn’t just use it in combat situations like his siblings, but in normal situations as well. His is not a combat power.

Reginald has often framed punishment as training, and so he still does it. He takes their powers and dumps them in a situation and he says get out. survive. you can’t always rely on your powers. and the siblings have to learn to get along without them

Luther makes sure that his body is strong with or without his powers - he can’t carry the same weights as he could with his powers of course but he can do enough that he doesn’t feel completely helpless. Diego learns to use his knives and not just throw them, learns how to slash and turn his body into a weapon whether he has projectiles or not - and when he’s without his power he hones his aim regardless. He can’t curve the knives, but he can still throw straight on and that isn’t nothing. Allison learns to manipulate without her rumors, learns how to look at people with such big sad eyes with just a hint of tears and lie through her teeth, learns how to turn people against one another using nothing but her words.

And Five? Five learns to escape, learns how to twist and pop his thumb from its socket to maneuver handcuffs from his wrists and how to snap zipties and use every object in the room as a weapon and a tool. Five is scrappy, he doesn’t go down easily.

It would change them. It would change all of them. Luther is so rarely punished that it hardly matters, but the threat looms over his head nonetheless and it makes him wary of Reginald in a way that show!Luther is almost incapable of being.

Diego on the other hand is probably more sure of himself, more careful with his abilities. He knows exactly what his body is capable of and what he demands of it, and he’s maybe a little more hostile to Vanya. Because he knows what it is to be powerless, and he thinks she has no excuse for not being useful.

Allison doesn’t use her powers as much to get what she wants in life, and in fact almost takes a ruthless sort of joy in figuring out just how far she can push without her powers. It’s a safety net for her, but she doesn’t jump to it like she did in the show’s past. Maybe this Allison didn’t rumor her daughter, she instead knew exactly what to say to distract Claire and snap her out of tantrums. She and Patrick probably still divorced, but she probably has partial custody. On the other hand, she doesn’t have the same repulsion towards her powers show!Allison does either and is quicker to use it when she deems necessary and words fail her. (“I heard a rumor,” Allison says, cutting through Vanya’s protests easily because this is for her own good, “That you didn’t want to see Leonard Peabody again.”)

Klaus hates his father even more for having something that could provide him the much needed relief that Klaus has to go after drugs to even attempt to replicate and instead of giving it to him, Reginald refused. Reginald held the keys to Klaus having restful nights and days without the dead screaming in his face, and Reginald wouldn’t give it to him. So yeah, Klaus hates Reginald a whole lot more

Five is more desperate. He jumps, that’s what he does. It’s backing him into a corner, a bird of prey grounded and wounded who will last out and attack at the first provocation. Fight or flight, and with his option of flight stolen from him Five fights. He’s more ruthless, more dangerous, more terrified because can you even imagine what would happen if the Commission got their hands on that serum? Because Five can. He has nightmares about it that he wakes up from, hands flexed into claws because if necessary he’ll rip out someone’s throat with his bare hands. This is not a Five who draws the line at biting, this is a Five who barely even has a concept of a line.

This is a Five who jumps to the future and who only halfway planned to come back, this was a Five who wanted to time travel to any period where Reginald Hargreeves didn’t exist and who wanted to know he could take himself before he took his siblings. This is a Five Hargreeves who didn’t ask permission. Because telling Reginald things is giving him something to use against you, is giving him something to take away from you. This is a Five that vanishes in the night with no explanation, save for a whispered plan to Vanya in the middle of the night.

Vanya never tells her siblings what she knows. She tries, once, she approaches them all shy and nerves and they brush her off and something inside of her is so cold cold cold and she turns on her heel and walks away from them. They don’t even notice her leave, and Vanya keeps the secret of Five’s ability to herself.

She still makes the sandwiches, because Five said he planned to come back and get them. Planned to pull them away. Because even Luther couldn’t force them back to their father if there was no Dad to go back to. But he doesn’t come back, and Vanya knows that something must have gone terribly wrong.

