Chapter Text
“Sloane. Status report.”
If she were Fei, or Alphonso or Jayme, she would have replied with gee, it’s nice to hear from you too, Marcus.
But despite his curt tone, Sloane liked to believe that Marcus did care about their family. He also cared about fame and his reputation and status as number one... But everyone had their flaws, right?
She slipped the sunflower yellow top back onto its place on the clothing rack and kept skimming over the merchandise. Thank goodness she had thought ahead and disabled her phone’s GPS tracking capacity.
If Marcus asked, she would tell him it was because of an update.
“I’m currently tracking targets one, seven, three and four. They left the bunker at approximately one fifty-two this afternoon and have been here for three hours.”
“Where’s here?” Marcus demanded. Sloane rolled her eyes. She had uploaded all this information to the iPad already. Marcus surely must have seen the data; but leave it to her big brother to want a confirmation.
Or, a tiny voice in the back of her mind, the voice that had been trained into her by dad whispered, he doesn’t trust you.
Sloane gritted her teeth and ducked her head to peer at the price tag of a blouse. It shouldn’t hurt so much to know that Marcus didn’t trust her. He didn’t trust any of them. None of them trusted each other outside of missions. There was a strict hierarchy that separated them, turned them feral in each other’s presence.
Sloane didn’t want to be number one. She just wanted a family.
“The mall,” she replied. The blouse was seventy-five dollars. Even with her family being affluent as it was, Sloane could acknowledge that that was a cheat. She put it back with a harrumph.
There was a beat of silence. Then, “Sloane, are you shopping right now?”
Her cheeks grew hot. “No! I-I’m doing espionage.”
Granted, she had no idea where the Umbrella siblings were at the moment, but even good spies had their moments, right?
“I didn’t send you to California for a vacation,” Marcus snapped. “If you can’t stay focused, maybe I should have Ben take point on this assignment instead.”
Sloane tensed. Sending Ben to do anything was always a threat. He saw any opportunity to flaunt his strength as further evidence that he was better than the rest of them. He was never quiet about it either. If Sloane wanted to sleep in the next six months without being endlessly mocked and ridiculed, not to mention forced to go through behavioral conditioning training, she needed to keep Ben out of this.
“That isn’t necessary,” she replied, monotone. Marcus would see any emotion as a sign of weakness. He always did. “I’m watching them.”
“Good. I want weaknesses to exploit, Sloane. These people are dangerous and unstable. We’re taking them down.”
“I understand, Marcus,” she sighed. The line clicked off without so much as a Good Luck. Sloane lowered her sunglasses back onto her face and slipped from the store back into the quiet Malibu Street. It was mid-day, and the small square of stores and markets weren’t as crowded as usual.
Had Marcus been a little less of an asshole, Sloane would have told him that she was beginning to think the Umbrellas weren’t actually a threat at all. If anything, the only one concerned with her family seemed to be Diego, and even his enthusiasm had waned over the week since Sloane had been spying on them.
Maybe the Umbrellas were unpredictable, but she would hardly categorize them as dangerous. But how to explain this in her reports? How did one tell Marcus this, when he saw his own family as active threats to him?
How did Sloane say that the Umbrella’s training seemed to have devolved into some sort of concerted therapy session? Just three days earlier, Viktor had learned to use his violin to aim exact soundwaves at targets. Sloane had found herself cheering along with the others when the small man had dropped his instrument in shock and joy.
Lila was able to use two of the other’s powers so long as she was focusing hard enough to give herself a headache. Sloane may have been imagining it, but the other woman seemed to have grafted herself into the family with more ease, too.
Klaus affectionately called her Number Eight, which was really cute and never failed to make Lila smile.
Lila and Five no longer tried to assassinate each other on the stairs. In fact, Lila had begun making Five a cup of coffee in the morning while he poured her a cup of scotch in the afternoon. It was a tentative peace.
How could Sloane think this batch of so-called criminals meant any harm when there were plans to throw Viktor a Transition party and get Five a Welcome-back-from- Switzerland cake? For shits sakes, Luther was teaching Stanley to play basketball. Lila, Viktor and Allison had a standing reservation to watch trashy reality television at noon.
Diego and Klaus prank called random numbers from the internet, pretending to be telemarketers named Ruby and Franko. Five often vanished for several hours a day but returned with small but sweet gifts for each of his siblings.
He’d brought Allison a seashell from the coast yesterday and Sloane knew for a fact that it sat right on Allison’s bedside table.
Observing the Umbrella Academy had given Sloane a cramp in her cheek from smiling so hard. It was akin to watching one’s favorite show, aching for the characters while also loving and envying them in equal measure.
When she was little, Sloane thought her siblings and her couldn’t be a family because of their powers, their inherent responsibility to the world. But the Umbrellas somehow managed not only to be a family, but a good one, powers be damned.
She checked the tracer she had sewn into the seam of Luther’s hoodie. She had contemplated putting it in his back pocket, but his pants were already… Well-shaped to his rear. He would probably feel it, and the lump would obscure Sloane’s view.
He was… In the store next to her.
Interesting.
Sloane adjusted her glasses, reapplied her lip gloss (this isn’t a date, Sloane, Fei might have scoffed) and hurried inside. It wasn’t difficult to locate Luther. He was inside a home goods store after all, staring down at the shelf full of candles wonderingly.
