Chapter Text
For as long as Klaus can remember he has been surrounded by ghosts. No one else can see or hear them and he is alone with their screaming. That is a basic fact of existence, like that the sky is blue or gravity exists.
As long as Klaus can remember there have been four ghosts who rarely leave his side. A blond girl in a nightgown, two muscular dudes in their underwear and a boy in a trenchcoat who looks and speaks like a school shooter.
The other three ghosts tell him that he is. Despite this, he likes the trenchcoat boy the best.
Unlike the other ghosts, these ones don’t scream, they don’t try to attack him and they (usually) don’t look like they’re dead. The girl will sometimes have a blue liquid leaking down the side of her mouth, the muscular guys sometimes have bulletwounds and the trenchcoat boy sometimes isn’t even there, there is only fire that implodes and then explodes over and over.
But they usually look like normal teenagers. Not like the ghosts he knows they are.
When he was seven and had just been named Klaus, they all told him their names. The blonde girl was Heather, the muscular boys were Kurt and Ram and the boy in the trenchcoat was JD, or Jason as he later allows Klaus to call him. Only Klaus is allowed to call him that, one time the others tried. Klaus learnt that day that ghosts can punch each other.
The four ghosts were apparently haunting him because of his mother. Not the robot that lived in their home and treated them kinder than their very human father. No, his biological mother.
These were the facts he knew about her from the ghosts:
1. Her name was Veronica Sawyer
2. She killed (or helped kill) Heather, Kurt and Ram. She did not kill Jason, although the boy admits one night that he used to think it was her fault. He does not anymore. Klaus doesn’t ask why.
3. She did all of these murders in the first month of senior year. In fact, it was only a few days after Jason died (blown up) that Klaus was born, even though Veronica was not pregnant earlier that day.
4. Veronica could see the ghosts. They weren’t sure if she was actually a medium or just had very accurate, guilt-ridden hallucinations
5. Veronica gave him up to Reginald (not father or dad or papa. Only Reginald) because she wanted to one day go to college and marry a lawyer (Jason’s words) and didn’t think she could do that with a child she didn’t want and hadn’t prepared for. Reginald had seemed nice enough and was rich and she assumed he could look after her baby. She was wrong.
6. Veronica would have loved him.
And that was it. Those six facts made up the entirety of his knowledge of his mother. He knew more than his siblings at least but he still wanted to know more.
He wanted to run away and find her and live happily ever after with her and her lawyer husband (assuming her dream had come true (assuming that even was her dream and Jason hadn’t made it up)).
Klaus had learnt at age 12, when he snuck his first, and then second, and then third shot of alcohol in one night, that he could still see the ghosts when he was drunk. At least those four, the other ghosts, the meaner ghosts, left him alone when he was too intoxicated to see them. According to Heather the other ghosts were still there but Klaus couldn’t see them so he didn’t give a shit.
This was the way it worked, as Klaus discovered more and more drugs to clear his mind by clogging it with ‘poison’ as his family called it. He still kept the ghosts he wanted to, just not the others.
He was fine with that.
He decided the ghosts were terrible at haunting him when Ben died. Instead of using his grief to fuck with him, they tried to help. Kurt and Ram made a joke that was very inappropriate, especially to be saying at a funeral. Heather awkwardly told him to suck it up, even as she helped him pick out a suit. He noticed out of the corner of his eyes that she was crying lightly, although the tears looked like the same blue liquid that came out of her mouth sometimes.
Jason was the kindest. He told him stories of Klaus’ mother, and then opened up about his own mother. He let the crying boy scream and rage at the world because his brother, his favourite brother, the brother who had always comforted him when the ghosts got too much, was dead and gone and it was all his father’s fault.
Jason revealed his own mother’s death was his (Jason’s) father’s fault as well.
When Ben first showed up as a ghost, Klaus didn’t know whether to cry with relief or anger. All of the ghosts (except his four) were angry and in pain and always screaming. Klaus didn’t want an eternity of that for Ben.
Instead, Ben was coherent and kind and just as snarky as before.
His four ghosts became his five ghosts.
And then Klaus spent most of his time drunk or high or both because at least then he only had his five ghosts and not the others. And then Five came back, and Klaus got tortured and then he was in Vietnam (without them) and he lost the love of his life and came back broken.
None of them knew how to help, not even Jason because he wasn’t the one who lost the love of his life, he was the love of Veronica’s life (not her only love but one of them) and he was the one lost.
And then he got sober and the world ended but it didn’t and he sat in the aftermath of it all, surrounded by his family and his five ghosts and swore that soon it would be six ghosts because he was going to find Dave.
And then he would find his mother.