Chapter Text
“Woah, woah, woah, you’re blaming me for—?”
“Yes, I’m blaming you,” Five cuts him off, arms crossed over his chest as he glares at Diego. “Obviously I’m blaming you.”
“Oh, what, so I’m not allowed in the house now—?”
“Hey, look at that, big guy,” Klaus says, ignoring Five’s and Diego’s argument in favor of nudging Luther as he passes him by and slings an arm around Mom in a sideways hug. “He ended up coming to us after all. Score one for Number One, eh?”
“Well, uh… yeah, I mean, I guess, not that it matters—”
“Not that it matters now that Diego scared him off,” Five interrupts Luther, rolling his eyes.
“Guys,” Viktor speaks up, as usual too quiet and hesitant to derail all of them yelling over each other.
“I wouldn’t have scared him off if he didn’t have anything to hide—”
“Oh, yeah? You barging in here like you own the place—”
“Hey, come on,” Allison tries. “All he did was come inside.”
“And it is his house, too,” Luther murmurs.
“Oh, you’re on his side, now?” Five asks.
“Yeah, he is!” Diego shouts at the same time as Luther says, “Well, no, but—”
“But nothing—!”
“The hell you mean you’re not on my side?” Diego asks, rounding on Luther.
“He shouldn’t be!” Five argues. “Seriously, I was this close to—”
“To a wanted criminal that tried to kill us yesterday?” Diego asks him. “Yeah, you friggin’ were.”
“He didn’t,” Luther mutters, and his cheeks and ears flush bright red as Diego directs a wide-eyed stare at him, eyebrows raised. Number One hunches in on himself a little, which does fuck-all to make him look any less huge, and he shrugs. “He, uh… didn’t try to kill us.”
“Oh?” Diego asks. “We’re still going with the whole he didn’t mean to theory, then, huh?”
“It’s not a theory,” Five cuts in. “We confirmed it—”
Diego adds, “With the wanted criminal—”
“Guys—”
“With the kid,” Five corrects, either not noticing Viktor speaking up again or too steamed to divert any attention at the moment.
“He told us everything, Diego,” Allison tells him.
“And you believed him?”
“Yeah, we did,” Allison insists, glaring a little with her hands on her hips. “Is it that hard to believe?”
“Uh, yeah, it really—”
“Diego, we’ve all done things we didn’t mean to because of our powers,” she reminds him.
“I sure as hell haven’t!”
“Okay,” she plows right on, undeterred. “Most of us have.”
Luther’s already nodding. “I just broke the door frame to my bedroom, like, two days ago.”
Diego opens his mouth and very nearly says, you didn’t almost kill anybody, though, did you, until he snaps his mouth shut. Definitely not a good idea to draw attention to the fact that, yes, actually, Luther has accidentally killed because of his powers before, way back when they were all kids and still running under dear old Dad’s orders.
It’d be a dick move to bring up. It would also, more importantly, be detrimental to his argument.
And in any case, Klaus and Allison and Five are all already talking at once.
“Hey, score two for Number One! He didn’t mean to flip the car after all—”
“He’s just a kid, Diego, it’s not all that hard to believe that—”
“Now I have to track him down all over again, and who knows how far he’ll have gotten with how fast he—”
“It’s not my fault, man,” Diego cuts in again, getting more incensed by the second. “You could have mentioned you had the friggin’ jewelry thief just chilling in—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Diego,” Allison sighs. “He already agreed to return the jewelry.”
“Yeah? Did he!”
“Hey, guys—?”
“Ugh, come on, do you guys really have to turn everything into—”
“As a matter of fact, he did,” Allison shouts over Klaus, glaring at Diego like she doesn’t understand why he won’t just come around, like she always looks at him when they argue these days and she can’t just rumor him into agreeing. Not anymore, not like when they were kids. “We all talked to him about it, and he hasn’t sold any of it yet, so—”
“Uh-huh, okay, so now that he’s been caught, he’s turning over a whole new leaf, yeah? You don’t think that’s a little convenient—?”
