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Klaus didn’t remember getting his first tattoos—well, his first after that goddamned umbrella—though there was probably a reason for that. The reason, of course, being the unholy cocktail of drugs singing through his bloodstream at any given moment.
He did remember, however, waking up in some grungy alleyway, head aching and hands stinging, and first seeing the product of the previous night’s activities. He remembered throwing his head back and howling with laughter, because, yeah, that was about right. At least he knew that even high off his ass, he had a sense of humor.
He remembered Ben, staring at him as he lost his ever-loving mind sprawled in the dirt and garbage of the streets, trying to look disapproving. Remembered him cracking a smile, despite it. Because it was funny.
HELLO and GOODBYE, written shakily enough that he wondered if the tattoo artist had been high as well, one on either palm in plain black block lettering. He was a Ouija board, wasn’t he, a fucking living Ouija board, a living séance, a bona fide circus sideshow. This was just making light of it, making it into as much of a joke as his life was.
And if you didn’t like it, you could talk to the hand.
☂
“Here.” It was Allison. She was holding something dangling from a chain… something like a guitar pick, but with a hole cut into it. Wooden. Simple. A necklace? Not his usual style—nor hers, for that matter.
“Pardon? I’m not the musician in the family. And even if I were our dear Number Seven, I don’t think you can play a violin with a pick.”
She rolled her eyes, and shook the chain as she held it out to him. “It’s a planchette, not a guitar pick. One of those things that go on Ouija boards.” At that, she shrugged, looking uncharacteristically unsure. “You always take my clothes and jewelry. Thought you might like something of your own… and, uh, it matches your tattoos.”
Part of Klaus wanted to laugh it off; another part, buried far, far under years of drinking and drugs and emotional repression, wanted to cry a little bit. As it was, he went with his M.O. when surprised: roll with it and hope that whatever shit hit the fan didn’t hit him.
“Huh. Thanks.” He took the necklace and dropped it over his head, letting the little wooden planchette thud against his chest. It… well, actually, it kinda fit. Trust Allison to find just the thing for him to wear, even when it was a cheap wood chip repurposed from someone’s thrifted Ouija board. “I like it.”
“Great,” she replied, sighing and smiling, and he grinned back. It almost felt like old times again, before everyone moved out and Klaus’s life was more than where he was getting his next high from. When he would sneak into Allison’s rooms and they would talk, and paint each other’s nails, and just… act like siblings. Real siblings. Not whatever the hell they were now, estranged and dysfunctional and the casualties of their shitty father’s shitty parenting.
And this was getting way too real, and he wasn’t nearly high enough for it, but Allison was here now smiling at him like a sister would and the planchette was a comforting weight on his chest and he could almost pretend that life hadn’t all gone down the toilet.
“Great,” he repeated. And he actually meant it.
☂
“What are these for?” Dave asked one day (years in the future and decades in the past), cupping Klaus’s hands, palms up, in his own. He brushed his thumbs over the tattoos. It was such a simple question, asked with honest curiosity, like Dave actually cared about the answer, like he actually cared about Klaus. And that was an embarrassingly unfamiliar concept, God, he was a mess.
But Dave didn’t seem to mind.
Klaus turned his hands over and took Dave’s, clasping their palms together and trapping his words between them, his words inked in another lifetime. He smiled; Dave returned it, cocking his head in an unspoken question.
Klaus just laughed quietly. “It’s an inside joke.”
☂
More tattoos joined his first and second, large and black and sprawling over his upper arms. He got them with Dave, with the other guys, and it burned getting them. It hurt as much as he remembered it hurting when he was young and dear old Dad was still alive and branding them with that damned umbrella, but this pain was different. This was a good pain, a good burn, because Dave was next to him and this was his choice and he felt alive. It wasn’t the cold of the mausoleum or the itching and nausea and bleeding of being tortured or even the noise and smoke and gunfire of the war.
It was like the burn of alcohol going down while out drinking with friends. Pain tempered by pleasure. Hot and sharp and strangely safe, a precious warm moment trapped in time, immortalized by the swirls of ink in his skin.
