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"Did you nag this much before you became a ghost? I swear I don't remember you nagging this much."
"I didn't know the extent to which you needed it."
"What I need is for you to can your demands, Benjamin."
Ben, infuriatingly, is unfazed as Klaus asserts a rightful appeal for peace and justice. As usual, he's calm and soothing like a clear and gentle river, god damn him, or like a thick layer of aloe vera sap squeezed straight out of the succulent's spike-lined leaves. Sometimes that's a comfort and a godsend to have around, but today Klaus would rather take the sunburn.
"Come on," he says. "You were just talking about this at breakfast."
"I'm a different person now," Klaus says. "Countless events have transpired since then."
"Three events have transpired since then: you came upstairs, you put a kettle of water to boil on the hot plate and forgot about it, and you rotated through the eight default midi samples on your keyboard while you lit a bunch of incense."
"Which one did you like the most? The jazzy one with the whistles? So avant-garde."
"Klaus, you're not going to hold any sway over your abilities if you never practice using them," Ben reminds him, inconveniently attaching his focus to his chosen topic with the stubborn patience Klaus knows him for and has never quite seen in anyone else. "I know it takes a lot of concentration, but you're really getting so much better."
Klaus exalts his awesome little pink keyboard back onto his lap and clicks the flat rubber button that turns it back on. The volume's too low because he's a considerate person, but he likes the sarcastic sound of the sharps and flats and he can reach a lot of them really quickly because the toy piano's intended maestros are three-to-eight-year-old girls (who have very small hands and are also allowed to have more fun than anyone else in the world).
Ben crosses his arms, eyes half-lidded and brows high, unimpressed and prompting. He's never been authoritative, but something about him is vexingly convincing and makes his victims feel like they'd rather dissolve into the abyss than disappoint him.
"Fine," Klaus says, because there is no abyss for him to crawl toward to escape the wrath of his dead brother's good-natured encouragement, "I'll bring you into the physical realm for fifteen minutes if you play me a song. Original work only, no covers."
"You can already do that. You know that's not what I'm asking," Ben says with an even-tempered understanding, the familiar one that says he's challenging Klaus to do something he knows is hard for him because Ben has enough faith for them both. Klaus and his own will to persevere for the sake of tiring himself out with no results have been wrung dry.
It isn't like he's not excited about digging up his latent abilities -- he's barely been able to think about anything else ever since the world didn't end and he found out they were there -- but it's a tiresome feat to locate and then pull from the energy of whatever part of him holds the key to his awful curse that may not entirely be a curse after all. The determination that had rung brightly through his spirit in the beginning has hushed with impending resentment, exacerbated by his surpassing the proverbial thirty-day mark of sobriety and navigating the obscurity beyond it (in a normal way, he wagers, mental and psychological and not necessarily ghost-related and it's shitty to think about but he really misses being high).
So maybe it's to be expected that he's colliding with some limitations at this point. He still sees plenty of ghosts and it's still terribly unpleasant, even though he can sometimes cast them away in the same way he can sometimes conjure them, and the longest Klaus has been able to keep Ben consistently present to the rest of the world with no breaks so far is only forty-five minutes. Afterward, he'd been fully depleted and when Ben flickered back into intangibility, Klaus couldn't do anything about it other than feel his body involuntarily slumping back against the couch in front of everyone as his nose started to bleed.
But at least Klaus knows how to make that happen every time, thanks to a couple months of consistent practice. At least it's an achievement he can rely on.
"Let's just try this on the stairs," Ben says. "We don't even have to be that far apart."
Klaus presses the same two black keys back and forth for a while and hopes it sounds menacing.
Eventually, he sighs, eyes roaming up toward the ceiling so he can't see whether Ben looks pleased with himself or not. He can't decide if it would be worse if he did.
"Okay," Klaus says. Truth be told, he was probably going to get on with training anyway, sooner or later, once his room got boring enough. He doesn't have any other plans today.
Ben only looks relieved.
If he were somebody else, Ben would be pulling out and pushing forth an avalanche of every last guilt-trippy scheme from the official silver-stamped manipulation handbook. Through dead people physics (or whatever it is), he has free rein to travel alone wherever he chooses to go, and through Klaus, he has the opportunity to interact physically with the world from whence he came, to be seen and heard by living beings beside his brother. But it's got to be one or the other. With the resources of the afterlife alone, Ben can't experience both at once. With the resources of a medium, however…
Well, a clumsy novice of a medium to be precise, because unfortunately for Ben, that's all the world gave him. Sorry, Bro.