“Oh, don’t be a—”
“He did agree to return all of it,” Luther speaks up again. “And in exchange, we agreed that we wouldn’t turn him in to the authorities.”
“Did you, now?” Diego asks, raising his eyebrows at Luther again. “And that was your call to make? Think I missed the part where this whole thing became your case, bro—”
“Hey, come on, you know I didn’t mean—”
Allison comes to his defense, bristling. “Seriously, Diego—?”
“— guys really are worse than the ghosts, I swear—”
“I’m just saying, if I’d have been here—”
“You would have scared him off even sooner—”
“I wouldn’t have,” Diego raises his voice over Five’s. “And I’m thinking it would’ve been better if I was here, since apparently I’m the only one of us that’s not naive enough to take everything this kid says at face value, and—”
“Oh, really, you think I would have even survived the Commission without learning how to tell if someone’s—”
“GUYS.”
It’s not so much the volume of Viktor’s voice that gets them all to shut the hell up.
It’s more the fact that the entire kitchen lurches like it’s caught in a half second long earthquake, like that single syllable hadn’t come from their tiny little brother at all but instead from an angry, petulant giant that felt the need to grab the whole house and give it a shake to make itself heard. The pots and pans hanging from above the stove clang and bang against each other, a bit of plaster dislodges from the ceiling and spirals down to the floor in a thin plume of powder, and Diego has to glance down just to be sure he keeps his feet rather than falling back on his ass.
The rest of them all turn to direct their wide eyes at Viktor—
And it’s then, finally, that Diego remembers Claire.
Not that he’d actually forgotten her. Obviously. It’s just that he was… distracted. But there she is, all four-and-a-half feet of her standing right beside her Uncle Viktor, her soft little kid features all pinched in an angry glare and her arms crossed tight over her chest. Diego would’ve expected that she’d be upset or scared or overwhelmed at being witness to all her uncles and her mom all yelling over one another (would’ve been guilty as all hell over it the second he realized, but he definitely would have expected it) and instead she doesn’t look like any of those things.
She just looks pissed.
Viktor takes a slow breath, puffing it out all at once and shaking out his shoulders.
“Go ahead and say that again, Claire,” he murmurs, his voice once again returned to its quiet mousiness now, despite the underlying tension Diego can’t help but notice. “No one else heard it.”
Everyone’s eyes shift to Claire, and she directs that pissy little look at everybody, not just Diego.
“What is it, baby?” Allison asks.
“Are you alright, dear?” asks Mom, speaking up for the first time since this whole argument got started.
“Yeah, honey bunch,” Klaus says, “you okay?”
Claire glances up at Viktor, who just shrugs and gestures at everyone else as if to say, Go ahead, and apparently that’s all the encouragement she needs.
“You are all,” Claire says, gritting her teeth, “So. Stupid.”
Diego blinks, eyes widening, and he imagines he must look just as dumbstruck as the rest of them do. Allison’s got her hands on her hips again, her brow creased. Luther’s jaw hangs open, while Klaus keeps opening and closing his like a fish out of water, evidently lost on what to say. Hell, the kid might as well have grown a second head for the way Five’s staring at her.
“Claire,” Allison says when she finally regains her senses. “That’s not very nice.”
“I don’t care,” Claire insists, and now she’s glaring, if possible, even harder at all of them. “You’re all being stupid.”
“Claire!” Allison says again, firmer this time.
Diego opens his mouth, then closes it, his mind running at a mile a minute with nothing but a big old blank to show for it.
And it isn’t until he realizes that — underneath a thick layer of concern and confusion over how upset Claire seems to be — he’s still really goddamn pissed off at Five and Luther and Klaus and all of them for reasons he can’t quite describe, that Diego finally starts to piece together what the hell’s going on.
Fuck. Damn it.
He is an idiot. They all are.
“Uh, kid,” he says, gently, and as Claire’s glare turns toward him he forces himself to take a nice slow breath. In, one, two, three. Out, one, two, three. Relax, Hargreeves. Breathe. “Can you, uh… take a breath for me real quick? Just, you know, like I’m doing? Nice and slow?”
