Prologue.        Who's Got the High Ground Now, Obi-Wan?

TW: Non-consensual touching

        Once, The Handler had taken Ramona with her to watch one of child prodigy Paul Morphy's chess tournaments.  The Handler remembers Morphy's opening move and everything that came in between.  Ramona remembers how The Handler's hand rested on her knee and slowly slithered its way up her thigh as the day grew later and she remembers how The Handler's fingers tangled in the ends of Ramona's hair. 

Ever since then, The Handler had this obsession with the game.  It was like clockwork.  Every evening after dinner, Ramona would meet The Handler in her office where the chess board would be waiting on her desk.  They would play a game.  Ramona would let the Handler win even though there so many opportunities to checkmate her and let the Handler believe that Ramona was still nestled delicately beneath her thumb.  The Handler would lose herself in Ramona and Ramona would pretend that she didn't notice how The Handler played with the hem of her skirt.  Instead, she would pretend that she was ten years old again and she was sitting across from Five and nothing bad was happening to her. 

The Handler's hand is on Ramona's thigh.

It hadn't been there a few moments ago.

She turns her attention to the board in front of her and tries to ignore the way her chest tightens.

The Handler's king is positioned in the back lines, surrounded by a thin line of pawns while her queen stands on d3; overextended and aggressive.  She's always had a habit of pushing too far and too fast because she forgets that consequences exist for her too.  When you live your life with the world cupped in the palms of your hands, you tend to forget that you too can still die.  Her pawns are scattered across the board, most of them lost earlier in the game to Ramona's own soldiers; The Handler had always been careless with her pawns.  To her, they were just collateral damage.  Ramona thinks that there's some poeticism in that.

Her own king is safely nestled behind a wall of pawns. 

It's her move and the clock beside her is ticking.

Her fingers brush against the cool wood of her knight, considering her next move.  It's already laid out perfectly for her; she could checkmate The Handler in three moves.  Her queen and rook are poised for the checkmate; The Handler had fallen into the trap.  Hook, line, and sinker.  But instead, Ramona slides her knight into a harmless square and hits her time on the clock.  Always beneath The Handler's thumb.  Always wrapped so tightly around her finger.  Always The Handler's docile little lamb.  Ramona heard the whispers in the hallway.  How they always referred to her as The Handler's favorite.  The name burned her.  She was not The Handler's anything.

She may be letting The Handler win tonight, but the real game—the one that really matters—is far from over.

The Handler smiles and leans back in her chair.  Her fingers with their taloned nails idly trace circles into Ramona's knee.  She tries to ignore how her fingers travel higher with each pass.  "You're improving, darling," The Handler purrs.  "Perhaps one day, you'll even beat me."

Ramona looks up to meet The Handler's gaze, face blank.  "Perhaps."

When she was younger and she was playing Poker or Black Jack with Five, he would always complain about just how telling she was.  Before Ben died, Ramona had always had this habit of wearing her heart on her sleeve for the rest of the world to see.  She was armed with a soft heart beating on the edge of her sleeve and that was her downfall.  The thing is that hurt people hurt people.  Reginald had taken her heart in his hand and squeezed until Ramona couldn't breathe.  Until her heart had hardened in defense.  A heart is a heavy burden.  Her chest is smothered with it.

Ramona knows better, now.

She'd built a skin thick enough to never let anything really hurt her again. 

She'd learned to wear her heart on the inside of her sleeve where nobody could really see what she was feeling ever again.

It was better that way.

"Your move."

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

"You're late."

The year is 1888.  

What would soon be the Eiffel Tower stands on the horizon.

Ramona slides onto the backside of a park bench.  Five is already waiting for her, bowler hat pulled low over his eyes.  He tries to hide the fact that his head is angled up toward the starry night sky.  For some reason, the image of somebody like Five taking time out of his day to admire the stars was alien to Ramona.  

(Once, when they were kids, Allison had said something about finding somebody who would drag her out at 3 in the morning to look at the stars.  Five had retorted that if anybody ever did that to him, that they would be removed from his life indefinitely). 

He had always been slightly detached when they were kids.  Blunt around the edges.  But Ramona had learned quickly that in Five's old age, he'd started to become strangely sentimental.  She still remembers how tightly he had hugged her when they found each other again; that was strange in itself considering the fact that Five never really let anybody touch him when they were kids.  It wasn't until Five told her everything that had happened to him after he'd disappeared that she started to understand.  

When he disappeared, he had stranded himself at the end of the world.  The dust was still settling around him when he'd stumbled upon their childhood home and their sibling's bodies buried in the rubble.  The image had haunted him ever since. 

(Ramona wasn't buried with the rest of her siblings.  In that timeline, Ramona was forever doomed to be The Handler's little lamb).

