Chapter Text
Klaus tightened his grip on Luther and Diego and felt Ben’s hand clench harder on his shoulder. Five’s scream blotted out all other sound, the warping blue of his power eroding the world until all Klaus could see was rippling shades of neon sky. Pressure registered on his skin, first the warm presence of a humid day, then a force stronger than rain beating into his every pore, determined to condense him, burning with a cold fire. The blue flames swelled and Five wasn’t the only one screaming and Klaus felt as young and vulnerable as he had at thirteen years old, clinging to his family for dear life, unsure he’d be safe with them but terrified to be alone.
Too abruptly, it all stopped.
Hard, uneven ground replaced the stage. The walls winked into rubble. Night blazed into a hot, hazy day. Klaus broke contact with his brothers as a gust of air punched him back. He stumbled, almost fell, but twirled himself onto steady feet. Panting, wide-eyed, he looked up.
Luther had fallen backwards, Vanya still safe in his arms. He struggled to his feet, expression horrified. Five was in a crumpled heap, unconscious, with Allison crawling over to check his pulse. Diego was on his other side, jaw tight.
And the world was over.
The Icarus Theatre was more than a ruin. There was no sign of the stage, seats barely recognisable under decades’ worth of dust and soaked to a dull, dreary brown. The closest thing to a wall was the upper circle angled at where the moon had been screaming towards them just moments before, propped up by the remains of the ticket booth and foyer.
Klaus swallowed hard and turned around.
“Ben?”
“Five! Five, c’mon, wake up, bro.” Diego was half-patting, half-slapping Five’s cheek but he didn’t so much as stir. Allison took his arm and shook her head.
“Where ... when are we?” Luther breathed, getting to his feet after depositing Vanya carefully on the ground. “I thought we were going ... back.”
Klaus followed his gaze through the vanished roof. Low, heavy cloud pressed down on them, obscuring the broken moon and indifferent stars. The orange hue was streaked with feathers of red, the uppermost layers sleepy with encroaching twilight.
A very familiar tingle swept along Klaus’s bare skin. The hovering presence of ghosts oozed from the stillness. Figures stole into the ruined theatre like swooping shadows. Some solid, others indistinct. All gruesome. Charred skin. Burnt hair. Missing limbs. Spilling guts. Caved-in skulls. The one thing each ghost shared was that awful, aching, lost yearning in their hollowed, miserable eyes. They watched the Hargreeves gather themselves with mild interest, some already bored and milling around aimlessly, still in the tatters of their fancy suits and flowing dresses.
There were hundreds of them.
Klaus looked away, clenching his jaw and hoping none of them noticed he could see them. Their presence itched into his skin like withdrawals, the unignorable pressure of a hand hovering just above his arms, his neck. He shivered. Ghosts hadn’t felt this strong since Vietnam.
And the feeling kept growing as more and more ghosts faded into view. Impaled ghosts. Crushed ghosts. Kid ghosts.
Klaus put his hands on his knees and retched. What little he had eaten spewed onto the carnage and he collapsed onto his knees, preferring this view than what lay a little higher.
A pebble bounced off Klaus’s shoulder and he jumped, arms flailing in a laughable defence as he turned and fell onto his butt. Diego cast a concerned look his way.
“What?”
“You okay?”
Not feeling it, Klaus forced a laugh. “Never better!” He held up a shaking thumbs up. When Diego raised his eyebrows at him, unconvinced, he just said, “I hate time travel.”
Diego snorted. “Yeah, no shit.”
Klaus glanced around the uncomfortably crowded room and wobbled to his feet, scanning face after awful face.
“B-Ben’s not here,” he said slowly, frowning at the ghosts, forgetting to hide his attention. Several turned to him, interest piqued.
“What?”
“Ben’s gone?”
“I thought you could bring him with us?”
Heat pressed against Klaus’s eyes as he turned back to his living siblings, taking in their fear for the first time. “So did I.”
Silence joined them for a long moment. Klaus was the one to break it, squirming in his own skin.
“We need to get out of here, c’mon, let’s go outside, let’s –”
“Go where?” Luther cut in, standing to his full height with that Number One bearing Klaus had learned to hate. “Five was right – this is the Apocalypse. Where are we supposed to go? He was meant to jump us back, not –”
“Well sorry he disappointed you, Number One,” Diego snapped, stepping closer to Luther and glaring up at him. “But clearly jumping six people through time isn’t as easy as he thought!”
“Diego, we’re trapped in the Apocalypse –!”
“I know that asshole, but there’s no point blaming Five – he’s passed out if you didn’t notice – you see, some powers actually take a toll –”
“Guys,” Klaus groaned, pressing his hands against his ears to stifle their bickering – and the shore of whispers rippling through the room. “Don’t fight, just –”
“Like you’d know anything about the toll powers take!” Luther spat, raising one fist as though to grab Diego’s shirt and lift him. “You don’t have a clue, all you do is aim well you – ow!”