She looks at him like he’s grown a second head. “Why?”
“Just trust me, yeah?”
He does it again, in for three counts, then blows it out through pursed lips all dramatic and showy until his lungs are totally empty.
And Diego’s not… totally sure if what’s going on is what he thinks is going on. Were Claire’s emotions leaking through to all of them and taking their annoyance and dialing it up to a hundred? Was she just getting more angry because she could sense them getting pissed off at each other? Definitely could have been both, he supposes, their anger feeding into hers and vice versa, an endless loop of anger getting stronger at every pass like a damn water wheel.
He doesn’t know, but whatever. This should help either way.
Klaus is the first one that seems to figure out what he’s getting at, judging by the way he looks like a light bulb just went off in his brain. Then it seems to dawn in quick succession on Allison, then Viktor, then Five and Luther. Allison looks crestfallen for a second, her shoulders slumping, and then she crouches down in front of Claire so that she’s at her eye level.
“Hey, we didn’t mean to get so worked up,” she says in her gentlest Mom voice. “We’re sorry we upset you, baby.”
Claire frowns at her mom, then takes a slow breath like Diego told her to — even if she’s a little more huffy about it than he’d have wanted. It seems to work anyway, a little bit. Some of the red hot anger bubbling in his own stomach starts to dull to a simmer, at least.
“You okay, peanut?”
Claire pouts a little, then shrugs one shoulder.
“Okay,” Allison says, nodding. “We all just got a little angry and got ahead of ourselves there. That was our bad, though. You’re allowed to be a little mad at us for that.”
“Yeah, like you said,” Klaus adds, offering her a smile, “we all can be pretty stupid sometimes, right?”
Claire takes another breath, then her shoulders slump as she lets it out. Diego swears he sees a flash of guilt cross her features, but it disappears quick enough as she bites her cheek. She mutters, “I didn’t say you were all stupid ‘cause you were yelling at each other.”
Luther asks, “Then why did you, munchkin?”
“Because,” Claire says, suddenly finding her socks very interesting, “I was having a really good time talking to Nikhil and he’s really super nice except he was kinda scared and then he got way more scared and then he ran away, and you guys were fighting so much all just ‘cause you—” she looks up at Diego — “don’t think Nikhil was telling the truth and you think he’s not nice, and you—” she waves at Five and Allison and Luther all at once — “all do think he was telling the truth and that he is nice, and you all just kept fighting and fighting and fighting about it and nobody thought it would be a good idea to just ask me.”
“Ask you?” Diego repeats without thinking.
Claire nods. “Yeah.”
Allison frowns. “Honey… What do you mean? Ask you what?”
“If he was telling the truth,” Claire says, raising her eyebrows as if to say duh.
“Claire,” Five speaks up, crossing his arms. “You can tell that?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“How?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. Everybody gets, like, a special kind of scared when they’re lying? And Nikhil was just the normal kind of scared. Like… like when I cheated on my quiz that one time, remember, Mommy? And Sally Wilson saw me and tattle taled and I knew I was gonna get in really big trouble and I was so scared and I felt really bad the whole day, like I was gonna throw up? That’s the kind of scared he was, except a whole lot more. And then,” she continues, directing her explanation at everyone again, “when Mommy came downstairs he felt a little less scared ‘cause… I dunno, I think he feels better around girls than around boys maybe. And he was scared of Uncle Luther at first, too, but then I told him that Uncle Luther was nice and that he went to the moon before and then Nikhil wasn’t so scared anymore.”
“But… why would that make him less scared of me?” Luther asks, tilting his head and regarding her with his arms crossed.
She shrugs again. “He likes space. He told me about it when we were talking about school.”
“Claire,” Five says. “What about when I told him he’d have to return all that jewelry he stole? What was he feeling then?”
