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When Klaus told Hazel and Cha-Cha that no one would come for him, he wanted it to be a lie.
The fact if the matter, though, is that he never stood a chance of gaining the attention of his siblings. It isn’t that they don’t love him - because, his sluggish brain reasons, he‘s sure they really do, in their own twisted and self-absorbed ways - it‘s just that due to the nature of his particular beast, he knows he‘s lowest on the totem pole. He‘s selfish too, he knows. Addiction is selfish. His reasoning for starting taking the pills, the powders, everything - it‘s all selfish. Him being high all the time did nothing to benefit any of them. It made the ghosts quiet (quiet, but never quite gone), but none of them knew that. Or, he corrects himself, his head flopping from one shoulder to the other, his face twitching and itching from the tape covering his mouth - it wasn’t that they didn’t know, it’s just that they didn’t really understand (or care, his brain insists - they also don’t care). He can drunkenly spew all of his secrets and struggles and traumas until he’s blue in the face, but it never matters. The blessing and the curse of being the dramatic one in the bunch is that he is mostly ignored.
“Klaus? You’re in the worst of it now. Just try and stay calm,” he hears Ben say distantly. He didn’t even realized he had been screaming until Ben’s voice cut through the haze. He whimpers, writhing against his bonds, and lets his chin fall against chest. His body caves in on itself and he listens to the cleaning lady in the living room vacuum away, completely unaware of his presence. Every nerve ending in his body hums in time with the whirring of her vacuum. A bead of sweat travels from his forehead, down the slope of his nose, and drips onto the towel on his lap. He yanks at the ropes around his wrists and screams again. Sobriety is not only overrated, it‘s painful. He screams and screams.
“That’s the real torture, if you gotta know,” Ben is saying. Klaus pants against the tape over his mouth and tries to focus on his brother. “Watching your brother take for granted everything you lost and pissing it all away.”
Klaus sobs. He turns away from Ben’s judgmental gaze and closes his eyes. No one is coming for him, and the only person he thought he had in his corner was only there to lay on the harshest truth he could come up with, apparently. No sympathy for Number Four.
He loses time. He’s pulled harshly from the closet and finally faces his kidnappers, but knowing their faces brings him little relief. No one is coming for him. He tells them again and again. A Russian woman screams and blubbers and he can’t make her stop, has no way of quieting her shrieks or numbing himself to her pain at all. And then, all at once, there are more. He has always heard them, but now, with Ben at his side - he tries to listen. He needs Ben. He needs Ben to approve of him, to support him, no matter how deeply his words have stung. He can’t be alone, he knows. He has even less than the zero chance he has now if he’s alone. So he listens and he uses the secrets the spirits tell him to sow discord between Cha-Cha and Hazel, and -
And it works. They lock themselves in the bathroom and he’s alone for a while (or as alone as he can be, surrounded by spirits). Cha-Cha tapes his mouth shut again and his heart threatens to choke him. His skin crawls and itches and when a shadow passes over the window, he doesn’t even hesitate. He just screams and screams and it’s not enough so he -
He slams his head off the table. He screams and slams his head, over and over. It’s the only noise he can make, the only idea his stinging mind can conjure up to make someone pay attention, and it still doesn’t work. He slams his head one last time against the table. His heart hammers. His forehead throbs. His shoulders shake and he sobs, and he wonders if he’ll suffocate on his own tears and snot and vomit before Cha-Cha and Hazel decide to do away with him in their own time. If only he could be so lucky.
He almost doesn’t register the beeping noise the door makes when the lock disengages. His thoughts are swimming. He picks his head up slightly, just in time to see the door open just slightly, and then all at once.
There’s a woman in the doorway. She is holding a gun, and she is the most beautiful person Klaus has ever seen. In that moment, he knows he would give his life for her if she asked, because she is here to save him. And then, behind her -
“Klaus,” Diego breathes. Klaus lets his head fall forward again and slam against the table. His whole body is overcome with his sobs, and Diego’s hands are there. He touches Klaus’s hands, his shoulders, his face, and then his hands are gone just long enough for him to pull out one of his knives. And then Klaus’s hands are free, his fingers stinging and tingling as blood rushes back to his hands. He shakes them weakly and wraps his arms around himself, numb and bloated fingers clutching weakly against his own shoulders, and he turns away from his brother and the woman who had opened the door.