Months later, he looked over on the battlefield to see Dave—strong, beautiful Dave—dying, bleeding out, shot in the chest, dying. Klaus took his face in his hand—GOODBYE, his palm read, cupped under Dave’s chin, and he’d never hated his tattoos more—and begged him to stay alive. Clutched him tightly, as if he could stop Dave’s life leaking away with only the force of his body. Screamed, while the one love of his life died, while the world belched smoke and fire and burned around him.
It burned, and he had never felt so cold.
☂
He returned to the future as soon as they left the battlefield. It was funny, he thought of it as “the future” instead of “the present.” Wasn’t there some saying: the present is a gift, that’s why they call it the present, or some similar hackneyed garbage? Well, Klaus was of the opinion that the present—the present of 1968 or of 2019, whichever, both—royally fucking sucked, and he’d like the receipt, please.
Going back didn’t feel like going home—it felt familiar, though, like the familiar sensation of drugs coursing through his veins and taking the edge off things.
He was trying to go clean. But damn if it wasn’t hard. Over a decade of child abuse plus being haunted by ghosts plus the mausoleum plus years and years of being ignored plus literal torture plus ten months-worth of fighting in a war plus losing the love of his life minus drugs didn’t equal fucking rainbows and sunshine and puppies. It just equalled pain.
And Klaus was so tired of being in pain.
He was tired of his siblings ignoring him, too, but he didn’t have the energy to care. He let them fight, let them yell, didn’t intervene or make a smart comment. They could cause the goddamn apocalypse and he would just clutch Dave’s dog-tags and pray that after the world went up in flames, they could still be together.
“Lucky,” Diego had called him, when Klaus had mentioned losing someone. Well, “luckier than most.” Luckier than him was what he’d meant, Klaus knew. That detective—Patch, or something—had died. The one who had saved him from those mask-wearing bastards. The one Diego had some weird, sorta-relationship with. The one he’d loved, Klaus was guessing.
Well, Diego wasn’t wrong. He could see Dave again.
If he could just… get… fucking… sober. Which, as heretofore mentioned, was goddamned hard.
Which brought him here, bantering with his brother—his younger brother after those ten months in Vietnam, so suck it, Number Two—trying to ignore what he was about to do. Letting himself get tied up. Forcing himself off drugs the only way that had worked so far, getting tied to a chair and having no choice in the matter. Yay, torture.
Dear old Dad had always been a master of tough love, and apparently Klaus wasn’t going to learn any other way. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if confronted by a hug, or an offer to just sit down and talk about it. Luckily, Diego didn’t seem to have a problem with trussing up his weaselly junkie brother.
Nor did he have a problem with stopping Klaus from backing out. Which felt like a betrayal, with the need for a high eating away at his skin, with flashbacks cycling through his head like an old film reel. Except old film reels were spotty and fuzzy around the edges; Klaus’s memories were painfully sharp, as if he was back in 1968 and watching Dave die below him, GOODBYE pressed against his cold cheek.
“Klaus.”
After an eternity trapped between a hellish past and a hellish present, he came back to himself.
More importantly, he came back to the man standing before him. A man hazy at the edges with that indescribable quality that meant ghost. A man no less radiant in death than he’d been in life.
“Dave,” Klaus breathed. And it was. “Oh my God. I did it. Dave!”
His hands were bound behind him, but all he wanted to do was reach out, HELLO and GOODBYE and desperate searching fingers, and touch what he knew he couldn’t touch. Maybe it was better that he was tied up. The disappointment of his hands going through empty space where they should’ve met warm flesh would’ve been too much to bear.
“Klaus,” Dave repeated, and then the rest was lost. Lost like the rest of the day was, turned back in time, gone forever. Rewritten like an old tape, taking it and recording over what had been there before, erasing it. Erasing it all.
Klaus had no memories of that day, because it never happened.
☂
He fiddled with the planchette around his neck—he’d found it in his room, after he’d come back from the war. Now he wore it all the time, a constant, like his tattoos. They were permanent and that was comforting. He could be high as a kite or stone cold sober or tortured or raving mad or in the past or in the present or in the future or dead, and he would always have those marks on his arms, on his palms.