“Sad, mostly,” she answers without hesitation. “Or, like… I guess sad-mad, but more sad. The only time he wasn’t sad or mad or scared was when he was talking to me about school and about his little sister. Oh, and when you asked him if we wanted to stay here. Then, too.”
Diego’s eyes widen, and he blinks before he turns that look on Five, the how the hell did you not mention that before kind of look, but Five doesn’t even acknowledge it.
Luther, at least, has the decency to wince.
“When they asked him what, now, kid?” Diego asks, turning back to her.
“If he wanted to stay here.”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Mom pipes up, flashing a smile at them from where she’s been neatly stacking little containers of food into the fridge, as unbothered by their arguing as ever. Beside her, Klaus is leaning back against the counter, slurping from one of the tupperwares like he’s never heard of a spoon before and, occasionally, glancing at what Diego can only assume is Ben and nodding along to a silent conversation.
“So…” Diego says, “what, we’re just gonna—?”
“We’ll talk about it later, Diego,” Five interrupts, his eyes still on Claire.
“Now, that,” Allison nods, “is definitely a good idea. It is way past Claire’s bedtime.”
“But Mom—”
“No buts, you little troublemaker,” Allison tells her, ruffling her hair and ferrying her toward the kitchen door. “You’re lucky you got to stay up this late.”
“But what if Nikhil comes back?” Claire asks, stopping where the kitchen tile ends and refusing to budge another step. “And what if he’s scared and the only people awake are people he’s scared of and then he runs away again and he never comes back and—”
“Claire, honey,” Mom speaks up, and then all eyes are on her as she shuts the fridge door and turns her own eyes on Claire alone. “Was Nikhil frightened of me?”
Claire frowns, shaking her head. “No, he thought you were nice, Nana.”
“Well, then, maybe I should stay awake through the night in the event that he does return,” Mom tells her with a gentle smile. “That way someone he is not afraid of will be awake to greet him, and you can get to bed without a worry. Does that sound better?”
It’s funny, Diego thinks, watching Claire battle with herself between the fact that she clearly wants to stay awake anyway, the fact that Mom is almost impossible to disagree with at the best of times, and the fact that the kid looks like she’s running on fumes as it is, ready to collapse into bed the second she gets upstairs.
Eventually, though, the latter two win out and Claire sighs. “Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Nana.”
Mom’s smile widens, crinkling her eyes. “Goodnight, dear.”
“Night, Nana,” Claire says as Allison continues guiding her out of the kitchen, this time with far less resistance. “Night, everybody.”
There’s a chorus of goodnights from the rest of them, each one tagged with a different nickname for her, but she gets the gist. Viktor runs both hands over his face, yawning, and follows them upstairs, too. Klaus, still slurping soup from a tupperware, resumes his murmured conversation with the empty space that’s probably Ben. Mom hums a little melody to herself as she starts wiping down the kitchen counters, and Five huffs an annoyed sigh and allows himself to drop back into one of the kitchen chairs.
“Times like these a drink would be nice,” he mutters, massaging the bridge of his nose.
“Now, Five—”
“Kidding, Mom,” he says, automatic. “Not actually going to.”
Luther closes the distance between him and Diego in a few quick strides, and he leans in, speaking lowly and just for Diego to hear. “Hey. Can we…?”
He nods in the direction of the kitchen doorway, and Diego sighs, shrugging one shoulder.
“Sure, why not.”
He lets Luther lead the way, trailing behind with his arms crossed over his chest, fingers drumming along his bicep. As soon as they reach the relative privacy of the stairwell, Luther turns around to face him and, after a quick glance in the direction of the kitchen, he asks, “You know I wasn’t actually trying to take your case from you, right? You just weren’t here when the kid happened to show up, and—”
“Dude,” Diego interrupts him, raising a hand to stop him. “I know.”
Luther deflates, like, visibly. He’d clearly been prepped for the need to actually defend himself against an argument that’s no longer happening. “You… You do?”