“About time,” Ben says disapprovingly to no one but Klaus, but he isn’t really listening. He just shivers and sobs and tries not to fight when familiar hands pull him up and out of the chair. His back and legs protest angrily against the sudden change in position. He hunches awkwardly as Diego pulls him up, unable to straighten his aching body and still trembling like a baby deer.
The woman is yelling orders that his brain can’t keep up with. From the corner of his eye, he sees Hazel emerge from the bathroom. He is unarmed, but Klaus still flinches away, his hunched body pressing awkwardly against his brother’s. Diego’s gloved hand gently peels away the tape over his mouth as the woman - the cop, the detective, Diego’s former partner, his hazy mind belatedly provides - inches closer to Hazel, who is clearly surrendering. But it’s not right, Klaus knows. It’s not right, because -
“Two,” he mumbles against Diego’s shoulder. Diego’s arm comes around him, pulling him close and up and straight despite the screaming of the muscles of his back.
“What? Klaus, what?” Diego asks urgently.
Klaus’ head bobs to the side and he can feel his eyes rolling. Hazel is secured, but Cha-Cha is nowhere to be seen and she is arguably far, far more dangerous. But he’s not talking to Diego when he groans, “Two -“ but Diego doesn’t understand that. Klaus is lightheaded and facing sobriety cold turkey for the first time in years and he can’t quite make his brain work the right way but this is important and -
“There’s two,” he gasps.
His legs give out at the same moment that Diego tosses him bodily away. A gunshot cracks through the silence of the hotel block and Klaus wonders, very briefly, where all the ghosts have gone. He bounces off the bed and onto the floor and uses his arms to cover his head the best he can. There are more gunshots and there’s yelling and he doesn’t know what happens next, except after a moment, everything is as quiet again as it was before the gunfire erupted.
Klaus breathes, his face pressed against the dirty carpet between the bed and the wall with the window. His hands clutch at the threadbare carpet and he just breathes because it’s the first time in two days he feels like he really can. He won’t open his eyes. A moment ago, Diego was there. After the guns went off, he has no way of knowing if Diego will still be there, and, if he is, what form he’ll be in. Klaus doesn’t know, in that moment, if he can open his eyes to two dead brothers instead of just the one.
He registers a voice after a moment. It’s familiar enough that he knows who is speaking, but laced with enough panic that it sounds almost foreign.
“Eudora! Eudora!” It’s Diego’s voice. Klaus clenches his eyes shut and waits to see if anyone else can hear Diego’s screams.
Klaus dares, after a moment, to open his eyes. He is face to face with Ben, whose position matches his. They are both laying face down on the floor in this cramped space. Ben smiles slightly.
“He did come,” he whispers to Klaus. He reaches out, but his hand falls right through Klaus’s like it always has. “Diego came, Klaus.”
Klaus jerks violently as hands grasp at him. He is trembling so much that he almost doesn’t notice when his own jacket is draped over his shoulders. He’s sitting on the bed now, staring up into the eyes of his brother, and he can’t remember a time when Diego looked so scared - not since Ben died, anyway.
“Klaus?” he’s asking. Klaus watches his lips curve, his tongue press against his teeth as he speaks his name. He is mesmerized. Diego’s hands tighten painfully on his shoulders and he gives him an urgent shake that sends Klaus’s head flopping back and forth. “K-Klaus? Klaus!”
“Klaus,” Ben prompts him quietly. Klaus blinks at Diego, looks over at Ben. Diego’s hand catches his cheek and slowly guides his face back. Klaus wonders when the last time was that Diego treated anyone so gently.
“Klaus?” Diego asks. His eyes are intense. Klaus nods weakly against Diego’s hand, still cradling his cheek.
“Hazel and Cha-Cha,” he mumbles. His head thrums. He may have given himself a concussion, he realizes.
“They’re gone,” Diego says. “Klaus? Are you okay? Talk to me.”
“You came,” Klaus mumbles. Diego’s expression is hard to read. Klaus’s eyes wander on their own to the beautiful lady, who is now slumped against the wall, grasping her shoulder tightly. There’s blood on the carpet and the wall and he realizes it might not all be his. “Lady cop. Is she okay?”
He can hear sirens. Diego pulls him to his feet. His body protests the sharp and sudden movements, and he blacks out for a time.