And Klaus has made that happen for him only one time before -- not on purpose, it's never fucking on purpose -- and it had only lasted for a few seconds, during an afternoon last week while Ben was in the library and Klaus was walls away in the empty office, looking through one of Dad's boxes he missed the first time around. Klaus hadn't heard or felt a thing -- he rarely ever does, lucky him, having psychic powers is so easy and safe and relaxing -- and Ben had knocked half a dozen books off one of the shelves and immediately brought himself over to tell Klaus the remarkable news.
And it was remarkable! It was sublime, genuinely, it was massively exciting. Klaus would love for Ben to be able to essentially function as a member of their physical familial world independently from him, for just so many reasons, for the sake of so many things. Klaus would love to give Ben the gift of temporary yet recurring autonomy. Obviously.
But Jesus Christ is it grueling to try and figure out how he did it the first time, especially when hours of practice have bestowed upon them the rewards of wasted time and zero payoff. Once Ben is just a couple feet out of sight, Klaus loses his grip on him and he flickers back out. At least his range has been reliable. Klaus is pretty sure it would be far more frustrating if they were given more allowances at some times than at others without an identifiable pattern.
But Klaus knows that could always change, and in spite of his despondency and fear, he still wants to see it happen.
"All right, uh," Klaus proposes after he slides his discouraged mind, body, and soul off of his bed, leaves his very best friend the children's keyboard as it lies beautiful and abandoned on his disorderly plaid quilt, and steps over to the low-lying wooden table on the other side of his room. "How about this?"
Ben looks at Klaus and then at the palm-sized, empty red translucent vase he's presenting to him. "What about it?" he asks.
"That's how we'll test if it's working," Klaus explains. "I'll put it at the bottom of the staircase where I can't see it and you just try to pick it up. Or kick it or something."
"That's a good idea," Ben says. He follows Klaus out into the hall. "Where did you get that anyway?"
"Oh, I dunno." Stole it from some shitty house party, probably. "It's cool, right?"
"Yeah, it's cool."
Before the both of them head downstairs to the entry hall, Klaus asks, "Do you wanna try catching it?"
Ben squats down a couple inches and says, "Batter up."
"Is that how baseball works?"
"Oh, shit. Yeah, you're right, I guess I'm not hitting it back to you."
Klaus tosses the trinket over to him. "You sounded suave, though!"
"Thanks. Oh-- shit. Damn it."
"Sorry, I was distracted," Klaus says. He bends diagonally forward to retrieve the vase that he'd essentially just tossed at nothing, and Ben politely steps backward to get out of his way even though he doesn't need to. Klaus focuses and tries again.
"Nice!"
Ben grins and holds the vase up between his thumb and index finger, shaking it from side to side. Klaus lets him go for the sake of his own energy, and when it falls, the thick glass pairs with the tile in the hallway floor to produce a delicate clink instead of just completely shattering like Klaus only just now realized was a possibility. Whoops. Crisis averted.
"Did it feel easier that time?"
"Easier than last week," Klaus says. He picks up his fallen trinket and rolls it back and forth between his palms for a little stimulation.
"That's good!" Ben says. "That's really fast improvement, Klaus."
Dad often showed similar excitement whenever any of them showed improvement for something like this, but the look in his eyes had been a selfish one, the addendum of but it could be better always deafening and unspoken. He never looked at them as though they were people instead of machines, never any warmth or regard for their humanity in his eyes. It was so much unlike the way Ben is looking at Klaus right now.
"Thank you," Klaus says. He wonders what the normal rate of improvement should be.
Klaus accompanies Ben to the bottom of the staircase and sets the vase down on the last step. For easy access, Ben paces all the way down and turns around so he's facing the staircase from the foyer.
"Okay," Klaus says.
Then, he says, "Wait, do you think this is better?" and puts it on top of the flat, square surface at the bottom of the railing. "That way you can at least knock it off if you can't grab it."
Ben nods and says, "Good thinking."