Permanence had never been a thing he’d gone for. After escaping the hellhole that was the academy, he hadn’t even had a permanent place to live, always bouncing between someone’s couch, someone else’s bed, the facilities in rehab. Anywhere but a home. The only constants he’d had in his life were the drugs, Ben—and not even Ben, when he got high enough, when he was so dead to the world even the most stubborn dead couldn’t reach him—and his tattoos.
Out of those whopping three things, the tattoos were the only ones without twenty years of negative memories built up around them. They weren’t his dead brother who shouldn’t have died, and they weren’t the only barrier he had against the demons of his past. They were just… tattoos.
He liked that. He liked them. He had them purely for his own benefit, no one else’s. Anyone who had a problem with it could fuck right off to the moon, thank you very much.
The planchette was like that. Another solely-for-him thing that didn’t sting at the edges. There wasn’t a lot of room for solely-for-him things anymore, not with the apocalypse looming. There wasn’t time for drugs, there wasn’t time for personal crises, there wasn’t time for self-pity.
So of course, he was standing outside an honest-to-God fucking rave. Life was not goddamn fair in the slightest.
Not that that was news. He just felt the need to reiterate.
He cast one last pleading look toward Ben, who had no sympathy in his eyes when he shook his head. Damn moral Ben. Always trying to keep him on “the right path” or whatever. He’d never asked for a fucking… for a fucking Jiminy Cricket to follow him around.
Klaus almost felt bad after he’d thought it, because he would’ve died long ago if not for Ben, and he’d do anything to have Ben alive and breathing again, and he knew it couldn’t be all fun and games to be permanently tethered to your screw-up junkie brother for all eternity—but right now, it was all he could do to not run screaming, so feeling regret wasn’t on the table.
Neither, apparently, was leaving his monkey-moon-man brother alone with drugs, girls, and a shattered world view. So into the rave it was.
After all, drugs, personal crises, and self-pity were Klaus’s areas of expertise.
☂
Klaus would say that the rave had been hell, but given that he’d actually died and gone to… Purgatory, or whatever… he wasn’t sure that was the right word.
Of course, if Sir Reginald Hardass had been there, it might’ve been Hell.
Regardless of where his little stint in the afterlife had taken him, it left him shaken, and in no mood to be disbelieved when he told everyone what he’d learned. Yeah, he got it, he was the druggie, the wash-up, the useless brother. But would it kill them to just listen to him for once?
Because it had killed him to learn what he had. Literally, because he’d died, head split open on the concrete floor, before getting rejected by God Herself and then his father right after.
He clenched his fists, nails digging into his palms, deep into the words written there. Dear old Dad had been so furious when he’d gotten those tattoos, when he’d crawled back to the mansion, dingy and dirt-stained and drunk and answered the accusatory “Where have you been?” with a flash of his left hand, GOODBYE, and stalked off to his room. Dad had always been furious, or disappointed, or coldly distant—or a mixture of all three. He hadn’t gotten any better in death, it seemed, though he gave a mean shave.
And, yeah, maybe that sounded far-fetched. “I died, woke up in the afterlife, God told me to piss off, and then I got shaved by our adopted deceased father who told me his death was a suicide.” But still. It was the truth.
He was prepared to walk out, to just throw in the towel and stop trying to convince his stubborn siblings of what they didn’t want to hear, when Pogo spoke up. And of course they believed him.
What Klaus wouldn’t have given for some drugs right then. Sobriety was over-fucking-rated.
☂
The world was smoke and gunfire and violin music and bright, glowing blue.
For the first time in a lifetime, Klaus’s power didn’t control him. He controlled his power. And it felt so. Ridiculously. Freeing. This was a high he’d never experienced, with his fists wreathed in neon fire, his brother smoky and blue and corporeal before him, and pure undiluted power surging through his veins.
He smiled as the last of the gunmen were ripped apart and Ben regained full color, losing that strange smoldering quality that had marked him as tangible. It was a wide, uncontrollable smile, and he couldn’t tamp it back any more than he could stop the whoop that escaped him.
“Now who’s the lookout?”
☂
It was certainly strange being back in his young body. It hadn’t yet encountered drugs—or at least, not to the extent that his thirty-year-old self had—and so the physical pains of addiction didn’t exist. Another thing that didn’t exist: his tattoos, barring that damned umbrella. At the time, the umbrella tattoo had been sorta cool, a mark of their team, a permanent symbol of their permanent bond. But that delusion had fallen apart as surely as their family had.
