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It’s a grey, blusterous afternoon, and the children are restless. Windy weather always brings out their feral side, and even Number One is fidgeting at his desk, his wide thighs straining against the constraints of the wooden structure. He’s trying his hardest to pay attention to the book in front of him, but intelligence has never been his strong suit. His eyes regularly skid around the room, trying to summon the solutions in his head. They don’t appear to be forthcoming.
Number Two is sharpening his knives, not even bothering to hide them; Number Six is surreptitiously reading his own favored literature underneath the heavy Algebra textbook. Number Three - foolish girl that she is - keeps sighing dreamily in Number One’s direction. The only one on task is Number Seven, for all the good it will do her.
Reginald, however, is most irritated by Number Four.
This is becoming increasingly common. He knows he shouldn’t play favorites and least favorites (such a bizarre, human concept, when applied at an emotional rather than a logical level) but Four has been particularly vexing as of late. Since the children came of age - the eagerness of puberty morphing rapidly into fully-flung, difficult and surly adolescence at almost exactly the same time for each of them - he’s noticed Four in particular finding perplexing ways to undermine his authority.
As youngsters, for example, it had mainly been One, Two and Three who had sought out Reginald’s approval and recognition, the others finding themselves too far down the pecking order to extend much hope. Now, though, Four will linger long after supper, longer than is at all decent, while Reginald attempts to read the evening news.
“Yes?” Reginald has asked him sharply on more than one of those occasions, irritated by the bright green eyes (eyes that the boy has taken to opening wide in order to get his own way, Reginald has concluded with suspicion, noticing it even appears to have an effect on Grace, a primal part of her programming aligning it with a small animal in need of protection.) “What do you want, Number Four?”
The boy never answers, just looks crestfallen, as though Reginald is at fault for not understanding.
There are other things, too, that Reginald can’t quite understand. Why the boy insists on calling him daddy, rather than the more dignified ‘father’. Why he creeps down in the middle of the night to curl up in his mother’s arms, finding no resistance while the robot is in stand-by mode, but startling when Reginald walks past on his nightly inspections of the house, babbling nonsensically about nightmares and ghosts.
And… worst of all… (the very memory of it causing Reginald's chest and shoulders to give into a short, involuntary shudder) the day when he had, in a moment of paternal weakness, allowed Grace to bake the children a cake for their sixteenth birthday. Number Four had run towards him in what Reginald had assumed was some sort of demonic possession (which had seemed perfectly reasonable, given the boy’s so-called abilities), and, upon Reginald shoving him to the floor with his cane, had proceeded to whimper that he’d simply wanted to hug him.
Strange behavior. Most strange, indeed.
“Number Four, what are you doing?” he barks out, as he watches the boy’s pencil flying wildly over the page, though clearly not forming the disciplined structure of important mathematical equations. “Come up here, immediately.”
The narrow, shoulders of his most difficult child stiffen, as the boy sits bolt upright in his seat.
“Sorry, daddy, I’ll-”
He’s reaching to crumple the paper up when Reginald intercepts him, snatching it from his hands in one swift motion. Four’s dismayed face falls further still, Reginald not looking at the paper as he waits expectantly for the boy to obey his instruction.
“I said, come up here, immediately.”
The classroom is silent, save for the screech of Four pushing back his chair and standing up. Every face turns to look at him; this is by no means an unusual occurrence, and the children have come to regard Four with exasperation.
Reginald wonders in that moment if he’s perhaps being a little too harsh. After all, Two is probably more impertinent than Four, all things considered, and goodness knows Five was the worst of all when he was still around. Then there is Three, who is equally as self-centered, constantly challenging Reginald on opportunities she is missing, righteous indignation brimming in her every demand.
But something about Four’s face, the silent challenge that lies behind it - a challenge Reginald can’t quite figure out - rankles at him like an itch he can’t scratch.
Four takes short, timid footsteps, prolonging his inevitable humiliation, and Reginald waits patiently. He can see the faces of the other children relax, enjoying the moment of respite they feel when they’re no longer potentially under scrutiny; it seems to Reginald this is the only thing they see Four as useful for, and he can’t quite bring himself to disapprove of that notion.
“Now. Show your brothers and sisters just what you feel is so important that it takes precedent over your schoolwork. The schoolwork you surely need to focus on, given how miserably you’re failing to harness your power.”
The boy reaches out with a pale, shaking hand, and Reginald observes the boy’s trembling form with something approaching... foreboding? Surely not. Maybe he’s still slightly gassy from lunch.
“I,” Number Four clears his throat and holds a sketch up to the class. Reginald stares at it curiously, as does the rest of the Academy. The boy isn’t a bad artist, at least, though his efforts are a little too avant garde for Reginald’s taste. This one is more traditional than usual, and Reginald immediately makes out his own face within. “I was just drawing a picture. To try and get my… my thoughts back in focus. It’s nothing.”