“Yeah. First off, you couldn’t take my case from me if you wanted to,” Diego says, leaning in and narrowing his eyes at Luther as if to say come on, man, you know that much, to which Luther only rolls his eyes a little, nodding in reluctant agreement. “And second off, I know you don’t want to. Private investigating isn’t exactly your thing, bro.”
Luther straightens his shoulders a bit. “It could be.”
“It’s not,” Diego assures him. He doesn’t mean it as a bad thing, but that’s not really the issue here. “Anyway, I don’t care about the case. What I care about is the fact that there was a wanted criminal—” he points at the open kitchen doorway— “who flipped over a car with all of us still in it yesterday, sitting two goddamn feet away from our eight-year-old niece.”
“He wasn’t a—”
“What I care about,” Diego presses on before Luther can get going, “is that I know next to nothing about this kid outside of the laws he’s broken and the things he’s stolen and the people he’s tried to hurt, and you guys went ahead and… what, offered him some kinda off the books amnesty deal? Offered to let the kid stay here? In our house, where — one more time — our eight-year-old niece is sleeping?”
“Diego, this house is full of people who can do things no one else can do.”
“Yeah? So? You think just cause Claire has powers we can just go ahead and let anyone—”
“I’m not saying that,” Luther cuts him off. “All I said is that this house is full of people who can do things no one else can do. So, we… you know. Accommodate.”
It takes Diego a second, and when he realizes, he lets out a groan and scrubs his hands over his face. “Oh, no. No way. You do not get to use my own words against me. I said that because you broke a punching bag, man. That’s different.”
Luther wrinkles his nose. “Is it?”
“Well— I mean, no, but it’s… ugh. That is so goddamn unfair.”
The shit-eating grin on Luther’s face tells him that he knows exactly how unfair it is, and that he doesn’t care one bit.
“Who the hell are you? Huh?” Diego asks. “My brother doesn’t play dirty. He doesn’t know how.”
Luther shrugs, but his smug grin turns a little more serious. “Really, though, Diego. You have to admit this would be a good place for him.”
“What, in a house full of other superpowered assholes? Oh, yeah,” Diego deadpans. “That shit worked out great for us, didn’t it? The kid’ll only have about a million different psychoses by the time he hits eighteen.”
“We’re different now, Diego, you know that. We can do better than Dad did. Not that that’s, you know, that high of a bar to reach.”
“Don’t shit talk Dad, it makes it impossible to disagree with you.”
“Okay, but I am serious.”
“So am I,” Diego shoots back, throwing his hands up. “He’s just a kid, yeah, but he’s not just a kid. He stole so much shit that he’s probably broken Klaus’ record at this point—”
“That sounds like an exaggeration—”
“— he tried to kidnap his own sister—”
“— from a bad foster home, he said—”
“— and he flipped over a car with us still in it!”
“He really didn’t mean to, Diego,” Luther insists. “He saw us watching his mom’s house, he got scared, and he thought he could scare us off by running by and rocking the car. He just, you know, overdid it a little bit.”
Diego drops his hands to his sides, exhaling through his nose and directing a pointed look at Luther.
“Okay,” Luther relents. “He overdid it a lot a bit.”
“You think?”
“He was terrified, Diego.”
“Yeah, you mentioned—”
“No, not… I’m not talking about him getting scared and then trying to rock the car. I’m talking about after. He was terrified when he saw the car flip and he just— bolted. Literally, in his case. He didn’t even see Five jump us out of the car. He thought he killed us.”
“He almost did.”
“And he was really relieved to find out that he didn’t,” Luther tells him. “Really, really relieved. I could see it. I know you can’t—” he pauses, breaks eye contact for a second. “I know you can’t really relate to it specifically, because your power’s a little more… controlled, I guess, but trust me on this, okay? It can be scary. Not knowing how much is too much. It takes a lot of getting used to.”
Diego lets his shoulders sag, and then he throws his head back, groaning. “That is also unfair, bro.”
“Yeah,” Luther admits. “But it’s true.”