(Five would have come back, if only for her. She knows that in her bones. Because Five is more vicious, and more protective, and he knows what it is to be powerless. He taught her grapples and how to break holds in the middle of the night on her bedroom floor, taught her how to throw a punch and hold a knife, taught her how to pick a lock and break zipties. He taught her all the things he’d had to teach himself when his option to run was taken from him. He taught her all the things he’d learned to do when he was normal, like her.

“Vanya,” He’d told her so very seriously, “Vanya, you listen to me. All of us are ordinary, it’s only what we can do that is extraordinary. Take that away and we’re just like everyone else - but that doesn’t mean we’re weak. Now try again, break out of my hold. You can do this.”

Vanya remembers the look in his eyes, wild and furious. A falcon forced into a songbird’s cage. “If you have the chance,” He told her, “You run. You run, and you don’t look back.” And Vanya gets the feeling he isn’t just talking about a theoretical villain attack, but she never does get the chance to ask for clarification.)

The others assume Five made a mistake with a jump, got lost in the in between, and Reginald puts up that portrait of Five with its cold unfeeling eyes that are so very wrong because Vanya knows Five and he’s never been cold. Five was only one letter away from being fire, all passion and furious determination and always so very very hungry for more. He’d made that cold cold cold part of her thaw, just a little bit, when she was around him. And now he was gone and she didn’t even have that comfort.

Vanya waits. She grows up. She stops leaving the lights on and leaving out peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches. She watches Diego’s powers get taken and she thinks you’re like me, now. you’re ordinary. but that doesn’t mean you can’t do extraordinary things.

The team comes home without Ben and all Vanya can feel is cold. If I’d been there - she thinks, because Dad makes her watch the footage. He calls it a thought exercise, to pinpoint where he siblings went wrong. She watches Ben die over and over again and she wonders if her father even realizes the cruelty.

Vanya hits 18, and she leaves. She’s been preparing to leave for a good long while now, not that anyone notices. She’s invisible in the household, she’s ordinary. She’s beneath notice.

(Right up until the day she leaves, she keeps practicing late at night in her bedroom. Reminds herself how to get out of restraints. How to throw a punch. Goes back over all the lessons that Five had given her, and more that she discovered on her own.)

She takes her violin and she auditions for an orchestra, and she’s good. She practices, she’s technically perfect. She doesn’t get first chair though, because there isn’t passion.

(She wonders, if Five has taken up an instrument - how would he play? She thinks he would have gotten first chair, would have brought fire and fury into his playing. She thinks of her metaphor of him as a bird in a cage, and she thinks - why does the caged bird sing?)

She also signs up for self defense lessons. Signs up for karate. Signs up for kickboxing. She’ll never be a master of any of them, but she doesn’t need to be. She just needs to be good enough. Good enough to get away, good enough to surprise someone. One of her teachers compliments her on her ability to break holds, the way she throws a punch, and she suddenly misses Five with such ferocity it frightens her. Because usually she’s so very very numb.

She writes the book. It isn’t anything like the one she could have written. This is a book that lifts her up, a book where she says that everyone is ordinary to start out with. But everyone is capable of extraordinary things. She tells the world about her siblings, about Luther who so rarely gets punished. About Diego who sneered at her even as his powers were taken, even as he was put on the same level as her. About Klaus who turned to drugs and Ben who died and Five who vanished and left a hole in her life.

But it’s Allison who left her the most important lesson: how to recognize subtle manipulation. Because an Allison that doesn’t rely on her rumors is still manipulative, but in a more quiet and careful sort of way that twists you up inside if you listen to her for too long.

She goes to the funeral because she wants to, not because she feels like she has to. She wants closure, she wants to look at the urn that contains her father’s body and realize that he can’t poison her anymore.

She’s there when the world splits apart in the courtyard, and Five drops through. And he looks up with fire in his eyes, raw and frightened and there’s an almost euphoria that she recognizes from when one of Five’s plans, one of the risky ones, worked. Even though his mouth says shit.