Klaus walks halfway up the stairs. Again, he enacts a corporeal state throughout his brother's form.
"Okay," he prompts. Ben easily grabs the vase and sets it down. Klaus braces himself and again says, "okay," but with more apprehensive expectancy because now the real test is upon him.
"Do you want me to try picking it up and putting it down again, or should I just hold it and see if it drops?" Ben asks as Klaus begins his ominous ascent.
"Uh," Klaus says, slowing down a little as he thinks. "Oh, it'd feel so much sadder if it just dropped, don't you think? Like, that's the cold, objective sound of failure. I'd much rather hear the bad news," he turns on the melodramatic fake self-sympathy, "from a loved one."
Ben smiles but it does look kind of sad, actually. He puts the vase back down and says, "All right."
He very softly rocks it back and forth on its pedestal to perform a steady confirmation that Klaus is maintaining his success. Klaus can very faintly hear the friendly rolling-tapping sound it makes against the dusty wood.
"Can you hear me?" Ben asks without shouting.
From the top of the stairs, Klaus matches his volume and says, "Yeah. Can you hear me?"
"Yeah."
Klaus turns his back to the staircase as he nears the top. He seems to be able to keep Ben tangible from pretty far away, but the distance adds some difficulty and Klaus can feel the ethereal drain starting to capture him from somewhere deep inside. It's not too drastic right now, more akin to the fading of a pair of blue jeans than to a dwindling flame, but his color is starting to get snuffed out regardless.
Perfectly on cue, as soon as Klaus rounds the corner, his increasingly thin, taut string of optimism goes loose and limp as Ben says, "You lost me."
"Ugh. Well, of course I did. Hold on."
Klaus has been relying so much on the reports of others when it comes to trying to use the active components of his powers. He doesn't know if it's because he's spent his entire life trying to become as out of touch with them -- and with his own body -- as possible or if it's just how they're meant to work, but he has so much trouble feeling whether he's employing his abilities at all. There can be a mist of pressure in his head and occasionally an ambiguous aching zap, but that's the extent of it. The point is that the only sensations it brings him are unpleasant ones.
There are also times when he literally doesn't feel anything whatsoever, which is worse, because all that does is leave Klaus reaching out and fumbling uneasily in the dark with no idea what he's doing or if he's even doing anything at all. Sometimes he gets a headache if he's been doing it for too long or focusing too hard, but that only comes on slowly a few minutes after he's stopped purposefully engaging with the supernatural energy. It doesn't do him any good while he's in action.
Klaus pokes his head back around and sees Ben's hand tragically go right through the vase as he continues to test their experiment. "Okay, watch out," Klaus tells him, and Ben pulls his hand up out of the way and lets it hang in the air. Klaus brings him back to the land of the living.
Ben rhythmically plunks the vase up and down while Klaus begins to test the distance again. "Try going more slowly," he suggests. "Maybe it needs more time to gather strength."
It's worth a shot. Klaus nods and keeps eye contact, the edges of his uncertainty faintly diluted by Ben's reassurance.
"So far, so good," says Ben with a thumbs-up as Klaus nears the top.
Klaus inhales an excess of unwelcoming mansion air and lets it out steadily. "Moment of truth, Benny-boy," he says, then he steps away and waits and assumes it's normal to feel just a little lightheaded after climbing up and down a flight of stairs while practicing a complicated mechanism of necromancy.
He hears a clatter and then Ben's voice saying, "Nope! Sorry. I'm out again." He's back to his usual specter when Klaus comes back into his line of sight, transparent hands in his transparent pockets to show that he isn't personally all too bothered by their continued streak of failure. "How are you feeling?"
"I'm okay," Klaus says.
"I know you are. How are you feeling?" Ben repeats trickily. He's good at that.
"Uh," Klaus says as he starts to walk back down the stairs, "feeling like… Yeah, I don't know. I'm fine."
Without much concern, Ben says, "Your cheeks are turning pink."
"Yeah, well…" Klaus pauses to gesture at the set of steps behind him, moving his arm back and forth to emphasize its magnitude.
"I think you're out of shape, bro," he says.
"Better shape than you."
"It was just a couple flights. Your limbs are like twigs."
Klaus takes his time reaching the bottom.