Now Klaus could only see it for the brand it was. He was surprised their bastard father hadn’t taken a red hot iron to their neck, really, and numbered them one two three four five six seven, all nice and pretty in a row, his weapons against the apocalypse.
Well, they’d stopped the apocalypse, if you counted “going back in time before it happened” as stopping it. Maybe if they just kept doing this, kept living in an endless loop between thirteen years old and thirty, they’d figure something out.
Or maybe they’d spend eternity at each other’s throats until Five got fed up and left them to die. Based on their abysmal track record, Klaus thought the latter had a better chance of happening.
But the fact stood: they were back in the past. He felt strangely naked, really, without his make-up, without HELLO and GOODBYE and the army tattoos, without the things that he’d claimed over the years. The only remnants he’d retained from the future were Dave’s dog-tags, Allison’s planchette (which he’d strung on the same chain as the tags), and a lot of disturbing memories.
He’d gained his brother, though. Ben was alive again. And he had a newfound ability, the power to make ghosts corporeal. Maybe now, with his blood unpolluted and his mind relatively clear, he’d be able to conjure Dave. Maybe now, he could even touch him.
What Klaus wouldn’t give for just one damned hug.
Ben found him in his room, after Hargreeves had caught them, disoriented and still clutching each other, and reprimanded them all for being out past curfew. The six of them, united for once, had shared one long look and gone wordlessly off to bed, still carrying the unconscious Vanya. Even Luther, loyal to the point of blindness Luther, had been in agreement: they didn’t owe Sir Reginald Fucking Hargreeves one single explanation.
And in accordance with that fuck-Sir-Reggie mindset, Ben had snuck out and climbed onto Klaus’s bed, looking uncomfortable in his pajamas, which were itchy and gray and embroidered with the Academy logo. They all had the same pajamas, and Father Dearest had only started to give them small allowances for clothes at age sixteen. So the uniforms it was.
Ben pulled his knees to his chest, as if trying to take up as little space as possible. “It all feels so strange.”
Despite the astounding lack of context, Klaus thought he knew what he meant. “Being alive again?”
“Yeah. There’s… so much to feel, y’know, I missed that. I forgot what the house smelled like.”
“You’re miraculously back from the dead and the first thing you take stock of is how our house smells?”
Ben scoffed and socked him lightly in the shoulder, looking almost surprised when his fist connected. “No, it’s just… there’s so much. It’s weird to even be able to punch you.”
“Yeah, well, that didn’t stop you before.” Ben smirked at that, and Klaus laughed. “Bet that felt good, releasing a decade’s worth of pent-up frustration on your junkie brother.”
Ben shrugged. “It felt good to finally be able to stop you for once. But I don’t think of you as my ‘junkie brother.’”
“Even though I am.”
“Even though you are. Technically.” He fixed Klaus with a long, searching look, surprisingly intimidating for a thirteen-year-old. “But you’re not going to be anymore, right? You’re going clean?”
“Swear to God, cute little ragamuffin that She is,” Klaus said, raising his disconcertingly blank right hand. “I’m going clean. Can’t see the boyfriend if I can’t conjure him from the afterlife, after all, even though I’m in a thirteen-year-old’s body. Wonder how he’ll take that. Can’t be any weirder than any of the other garbage I’ve shown him. Is this how Five felt with Delores? God, our lives are fucked up—”
“Good,” Ben said simply, smiling wide and innocent. “I’m proud of you.”
Oh. “Oh,” Klaus squeaked. He reached up to fiddle with the dog-tags and the planchette, like he’d started doing whenever he didn’t know what to do with his hands. Or his mouth, for that matter. It took a lot to render Klaus “The Séance” Hargreeves speechless, but apparently all “a lot” entitled was someone genuinely expressing pride in him.
Go figure.
But before he could touch his necklace or stick his foot in his mouth (as he was wont to do), Ben reached over and pulled him into a hug.
Klaus was not ashamed to admit he cried. He wrapped his arms around his brother—his warm, alive, breathing brother—and cried, clinging to the boy he thought he’d never touch again like an octopus.
