Title: Please don't take my sunshine away
Fandom: Umbrella Academy
Characters: Allison, Patrick, Claire, Vanya, Luther; Allison POV
Author: sjnt
Rating: PG
Length: 2234 words
Author notes: Written for fan_flashworks challenge 264: Shelter. My first posting to this comm. (Fingers crossed I've done everything correctly.) I've been thinking about Allison's motivations and actions in S1. This prompt brought them into focus.
Content notes: References to post-pregnancy body changes and people's terrible, horrible, no good reactions to them.
Summary: Shelter is hard to find; or, Allison comes to a reckoning with herself.  



Here’s something they don’t tell you about marriage and children.

If you’re lucky, you can have one or the other.

If you’re unlucky, you can lose them both.

To start, it’s perfection. The magazine dream except real. When she’s on the cover of the glossies there’s no need to fabricate or suggest. There’s no need to hear a rumor. There’s no need to hear anything at all because she has made it so. The doting, gorgeous husband who’s hardworking and ambitious, but not so much as to dim her light. The lovely, delicate daughter, the beautiful baby who coos and burbles and feeds like clockwork. A waking dream. (Freshly cut grass dries in the heat of the noonday sun. A robin, head tilted, worm dangling from its beak, examines them, lying on a blanket under the shade of an oak tree. She hears the sleepy whir of grasshoppers, a light breeze ruffling leaves.)  A legacy created not through inexplicable magic or magical innuendo. A family whose foundation doesn’t rest on money, power and a lust for control barely held in check by a thin veneer of civilization. But one that was built authentically. Out of goodness. The goodness of her heart.

She thinks back to years past, what others more credulous might call her childhood. She knows she will do better. She knows she can do better with a hundred-and-four-degree fever, two arms tied behind her back and two shattered legs.

Has she mentioned that Claire already sleeps through the night? Honestly, people find taking care of a baby difficult? 

In what she later, too late, understands was a gusher of hormones fueling delusions of grandeur, she dismisses the night nanny. She dismisses the day nanny. The three of them and only them. They’re in this together.

Inevitably, yet unexpectedly, reality sets in.

She stops breast feeding, and the pregnancy weight returns. She is soft in places that used to be hard. She droops in places that used to be perky.

Her publicist: a waterfall of straight black hair cut at a sharp angle along her jaw; luxurious eyelashes that perfectly frame eyes reminiscent of Liz Taylor in her prime. (Sometimes, mesmerized, she finds herself leaning close, closer than is appropriate.) Her publicist expresses concern. “Have I told you about my trainer? He works miracles. One hundred sixty minutes a day, seven days a week. He cooks all your meals for you and watches you eat them too!”

Her agent: fast talking, aggressive and wise-cracking. Her agent gives it to her straight. “Have I told you about this new juice diet I’m on? It’s fabulous! You absolutely need to be on it. I’m sending you two weeks worth. No, it’s not too much! I’ve already done it. I hope you like cayenne!”

Her best friend: a skinny, calculating bitch who’s debating whether adopting a baby is so eighteen months ago. Her best friend drops unsubtle hints. “Do you want the name of my doctor? He can write you a prescription and oh my, you’re better than new. You’re the you you always knew you could be. If that doesn’t get results, he can refer you to some surgeons who do Very Good Work.”

The journalist: supposed to be doing a puff piece on her; examines her over the top of his spectacles and thoughtfully strokes his chestnut hued mutton chops, like he’s petting a chinchilla. The journalist asks, “Aren’t you worried that you won’t be able to take such…active roles as you used to?”

She replies, to one and all, “I heard a rumor that Allison’s post-baby body is breathtaking. Stunning and strong. Better than before. How did she do it? ‘Oh, it was so easy,’ she laughed. ‘I didn’t have to do a thing!’”

Once there was fun, travel and glamor. Now? Not so much. She hasn’t had sex in months, but it’s not because she’s too tired. (“Maybe tomorrow, love. Claire’s got a cold, and she sleeps so much better when I’m in the room with her.”) It's not because she's the one obsessed with being a parent.

When she couldn’t take it any more, she might have heard a rumor.

“The first few months are the worst. Don’t worry. It gets better!”

The work doesn’t lessen, though.   

Once, Claire lay quietly in her ten-thousand dollar crib: the height of infant chic. Undulating surfaces and solid cherry wood, movement without end. It’s as if she never left the womb, and they didn’t even have to pay for it. Once, Claire gurgled and cooed, did nothing more strenuous than bat at mobiles: handmade fairies, elves and gnomes; sweet-faced lambs, ducks and pigs, each soft as a whisper. She lay under pastel printed, quilted cotton, organic blankets made by ladies in exotic villages oceans away. Swathed in butterfly bright fabrics, studiously working in dappled afternoon light. Learning a trade, fed three meals a day and paid fairly for their work, it said so on the label. Claire was an idea of a baby, an abstraction of infancy.

Now, Claire is grabby and grubby and sticky. Desperate and constant and loud. She wails. At first it’s wordless, then it’s not. It’s always accusing. As if Claire understands her, knows that she’s thinking about something other than her. As if Claire hears her, counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds until nap time, bedtime, someone-else-is-taking-care-of-this-child time and she is free.

“Embrace this time, enjoy it! You will miss it when it’s gone!”

The work only becomes different. Harder.

Once, she was finally finally the center of attention. No more sharing the limelight with five, then four others.
No more fighting to be part of boys’ games. No more justifying her power as being a real one, just as good as theirs. No more playing with boring, ordinary, sullen, milquetoast Vanya. (Who is her sister. Should be her ally, her friend, the two of them against the boys but she only sits, pale and timid and diffident and that violin so awful, so sad and whiny. Didn’t it used to be different? She remembers Vanya used to be different. It's like a dream, though: sharp in her mind, but she tries to bring words to it and the images disappear. It must have been a dream.)