"I thought it might be more likely to work without an actual wall between us," Ben confesses once Klaus reaches the floor and takes his fun miniature hourglass vase back.
Klaus says, "Who knows. I could be doing something wrong."
"Maybe we should try practicing down here so you don't have to run up and down so much," Ben suggests, "or I could try walking away this time."
They try them both. Klaus appreciates Ben offering him a rest; he wouldn't have thought of that himself, and it's very impressive of Ben and indicative of his compassion to still think of the way Klaus might be affected by the disadvantages of having a physical body when he hasn't had his own for years. It was a good idea, too, because corporealizing Ben feels easier after a few minutes at a standstill, which reminds Klaus of how little mental or physical misalignment it takes to screw up his powers. He's finding that he can't rely on them if he's even the slightest bit off-kilter.
Despite the comfort it brings, Ben's consideration toward his well-being unfortunately isn't enough. The trick still isn't working. Once they've been at it for nearly an hour, Klaus starts to feel like a damp sponge that's been squeezed by hardened hands, and there's an occasional sharp sting around his temples to accompany the pressure lining the top of his skull. It feels like he's being pressed to release something that isn't there.
None of it is agonizing -- he could probably mostly forget about it, actually, if he had something else to pay attention to -- but it's starting to get uncomfortable, especially while coupled with the frustration of hearing his brother's continued reports that his efforts are going to waste (and his accompanying confusion as to why).
"You okay?" Ben asks a few moments after he comes back into view for the dozenth time.
"Uh… yeah," Klaus says. "I'm cashed though. I think we have to stop for now, man, it's not happening today."
Ben doesn't even seem disappointed. "That's all right," he says. "It's still early on, I'm sure we'll figure it out."
Klaus meets him halfway and flaps at him like he's going to give him a pat on the shoulder. "Your belief in me is touching," he says, wiggling one of his arms histrionically as he spins around to display the resilience of his energy.
"Do you wanna watch a movie or something?" Ben asks, initiating their transition into the rest of the day.
"Like at the theater, or…"
Klaus finds the vase sitting happily on the floor where Ben had knowingly set it down before losing his physicality a few moments ago, its rim blending in with the elegant Persian runner that's been stomped flat by their family's drab and expensive Oxfords over the years. He picks it up and doesn't know what to do with it so he leaves it on the bench over by the phone.
"No, let's just find something here," Ben says. "It'll be better to stay home in case you get a migraine again."
"Okay, but you can calm down, they're not migraines-- "
"All right, Klaus."
Klaus leans back against the wall after walking two steps up, his stance asymmetrical with one foot higher and further back than the other as his arms hang down freely. "But you still have to let me pick," he says. "I worked the hardest today. Maybe nothing loud."
"Nothing loud sounds like a good idea."
"Although…" Klaus grins, head tilted back against the rust-painted plaster and eyes up on the patterned molding on the ceiling as though someone's shining a projector up there and playing a reel of his memories. "Heh. You remember when Dad made us watch Amadeus? But like, for school?"
"And you amplified that middle scene through the second floor so he could hear it?" Ben's smiling now, too.
"He never let us watch movies without turning it into some shitty assignment, like writing an essay about all of the inaccuracies, or whatever," Klaus says. "I didn't mean to make it that loud, but the dry British conversation turned out to sound much cooler that way."
"It made them seem so aggressive, right?" Ben agrees. "But they were just--"
"Being boring."
"Yeah, they just weren't threatening at all."
"So maybe we could go through Dad's tapes to see if he still has that documentary about British archeology? I bet those guys would sound great at ninety decibels."
"No, Klaus."
"Whaaaat. Why? You sure?"
"Not today."
"Fine, whatever, Salieri. Or whoever that guy was."
"I think it was Salieri."
"Cool. Then whatever, Salieri."
Ben shrugs. "How did you learn to fuck with the speakers that badly, anyway?"
"I was really into making things loud at the time."
Ben puffs out this affectionate scoff like he's just heard something ridiculous and he says, "You still are."
"Yeah, and I have a reason. And I had a reason back then, too, only Bastard Hargreeves took away my headphones earlier that month, so I had to study up and get creative."
"Shit, I forgot about that. He was so mad," Ben says, and then Klaus abruptly jumps and straightens up.