Which was kinda Ben’s territory, now that he thought about it. He snorted.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just… thinking.”
“That’s new. How does utilizing your one brain cell feel, after so little exercise? Is the poor thing sore?”
Klaus pulled back out of the hug to punch Ben on the arm—not pulling away entirely, mind, because he was tired and pathetic and wanted to feel his brother beside him—before blowing a raspberry at him.
Ben laughed, but managed a derisive tone to reply, “Really mature. I see the brain cell has fainted dead away.”
“Pssh, we both know that between us, we had two working brain cells, and when you died you took both of them. Greedy pig.”
“You caught me red-handed. I wanted to be the last vestige of sense you had for a decade.”
For some reason, that sobered Klaus up. All at once, he was out of that nice, safe, untouchable warm bubble where the past and the future didn’t exist, and the cold tendrils of something like guilt began to creep in. “Yeah. Uh, thanks. For, y’know.”
“Playing your conscience?” Ben’s face was unreadable. He looked almost like his ghost again, the closest he’d looked to the ghost of himself since they’d time-travelled.
“That,” Klaus agreed, swallowing nervously. His fingers played with his necklace. “I… it can’t have been easy. Or fun. Watching me nearly kill myself, over and over again.”
“It wasn’t,” Ben replied, and Klaus winced. Yeah, he deserved that. That and more. “But I’d do it again. I won’t, because I’m not dying again and you’re not going back to drugs, but. I’d do it again if I had to.”
Oh, was all Klaus could think. Because, again, it appeared that kind words directed his way were a particular weakness of his.
“I told you there was nothing Luther wouldn’t do to save your scrawny junkie ass, and then he went off and got laid while you were dead on the ground. Which I’m going to talk to him about, because that was a dick move worthy of Dad, but. Over the years I got frustrated, exasperated, and completely fed-up watching you poison yourself and make dumbass decisions. But you’re my brother, Klaus. I can’t abandon you any more than I can abandon the eldritch tentacle horrors living in my chest.”
Klaus winced, though on the inside he was glowing. “Oof, Benny my bro, can we not compare me to your fucking living nightmare power that you despise more than anything in this world?”
“But you both refuse to let me live my life in peace.” And for all that Klaus should be feeling insulted, he simply couldn’t—Ben was laughing and smiling and alive, and he was making cracks about his horrors. The first time around, at this age, Ben had been scared out of his mind by the things living in his stomach. He could barely talk about them, much less casually joke around. So instead of retorting with a sarcastic quip, Klaus just beamed.
“What?” Ben asked. “I’ve spent enough time haunting your scrawny junkie ass that I know anything that makes you smile that wide can’t be a good thing.”
“I’m just proud of you, little Benny boy.”
Ben fixed him with an unimpressed look, but Klaus could see his lips twitching against a smile. “I’m the same age as you, you know.”
“No, actually, I’m ten months older. Mentally. ‘Cause time travel. Five could explain it better.”
“No shit,” Ben replied, and Klaus punched him, and they both laughed, laughed and laughed and laughed.
And things actually felt alright.
☂
Things weren’t alright, obviously. They still had the apocalypse to deal with, and more immediately, their bastard father. Every single one of them was fucked up beyond measure. Klaus was still dealing with the mental effects of going clean, plus the PTSD from being tortured and Vietnam. He was still learning how to use his powers, for real for real, and there were still days—so many days—where he just wanted to be numb again. And that was just him; just the barest tip of the iceberg that was the Hargreeves Family Mile-Long List of Issues.
Things weren’t alright, but there were moments that were.
When Vanya woke up again, surrounded by her worried siblings, and she and Allison hugged and everyone was crying because they had all made it.
When Five teleported out to Griddy’s and brought them all doughnuts, and they all laughed and talked and ate together. Diego ate four chocolate-sprinkled ones and promptly vomited them up on Five’s shoes. Klaus nearly pissed himself laughing—riotous, howling laughter echoed by everyone, even Diego, wiping his mouth, even Five, wiping his shoes, even Vanya. She wasn’t just giggling, she was full-on guffawing, and Klaus felt warm.