Now, so much of her precious time, space and energy is spent, water on stone, cosseting and soothing. Attempting to inculcate reason into an entirely unreasonable human being who she loves and adores, who is the center of her world, who she is every day thankful for, she knows she is blessed.

But.

Claire is so damn ungrateful. As a child (was she ever a child?) she would have done anything - crawled on hands and knees across broken glass, given up her gift, given up most of her siblings - for a fraction of what Claire has. When it is time to get ready for bed and, instead of a sweet smelling three-year old lisping “g’night Mommy” she must coax a howling, shrieking, flailing monster to stop rolling around the floor, to stop trying to bite her when gets too close, she explains.

“Did you know, oh this is funny, that Mommy was only allowed three toys at a time? When I got a new one I had to get rid of an old one. Because we didn’t have the space!”

“Did I ever tell you that once Mommy wasn’t allowed to talk for a month? Can you imagine! She had laryngitis, from singing too much, and couldn’t do her part of an important job. Your grandfather thought not talking for a while would help me to remember to take better care of my voice. What do you think of that? Isn’t that silly!” 

But Claire doesn’t comprehend. Doesn’t want to. How much she has. How little she’s done to deserve it.

She thinks about Mom, sometimes, about calling her up and asking for her advice. Mom never got tired, or stressed.

Then she remembers. There was a good reason for that.
 
********
 
When Patrick looks at her. The toe curling, stomach clenching wash of shame and fear. (What has she done? How stupid to get caught doing it.) She grabs onto the bed. To keep from passing out. To keep from falling out of her chair. In that moment she is simultaneously in her body and seeing herself through his eyes.

She sees a grown woman cowering in fear of, seething in poorly concealed rage at a four-year old.

She sees a daughter far too similar to her father, demanding that her family’s life at all times be ordered and focused. Around her. On her. Because she has work to do. Because she doesn’t have time for childish behavior.

It is this moment of clarity that stops her, that keeps in check her howling need. (Her body that held and birthed and fed the baby. Her voice that soothed her, her arms that rocked her. How dare he take her away she is hers. She heard a rumor.)

He was so tense, standing in the doorway, not daring to come close. Prepared, at the slightest move from her, to clap his hands over his ears and bound away.

Later, he asked, “Was any of this real? Any of it? Do I love you because you told me to?”

“No!” she protested. “It’s not like that! You are different. We are different! I never would have done that to you, to us. This is real. We are real. Always and forever.” She’s not sure, as she says it, if that’s true or a rumor she told herself.
 

********
 

She crawls home, in retreat and defeat, and is part of her glad that Dad’s death gives her an excuse to do so?   

She prepares herself. How they will gloat. That she, who had not anything as banal as a normal life but the perfect life – so unlike them with their drug abuse, vigilante obsessions, literary sniping, and unstinting devotion to a megalomaniac – brought it all down with a crash and bang, for the whole world to see.

She thinks of Luther, dear, sweet Luther, and she blushes. She’s not being fair to him. He won’t bludgeon her with her mistakes. He’s always understood her, cared for her, made her feel special and wanted and loved. He’s on the moon. How did that happen? Her first love. They say you never truly get over your first love, especially when it ends how it did with them: wistfully, without completion and closure. (Does she still think about Luther because their feelings didn’t have time to dwindle, the way they did with Patrick?) She corrects herself. (The way they might have dwindled with Patrick, but just for a little while, it happens when you have a baby. They’ll get back on track if - when - he gives her another chance.) (Or is it different? Does she just love Luther more?) She firmly sets these thoughts aside. (You are here to put the Umbrella Academy to bed, to find shelter from the press, to drum up some sympathy from the press, and to hear what’s written in the will.)

 
********

 
If she had to do it all over again, knowing what the outcome would be, she’d do the same. She would resist temptation to put everything back in its place (to re-order, to re-focus). She would take her punishment on the chin, accept her losses. She deserves her fate.

She can’t swear by it, but she’s almost positive that’s what she’d do.

Maybe, though, there is a deep down part of her that knows different. Knows that you can’t be given a gift like hers and not use it.

Vanya knows. Knows that someone like her doesn’t deserve peace.

All those years of watching. Watching and judging, watching and stewing, watching and wanting, watching and dissecting. Spinning stories of how it could be different, should be different, not just different but better. How it would be better if only she were given her due, what’s owed her, what she deserves. (What was stolen from her by her family, by Father and Pogo and her.) When her time comes, the decision is already made. Vanya doesn’t hesitate. Because Vanya knows what she’s capable of. Because they’re sisters.
 

********
 

Lying in her bed, she keeps her eyes shut. Her neck is on fire, inside and out, a blowtorch that’s too much to bear except she deserves it. Luther’s solid presence, his familiar smell mixed with something…strange but not unpleasant, is welcome but at the same time unbearably close.

She believed she was making headway with Vanya, getting through to her. They were on the road to being not just sisters, but friends. That was the final destination. Up ahead, she could see it. They were friendly. Developing a friendship.

Turns out, it was all one-sided, another story she told herself. Once again, in the absence of her gift, wheedling and guilt-ridden, grasping at shadows. Vanya will never not see her as the one who took her place as the special sister. As if, in this world, there can only be room for one.

(And perhaps there is?)

(No, that is not true.)

She will show her. That they are stronger together. She doesn’t need a voice to do that.  Her intentions are good and true. They will shine through, and Vanya will see that.

(Her road to redemption begins here.)