He comes to in the passenger seat of a car he doesn’t really recognize. He’s buckled in. He’s cold. The nylon strap holding him up presses painfully against his chest, the side of his neck. The seatbelt feels so restrictive. He can breathe through his mouth and move his hands but the seatbelt - the seatbelt -
He yanks at it. He lifts it away from his body as best he can, his aching back arching away. He can’t breathe, but not in a good way. “Let me go,” he whimpers, and he’s not proud of it. “Please let me go.”
“You’re okay, Klaus,” he hears Ben say. But what would Ben know? Ben is dead. Everything in relation to dead is okay.
“Klaus, calm down,” Diego barks. Klaus blinks owlishly over at his brother in the driver’s seat.
“Diego?” he asks timidly. His head throbs. His right eye is blurry and his throat is raw from screaming. Diego’s hands are tight on the steering wheel.
“You’re okay,” Ben repeats. Klaus’s eyes wander to the back seat and he cranes his neck to see.
He usually always sits in the back because he doesn’t like Ben to be alone. But now he’s in the front and Ben is in the back, but Ben is not alone because there’s a woman sitting next to him. Her face is pale and sweaty and she’s bleeding from her shoulder or maybe her chest but there’s so much blood that he can’t really tell. His eyes flick from her to Ben and back. She stares at him. She’s the woman cop who opened the hotel room door.
“I’m sorry,” he tells her. She doesn’t say anything, but her lips do part slightly and she groans. Klaus looks over at Diego, who doesn’t spare him a glance. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Diego.”
“Stop talking,” Diego grunts.
“She -“ Klaus looks back at her. She blinks at him again.
“Diego,” she whispers. Klaus has a vague memory of this woman from when he was homeless and she was kind but still somehow seeing his idiot brother with the hot temper.
“I’m sorry, Diego,” Klaus says. He doesn’t take his eyes off of her. Ben is looking at her too. He wonders briefly what it will be like to have two ever present spirits following him around and judging his every move. His lips and fingertips tingle.
He watches her quietly. She watches him right back, her face pinched but stoic, pale but sweaty. Even with half her blood volume, she’s pretty. Her hand twitches against her wound. She whispers his name, but she isn’t like the others, screaming and crying and clawing at him.
“Keep pressure, Eudora,” Diego barks. Klaus looks from Diego to Eudora to Ben.
“She’s not dead,” he whispers.
“She’s not dead,” Ben confirms.
Relief washes over him like a waterfall. It’s hot and cold and too much and he closes his eyes and loses more time. He comes to when the car stops, but his brain is so sluggish that he can’t bring himself to do much more than roll his head to the side and see what Diego is doing. The driver’s seat is empty by the time he can make his eyes focus.
Diego pulls the lady cop (Eudora! Eudora! Klaus’s mind screams in Diego’s panicked voice) from the backseat. He carries her away and it’s just him and Ben again, but Klaus can see spirits wandering in front of and next to the car who haven’t noticed him yet. They’re at a hospital, he realizes as a man with scrubs peers into his window. Klaus brings a hand to his sweaty, bloody chest and feels his heart beating wildly.
“I don’t want to be here,” he whispers to no one. Maybe to Ben. The man in scrubs pulls the car door open and crouches down next to him.
“Sir? Are you hurt?” he asks.
Klaus looks past him. A group of spirits in scrubs, some bloodied and some with the remnants of IVs and breathing tubes still hanging off of them, has started to notice him.
“I don’t want to be here,” he repeats. Hospitals are a ghost’s favorite place to be, besides cemeteries and crime scenes.
“Sir, you’re bleeding,” the man says gently. He’s probably right, Klaus thinks. His body is all but rebelling against itself already from forced sobriety and severe trauma, so it makes some sense that he’s not healing very well at the moment. His best bet would be some sedation, but his supply is all gone thanks to the masked freak shows at the hotel.
The most pressing matter, however, is not that he’s bleeding or that he’s painfully sober or that he has no idea where his brother went. The most pressing matter is that he can’t be here right now. His nerve endings feel like they’re on fire and he can feel the beginnings of a panic attack creeping up his throat. He knows he could scoot over to the driver’s seat and take off. The keys are still in the ignition. But he can’t drive, and Diego knows that, so that’s probably why he left the keys there anyway. Even if he had his license, he’s far too shaky and strung out to be able to drive safely.
The man in scrubs is gone and Diego is kneeling next to him. He holds Klaus’s arms and Klaus clutches right back at him.
“I can’t be here,” he says.
“You need medical attention,” Diego says. He reaches across Klaus’s lap and unbuckles his seatbelt.