Klaus giggled, then quickly cupped a hand to his mouth at Diego’s glare. Allison had slapped Luther with her notepad. Her glare had really levelled up, that was a real disappointed mom glare right there. And the way Luther cowered, god it was funny!
Allison righted her pad and wrote furiously while the boys waited in meek silence, both still shooting each other vengeful side-eye.
Arguing won’t help. Gotta work together.
“Exactly!” Klaus said with a clap, spinning around looking for Ben again. He had to be here, right? He’d made it to Vietnam he ... he had to be here. “So, first things first, we need to find Be –”
“What we need is Five,” Luther interjected, using his Leader Voice. Klaus’s shoulders slumped. “He’s the only one who knows this place, who can get us the hell out of here.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not exactly gonna help anyone right now, is he?” Diego shot back, pointing to Five’s unconscious figure.
Klaus followed his finger and was struck by how tiny Five looked, even for the thirteen-year-old he wasn’t. Something squirmed in his stomach and suddenly he wished Five wasn’t the time-jumper. He wished someone else could figure this out, fix everything so Five didn’t have to wake up again in the Apocalypse. The thought of opening his eyes and seeing that jungle, smelling gunpowder and burning flesh and napalm – Klaus shivered just imagining it. He picked his way over to Five and crouched down, reaching out for his little older brother’s hand. At least he wouldn’t wake up alone, right?
“I know that!” Luther was arguing. Still. “But we can’t just sit here, can we? No, we need to get somewhere safe, we need to regroup, come up with a plan.”
Allison raised a disbelieving eyebrow. Her expression very clearly doubted the existence of anywhere safe in the Apocalypse.
“I know where to go,” Diego said suddenly, eyes bright with an idea.
“You do?”
“Yeah, Luther, I do. Where did Five wait this thing out? Before his employers came to him?”
“Um,” Klaus drawled into the silence. “The mall?”
“The – no, Klaus, not the mall.”
Klaus raised both hands in sassy surrender. “Sor-ry, it’s where I’d spend the end of days. Free clothes for life.”
“The library! That’s where he went to figure out ... this.” Diego gestured to the lack of all things civil around them. “That must be where he, y’know, lived. With the mannequin.”
Luther and Allison exchanged one of their speaking glances. Klaus stood and shrugged.
“Sounds good to me. Reading’s more relaxing than a creepy haunted theatre.” He wished instantly he hadn’t said it – more ghostly eyes looked to him with interest, and none of them were Ben’s.
“Yeah, all right,” Luther said as Allison nodded decisively. “The library it is. You take Five, I’ve got Vanya.”
When they eventually picked their way outside, Klaus threw up again. If the others noticed, they didn’t comment. They just walked on, through the hundreds upon hundreds of ghosts packed into the hellscape. Klaus followed close on Diego’s heels, not wanting to walk through any more dead than necessary.
Night inched around them as they made their way past charred busses and hip-high weeds ripped from tarmac. Klaus whimpered to himself, feeling weak. The tingling had become painful pins and needles, stabbing along his skin and coiling, hot and prickly, in his gut. There was nowhere to look that wasn’t gory, miserable, lost, broken, dead. His siblings manoeuvred their way over fallen walls, under bent traffic lights, around the husks of cars. Klaus followed, looking at his feet and blinking hard to keep his vision clear. Even when he wasn’t looking at them he could feel them. They knew they were here. Most didn’t care but some weren’t taking kindly to the intrusion and were hissing, spitting insults and ire, furious that these six should live while they couldn’t. And when there were several hundred ghosts on this street alone, ‘some’ was one hell of a freaking lot. Klaus curled his arms around his chest for comfort, muttering to himself to try and block them out. He couldn’t take in the once-familiar streets turned nightmarish, couldn’t even register the sombre silence that was all his siblings could hear, save their scratching footsteps. Eventually, he covered his ears.
Diego stopped abruptly in front of him and Klaus side-stepped to avoid a collision, dodging Five’s lolling feet as he turned. He looked up, flinched minutely at the man to Deigo’s right who was missing their entire right side, head included.
Diego said something. Klaus relaxed his grip on his ears and raised his eyebrows in question.
“You okay?” Diego repeated.
Klaus nodded before he’d processed the question. He tried to smile at Diego’s disbelieving expression.
“It’s just, y’know, a li’l crowded here,” he relented.
Diego glanced around at the street he thought was completely empty. Completely silent.
“Oh. Shit. Yeah. You gonna be okay?”
Pretending Ben was there to say something bracing, Klaus straightened, fixed on his best smile, and nodded, letting his hands fall to his sides.
“You kidding? Been training my whole life for this.”
Diego gave him an odd look Klaus chose to interpret as confident and turned back, hitching Five up in his arms and moving to catch up with Luther and Allison. Wishing for Ben, Klaus followed, wincing as he passed through dead. He reached up for Dave’s dogtags and held them tight, sending his usual prayer of I miss you, I love you, to the only other ghost he wanted to see.