Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

At first he thinks it’s a dream, but it’s not long before he realizes that’s not right. If Dave were dreaming, Klaus would be here.

‘Not long’ is relative. Or just - time doesn’t matter here. Or it doesn’t exist, or something. It’s weird. The time part is weird, anyway, most of the rest of it is nice. Really, really nice.

Life is in soft focus, somehow, and only ever the best bits. He’s back in the states, somewhere nameless and non-specific, but definitely back home, and he’s got his own little house, where he makes eggs and toast in the mornings and goes out to garden in the afternoons and it never gets above 75° and he has a beer on the porch as the evening falls and he watches neighbors walking their dogs down the tree-lined lane until after the fireflies come flitting to life and it’s never loud or dirty or painful. It’s just really nice.

Some days he thinks he would like to have a dog, and some days he does. The serenity is lovely, truly it is, but some days it’s a little lonely. Day after day for however long 'not long’ is, smiling out from his cozy home at the passers-by is his only interaction with another living soul.

Although, he’s pretty sure ‘living’ isn’t the right word.

That knowledge isn’t distressing, not like he might have expected. Being dead. Just like the music that always sounds like it’s coming from across the way, filtering beneath the hush of birdsong and leaves, everything’s sort of muted here, even emotions. Maybe especially emotions, or the negative ones, anyway.

Dave thinks about that, when his hands get busy working the soil. His brain finds something to turn over, too, and he’ll think about how it is that the worst part about being dead isn’t concern about the things in life he will miss out on (or has already missed out on, more accurately), or even the facts of how he died, smothered in mud with a crater in his chest pumping his life away, slippery and dark and too much, too fast. The worst part about his death is who was there to witness it. Dave wishes he hadn’t.

It’s okay, though. Everything’s okay here. Tragedy can only be bittersweet; what once was agonizing now simply makes him pensive. There’s this instinctual knowledge that is a constant cushioning comfort, caressing every moment - everyone will get here, eventually. It’s soft and lovely and kind here, and everyone will come to know that tenderness.

And he’ll be able to see him again.

He sees Powloski again, before he finds anyone else. Powloski finds Dave, really, because Dave never even thought to venture beyond his cream-colored fence posts.

“It’s a whole world out there, Katz,” Powloski exclaims. “Bigger than the whole world, probably. Everyone who’s ever lived, spread out however they want, and you can travel to visit any of it as quick as you want. And you’ve stayed in the suburbs planting peonies.”

“What I’m hearing is that you can’t tell the difference between peonies and marigolds.”

Powloski roars with laughter. “No, I sure as hell cannot! That’s got to be the fruitiest thing you’ve ever said, and I’ve heard you go on and on about Sal Mineo."

Powloski is one to talk. He was the biggest flirt on the base, lavishing the nurses with his loud attention and his fellows soldiers with quieter but no less robust attraction. The two of them had spent some time canoodling together in the earlier days of Dave’s tour, but he’d come to realize that even in a war, the kind of love he’s looking for is steady and deep. Powloski, on the other hand, feeds off of novelty, which means he has the best stories, and he’s got an entertainer’s soul, which means he’s always more than willing to share.

He’ll throw his whole body into descriptive motion when he's telling a story, like during the dramatic retelling of a night when he’d shared Grillo’s tent for spirited little while, and when he went to return to his own, he’d accidentally busted in on Oscar instead.

“‘What’s going on?’ Oscar’s asking me because he thinks we’re under attack or something. I’m telling him not to worry, but he keeps saying, ‘What happened? What’s happened?’ So I have to say, ‘It’s not Charlie, Oscar, it was just me having a screw.’ His face when he hears that!” Powloski shakes his head. “He was just a kid out there. Lucky for me, too, that he was a fucking new guy or he would have blown my face off soon as I barged in on him. Not that it really mattered, in the end, I guess. Couple of months.” He shrugs. It’s so easy to shrug about things here.

He’s not the tallest guy, but his personality always made him so big. He never spoke so much as bellowed, but the more time they spend together over here, Dave comes to see the smaller side of him, too.