His sensitive, prickly reflexes react to the sudden noise before he even processes it. There's an unseen something hard grinding in a straight line down something wooden, followed by a shrill drum of impact and the splintering of glass. It's quick and clashing, the chaotic dissonance much bossier than a simple crash and far more unnerving.
"Oh my fuck, " Klaus says breathlessly to expel the electric jerk in his heart that radiates all the way out through his arms. "What the hell?!"
Both he and Ben lean over the railing to investigate, but the source of the sound is a blind spot so they step down and around the staircase to see what's going on.
But -- surprise! -- nothing's going on. Nobody's there. Their beloved prop, however, lies on its side against the corridor's patterned hexagon tile. It's a total survivor and still in one piece.
There's no mess to clean up, but Klaus approaches the site anyway, then indecisively reaches forward and back and forward and back, delicately bending his arms while he thinks about bowing down to pick it up.
"Klaus…" Ben says.
Klaus groans, finally takes the vase and notices the badass scar freshly cracked halfway down its side. Healthy little thing, he thinks. That's impressive.
He runs his thumb down the noble survivor's evidence-injury and then he needs to face what happened so he slumps against the wall and remembers how annoying his life is.
"Fuuuuuck," he says. "That wasn't-- that wasn't what I was trying to do today. I mean-- God. That was me, right?"
Ben shows him this sad, cognizant flat smile, his mouth a needlessly apologetic straight line telling Klaus that yes, it was.
And while that has been insisting on being addressed as it happens more and more with no drugs in his system, Klaus really doesn't want to touch it. He isn't even able to entertain the idea that moving things without making any physical contact with them could be fun, because his mind goes rigid with terror when he thinks about how the power (and it's too much power) could've always been active within him, going off literally just whenever without Klaus knowing about it and risking all sorts of accidents.
He's frozen from the retroactive anxiety of it all, like when he used to wake up somewhere strange and far away after a bender and wonder what kind of shit he'd pulled before he crashed. But instead of one night of fun it's his entire life of this, which he's had to use a legion of benders to try and get away from due to reasons exactly like this one. It all comes full circle and Klaus feels claustrophobic inside of the ring.
"I know you don't want me to say this…"
"Yup. Then don't say it."
"…but I think that's really starting to become more frequent."
He's right.
"Is it?"
"The last time it happened was two days ago when you made Diego's glasses float above the coffee table. And they were behind you; you weren't even looking at them."
That's exactly the problem. Klaus didn't even know how long he'd been keeping it in the air.
"Maybe I can only do it to things I'm not looking at or don't care about," Klaus says sardonically, a familiar and pathetically makeshift grasp at humor that's too thin to mask the despair frothing in the part of him that he crams full of his unwanted feelings. Making fun of undesirable situations always makes him feel a little better, at least. "Maybe that's why all those library books…"
Oh, no.
Oh, fuck.
"Dude," Ben says.
"Oh, I don't think I like that."
Ben -- who can usually read Klaus remarkably well -- is honestly confused this time, but Klaus doesn't really want to talk about it.
However, he doesn't know how to not express himself either, so he does say, "No, I really don't like that."
He just doesn't. That's all Ben needs to know right now.
Ben's empathy saves the day and he doesn't press. Kindly, he starts to turn back toward the stairs and says, "Well, it doesn't seem to be very powerful and you need a break anyway, so… why don't we check out Dad's old AV stash and see if there's something quiet in there that you want to watch."
"If I fall asleep, will you wake me up?"
"No."
Klaus forgets if he wanted Ben to say yes or no to that. It's likely that he did want to be woken up, but he'll probably prefer to stay napping if the time does come. There's something so much nicer about sleeping during the day; maybe society's rule against it bringing about the corresponding comfort of rebellion, or the safety that comes from knowing everyone else is awake and he won't be by himself if he wakes up before he's supposed to be finished. Either way, he could probably use it. Shut-eye hasn't come so easily to him since he disinherited the only tools he had to dizzy himself enough to stay down for the night.
"Okay," Klaus says. "Thanks."
"You're welcome."
Ben smiles at him, heartening and solid like he's decided it's what he's supposed to be doing, but the uncomplaining, waiting confusion is still there. He slows down to let Klaus pass him and lead the both of them up the stairs and down the hall and through the remedial afternoon.