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Now that Klaus was sober, and what a pesky thing to be, really, he was much more aware of ghosts. They were everywhere in the mansion, which was somehow shocking and expected all at the same time. The mansion was a solemn, tragic place, one with memories that made Klaus' skin crawl, his chest ache, his bones tremble. It seemed like the place a lot of ghosts would live.
But the thing was, ghosts tended to haunt people or places they were connected to. Places, if they died peacefully, or even violently, people if they were murdered or loved someone strongly enough. And not that the mansion didn't seem like the most deathly place on the face of the Earth, but it just didn't make sense why all the ghosts were around. All the noisy, angry, ugly ghosts.
Klaus had tried to ignore them at first, but then it got hard. He began to recognize them, notice that, hey, that's the ghost I saw in the kitchen the other day, and so on and so forth. After he began to notice them more, he noticed things about them. Like how they all bore gunshot wounds. Never more than one, because when he looked, Klaus noticed that the shots were always precise. Either in the heart or the head, they looked like the work of a professional killer.
It didn't take a painfully long time for Klaus to realize that all these ghosts had been killed by Five, but it really did take longer than he would have liked to admit.
Klaus didn't say anything to Five at first, because he knew that he had his reasons (his decadent, gray-area reasons), and that he also wasn't very fond of talking about his time in the future (past? alternate future? past future? this was so confusing). If his brother wanted to talk to him about his ghosts, he would, and Klaus was pushy, but never on the emotional front. So he let it be. And he was fine with it.
The ghosts, it seemed, were not. They were loud, so loud, and they kept Klaus up at night. They would wander into his room and moan or whine, some would scream at him, shout and plead for his help. If Klaus were a weaker man, he would have visited some alley by now looking for drugs. As it was, Klaus still considered himself relatively weak, but Ben was there and that bastard had means of stopping him now, so Klaus stayed sober.
Sober meant he couldn't sleep.
It all came to a peak one night when a particularly ornery ghost decided to violently reenact it's own death, and then loudly complain. Klaus just wanted to sleep, he was so fucking tired, and he was already pissed at Luther for... well, he'd forgotten by now, but the feeling lingered so he was sure it was for a good reason. But Klaus had had it, and so he threw himself from his bed in a huff and made his way to the kitchen, where he knew Five would be despite the late hour.
"Five!" he sang, the effect dampened by his grit teeth. "Oh brother of mine, I have a query for you."
Klaus swept in to the kitchen, because that was just how he entered every room, and immediately perched himself on the end of the table. Five, from his end, looked up. His eyes were tired and bored and deadly looking. Looking into them, Klaus didn't know how he hadn't figured it out sooner that Five was the source of all these ghosts.
"It's two in the morning," Five said in a flat voice. There was a half eaten sandwich in front of him, laying on the table, no plate. Klaus shrugged.
"And you're awake," he observed, looking pointedly at his younger-older brother. "So hello." He smiled, pinched-lipped and sardonic, lifting his right hand with "HELLO" tattooed on it.
Five raised an eyebrow. "You're irritable."
"That I am, dear brother," Klaus said. "Care to guess why?"
"Because that's just who you are as a person?"
"Hmm, guess again."
"Because Luther made you give back Allison's boa?"
Oh, that's why he had been mad at Luther- completely valid reason, yes. "Yes, but no. I am so annoyed by all these ghosts in the house."
If Five was surprised, he did an excellent job hiding it. Instead, he just sighed. "I was wondering when you would notice it was me."
Klaus bugged his eyes at him. "I noticed a while ago!" he said petulantly. "Give me some credit, Five, I'm not completely senseless! I just wasn't saying anything because... well, you're you and if I brought it up you probably would've jumped away." In fact, Five looked like he was considering it now, shifting in his seat with a cautious expression. "Oh, come off it, I'm not going to attack you for how many there are, or even that there are any. I don't care about that drivel." Klaus waved a hand. "I just want you to make them SHUT UP!" Klaus turned then, not looking at Five, but shouting at the ghosts that had come to gather around the brothers. The man that had killed them and the man who could hear them, sitting together in one room. They were all here, all vying for attention. It was overwhelming.
