Chapter Text
Everybody knows that Klaus can’t use his abilities when he’s high. When he’s been drinking. When he’s not sober.
It’s something they learned when he was thirteen and he stole some of Vanya’s pills and took more than the recommended dose. They heard him laughing for the first time in months. They saw him sleep peacefully. They watched him wake with a hangover and a smile.
To be clear, the pills themselves did not make him laugh. But the silence in his head when he took them did.
Dad was not impressed. But he decided it was a good avenue for experimentation. What drugs would inhibit his powers, could he fight past the inhibition, would any drugs heighten his abilities?
The answer was pretty much anything mind altering stopped him from contacting the dead.
So when he says he sees Ben, three days After, when he’s drunk and he’s taken something and he’s slurring his words, Luthor punches him.
Diego gets between them, protects like he always does. Allison is screaming at them to stop, Vanya is crying. Ben is sitting with his head in his hands, his hood drawn down over his face.
“I told you,” Klaus slurred, his lip thick and the taste of blood in his mouth (Luthor pulled the punch at the last second and Klaus knows it). “They never believe me.”
It becomes common to see Klaus talking to his brother. Their brother. To Ben. After a few days of hurt feelings and anger, they decide Klaus is broken. They decide he’s cracked. That the pressure of everything, the drugs, the shock of Ben’s death, one or the other or all of the above, has proved too much for him. And he’s almost sure they’re right. He can’t see dead people when he’s high (and he’s 17 now and high or drunk whenever he can get away with it). So Ben can’t be real. Ben died. Ben was gone.
But real or not, Ben was right there. He was visible and he was listening and talking and present. Luthor and Alison were a unit. Diego was caught in between, spending half his time biting at Luthor’s heels, the other half leading Ben and Klaus into trouble. Five had been closest to Vanya, and now that he was gone, she was an outpost to herself. Without Ben, Klaus looked to Diego and found him fighting desperately to lead, to be the hero. And Klaus did not want that. Ben knew. Ben understood. They didn’t sign up for this. They didn’t ask for this. They were children.
And Ben was dead.