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Diego is eleven years old and he’s sitting in a chair, arm outstretched while the tattoo artist cleans his wrist with a cotton ball. The smell of rubbing alcohol is sticking to his lungs and from where he’s sitting, Diego can see Klaus and Allison clinging to each other with tears in their eyes, and that makes his stomach turn awfully because it means this is so going to hurt.
The tattoo gun buzzes into life and it sounds like it could drill into his skull. Diego wants to say he absolutely does not want this and tattoos are kind of stupid anyway, but he knows Dad would never agree. Dad would only keep on watching them gravely and tell him to stop whining.
Diego is Number Two, he needs to set an example to his siblings and all.
Still, nothing could prepare him for the moment the needle touches his skin. It burns like nothing else he’s ever known, it hurts more than any training injury ever did, and it seems never-ending.
The gun goes over and over in loops, staining his skin and branding layer after layer of color.
And now, Diego kind of understands why Klaus and Allison are clinging for dear life, because with their father watching everything like a statue without even a scrap of comfort, without even the usual crumbs of affection– it’s a very lonely sort of hurt.
At his right, Diego sees out of the corner of his eyes Mom move, reaching for him, but Dad is already looking disapprovingly at Klaus and Allison’s sniffling, and Ben’s fidgeting, and Diego’s own squirming, so when she tries to take his hand, Diego flinches away.
His wrist is on fire, but Diego grits his teeth through the pain until his vision is more shadows than light.
*
Diego is seventeen years old and he’s going to be a police officer. A detective, he hopes, catching criminals and saving lives and looking damn fine while he’s at it.
He’s waiting at the lab get his blood drawn and he’s only one drug screen away from being officially a cadet. He’s one vial of blood away from moving out of that giant empty house so full of ghosts that you don’t have to be Klaus to see just how haunted it really is.
A girl, no older than him brushes past him, a round band-aid on the crook of her arm and she flicks a shadow of a smile at him as she passes. Diego thinks he’d very much like to follow up on that but then his name is called and all he hears is the sound of his suitcase zipping closed, the echo of his boots climbing down the stairs, the front doors closing behind him.
“Diego Hargreeves?” The nurse calls again. A way out, he hears.
She leads him to another room and tells him to sit in another chair, and when she dabs the cotton ball in rubbing alcohol, Diego is suddenly eleven again with a tattoo gun buzzing next to his ear.
“This is going to hurt just a little,” the nurse says, and Diego blinks back into reality. The room spins, and his stomach it churning, and he might be sick. “Don’t move,” she warns.
Then, she brings out the needle and oh god, looking was a mistake–
*
Diego is seventeen years old and his shame follows him down the hall, settling perfectly in the hunch of his shoulders. “You haven’t eaten in too long,” the nurse tells him sympathetically. “It’s perfectly normal, honey.”
*
Diego is twenty years old and he might be dying.
“You’re not dying,” Eudora says, giving him one of her fondly exasperated looks. It’s easy for her to say that, though, because she’s not the one with the giant, gaping cut on her back. “It’s just a flesh wound, don’t be a baby.”
They’re at her place, and he’s bleeding all over her bathroom floor, smearing the white tiles a glaring red, and Diego thinks this might mean something. He thinks his coming here in the first place might mean something too.
“And anyway, you could always go to a damn hospital if you’re so worried,” she continues, pulling her first aid kit from the cabinets. “Instead of crashing uselessly against my window.”
“I thought I could shimmy it open,” he defends himself, rolling his shoulder and immediately regretting it.
“Yes, please tell me how you were going to break and enter in a cop’s house.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
Eudora snorts, takes in the state of her small bathroom. “Just take off your shirt before I change my mind.”
“You know,” Diego says, still finding in himself to flash her a smirk because he might be in a terrible amount of pain, but this is just too easy an opportunity to rile her up to pass up. “If you wanted to get me out of my clothes, there were easier ways to do it– ouch!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, didn’t I warn you? This might sting a little,” and even though Diego can’t see her face, he knows she’s smirking too. He can hear the curve of her grin in the cadence of her voice, and cleaning the cut stings like a motherfucker but Diego bites his lips through the pain, and thinking about her smile helps. “You need stitches, are you sure you don’t want to go to a hospital?”
Hospitals would mean either going completely broke or giving in and calling his family, and Diego would rather bleed out in someone else’s bathroom floor than accepting help from his father. “No hospitals,” he tells Eudora, looking over his shoulder to meet her eyes, and for a second the artificial lights frame her face so beautifully, Diego can’t quite breathe. She nods, focusing back to her first aid kit, digging for the needle, but the moment doesn’t pass, not for him– if it’s a trick of the light, then it comes from the sun living in her ribcage; it stays.
“In the interest of full disclosure, I was terrible at this kind of shit,” Eudora says, and in her hand she brandishes the needle like a sword released from stone, but the room smells too much like rubbing alcohol and chemicals, and the walls are spinning, and Diego isn’t feeling so well–
*
Diego is twenty years old and he wakes up to the smell of coffee and pancakes, and his face burns as Eudora laughs. “You did bleed all over my garden,” she pats his shoulder in comfort, and her eyes dance in the soft, early morning sunlight. Diego thinks fainting out of blood loss might not have been the worst thing in the world after all.
*
Diego is twenty-nine years old and his sister is dying.
Giving her his blood is not even a question, he offers his arm without hesitation, because Allison is looking scarily pale in the metal table and her throat is slashed open.
It’s a miracle she’s even still alive.
So he rolls up his shirtsleeves and waits impatiently, counts each ticking of the clock, until Mom turns around, syringe in hand and–
*
Diego is twenty-nine years old and alright, maybe there’s a recurring theme in his fainting episodes, but that’s as far as he’s willing to admit out loud.