Chapter Text
After his meeting with Vanya, Marcus drove himself home, pulled into the garage, cut off the ignition, and sat alone in his car for nearly two hours.
He’d been doing that a lot lately. Fifteen minutes to hear the end of the radio segment he’d been listening to, thirty to eat the takeout he’d picked up while running an errand. A full hour after a meeting with their PR team. To collect his thoughts.
He wasn’t hiding.
He wasn’t. It was only that he knew exactly what would happen when he set foot back in the house, and why run to catch a show he knew by heart?
Ben would nitpick any little thing he could find, because he wanted to argue. Christopher would diffuse the tension with his typical wit, because he wanted Marcus to consider him his closest ally, but he didn’t want to alienate Ben, either. This was not due to any great affection for either of them, Marcus knew. Christopher liked being close to Number One, and he wanted to keep his options open in the event Ben ever reclaimed the title.
Fei would ask where he’d been and try to read between the lines of every word he said. Fei didn’t trust him, and she wanted him to know it. Sloane, on the other hand, would ask the same question and accept his answer uncritically. She had a genuine desire to know where Marcus went and what he did, and he was starting to think she didn’t even have an ulterior motive for it.
Alphonso would force a few jokes and slap his shoulders like they were great pals and Jayme would hang back sullen and scowling. Their dearest wish was for him to overlook all the stupid degenerate bullshit they got up to, and one thought they could accomplish that end via false bonhomie, where the other preferred distance. Marcus would never tell them, but they had already won that war. He didn’t know how to civilize the pair of them, and had long since given up hope of figuring it out.
What awaited Marcus inside was a movie he’d seen a thousand times. The millionth encore of a concert he’d been at since birth. A rerun of an episode that had been okay the first time he watched it, but he only tuned in to it now because nothing else was on.
So no, he wasn’t hiding. He was becoming inert.
He closed his eyes and saw Vanya behind the lids. So small she had to perch at the edge of her seat so her feet would touch the floor, so powerful she had ended the world. The curve of her mouth, wicked and regretful, as she had told him so.
She was a clearcut villain, and therefore in need of smiting. But. That smile. It hadn’t felt evil.
It had felt like the start of something big.
Marcus opened the door and got out of his car. Briefcase. He didn’t know yet how this thing with the Umbrella Academy would play out, but this, he knew, was the first step.
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There were, in fact, a number of things that Marcus did not know.
He didn’t know that Fei had been spying on him and Vanya at Ben’s direction; he didn’t know that in Sloane’s daydreams of riding a scooter through the streets of Santorini, the nebulous male figure that always rode behind her had developed a dorky smile and a very broad chest; he didn’t know that when Christopher had grown bored of supervising Grace’s cleanup efforts and floated off, she had made a startling discovery in the wreckage of their living room, and taken it down to the basement, where all things that had no other place belonged; and he did not know that Jayme had bet Alphonso a soft pretzel that he was too chickenshit to draw a dick on the buttcheek of Marcus’s uniform.
Other things that had happened during the two hours he wasn’t hiding in his car:
On the opposite side of the country, Allison sat wrung-out and bleary-eyed on a bench outside of LAX, trying to scrape up the wherewithal to rumor her way onto a flight back to New York, or, failing that, to maybe just walk into the ocean and let it keep her.
At the Hotel Obsidian, Diego was in the shower, allowing the hot water sluicing over his countless injuries to bring each one back to stinging memory. The dull ache from his father’s knife, the swollen throb of a twisted ankle. Scratches on his back, courtesy of Lila. Sharp and shivery. He rested his forehead against the cool of the tile, and he could almost imagine she was there with him.
Two blocks away, Five was attempting to force Luther into being his accomplice in a robbery.
“I’ll jump in behind the counter and grab the lock box,” he said, nodding at the check cashing place he’d chosen. “You just keep the owner busy. Ask a bunch of stupid questions or something. You excel at that.”
