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Two days before the eccentric billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves passes away of a suspected heart attack, the eighth child, Johanna, coincidentally finds herself stumbling across her childhood home

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Two days before the eccentric billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves passes away of a suspected heart attack, the eighth child, Johanna, coincidentally finds herself stumbling across her childhood home.

Except it isn't really a coincidence, because Johanna knows better from experience than to believe in those, and she is quite literally stumbling.

Vision blurring from the torture of a migraine, she isn't sure in hindsight how she manages to climb her way up the fire escape without cracking her skull open in the alleyway below. She gets to her missing brothers window, ignoring the deja vu twisting at her mind, standing on the railing to forego the broken ladder (that hadn't been fixed since she was fifteen), and reaches up to grab the next landing of metal. Her vision swims as she swings her leg up, wedging her boot into a gap in the railings and hauls herself up and over with strength she doesn't even know she had. She prises open her window with her fingernails, unblinking as one splits against the old wood before it finally gave.

She has to flop down on her bed before she collapses, covering her eyes with her forearm, feeling like the surface beneath her is rocking like a boat on choppy seas.

An unknown amount of time passes before she has no choice but to head downstairs in the middle of the night for some water.

She didn't foresee crossing her father just hours before he was supposed to die, but doesn't flinch at the sound if his voice either.

"What are you doing here, Number Eight?"

There is accusation in his tone.

The girl pushes some of her messy, curly hair from her face to cover her eyes, still in pain and holding onto the counter. She presses her fingers against her temple and blinks over at him with half lidded eyes.

And it's funny - because over the years of their childhood she had grown to speak less and less, under the realisation that if no one was going to listen to her, why should she bother? - until age fifteen wherein she had practically vowed herself to complete silence.

Reginald Hargeeves had not heard another prophetical word from her lips since the day Ben had died, and no one had heard anything else at all.

But in her delirium, or maybe at the knowledge that he'd be dead by morning and it all wouldn't matter, the words just slip out.

She barely remembers to grab her water on the way out, murmuring absently, "here for the funeral."

The wise man watches her bypass him, unsteady on her feet, and can't bring himself to acknowledge his own surprise.

"You're early." Was all he said, knowing that hiding things from someone who saw everything had always been difficult.

"Thought I'd save myself the hassle of morning traffic." She shoots back, going back upstairs to bed.

By morning, Johanna has no clue if that conversation had been real or a figment of her dreams. It didn't feel real, but she finds that most of her life never really do, as though she is constantly moving through time in a haze.

Her migraine lifts to something bareable by the time Grace informed her that the rest of her siblings would be on the way for the funeral.

• DREAMER • The Umbrella AcademyWhere stories live. Discover now