When Ben called a sibling meeting and proceeded to rip them all a new one for how they’d treated Klaus over the years. They’d stared, speechless, shocked, at quiet even-tempered mild-mannered Ben as he’d torn into them more efficiently than his horrors could have. And then they’d apologized to Klaus, real honest-to-God apologies, even from Luther of all people, and Klaus couldn’t stop himself from crying.
When they’d instated sibling meeting/therapy night as a weekly thing, shortly after Ben’s dressing-down. It wasn’t easy to hear all the ways they’d fucked up and fucked each other up over the years, but they were making progress. Every time Vanya could look at Luther without flinching, every time Diego walked away instead of starting a fist-fight, every time Five managed to ask for help instead of taking on everything by himself. It was progress.
When Klaus finally, finally conjured Dave. He hadn’t been able to touch him—despite his sobriety, he’d yet to harness that particular power—but he’d seen him. Talked to him. And that was worth everything; just knowing that he was able to do it took an enormous weight off his shoulders.
He talked to Dave nearly everyday after that. It only became easier to summon him; he was hopeful that soon he’d be able to make him corporeal. Ben, ever his cheerleader (his emo, nagging, often not cheerful at all cheerleader), shared his hope. They were both working on coming to terms with their powers together; overcoming their fears of the ghosts and the horrors with each other’s help. It was hard work, and it yielded little in the way of tangible results, but it was worth it.
When Klaus introduced them all to Dave, the only seven people he’d ever cared about finally meeting each other. (Eight, if you counted Mom, who’d stopped in and said, “Nice to meet you, dear,” to which Dave had replied, “It’s a pleasure, ma’am,” and Klaus’s heart had been about to burst with love and happiness and a bunch of warm unfamiliar emotions.)
Luther, predictably, had asked, “Wait, you’re gay?” to which everyone groaned and gestured vaguely at Klaus’s entire person, which Klaus figured was a reasonable response. “You think I can deny any gender a shot at this?” he’d asked loudly, gesturing vaguely at his entire person, to which everyone had groaned again. Dave had laughed, full-belly guffaws that left him clutching his stomach, and Klaus hadn’t been able to stop beaming.
When Diego had come to him, slipping back into the stutter he had whenever he was nervous, and asked if he could conjure Patch. Klaus had tried, focusing hard for half a second, before realizing: of course he wouldn’t be able to. He told Diego no, but before his brother’s face could fall, he reminded him why. And he’d held Diego as he sobbed into Klaus’s chest, as he’d whimpered, “She’s alive, alive, she never died.”
When Klaus snuck out, around the same age as he’d done it years ago, to a tattoo parlor. But this time, he wasn’t high off his ass and he had more than a vague sense of “this’ll be hilarious” to guide him. This time he wasn’t alone, because the rest of his siblings had come with him.
“How old are you kids?” the tattoo artist asked when they filed into her shop.
Five had walked up to the front counter and, hiking up his sleeve, bared his wrist. “Old enough to have tattoos already. Now, can you cover this up?”
“I can do anything with a needle, kid.” She looked past Five, cocking an eyebrow at the rest of them. “You all got one o’ these?”
“Everyone but her,” Five replied, nodding at Vanya. “But she wants something too.”
The artist studied them for a long moment before shrugging. “If you can pay.”
“We can pay.”
They walked out of that shop with wrists smarting but mouths split in wide grins. Funny that the very thing their father had marked them with to show their unity had finally brought them together—brought them together in their desire to deface it. Klaus couldn’t stop smiling.
He had gotten a planchette—because once you’ve found your aesthetic, why abandon it, and he owned freaky séance Ouija board shit—pointing outward, toward his hand. The old umbrella tattoo sat snugly in the planchette’s hole, filled in entirely by dark black ink. It wasn’t visible in the slightest, and Klaus had never felt freer.
Luther had filled in his old brand, too—the ring that had once held a umbrella was now nothing but a black circle, rimmed by triangles. A sun. It was small, hardly bigger than the original tattoo, but it suited Luther in some strange way Klaus couldn’t figure out. Plus, it was the ballsiest thing Luther had ever done—not only repurposing Father’s tattoo, but turning it into the sun. Spitting in the face of the four years he’d spent on the surface of the moon; and a promise, Klaus thought, to never let that happen again.