“I want Mom,” Klaus begs. “Please, Diego. Mom can fix me up fine, you know she can -“
“Mom’s...” Diego looks wounded. He looks up at Klaus with big, teary eyes. “Mom’s gone, Klaus. You’re bleeding and you need help.”
Mom’s gone? Klaus reels back, clutching his hands to his chest. His fingers slip-slide through blood and sweat and he holds his palm flat so he can feel his own heartbeat.
“Mom?” Ben whispers.
“P-Pogo, then,” Klaus chokes. “Pogo can help. Please, Diego. I can’t go in there. I can’t. You know I can’t.”
Diego does know. Diego remembers the very few times when they had needed actual medical attention as children and not just a quick set of stitches or a set bone. Every hospital visit would send Klaus into a tizzy, and he’d never come back quite the same. He’d done a lot of drugs after those visits and had turned everyone and all of their sympathy away.
“Diego,” Klaus begs. “Please don’t make me. There’s too many, Diego, and I’m sober and I can’t, I just can’t, Diego. Please.”
“Too many what?” Diego asks. “Sober? Klaus?”
“Please,” Klaus moans. His head flops side to side. The feathers on the collar of his coat set his skin on fire. “Too many ghosts. I can’t do it sober. Haven’t taken anything in two days and - I’m gonna die if I go in there Diego. I have to be numb. Please.”
“I’m taking you home. He’s fine!” Diego snaps at the man in scrubs when he tries to argue. “He’s my brother, and I can take care of him. I’m taking you home, Klaus.”
“I need to be numb,” Klaus repeats. Home is good. Home has fewer spirits. Home has his stash.
Diego has to basically drag him out of the car and into the house. The stairs seem impossible, but he somehow manages it. Diego is supporting almost all of his weight and carrying a bag in his other hand. Klaus wonders vaguely if he’s been working out and thinks about cracking a joke about his core strength but he can’t make the words come. They walk past Mom, sitting straight upright and staring dead-eyed ahead, her arm extended and sliced open. Snipped wires snake from the gash and dangle toward the floor. She looks like Mom but also not like Mom at all. Mom is a robot, but she’s always had an air of life about her. This is just the shell of Mom. At least she has no spirit to haunt him with.
When he’s finally in his own room, he takes a moment to just breathe. He sits in his bed and breathes in the silence and shudders. Diego stands in front of him warily, still holding the bag. Or, not a bag - a briefcase. It looks like the one Hazel had back at the hotel. That doesn’t make sense. Klaus tries to piece it together but his head hurts so badly he can barely see straight.
Diego sets down the briefcase and helps Klaus peel off his jacket. Klaus sheds the dirty towel and can’t even be bothered to muster up any embarrassment or shame about being naked in front of his brother, he just brushes (stumbles) past him and goes toward his dresser. There’s a pair of argyle dress socks stuffed in the back of the top drawer. He takes them out and pulls a baggy of pills out of one.
“Klaus, don’t,” Diego says, but Klaus swallows his last two pills dry anyway and then moves into the hallway. He stumbles toward the bathroom. “Klaus.”
“I need a bath,” Klaus mumbles. Now he’s tingling but it’s not painful. He turns on the faucet and shakes his head and hands vigorously as the familiar oppressive numbness creeps through him.
Ben is staring at him disapprovingly. Klaus knows that Ben has never been supportive of his drug habit (not that anyone is ever truly supportive of a voluntary addiction except for his dealers) but he looks, in this moment, almost betrayed.
“You were sober. Finally sober, and you used it to your benefit and saved your own ass. And for what?” Ben asks. “For what, Klaus? To come home and throw it all away?”
“Shut up,” Klaus says tiredly. He steps into the tub.
“I didn’t say anything,” Diego says.
“I know,” Klaus sighs. The water rises dangerously close to the rim of the tub before Diego takes initiative and turns it off.
Klaus has always liked baths more than showers. Luther especially thinks it’s disgusting (“You’re stewing away in your own filth, for God’s sake.”) but Klaus has always found it comforting to be able to sink under the water and float in the silence. He sinks under, completely submerging himself for as long as he can hold his breath, then emerges again.
Diego is still there. He’s sitting next to the tub now and doesn’t appear to be going away. Klaus leans his cheek on the rim of the tub and stares at him.
“You came,” he mumbles. “I didn’t think anyone would come.”
Diego’s jaw visibly tightens. Klaus can almost see the gears turning in his head.