The words come out all in one breath, and then he quickly lowers the picture, before anyone has had much of a chance to look at it.
“Hold it back up,” Reginald instructs him, in a voice so fierce that Number Seven jumps in her seat. “And tell me exactly what this picture is meant to represent, Four, given that you decided to include my likeness in it.”
The piece of paper comes back up and the children lean forward at their desks, beginning to titter a little with ill-natured humor as they make sense of the pencil strokes and shading.
“It’s… it’s me, and mom, and… and… you, dad.”
“Are they hugging you?!” Number Three asks, her voice projecting dramatic glee. “What the hell, Klaus? We’re not, like, six years old anymore!”
Four rocks back and forth on his feet, staring at the ground as though it might contain a doorway he can escape out of.
“Don’t you think father’s got better things to do than stand around hugging you?” Number One chimes in, always wishing to win Reginald’s approval. Reginald, for his part, stays close-lipped, waiting for the punishment to sink in; he still deigns it to be necessary, even though the contents of the picture has made him feel a little… conflicted.
“Seriously, Klaus, you know that... s-stuff like that... hugs and whatever... it’s just for weak-willed civilians,” Number Two adds, and Four’s face, which has just about remained composed, save for the wobbling bottom lip, now crumples completely.
Reginald wonders if he should feel responsible.
“That’s quite enough,” he snaps at Two. “And particularly rich coming from a boy who has yet to pull himself off his mother’s teat.”
Two turns an interesting shade of red, and Reginald wonders absently where his reprimand came from; after all, gentle humiliation had been at the forefront of his mind when he’d brought Four up to the front of the class to face the judgement of his siblings.
Still, looking at the boy now, green eyes shining with tears, his sleeve wet from scrubbing at his cheeks, he can’t help but feel a little… guilty , perhaps, about the meaning behind that silly doodle of his.
It’s a foreign feeling, and Reginald doesn’t like it one bit.
“You may sit,” Reginald tells Number Four, folding the paper up and putting it in his pocket. The boy gratefully hurries back to his desk, yelping loudly when Two, still brimming with outrage and with nowhere to direct it, sticks his foot out and succeeds in tripping him up.
The other children giggle again, almost in relief, as though they can’t quite work out what Reginald had expected of them in the previous teachable opportunity and are pleased to find themselves back in familiar territory (Number Four’s clumsiness is a particularly irritating trait that Reginald regularly reprimands him for.)
Still, Four shoots Two a betrayed look, and Two has the emotional weakness to look a little ashamed of himself, before scowling down at his work and dedicating himself to it with renewed vigor.
In fact, all of the children are better after that, including Number Four, who tries as hard as he can with the equations in front of him (which is not very hard at all, but recognition must be granted on occasion, even within the confines of Reginald's brain), while occasionally sniffling and wiping tears away.
Reginald’s fingers flex at his pocket. He feels the paper brushing against them.
At the end of the session, he calls on Four to stay. The boy shrinks down in his seat, eyes rolling to the heavens miserably, as the others hurry out in relief. Number Two ducks down next to his brother’s seat for a moment, whispering something in his ear, and then ruffles his hair. Normally a kind touch from one of his siblings is enough to pull Four out of whatever melodramatic tantrum he happens to be throwing, but this particular action barely registers.
So. It really is worse than Reginald thought.
“Number Four,” he says, having to clear his throat a little as he speaks, his voice a little less portentous than usual. “Do you know why I’ve asked you to stay?”
“Sure. So you can tell me, daddy dearest, about how stupid I am for wanting things I’m not meant to have. About how I let myself get distracted by fantasies that are,” and at this conjunction, the little imp of a boy pretends to clear his throat, his voice taking on an overly stern tone that Reginald supposes is meant to be a caricature of his own, “inspid and foolish and detrimental to the Academy’s purpose.”
His face, his demeanor, is almost a mirror image of his biological mother’s, when Reginald had located her sixteen years ago. She was pixie-like and pretty, even in her resentment; a wash of pale skin, pink cheeks and plush lips. She had cradled Four to her with the mother bear-like protectiveness of a little girl with her first doll. Truth be told, she hadn’t been much older than the boy was now.
But just like her son, she had been quick with her words, her remarks towards him cutting, withering.
“I’m not giving him to you,” she’d said as soon as she’d opened the door to him. She’d invited him in regardless, and Reginald had immediately formed the impression she was well-versed in inviting unaccompanied gentlemen into her home. He’d taken in the fishnet stockings flung over the back of a shabby chaise lounge, a velvet top hat, an intricate flapper dress with silver embroidery that would have covered almost none of her long limbs. Berlin might have been in the midst of a political revolution, but the old burlesque shows were still providing income to loose women of independent means.
“I know what you want,” she’d continued sharply. “I read the news. You’re probably some kind of pervert, collecting all these kids.”