Diego’s was less self-explanatory: a simple black square, filled in by cross-hatching, covering up the umbrella. It was bordered by a design that looked like stitching, and when Allison asked what it was, all he said was, “A patch.”
Understanding had flooded Klaus at once, and he’d changed the subject, joking that Diego should get another tattoo, a heart with an arrow through it and the word “Mom,” and everyone had laughed. Diego had scowled at him, rolling his eyes, but Klaus had seen the unspoken thank you within them.
Allison actually had gotten a heart over her umbrella. Six tiny letters were inked next to it, near-imperceptible unless you were looking carefully. Claire. Throughout the entire process, she’d stared down at her wrist, as silent as she’d been when her vocal cords were sliced, and Klaus had had to look away.
Five had filled in the ring of his old tattoo, turning it into the ‘O’ in ’NO. 5.’”
“Egotistical, much?” Diego had asked as Five’s tattoo was being done. “Also, you really want to wear Dad’s fucked-up numbering system for all time?”
Despite the needle being repeatedly plunged into his skin, Five didn’t seem pained in the slightest as he’d responded, “It’s my name, dumbass, not just my number.” And then when he’d gotten “Delores” written on the other wrist in flowing cursive script, Diego hadn’t said a word.
Ben had taken a while to decide. At first, he’d jokingly suggested getting a tombstone, which had been resoundingly shouted down the minute he’d brought it up. (“I didn’t get ‘HEROIN OVERDOSE’ tattooed across my forehead, dude, stop being morbid.”) After most of the others had gone—Numbers One through Five, because even despite their best attempts, they had yet to fully escape their father’s influence—he’d sat down in the chair, rolled up the sleeve of his hoodie, and said simply, “Surprise me.”
The tattoo artist had studied him, long and hard, before starting to work. Just as with the other designs, it was plain black ink (nothing else would obscure the umbrella), but unlike the other designs, it was purely for aesthetic appeal.
When she’d finished—it had taken her longer than the others had, and she’d seemed proud when she finally leaned back—Ben had looked down at the design and beamed. Where there had once been an umbrella, now a veritable garden of flowers bloomed. They traveled down his wrist, into his palm, and halfway up his forearm, a spray of petals and leaves wreathing their way across his smooth skin.
“I love it,” he’d told her. Klaus’s heart had been near to bursting with how broad and uninhibited his smile was, so sincerely happy in a way Ben rarely got to be.
She’d smiled back. “Damn straight. Haven’t guessed a person wrong yet. You looked like you could use some flowers, kid.”
Vanya hadn’t had an umbrella to cover up; Klaus suggested she abandon the wrist entirely, get something colorful and sprawling all along her back, like a dark angel or a big-ass snake or some other cool shit. She’d leveled him with an unimpressed look, her eyes sparkling, as she got three small music notes inked right where everyone else’s tattoos were. It was simple and pretty and, Klaus thought, very Vanya.
(Though he still thought a python winding its way over her back would’ve been badass.)
But, overall, it worked. All the tattoos worked. Luther’s sun, Diego’s patch, Allison’s heart, Klaus’s planchette, Five’s words, Ben’s flowers, Vanya’s music. All reclaiming a part of themselves, taking something that had been branded into them and making it into something new.
And, because he was sentimental and a little high on freedom and damned funny, Klaus had gotten another tattoo. Another two, to be exact.
Klaus flexed his stinging palms as they all walked out of the shop, laughing and bumping into one another and alright, so very alright. His hands were sore, but not nearly as sore as his mouth, which hadn’t dropped its grin since they’d first entered the tattoo parlor. Even the pain of the needle had been nothing—well, almost nothing—compared to the relief that came from throwing off the metaphorical shackles and inking a permanent “fuck you” to Sir Reginald Hargreeves onto his skin. It was a euphoric feeling.
It was a beautiful night.
The air was clear and cool and the stars were glittering bright in the sky, and his siblings were happy and as close to carefree as they ever got, and Klaus? Well, Klaus was feeling more alright than he’d ever felt, in either lifetime. And he would be damned if he let this feeling, this contented happy alrightness, go without a fight.
And if you didn’t like it, you could talk to the hand.