Klaus asks if anyone else sees little number Five but Vanya is already moving, pushing past her shocked sibling as she pulls her brother (he’s so small, she forgot how small he was even back then - he always seemed larger than life in her memories) and she smiles at him and says simply - “It worked.”

And Five pauses and looks at her even though their siblings clamor for answers in background, and he looks so sad that it almost penetrates the cold cold cold numbness wrapped around her heart. “No.” He tells her, “It didn’t.”

They go inside and Five makes his sandwich and they demand answers and Five gives them freely. He traveled in time. He traveled to the apocalypse. He got stuck. He made it back. He’s back in his 13 year old body.

(there’s no Reginald to tell them that time travel messes with the mind, because Five never mentioned it to him. There’s no reason for Vanya to doubt her brother’s truth.)

“Your power is spatial jumps.” Luther says, dubious, his arms crossed over his chest.

“And yours is stupidity,” Five shoots back, and it makes Diego snort with laughter. “How do you explain this then? What, dermatologists just hate me? I look fucking thirteen, Luther. If I couldn’t time travel I would be twenty-nine, like you.”

and there’s no real response to that

They go outside to the funeral, and Diego picks a fight with Luther, and Vanya is moving forward before she realizes, before anyone realizes, before they can stop. Allison calls out with fear for her ordinary sister, Klaus shouts in alarm, and Vanya?

Vanya flips Diego over her shoulder and he crashes into the wet ground.

She looks up into the astonishment on her siblings faces and the pride on Five’s. “You’ve been practicing,” He observes, smiling with just a few too many teeth. A predator’s smile.

Vanya smiles back, more softly. “I bet I could take you.” She tells him, ignoring their siblings still in shock around her. (Why shouldn’t she? They ignore her.)

“After we stop the apocalypse, I’d like to see you try.” Five offers back and Vanya nods and the deal is made. Because Five knows the power of what ordinary people can do when backed into a corner. He was the Commissions best not for his powers but for his creativity. He rarely jumped in the apocalypse or the commission, too many lost calories and energy, too much of a risk when those powers could be taken from him at any time

(Reginald cut off his powers in the middle of a jump once, and Five had fallen to the floor and vomited up everything in his stomach it was so painful. Tears streaming down his face as he retched, unable to even stand. Five is careful, after that. So very very careful.)

Vanya leaves to go home apologetically - she has to practice the violin and has kickboxing practice tomorrow and then she has a new student. Five waves her off and says he’ll catch up with her after her gets a cup of coffee. She gives him her address and they part ways.

He shows up in her apartment with blood oh his collar and a knife wound on his arm and Vanya fetches her med kit and feels rage chip away at the cold around her heart. “Did they die?” She asks him simply.

“Yes.” Five tells her, tilting his head to one side and examining her face as though he’s not quite sure what to make of her. But that’s okay, she not quite certain what to make of him, either.

He tells her about the eye, and when she tells him she can cancel her lesson he shakes his head. “I can go alone.” He tells her easily, “If all else fails I think I still have some blackmail material on our siblings - perhaps Allison would be useful in this endeavor.”

So Vanya stays behind, she opens her door and ushers Leonard Peabody into her apartment. She sees the way he ducks his head bashfully, the calculating glint in his eyes, and she thinks snake. But Vanya didn’t survive Reginald’s household by being dumb. She smiles and nods and ducks head shyly right back and wonders if this man had anything to do with her brother showing up in her apartment bleeding.

Later, when Allison expresses concern, Vanya doesn’t say anything against Leonard. Because despite everything, she loves her sister. And it would hurt Allison if Vanya told her that of course she didn’t trust Leonard, because Leonard was like Allison. Calculated words and actions, wondering just how quickly he could make her break.

“I heard a rumor that you didn’t want to see Leonard Peabody again.” Allison tells her, a regretful look on her face and Vanya nods blindly and tells her sister that she actually thinks seeing Leonard again would be a mistake.

But her sister is out of practice, and Vanya never forgot about the lessons she was taught as a child. Allison doesn’t word her rumor carefully enough. It doesn’t change anything.