On a quieter night, Powloski talks about Julia, one of the nurses, who was older than all of them, who had been there longer, who knew more than they ever would, and who would not put up with one single iota of bullshit.

“She was the toughest person I ever met out there, man.” He’s drinking scotch tonight. He swirls the glass and watches the whirlpool. “I wanted to ask her to marry me.”
If they were elsewhere, if they weren’t here where even sadness can be soothing, they would find a way to joke. They’d break the tension with a jeer about how she wouldn’t have married Powloski’s sorry ass anyway, but there isn’t any tension to break here. There’s just the quiet humming of a tranquil summer night, and something else. Something that puts Dave in the mind to finally ask what he’s both wanted and not wanted to know since Powloski first came around.

“What about Hargreeves?” he says into his own drink. Hargreeves. Like Dave hadn’t kissed the man so hard and then so soft that he forgot his own name, and like Dave doesn’t know that Powloski knows that.

Distancing. Being careful. Old habits.

“Your boy Klaus?”

Dave bites his lip to hold back the smile, but he doesn’t succeed and he doesn’t need to anymore. It sure does sound nice, out loud, like that.

“I wish!” Powloski says. “But you know from the minute he arrived, that kid only had eyes for you.”

It’s not the warm air or the alcohol that flushes his face. But, “That’s not really what I was talking about. I just wondered - well.”

It’s not hard to do anything here. It is hard to ask this.

Powloski shifts in his seat. He knows what Dave is trying to ask. They’d both been too near this exact unbearable conversation, countless times.
“I don’t know.” He saves Dave the question. “He went MIA right after… The last time I saw you was the last time I saw either of you.” He throws back the rest of his drink. It’s fine. There’s plenty more.

“Oh.” Dave finishes his drink, too.

It’s weird, though, about Klaus. Well, what wasn’t weird about Klaus?

But it’s weird to think that he disappeared. He was a lucky one; ever since that time with the landmine where he’d been the only survivor, the unit had adopted him as their charm, like he cast some kind of protection on those around him. It was always weird when your good luck charm ran out of luck, so that must have been rough on the men.

And.

You know.

Dave just wants to know. What happened?

This place gives him what he wants before he even knows to ask for it. He scratches his retriever’s head and thinks as loud as he can about Klaus and about how much he wants to know what happened to Klaus and if, wherever he is now, if Klaus is okay. He thinks, with as much fervor as he can pack into his thoughts, that what he wants is for Klaus to be okay.

He doesn’t know if it works like that.

He thinks that he didn’t get a long life and he didn’t get an easy death and if any of that means anything to the scales of fate, he’d like to trade whatever he’s worth for Klaus to be okay.

Not that he needs to be worried for Klaus. Because it’s true, Klaus has always had an impressive, almost uncanny, sort of resilience.

That time Klaus didn’t die, it was three weeks in. Not really long enough for Dave to be as affected as he was, seeing four dead bodies in the blast area but being particularly distraught by seeing that Klaus was one of them. He told himself, ‘Oh well, that probably wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway and that’s that,’ and he told himself that he hadn’t gotten that connected anyway in such a short time, but his weighted stomach proved that was a lie.

Klaus was unmoving on the ground, one hand splayed across his frozen chest and his face half sunk in the mud. He was pale under the dirt and blood, which turned out not to be his. Splattered on from the others, apparently. No matter how often they’d seen it, the young soldiers still all needed to take a somber beat before they went to collect their friends, which was when Dave noticed Klaus’ index finger twitch.

Dave’s feet carried him to his side before he managed to get out Hargreeves’ name. Klaus’ eyes hadn’t opened but his forehead creased in a grimace, and his left hand pulled shakily out from under debris to flutter next to his head, like he’d be covering his ears if he could stand the touch.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Klaus whispered, eyes still pressed tightly closed. “I’m fine.”

It was stupid how little Dave was fine, given he’d only met the guy less than a month ago. And given how many other people he’d had to witness be not fine in not too much longer than that.