“Eudora got the message they left for us. She called me, and I got there in time before she tried going in on her own,” he says carefully.
“Eudora?” Klaus muses. “Oh, the lady cop. My angel. How is she?”
“They were bringing her to surgery when I left her at the hospital,” Diego replies. “They seemed optimistic. They said they’d call me when she was out.”
Klaus hums, enjoying the cool porcelain against his cheek. He is comfortably numb now, well past buzzed and moving swiftly into euphoria. It makes the pain in his head and chest go away, and it makes him loose lipped.
“How long before you realized I was gone?” he mumbles. Diego doesn’t respond for long enough that Klaus opens his eyes and looks up at him. The water in the tub is tinged pink from his blood. Klaus sighs. “You didn’t even notice, did you?”
It shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. Ever since he left the Academy, after Five’s disappearance and Ben’s death, he’s always been mostly in the wind. Transiency comes with homelessness. He likes to describe himself as hard to nail down, but it’s mostly just that it’s truly hard to maintain any relationships when you have no permanent residency, no income, no phone, and no family who gives a goddamn. But when Klaus told Hazel and Cha-Cha that no one would come for him, he wanted it to be a lie.
“We were looking for Number Five,” Diego admits quietly. “We were so focused on him, and when we found him... and then I got Eudora’s message and I realized they had you.”
Klaus thinks for a moment. He’s not used to this aching feeling in his chest. Now when he’s high, at least. It’s easy to tell himself and anyone who’ll listen that he’s the one no one gives a damn about. It’s hard to hear that it’s actually the truth.
“They tortured me, and you didn’t come for so long that they literally had to leave you clues to come get me,” he whispers.
“Son of a bitch,” Ben snaps. He looks angrier than Klaus has ever seen him. He looks like he could unleash The Horror, if he was even still able to do that as a ghost. Klaus wasn’t sure.
“You didn’t even know I was gone,” he says. His eyes are blurry again, and it takes the first tear to fall before he realizes he’s crying.
“Klaus,” Diego begins. He looks so sad. Klaus can barely stand the sight of him. He blinks rapidly and his tears fall into the water in his tub.
“Please go,” he whimpers. “Please go away. Leave me alone.”
“Klaus -“
“Leave!” Klaus snaps. He sucks in a lungful of air and submerges himself again. He holds his breath until he truly can’t stand it anymore and then comes up, gasping. Diego is gone. He sobs.
Suddenly, as high as he is, it isn’t enough. He pulls the plug and lets the water drain. He dries himself and walks to his room quickly, but he knows that he has nothing left. Almost all of his supply was in his coat, now destroyed and sticking to the dirty carpet of a shitty motel. He throws on sweats and his bloody jacket. He’s pawned enough of dear old dad’s shit in the past to know that he can at least get a quick fix, but more than likely it will be enough to go on a proper bender.
He’s about to head upstairs to Reginald’s office when he spots the briefcase next to his door. Diego must have put it down there when he followed him into the bathroom. Hazel had been obsessed with the stupid briefcase, even going as far as to hide it in the damn air vent when he wasn’t clutching it like his life depended on it. It must have something inside that was worth some good money.
He grabs the briefcase and hurries down the stairs and toward the front door. He doesn’t meet anyone on his way and he no idea where any of his siblings could be, but he doesn’t care. They don’t care about him and he doesn’t care about them. Right now, he cares about pills, and selling this briefcase is going to get him what he wants.
He boards the bus going downtown at the corner across from the Academy like he used to do when he was a teenager sneaking out to get high. He sits on the bench and holds the briefcase in his lap and just breathes. Ben is next to him.
“They do care, Klaus,” he says, but it sounds weak. “Of course they care. Just give them a chance.”
Klaus shakes his head but doesn’t respond. They care, he thinks, but only when it affects them. He’s nothing to them until he’s useful, and he’s only useful as a lookout. Every other moment, he’s just useless Klaus, who can be burned and cut and choked and waterboarded and who no one will notice is gone. If Eudora hadn’t gotten the message, he’d probably be dead in a ditch somewhere, and how long would it take for his siblings to notice that?
He taps his fingers in the briefcase. The bus jerks him sideways as it turns the corner. He looks down at the briefcase and decides it’s time to see his bounty.
He thumbs open the clips and eases the lid open. There’s a whoosh and a zap and a blinding blue light -
And he’s gone.