Klaus put his hands over his ears for a moment, pressing hard, willing away some of the noise for a moment. He almost tricked himself into thinking it was peaceful before his hands were coming away, and he was opening his eyes (when had he closed them?) to looked at Five again. His young face was a mixture of concern and maybe guilt, and Klaus had to say that as wrong as it looked on Five, it was nice to see. "They're all in here, aren't they?" Five asked, peering around. The ghosts got louder then, knowing that he was looking for them. One swiped at his face and Klaus flinched, but the fist went right through Five without him even noticing.
"Yeah," Klaus said. He sounded dull and weak to his own ears and he hated it. But he was also too tired to really care too much.
Five sighed. "I'm sorry they're bothering you. Not sorry that they're here, because they were my means to an end but- it sucks that you were caught up in it."
Klaus gaped at him. "Was that an emotion I just witnessed?" he asked, eyes lighting up.
"No-" Five grumbled.
"It was! It was!" Klaus was gleeful, suddenly, forgetting his tiredness to leap across the table and wrap his arms around his brother. "Aww, baby's first emotion! This is one for the scrapbook."
Five growled, stiff as a rod in Klaus' arms. "Get off me."
Klaus nuzzled his cheek into the starchy shoulder of Five's schoolboy uniform. "Naw, if you wanted me off I would be."
There was an angry huff, but no response, and Klaus remained where he was. He grinned even wider, lingering just a moment before pulling away. Five was positively blushing, refusing to look at him. It was endearing. "So," he cleared his throat, rubbing a hand over his throat in embarrassment, "is there anything I can do to make the ghosts go away?"
Klaus paused, leaning back to think. "I suppose... some ghosts just need to make their peace so that they can disappear. So maybe, I don't know, try to help them find peace?"
"And how exactly," Five scoffed, "am I supposed to go about doing that?"
There was a moment of silence where Klaus pondered this. Then, "Let them speak to you."
Five blinked. "What?"
Klaus rushed to explain. "Well, not them speak to you, per se, I definitely can't keep that many ghosts corporeal for that long, plus they might hurt you. More like, they say what they want to say to you to me and then I repeat it to you and you... I don't know, acknowledge their feelings?"
Five stared at Klaus for a moment, completely deadpan. "Your idea of a solution is what, ghost therapy?"
Klaus shrugged. "I mean, yeah, I guess."
Five was silent for a moment before he said, "Ugh, okay."
"Yes!" Klaus shouted, pumping a fist in the air. "Yes! Alright, alright, gather 'round ghosties! Welcome to Therapy a' la Klaus!"
Five shot him a look. "Maybe if you talked a bit more the ghosts would want to leave all on their own."
Klaus put a hand on his chest, swooning dramatically. "Oh, how you wound me, Mein Bruder. Sticks and stones, Five. Sticks and stones." Klaus looked up and noticed that the ghosts were looking at the pair of them, mostly silent now. "Right!" he said, clapping his hands together. "Ghosties, line up! I'm gonna play translator today. Anything you want to say to this lovely little guy-" he gestured to Five, and angry shouts rose up, "you say to me, and I let him know what you think about him! Sound fun?"
The resounding chaos of disgruntled noise told Klaus that yes, they were.
"Right! Who's up to bat first?" he asked.
A middle aged woman stepped forward. She was wearing a Victorian style dress and her hair was curled in pretty little ringlets, framing a bullet hole dead in the center of her forehead. "I wish to know, why me? I have never done anything wrong and this man, this petulant child shoots me! Filthy-" Klaus drowns out the vulgar swearing that comes next.
"What's your name?" Klaus asks her. "So I can ask him."
The woman glares. "Marie Argent."
Klaus glances at Five for a moment, who is staring at him, expectant. "Marie Argent," Klaus says. "She wants to know why you killed her."
Five grimaces. "She was selfless. She was going to help a man who was supposed to die. If he didn't die... the outcome, it would have been catastrophic. It would have altered the course of the French Revolution."