“You’re okay?” Dave latched on to the hand still prone on Klaus’ chest and held on tight. Klaus finally tore his eyes open and looked up at him, disoriented like he hadn’t quite fully returned yet from someplace acutely distant. But he managed to come back into himself and jerk a few small nods. Somehow it felt like Klaus was the one asking the question, so Dave said it again, firmly. “You’re okay.”

“Okay.” Klaus’ voice was hoarse but Dave was weak in the knees himself with gratitude to be hearing it.

He squeezed Klaus’ hand and then realized there needed to be an explanation for this that wasn’t glaringly obvious infatuation. “Come on,” he said, shifting his grasp so he could use it to help pull Klaus to his feet. Klaus still wavered so harshly that he bent almost in half and nearly fell back to the ground face-first, but Dave held him steady.

He couldn’t really do anything to help with the way Klaus lost his voice. As he hyperventilated in quick, quiet little spasms, as his gaze swept across the corpses of the other men. As he stared at the hand he pulled away from his ear, coated in blood that could at best only be identified as ‘somebody’s.’

Clapping a hand on Klaus’ shoulder, Dave told him again, “You’re going to be okay.” The tangible helpfulness of this gesture was debatable. But then, as now, the only thing Dave was able to do was to put the hope out there in the universe and try his best to confidently believe it.

The other thing about Klaus, though, is that Powloski says that once a person is here, if you both want to, you can find each other, just by wishing. Powloski’s surprised they haven’t found each other yet.

So is it that Klaus isn’t here, or that he doesn’t want to see him?

Dave’s mother moves into a house across the street. She looks exactly as beautiful as he remembered when he was crouched face-flat in the bush, and her potato kugel tastes even better than he remembered.

His tendency towards quiet solitude comes from his dad. His mom likes bustle, she likes to chat with the neighbors and stroll through town to find new neighbors to chat with. She pulls Dave out to walk with her sometimes, which is how Dave learns that he sort of knows the people all around him.

Mrs. Hughes, the librarian from the big public library where he spent his Wednesday afternoons, lives on the other side of the park. Mr. Gorsky, a friend of his father’s, keeps chickens and rabbits in his lush backyard, one street over. The person living on Dave’s right is the same kid who lived next door until Dave was five. He doesn’t really remember Pete from back then, but they’d brushed up against each other in life. Everyone here did. There’s something poetic and majestic about that but he’s always been more of a reader than a writer. He doesn’t pursue it.

It may not be a real town, but in a lot of ways it behaves like one. No one has to have a job, but plenty of folks like to work, spend their timeless days busy and sociable and with a purpose. There’s a big, airy building at the center of town where his mom takes a class in watercolors and teaches one on bread-making herself. Turns out there is truth in that saying about it never being too late to learn new things.

“No time like the present,” his mom says, a phrase she said so much in life that it was practically her motto. Now she says it like it’s a special inside joke, but of course everyone here is on the inside for that one.

She tells him that she’s thinking of taking up piano, too. She’d always wanted to play an instrument - Dave’s dad could play so many, and she’s hoping to surprise him with a song when he joins them.

Dave’s walking with her to her class, carrying the new art kit she’d excitedly put together. Paints brush up against chalk and pastel inside the lined wicker basket. He twists his wrist back and forth and it swings around above his knees. “Do you miss him?” he asks. “Dad.”
She never seems to have a problem talking about him, casually mentions him in conversations all the time and never trips over his name. It’s literally the opposite of your loved one dying, Dave knows this, but sometimes it feels the same. To Dave it does.

“Well, of course I’m looking forward to seeing him again,” she says, and that’s the thing, isn’t it? “I’m not saying I want him to hurry it up - he can take his time down there, keep on spoiling your sister’s children, but, oh, of course there are things up here I want to share with him. We shared everything, for so long.” She catches hold of his hand. “Longer than you were alive.”