Vanya already didn’t want to see Leonard again. He’s slimy in a way that makes the cold cold cold around her heart flex with distaste. But Vanya has so rarely gotten what she wanted in life, and she is more than used to pushing past her dislike and discomforts to get things done.

She sees Leonard again. She’s made many mistakes in her life, but she wants to know what he’s up to. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer - isn’t that the saying?

so when her medicine goes missing after Leonard is in her apartment, Vanya thinks on it. She tracks down her brother, and asks him his opinion. It’s the only one she really cares about, after all.

“What kind of medicine is it, again?” Five asks, brow furrowing as he realizes he’s never asked that question before. It didn’t seem important. Vanya had taken her medicine for as long as Five could remember - it was just… part of her.

“Anxiety medication.” Vanya tells him demurely, hands flexing at her sides.

“Can you get more?” Five asks.

“It’s automatically refilled for me.” Vanya says, frowning now. “It arrives by mail, but now that I think about it I don’t think I ever provided an address after I left the manor.”

They exchange a significant look. However, Five figures that this is a mystery for after the apocalypse is stopped and Vanya agrees. “Can you last without them?”

Vanya nods. She can last most things. She lasted 17 years in the manor, after all.

She sees Leonard again.

(Allison doesn’t bother to ask after him after the rumor between them. Allison is confident in her powers, far too confident. Vanya simply doesn’t bring him up again, and the issue is put to rest between them.)

Vanya juggles her time between her life, her brother, and trying to figure out what Leonard Peabody is doing, what he wants from her. He tells her she isn’t ordinary, and she thinks what’s wrong with being ordinary? It doesn’t mean i can’t do extraordinary things. She thinks of a bedroom in the middle of the night, blood dripping down her brother’s wrists as he teaches her with steady hands how to pick locks. (“If you can be where people think you can’t reach,” He told her, eyes watching where his blood dripped onto Vanya’s carpet, “Then you can pull things off they don’t think possible. Pulling off the impossible, Vanya, is never an ordinary act.” and she believes him.)

Leonard grows more confident as she doesn’t push him away, and Vanya can feel something inside herself cracking. It’s like ice breaking up after a long and hard winter, as the cold cold cold she has grown so used to… snaps. And she waves her hand, and streetlamps are crushed as car alarms go off as they feed into the loop of street noise-anger-Leonard prodding-loud loud loud

She tells Leonard she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, her having powers. But she looks at the unholy glee he can’t quite disguise behind his eyes, the excitement in his voice, the pushing for her to try, and she thinks this is wrong.

She goes to find her brother, and shows him. She tells him about the cold cold cold and how she’s off her medicine and she didn’t realize but there was lava hiding beneath the sheets of ice and she feels rage. Because she knows what this is. She knows what has been done to her. She’s seen her father take away her siblings’ powers all her life, as punishment, on a whim, for training. Why would it come as any surprise that he tried to take away hers?

but there’s a relief because Five matches her fury, inch for inch. If Reginald wasn’t already dead, it’s fairly obvious that he wouldn’t have survived much longer regardless.

“You haven’t changed any.” Five tells her, fierce as anything. “You haven’t changed. What you can do has changed. But you’re still my sister. You’re still Vanya.”

And that lays to rest a fear she didn’t even know she was holding onto. She is Vanya. She plays the violin. She’s top of her kickboxing class. She’s a part time instructor now teaching women self defense. She has six siblings. She teaches children how to play an instrument. She is an ordinary person, who is capable of extraordinary things. She’s just a little more capable than before.

The magma settles, just a little. It’s odd to be running so hot after so long of being cold.

“I went to the Commission,” Five tells her, holding out a scrap of paper with the name Harold Jenkins written across it. “Want to help me save the world?”

They loop in the others. Luther protests, but Diego is conspicuously silent on the matter. He remembers Vanya flipping him in that courtyard. They don’t tell the others about Vanya’s powers. (It’s like Vanya not telling them about the time travel, they ignored her and dismissed her and she’s not quite as quick to trust them as she had been as a child. She’s not a little girl, anymore.)