Four had been the tiniest of the babies, even smaller than Seven. It had taken all of Reginald’s coercion, the promise of a better life, pictures of the mansion the boy would be brought up in, and finally, the misery his power would bring him if he wasn’t given the correct training, before she’d wearily rescinded.
“Please,” she’d asked Reginald, as she’d trailed after him to the door, a peacock-blue kimono wrapped protectively around her waif-like body. “Give him lots of hugs. Promise me that.”
He hadn’t promised her that, though maybe she’d taken his cursory nod as an agreement. And he hadn’t ever thought to hold himself in debt to such a silly, impractical notion. Children didn’t need hugs. An over-hugged child was a pampered child. Coddled, weak. Soft. None of these were useful or weaponizable qualities for a child soldier.
And yet, as Reginald takes the picture out of his pocket now, and stares down at it, seeing his own face staring back at him (an excellent likeness, almost, if not for the smile, because Reginald is quite certain he’s never smiled in his many years of existence), Grace’s elegant hands settled comfortably on Four’s back, as Reginald’s arms encircle his shoulders, he begins to feel just a little perturbed by the feelings muddling round in the pit of his stomach.
“This is what you want? A hug from Grace, and from myself?”
He shrugs. “Grace is a robot. She does hug me sometimes but it’s not… it’s not really the same, is it? Humans aren’t hard inside, but when I squeeze into her, she doesn’t feel squishy, just… kind of rigid.”
Reginald nods at that. The boy’s language leaves much to be desired, but he isn’t incorrect. Reginald’s invention, brilliant as it is, cannot possibly contain the soft human core that makes their bodies so physically vulnerable.
“So, would a hug from me be more…” Reginald clears his throat again, because blast it, there is a small, unfamiliar tickle in his throat that he can’t quite rid himself of, “satisfactory?”
Four looks confused for a moment, eyes darting around to survey the room like this is a potential training exercise that he needs to pass. “I-”
“It’s not a test, Number Four. You have been… rather challenging, recently. If all you need is a particular kind of physical action, it may save the two of us a lot of energy better spent elsewhere.”
“Wow,” Klaus says, then, when he realizes Reginald is not trying to test him. “You really are… a strange man.”
“Then again...” Reginald says, making to fold the picture away, and Klaus leaps up from his desk, shaking his head.
“Sorry, daddy. Sorry. No, I’d love it. I’d love… I’d really love a hug.”
He’s trembling again. Such a strange child, Reginald thinks, impartially, as he allows the boy to wobble unsteadily towards him, hands wrapped around his stomach as if he’s trying to protect his body from the crushing disappointment of being denied contact at the last moment.
“Well,” Reginald says, and holds his hands out, spreading them to grip the boy on the shoulders. “You may approach.”
Four shuffles into his arms, body held rigidly, and Reginald wonders what all the fuss is about: there is nothing remotely pleasurable about this. If anything, it is a little uncomfortable, not exactly the comfort-seeking necessity that humans treat this kind of contact as.
But then the boy starts to breathe a little quicker, his muscles clenching and unclenching, and following that he starts to cry softly, working his face into the crook of Reginald’s neck and shoulder, his small, timid hands gripping onto the back of Reginald's blazer as he finally relaxes.
Reginald instinctively brings the boy in closer and wraps his hands around the waif-like excuse for a sixteen year old. He feels a warmth emitting from the boy that presses into his own chest, and maybe he’s experiencing it too, though it may also be the unseasonably mild September weather.
“There… there…” he says, feeling entirely foolish.”I’m… fond of you, Klaus.”
The boy starts crying a little more hysterically, and Reginald bites down on a tut of disapproval. He supposes the tears are cathartic in a way. A necessary hurdle to overcome before the boy can pull himself together and act with a touch more decorum than he's displayed thus far.
“Thank you, daddy,” Klaus whispers, clinging to him like a particularly spirited koala bear. “I’ll be good. I’ll try and be good.”
An unpleasant image flashes through Reginald's brain: this soft, breakable boy trapped among the lost souls of the dead, by Reginald's own hand, as they clamor for their pound of flesh. He thinks about the Apocalpyse, should his children fail - their blackened and charred bodies lying among the rubble.
Instead of pushing the boy away, Reginald pulls him a little tighter, and curiously, it seems to do something to assuage his own fears.
There’s not much to say when the embrace has finally finished; Reginald breaks away from it, after the boy’s tears are completely gone, and he brushes at his damp blazer collar as Klaus cringes with apologetic fear, before hurrying out of the classroom to join his brothers and sisters.
As he watches him leave, Reginald assures himself that the hug was sufficient for the next three to six year, and that perhaps he’ll allow the boy one on his twenty-first birthday. After all, as nurturing methods go, it wasn’t one of the most unpleasant he’s had to mete out. He can almost understand the emotional attachment that humans attribute to them, foolish creatures that they are.
He tucks the paper back into his pocket, and taps it throughout the evening to check it is still there.