Sloane’s heart skipped a beat. Luther’s shoulders were broad and bulky, but the kindness in his face was like staring into the sun. How could Marcus ever think he was some madman? He looked like an angel on steroids.
She ducked behind a stand of cards just as he looked up. He’d probably sensed her staring at him like an idiot. Damn it she was an idiot. Spy 101 said thou shalt not get caught by the person you’re spying on even if he has a nice smile and compassionate eyes damn it, Sloane…
“Oh, hey,” Sloane yelped as Luther’s voice spoke from directly over her shoulder.
She tripped over her own feet in her haste to stumble backwards; and would have ended up flat on her face if a strong arm hadn’t wrapped around her waist from behind. “Whoa, careful!” Luther cried.
Sloane looked up. Her breath hitched in her throat at his apologetic smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. You’re Sloane, right?”
So much for secrecy. Whoever said sunglasses were a good disguise?
“Um. Yeah. Hi. I’m Sloane. Yeah,” she giggled awkwardly because his arm was still around her and it was sending shivers down her spine. He was so big. “Nice to, um, see you again. Luther, right?”
As if she hadn’t been stalking him for the past week. He unwound her from his grip, much to her disappointment, and nodded. “That’s me. I was, uh, shopping with my family.” His enormous shoulders lifted in a half shrug.
“Oh. That’s nice.”
Sloane had never gone shopping with her family. Grace did all of that. Sloane had tried to go with Fei once when they were seventeen, but because of the dark glasses people assumed Fei was blind, and that made Fei mad, so she had given more than one person a black eye which was, in Marcus’s words, “bad for business.”
They never went out after that.
Luther rocked back and forth on his heels.
Sloane obsessively shoved strands of her hair behind her ear.
“So, uh, if you don’t mind sharing…”
“Well, can I ask…?
“What are you doing in California?” They both blurted at the same time, then burst into laughter. The woman standing behind the counter to the left snorted and eyed Sloane over the rim of her glasses in silent judgement.
“My sister Allison has a friend whose daughter owns a summer house here. She agreed to let us hang out until we figure out our next steps,” Luther explained. Sloane nodded. She had wondered how the Umbrellas could afford such a magnificent estate. The six thousand they’d pocketed off dad wouldn’t be nearly enough to grant them this fancy asylum.
“Next steps,” she repeated warily. “As in…?”
“Oh, where we go from here, what we do now… Oh, oh!” Luther’s eyes grew wide. “No, no, I don’t mean steps like, as in, attacking your family or anything! We wouldn’t do that. I mean, it’s not you guy’s fault dad didn’t adopt us this time around, right? So yeah, no hard feelings. On our side, I mean. Well, Diego is still pretty pissed but that’s like his default setting, so it doesn’t mean anything. I’m talking too much, aren’t I? Sorry.”
Sloane couldn’t help but grin, her suspicions confirmed. She folded her hands in front of her daintily. “No, its alright. I’m glad to hear it. We thought maybe you’d come back to try and finish us off, but if that isn’t the case…”
Luther snorted. “Trust me, my family can’t ambush worth shit. You’d hear us coming from eight blocks away.” Sloane laughed. “So, what are you doing in California?”
“Oh, I…” She wracked her brain for a viable reason that was not I’m watching your family to expose your weak spots. “There’s a child trafficking ring. My family had tracked down some of its leaders here, so I’m, uh, working to root them out. Hero stuff, ya know?”
“Wow,” Luther breathed, with his big, trusting eyes. Sloane felt a pang of guilt. “That’s incredible. Do you need any help? I’m sure you’ve got everything covered, but I’d be happy to help. For the kids, of course.”
The worst part was that she could tell he meant it.
“No thanks,” she whispered, stomach twisting into knots. “It’s just reconnaissance right now.”
Luther’s gaze fell. “Oh. Well, that’s cool. Dad never had doing complex stuff like that. It was always stop a bank robbery or free some hostages from a terrorist network,” he rolled his eyes as if he had just described being relegated to the sidelines during a big game. Sloane gawked.
“You guys used to do hero gigs too?” She asked. She had never seen any billboards out for them, but it made sense. They had some preliminary training in hand-to-hand combat and using their abilities. They had to have used those skills somewhere.
Luther didn’t seem all that proud about it. “Oh yeah. When we were kids.”
“Why’d you stop?”
She couldn’t imagine living in a world where she didn’t use her powers to help people. What would be the point of her?
“Uh, one of our brothers, Ben, died on one of our missions,” Luther gulped, eyes glaring at some point over Sloane’s shoulder. “After that we fell apart. Everyone went their separate ways.”
“Oh,” she had wondered why there was no Number Six in the house, and why they had stared at her Ben with such wonder and bamboozlement. Now she knew. She reached out, instinctively, to squeeze Luther’s hand. “I’m so sorry. For what it’s worth, I’m sure your brother would be proud of you.”
His giant smile returned, and Sloane basked in its rays for a moment. “Thanks. Hey, I got separated from the others. Klaus has to try on, like eighty different outfits at each store and Viktor was going to start looking for a tailor. They’ll probably be a while. Would you want to, I don’t know, grab a coffee or something?”
“Good. I want weaknesses to exploit, Sloane. These people are dangerous and unstable. We’re taking them down.”
For the first time in her life, Sloane shoved Marcus’s directives out of her mind, and lifted her chin to the possibility of making a choice for her, not the business or the family or the world. Her. Sloane.
Something unfurled in her heart and began to sing.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I would love to do that.”