It’s not that her tone is empty of sorrow, but it’s in the distance, somehow. Acceptance is in the foreground. Maybe that’s less metaphorical than he thinks. Maybe the misery gets left behind, a landmark in the town they all passed through before they got here. But Dave thinks sometimes that it’s closer for him than the others, and he’s not sure why, or how.

He has his suspicions though. About the why.

His mom squeezes his hand. “But we’ll have so much time together. We’ll see him again, soon enough.”

Yeah.

They do. His father moves in with his mom and all three of them go on walks together. Their happiness isn’t loud; it’s simply complete and so comfortable that sometimes it’s almost overwhelming.

So sometimes Dave will go for walks by himself. Getting out and about with his mom broke him of what turned out to be a self-imposed house arrest. He’ll stroll around the little town, breeze sprinkled with drifting spring blossoms one day and dry snow dust the next, whichever Dave prefers.

He never brushes up against a city limit but still feel sure that he’s seen the whole place, a contained circle without a border. At the center is an open space, just like the historic downtown main square in his hometown, with a fountain and a gazebo and a bandstand, ringed by various community buildings. Spiraling out from there are long streets of pretty houses and little parks.

One of the community buildings is a library, impossibly endless on the inside. He’ll run into Mrs. Hughes there sometimes, but more often he’ll see Lewis, a kid that he knew when they were in elementary school together. Lewis’ nose had always been stuck in a book, even as an 8-year-old, and now he’s decided that he’s going to read every book, ever.

He gets really excited about the part where he’ll never actually complete this goal. “There’s always more being written!” he’ll say, brainy motormouth starting to go too fast for Dave to catch all of it. “And, if you think about it, we’re hardly missing out on anything, because you can read about thousands more lives than the sole one that you got to live.”

It’s during one of these conversations that Dave realizes that there’ll be books about the war, probably there are plenty already. Lewis hasn’t been able to bring himself to read any yet, but he says he’s looking forward to when he is up for it.

“Like I’m saying, we were there, but we could only see it from our tiny point of view. Besides,” he says, wry humor flattening out his voice, “we never got to find out how it ends.”

Which is true. But Dave isn’t sure that it really matters. Over the course of literally forever, he’ll probably change his mind, but for now, he’ll steer clear. Thinking about any of that still gives him a weird pain in his chest, a feeling that seems like it shouldn’t be possible over here.

Part of him wants to ask Lewis to keep an eye out, to let Dave know if he ever reads a book about a Klaus Hargreeves, but it’s such a dumb, lovesick long shot that he keeps it to himself.

Dave would read the hell out of a book about Klaus - he could read an entire series. But the likelihood that the one person he can’t get out of his head is also someone that a journalist ran into and cajoled a life story out of… Dave hadn’t even really gotten a whole life story.

There was that night, when Klaus set loose some of his secrets like they were bullets, like they were worth nothing, or everything.

A dark night, when the deep and stormy jungle seems to surround them closer than usual, and Klaus’ mood is all of that and more, darker and deeper and stormier, and cruel and frantic and delirious and wild, and his hands are shaking so badly that he can’t light up.

“You want to hear something really fucked up, Katz?” The use of his last name is an indicator that actually he probably doesn’t - they were at first names, even starting to drop unthinking, inadvertent pet names when they were alone - but Klaus snorts the smack from between his knuckles and tells him, “I think this war, this fucking war, is probably the best thing that ever happened to me.”

He laughs and laughs, the sound gaunt and sizzling, until the mortar fire picks up again and chokes him silent. Then he grins in a way Dave has never seen on him before, a rabid snarl, like his expression won’t be complete until there is blood slicking his teeth. He aims it up at the sky, where the constant smoke makes every night a starless one.

But for all that Klaus is a ‘soldier,’ he’s not very good at being combative, and it crumples out of him in seconds. He folds in on himself, clutching his shoulders, his ribs, clenching so tightly that he’s trembling, covering up his nose and mouth as he starts in on a whispered mantra, “Fuck,” repeated over and over on every inhale and exhale like he can only breath in curses, and then he presses his fingers into his eyes, with the same vibratingly forceful pressure that a moment ago he was putting to the bones of his chest and Dave is worried he is going to crush those gorgeous, haunted, perfect eyes right out of his head.