"To preserve history?" the woman snapped, and Klaus turned back to her. "Tell me, Cinq, did I deserve to die?"
Klaus winces at that. "She uh, she wants to know if she deserved it. Death."
"No," Five answered, and it was fast. "You didn't. But it was to save thousands of lives. One life versus thousands, it seemed like an easy choice."
Marie stiffened, narrowed her eyes, but she seemed satisfied. "I saved lives?" she asked.
"She saved lives?"
Five nodded. "Countless."
"I see," she said. And then she vanished.
Klaus let out a laugh, a happy, manic laugh, and Five turned to him in concern. "She- she's gone!" he grinned.
Five blinked. "She is?"
"She's gone! She made her peace! Oh, this is fantast- this is fucking awesome! Oh, yeah, man, let's go! Let's keep going, come on!"
And so they kept going. Klaus would translate, Five would almost apologize, or his version of it, and the ghost would vanish eventually. Sometimes the ghost stayed, still angry, but Klaus was fine with it because far more were leaving than staying. And that meant more peace for him.
It was all going quite swimmingly until one ghost in particular stepped up to plate and Klaus blanched because this one, he actually recognized. "Is that John F. Kennedy?" he gaped, eyes wide. Yeah, the guy's head was half blown off, but he was so recognizable. The ghost of former president of the United States, John F. Kennedy was in his dining room at 3am, and his brother had killed him. "Wait, what about Lee Harvey Oswald?"
It was probably an inappropriate question to ask, but Klaus was hardly an appropriate person. Nevertheless, Five answered. "I wasn't the only one trying to kill him. Oswald's aim was off, though. My bullet went a little explosive."
Klaus eyed the half-head that Kennedy was sporting, before his eyes drifted down to his neck, where another bullet wound sat. So Lee Harvey Oswald had shot the neck, but his brother has finished the job. Jeez, that was a weird thing to think about. "Uh, yikes. Okay." Klaus turned to Kennedy, not quite sure how to approach him. "Uh, Mr. President sir, what would you like to say to dear old Five?"
The one remaining eye narrowed at his brother, and Klaus gulped. "Tell me, young man," he said. "Some of the others here, you said their deaths saved lives. Did mine save any?"
Klaus turned to Five. "He wants to know if his death saved any lives."
Five paused, a pained look crossing his face. "Yes," he said, after a moment's silence. "It did. A lot of Americans were poised to die in rather... unfavorable circumstances. Your death prevented that from happening."
John F. Kennedy smiled, grotesque because only half of his mouth was there. But he vanished shortly thereafter. And then Klaus turned to the next ghost.
By the time they were done, only nine ghosts remained, which was so much better than the crowd they had started with. It was five in the morning, and Klaus was exhausted. He plopped down on the table. Five was glaring at his sandwich, which by now had begun to get crusty. He picked at it glumly.
"Did their deaths really save lives?" Klaus asked through a yawn. "All of them?"
Five spared him a glance. "Not all of them."
Klaus blinked, suddenly a bit more awake. "So you lied?"
"You wanted them gone, didn't you?" Five asked. "Wanted them to make their peace?"
There was something off about it, thinking about those ghosts making their peace with a lie, but he couldn't take it back- they were all gone now. Klaus sighed. "I guess. I just... feel bad, you know?"
"Baby's first guilt trip," Five barked, and Klaus laughed.
"Far from the first, baby bro," he smiled bitterly.
Five punched him. "I'm older than you, dipshit."
Klaus pressed a hand to his heart. "War makes a weary man, brother. I aged ten decades in ten months. And that means, I'm older."
Five looked like he wanted to comment on that, to maybe bring up the fact that Klaus probably had his own ghosts, to talk about Vietnam, how he knew Klaus had time traveled and fallen in love and then watched that love die. But he didn't. That was another ghost for another late night.
Instead, he said: "I wasn't lying about Kennedy, though. I saved our country from another war."
Klaus paused. "Damn." He sighed. "At least I didn't get stuck in that war, then."