He can't see it, but Ramona is looking up at the sky as well.  Allison had always had this strange fascination with the star signs that Ramona didn't really understand.  All these names and dates and meanings and messages of prophecy that never really came true but always gave Allison a bit of hope.  When they were younger, Ramona would lay with her head in Allison's lap, and Allison would read the horoscopes for the day from the magazines that she would hide underneath her mattress and Ramona would listen even though her head was a million miles away.  What Ramona wouldn't give to hear Allison talk about them all over again. 

"You're traveling through time and you still manage to be late," Five continues.

"I'm here aren't I?" Ramona snaps.  

The time between her match with The Handler and arriving at the park bench is a blur.  She had returned to her bedroom and promptly vomited into the toilet before staring at herself in the mirror.  Her knuckles are still white from how tightly she gripped the rim of the sink.  She had scrubbed at her skin for a while, trying to wash away the bruises that The Handler's touch had left behind.  For a long time, she was just going through the motions, trying to pick herself back together because that was the only way that she knew how.  Scrub, squeeze, rinse, repeat so she could keep her mind from trailing to The Handler's nails running down her back or how the backs of Ramona's knees hit The Handler's desk.  The force of it knocked the chess pieces over.  They didn't even finis the match.  And so she scrubbed, over and over and over until she couldn't really feel anything anymore. 

Ramona still doesn't feel fully there.

"How have you been?" Five asks her.

"Fine," Ramona replies.  "You?"

"Tired," Five admits.

They're silent for a few moments.  They don't really know what to do with each other anymore.  Once, the Hargreeves siblings had been bound together by an invisible gossamer string—all eight of them.  But as the years passed, that string started to fray and fall apart at the edges; they grew apart.  Five grew up and Ramona grew into something else entirely so that by the time that they found each other again, it felt like they were standing on opposite side of a cliff's edge.  Five was the catalyst.  Everything else fell into place after him.  Ramona was the first to leave after Ben died.  It was Five who taught Ramona how to leave and not look back—it wasn't until Ramona found him again, that she understood that he couldn't come back no matter how hard he tried.  What happened to Ramona after Five left and what happened to Ben taught Ramona to follow him. 

She'd left in the dead of night.

Diego had followed her out onto the stairs.

There were tears in his eyes when he begged her to stay—he could barely get the words out.

Ramona had only shaken her head.  She told him how much she loved him, but that there was no way that she could stay in that house for another day.

Ramona never looked back.

Still, this night is oddly reminiscent of the night before Five left.  When they were younger, they made a routine of sneaking out of their bedrooms when the stars were out and sitting on the roof with their feet dangling over the sidewalk and just talking until their eyes were heavy and they could no longer keep them open.  That particular night, they had broken into Klaus' stash of joints and the smoke had billowed around them and for the first time in a very long time, Ramona had felt something akin to peace.  Neither of them had known it then, but the family would start to tear apart the very next day and Ramona would not see or talk to Five again for another seventeen years.  She'd asked him what he wanted to do with his life if they were to ever get out of the home that they had grown up in.  He'd replied that he didn't know.

Ramona had replied that she didn't know what she would do either.

She hadn't really planned that far ahead.  She had always had this notion that she would die before she ever reached the point of moving out of the home.  That a bullet or a knife or something else would finally find its place lodged in her heart; that eventually, Reginald's little game of playing God would finally come to its gruesome end and he'd be left with blood on his hands and seven bodies to bury in the courtyard.  Their faces would fade away into history and The Umbrella Academy would turn into a story that parents tell their kids before putting them to sleep.

She didn't know who she would be without the mask.

What would be left if all of this was just taken away from Ramona?  Take away her claws and her siblings and The Commission and what would be left?  Would it even be Ramona anymore?  Because no matter how much Ramona hated to think about it, everything that happened to her shaped her into what she is today. 

Five slides a small scrap of paper across the bench to Ramona.  "Meet mere there in a week.  Burn it as soon as you can."

Ramona takes the paper in her hands.

"Give me a fifteen minute head start," Five instructs.

"Love you, too, Five," Ramona calls.

The only response she gets is the hum of his briefcase and a bright flash of blue before she's left alone on the park bench.  He still sometimes feels less like her brother and more like a stranger.  But she knows that he's still her brother because he could have left weeks ago, but then he found Ramona and he spent the next few weeks rewriting his equations to bring Ramona back home with him.  Still, she wishes she could take his hand and go back through time and watch the years shed off of his shoulders.  They could be the children that they never really got to be.  If Ramona could do it all again, she thinks that she would be scarier.  She sighs and looks down at the crumpled scrap of paper in her hand. 

Dealy Plaza

Dallas, Texas

Novermber 22, 1963.

Ramona smiles to herself. 

She's going home.

Author's Note: this was super short and i really don't know how to feel about this but i thought that it kind of did a lot to get the ball rolling instead of just jumping into ep. 1???  idk.  i think it gives good insight in ramona and the handler as well as ramona and five??

i am doing on chapter per episode because i like the pacing for that.  updates are gonna be way slow though because of that.  also most if not all of the chapter titles are going to be silly little unserious meme references to stick with the more silly side of the show and also so i can have fun with it :))