Diego lets his groan drag on, to the point that it almost starts to sound like a whine, and he stares up at the ceiling like it might offer some answers. Which it never does. “I still know next to nothing about the kid. I’ve never even talked to him.”
“But you’re willing to?”
“I’m not saying I’m cool with him just staying here, no strings attached,” Diego warns him, shooting him a look. “There’s gotta be… I don’t know, ground rules. Conditions.”
Luther gives an agreeing frown, nodding along. “Okay, well—”
“Did you two kiss and make up yet?”
“Jesus. God. Damn. Christ. Five,” Diego hisses, flexing his fingers against the instinct to reach for a knife as Five appears out of nothing right between the two of them. “You were one room away, would it have killed you to walk?”
“Or call for us?” Luther asks.
“And risk waking Claire up again? No, thank you,” Five answers without, Diego notices, acknowledging the suggestion to walk. “Just thought you two might want to know the kid came back.”
“What?” Diego shouts. “Already?”
“Yeah,” Five says, shrugging. “He’s fast.”
“Is he—?” Luther starts to ask, looking over Five’s shoulder at the kitchen doorway. “What, he’s here?”
“No, not anymore.”
Diego throws his hands up. “You lost him again?”
“I didn’t lose him,” Five insists. “He came back, and then he left.”
“I didn’t see him,” Luther says, twisting at the waist to glance up the staircase as if the kid’s gonna pop into existence on the ground floor.
“Again, in case it has escaped both of you,” Five says, “he is very fast. You wouldn’t have seen anything.”
“Yeah, no shit—”
“Why did he come back, Five?” Luther asks. “Did he… I don’t know, say anything?”
“If you count this,” Five tells them, pulling a crinkled and folded-in-half piece of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket and waving it at both of them, “as saying something, then yes. He said something. Dropped this on the table right in front of me.”
For a moment there’s just silence, both Diego and Luther staring wide-eyed at him and waiting for him to continue.
When he doesn’t, Diego says, “Five. What did he say.”
“Well, I don’t know yet, do I?” Five asks, waving the paper in their faces again. “Because you were so pissed about being left out of the loop earlier, I figured you’d want me to let you know about it before I read it. Now come on.”
He turns and gestures for them to follow, blinking out of existence and — judging by the creak of a kitchen chair — reappearing in the kitchen. Diego runs both hands over his face again, shaking his head and following behind, Luther close at his heels.
“Well, Five?” Luther asks, pulling out the chair directly across from Five and all but collapsing back into it. Klaus is seated at the table now, or on it, anyway, watching their eldest brother with rapt attention and a mug of tea held in his hands. Even Mom’s paying attention now, standing at the end of the table with her hands held in front of her and watching as Five unfolds the paper. “What’s it say?”
The paper looks like it’s been ripped out of a book, judging by the uneven tear along one side and the dog-eared corner up top. Five’s forehead creases as his eyes scan over the page, and then he raises his eyebrows, sitting back against his seat.
“Huh.”
“What’s huh?” Diego asks, the only one other than Mom who’s still standing.
“He’s in,” Five says, still reading. “He’ll return all the jewelry, he’ll stop squatting at his old house, and he’ll stay here as long as we let him and as long as we keep our promise and don’t send him to prison.”
“Wow,” Luther says.
Diego frowns. “So if he’s all in, then why didn’t he just tell us that in person?”
“Because…” Five says, slowly lowering the paper onto the table, “… there’s a catch.”
“Of course there is,” Diego sighs.
“What is it?” Luther asks.
Five chews on his cheek for a second, looking from one of them to the other in turn. Even Klaus and Mom and the empty seat that, presumably, Ben’s been sitting in. “So, when we told him that he wasn’t the only one with… abilities like ours,” Five explains, “we told him what each of our powers are. So we knows, more or less, what all of us can do.”
“So, what, he wants the big guy to lift some heavy stuff for him?” Diego asks, nodding toward Luther.
“Maybe he wants Allison to get him a date,” Klaus offers, gesturing at Diego with his tea. “A little celebrity influence here, a little rumor there…”
“Well, he’s shit out of luck, then, isn’t he?”