They go to the police station. Diego gets the file. The open it up and there’s a picture of Leonard Peabody and Allison gasps and Vanya thinks oh. This is what’s so wrong about him. A liar who can shed one identity like a snake shedding their skin. This is what I saw.

And Vanya is with them. She calls Leonard on the phone as Allison watches with wide eyes. Vanya brings up the magma boiling inside of her to her voice, coloring it with hurt and fury that she’s feeling, really feeling, as she fabricates an argument with her siblings and asks for Leonard to please pick her up. He agrees with barely disguised glee, and Vanya shoves down the wave of of hate-horror-make him pay that bubbles up in response to the man who dared think he could use her

(she isn’t stupid. neither is five. they share a look, because Leonard Peabody doesn’t have access to the kind of arsenal that could end the world. but he’s purposefully put himself in Vanya’s path, and Vanya has powers that they don’t know the full extent of just yet. in another life, Vanya is a bomb and Leonard is the one to light the fuse. in this life, Vanya won’t let him get that far.)

it’s anticlimactic, in the end. Leonard comes to pick her up, getting out of his truck and running towards her with concern on his face that sits like an ill-fitting suit. Five jumps behind him, and he is deadly and furious and loves his sister. Leonard-Harold, whoever he is, doesn’t see it coming as Five reaches and twists and there’s a snapping noise and suddenly they have a body on their hands.

They go to his house, and they find Reginald’s journal sitting there with the incriminating writing on its pages, and then they go home.

And then Five sits on the couch and flips through the journal and tells Vanya exactly what her powers are, as recorded by Reginald Hargreeves. And the others are there, and they can’t believe it - because she’s Vanya. She’s ordinary.

Vanya crosses her legs and stares her siblings in her eyes, “I’m still ordinary.” She tells them, because that’s what she believes. Allison’s rumor when she was four still grips her, but Allison has never been especially careful about her wording and Reginald didn’t know any better. “I’m still ordinary, but ordinary people can do extraordinary things more often than not.”

And Vanya thinks, and she smiles. Because the first chair in her orchestra played with such passion and beauty that it could move someone to tears. And wasn’t that extraordinary? And the women who taught her kickboxing was the mother of five children and takes night classes because she still wants to get her degree, and isn’t that extraordinary? The woman who Vanya taught how to break a man’s wrist the other week has been pale and frail looking but she’d looked Vanya in the eyes with such fierceness as she told Vanya in no uncertain terms that she was never going to allow someone to touch her without her permission again, and that strength was extraordinary.

April 2nd is the most beautiful dawn she’s ever seen, and she tucks Five against her side as he sobs and sobs. He’s so broken now, her brother, but she doesn’t love him any less for all his sharp and jagged edges. He came back and he stopped the apocalypse, and he’s her brother.

She isn’t cold anymore, and the heat hurts, but she’s carried a lot of pain in her life. This is nothing, in the grand scheme of things. She’s angry, yes, but she’s in control.

“Hey Five,” She gets her brother’s attention. She knows him, she knows that without this driving him he’ll feel so empty. So isn’t it fortunate that she has just the project for him? “Do you remember, when we were children, and you would teach me how to fight?”

“Yeah.” Five says, scrubbing a hand angrily at his eyes like he thought his tears were a weakness.

Vanya smiles at him, “Feel up to teaching me again?”

Because Five needs a purpose, and Vanya needs control, and together they can figure out her powers she knows they can. And if they mend their family at the same time, if they learn how to exist together again, then maybe everything will all be worth it.

“But for now,” Vanya says, “I think I’m kind of hungry. Anyone else want to order pizza?”

And Klaus raises his hand up and Vanya sees his new tattoo and the new ghosts behind his eyes and wonders if she should ask. Allison nods and stands up to go grab the phone. Diego shrugs and Luther looks shocked. And Five gives Vanya the smallest and most fragile smile she’s ever seen, and she smiles back at him.

The stopped the apocalypse.

Now they just have to figure out how to live again.

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