Luther sighed. “Look, Five, I get that being broke sucks, but I don’t think this is the best solution.”
“It is,” Five insisted. “I’ve been casing these places all morning, and this is the only one within ten blocks where the security cameras don’t work.”
“I meant because it’s wrong, Five. Stealing is wrong. This is a very basic fact and I feel like you should already know it.”
Five rolled his eyes. “Their insurance will cover the loss,” he said impatiently. “Do you have any idea how frequently check cashing businesses get robbed, Luther?”
“Uh… Do you have any idea how frequently check cashing businesses get robbed?”
“All the time,” said Five. “According to Klaus.”
Oh. Okay, yeah. It was all coming together now.
“Why don’t you have him help you?” asked Luther. “I don’t want to sound mean, but if I had to guess who in the family would grow up to become bank robbers, it would be you two.”
Five pursed his lips. “Klaus is… otherwise occupied.”
At that very moment, Klaus was having an allergic reaction in the STD clinic.
He had just gotten his pills and his shot—very efficient process, great teamwork all around, five stars for everybody—and the moment he stepped back into the waiting room to leave, he was struck by a sudden case of the itis.
“Um!” He beelined to the reception desk, scratching feverishly at his chest. “Hi, hi, uh, I was just in the back there getting some meds for the tickle in my pickle, and I’ve had them before—boy howdy, have I had them before—but something’s not sitting right this time and I feel very itchy and wrong and oh my God, can I please, please, please have a Benadryl?”
The receptionist peered up at him. “Yeah, wow, you’re really sweating,” she said. “Do you feel like you’re going to pass out? Sit, I’ll get you a water.”
“I don’t need water,” Klaus snapped with an unusual spike of annoyance. “I need drugs.”
He felt so—off. Methed up, almost, hyper aware of the way his clothes brushed his skin and how bright the lights were in here and all the people in the waiting room BREATHING through their MOUTHS like fucking LOSERS.
“Herschberger?” a nurse called. “You can come back here with me.”
As abruptly as his symptoms had come on, they began to fade. Klaus’s guts stopped bubbling. The perspiration under his arms cooled. His usual love for his fellow man came flooding back.
“You know, I think it passed,” he told the receptionist, stifling a burp with his fist. “Could I get that water after all? I’m parched.”
Back at the hotel, Vanya was sitting down in a barber’s chair. When he got back up, he would be Viktor.
Marcus did not yet know any of this, but he would learn all of these facts eventually.
Some sooner than others.
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“Grace?”
He knew she had to be down in the basement. When there was no cooking or cleaning to be done, that was where she always was.
“Grace?” He jogged down the steps. “Have you seen a—ah?”
She was crouched on the floor with a bowl of water and plate of strawberries, and she smiled up at him. She had always looked to him a bit like Maria from The Sound of Music. In the years since Pogo had left, she also looked a bit deranged.
“Hello, Marcus,” she said. “Are you looking for something?”
“Uh. A briefcase. That might have been left here the other day.” He looked down at the food. “What are you doing?”
Grace’s smile didn’t waver. “Serving lunch.”
To… mice? Roaches? Grace had been in desperate need of maintenance for a while now, but Marcus didn’t have time for this.
“The briefcase?” he prompted on a sigh.
Grace pointed to a corner. “Right there.”
Marcus had always hated it down here. They used to dare each other to sit a few minutes in the dark when they were young, and once someone—he suspected Ben, but it could have been any of them, really, in those days—had locked him in. He still remembered standing with his back pressed to the door, feeling as though if he took his eyes off the shadows for even a second, they would creep up and swallow him.
Even now, as an adult and a bona fide superhero, he got the sense that something was lurking back there. There was a jumble of bric-a-brac, an old coat or a ratty blanket with a button on it draped over a small end table. But when you looked at it the right way, it took on the form of a strange, squat figure with a glint like a beady eye staring at him.
It blinked.