Five shakes his head. “He doesn’t want anything from Allison. He wants to talk to you, Klaus.”
Klaus had been sipping at his tea, and he nearly chokes on it, flattening his palm against his chest as he clears his throat. “Ex-squeeze me? He wants to…? Oh, no,” Klaus says, his eyes going wide, his shoulders slumping as he lowers his tea down onto the table. “No, no, that’s… That’s just depressing. I can’t bring Mara back, you know I can’t, she’s not—”
“He doesn’t know you can bring ghosts back,” Five tells him. “Just that you can talk to them.”
“Wait,” Diego says. “Mara?”
“Oh, uh, yeah,” Klaus says. “She prefers that to Amara.”
“And you know this because…?”
“Because she… was here? Earlier,” Klaus says. “When everybody was arguing. We got to talking for a bit.”
“What?! You were—? Jesus, Klaus, I thought you were talking to Ben.”
“Oh, I was, it was all three of us. It was a nice little tête-à-tête for a while there, er— I guess a tête-à-tête-à-tête, technically.”
“Klaus, for the love of—”
“Hey, there wasn’t exactly a whole lot of time to bring it up!” Klaus defends himself, nearly sloshing his tea everywhere as he gesticulates with both hands. “She ducked out when Claire started giving her speech about how scared the kid was, then half the fam went to bed, and you two went off to have your secret big brother talk even though technically we’re the big brothers in this family, and—”
“So you could summon her, then?” Five asks, cutting off Klaus’ rant.
“Huh? Oh, uh,” Klaus says, drumming his fingers against his mug. “Uh, yeah. Yeah. I guess, sure, but…” He glances to the side, at an empty space of floor, and rolls his eyes. “Ugh, fine. You’re so pushy.”
“Wait, Klaus, is she here now?” Luther asks, eyes widening.
“What? No, I told you she left,” Klaus says. “Ben’s the pushy one. He’s— hang on, I can probably manage—”
He rolls his wrists like he’s trying to crack the joints, and a second later Ben flickers into view like a hazy blue hologram.
“I think it’s a really good idea,” Ben says as Klaus mouths his words with a half-hearted scowl and another eye roll. “I do,” he insists, apparently knowing Klaus was mocking him without having to look. “You always act like there are no good things that come of your powers, but you can do something really good for this kid, Klaus. And for his mom, too.”
And for you goes unsaid, but they all hear it loud and clear.
“I know, I know,” Klaus says.
“Klaus,” Diego speaks up. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. You know that.”
“No, I know, I… I want to,” Klaus says, his shoulders hunched as he looks down through his lashes at the mug still in his hands, chewing on his bottom lip and nodding. He always has the uncanny ability to look so small, Diego thinks, when he’s nervous, when he’s dreading something. “I want to,” he repeats, quietly. “It’s just… oh, man, is it gonna suck. But yeah, no, I’ll… I’ll do it.”
“I think you’ll do wonderfully, dear,” Mom says, stepping up to the kitchen table and reaching out to run a hand through his mop of curls, which he gratefully leans into. “What a great opportunity to use your ability to help others.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“There’s, uh…” Five interjects, then clears his throat. “There’s one more thing.”
“What else?” Luther asks. “Another catch?”
“Yup. Just one more,” Five says, tapping his fingers on the table’s edge as he peers down at the paper again. “He returns the jewelry, Diego gets paid for solving his client’s thievery problem, and we take one very confused superpowered kid off the streets, under… two conditions. He talks to Klaus first. And, uh…”
Five clicks his tongue, hesitating, and then apparently decides to just come out with it.
“… And we get his sister out of foster care, too.”
All of them fall silent, staring wide-eyed at Five while they wait — or at least Diego knows he’s waiting — for Five to say psych, just kidding, obviously no one here is anywhere near qualified to get a random kid out of foster care, can you imagine?
“I’m sorry,” Luther says before any of them can come up with anything to say to that. “He wants us to what?”