“Hey, hey,” he says, a manta of his own. Dave’s light touch to Klaus’ elbow makes his whole torso jerk away, but he moves his hands away from his eyes. He grips the bottom half of his face instead, but his shoulders consciously drop and he’s stopped the swearing as he clearly tries to get a hold of his breathing.

“There you go,” Dave says, soothingly, even though he knows that’s nothing more than an adverb, a modifier. He can say things in a soothing way, but nothing can actively soothe what’s happening here. “It’s alright - well, it’s not, but you’re not alone. This place is hell, everyone here has been right where you are right now. You’ll pull through it.”

At first he thinks Klaus is crying, but then he realizes it’s laughter. “No,” Klaus manages between gasping chuckles, “I actually mean it. The Viet-fucking-nam War is an actual high point in my shitty goddamned life. That is such bullshit!” He swipes dirty tears off of his cheeks, and Dave realizes that it’s both. He’s heard of ‘crying from laughter,’ but it turns out that Klaus does it the other way around. Eventually he comes to learn that this is a side effect of that ‘goddamned life’ of his.

But at the time, Dave flounders, out of his depth with this unfamiliar swirl of seemingly incongruous emotions. He stammers out something about good times and family, and it makes Klaus let out a cracked peal of laughter.

“My family!” he exclaims, smile and tone forcefully bright. He grows immediately brittle and says, “I’m going to die here, in Vietnam, and my family will never even know. I mean they’ll know I’m dead, but they’ll figure I’m in a ditch somewhere, or someone’s basement, or it doesn't really matter where. Just another brother that disappeared, but finally the one that it makes sense to lose.”

His knuckles go back up to his eyes again. All the snarling humor is gone, left him alone with nothing but weighty sorrow. “Ben’s all alone, and it’s my fault, again.” He breaks himself off to stifle a sob, clamps down on his quivering lower lip and turns the sound into a high, keening whine that claws up his throat. Dave wants to reach out, and his hands are ahead of him, halfway outstretched, but as much as he wants to comfort Klaus, for some reason that he can’t understand, he’s nervous to touch him.

“And this place. The things people can do to each other.” Klaus shakes his head, and the long, desolate stare is at least familiar ground. It’s the same in every pair of eyes that Dave has seen since he got in country. But Klaus surprises him again, he’s always doing that, because when he turns them on Dave, those big eyes have something new and unreadable in them. “And that woman, I’m pretty sure she died getting me out of there, and it sucks, all of it is so fucking spectacularly horrifically awful, and I would pick it all anyway, nothing could be enough for me not to pick this, because I’m a colossally selfish fuck-up, and you are the best thing that ever happened to me.”

And Dave is no selfless saint, either, because he understands this sentiment intimately.

He teases him for it later. Gently, because he holds those words and the person who said them so precious in his heart. It’s a week after that night, and Dave’s wheedling Klaus to share his tin of peaches, which he's pretending he’s going to store away in his rucksack. He knows Klaus will do it because he never seems to care about the rations they get, and he also knows Klaus will give him a playfully hard time over it because light bickering is something they both like to do for fun. They are clearly both younger siblings.

“This dessert is very important to me! Keeping it as a future snack is going to be what motivates me to stay alive out here.”

Dave says, “Oh, are those peaches the best thing that ever happened to you? Because I thought that was me.” He points at himself. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I remember you saying that. About me. The best thing that ever happened to you.” He’s not even through with the phrase when Klaus tosses the can over.

His face is heated up, which is something Dave hasn’t seen on him before. Turns out that Klaus is ridiculously attractive when he’s blushing. Unsurprisingly, since he is ridiculously attractive at all times.

“In my defense,” Klaus says throatily as he tries to find his way back to haughty banter, which seems unnecessary to Dave, who is enjoying this bashful, happily flustered Klaus, “you are at least partially to blame for that. Any normal person would have made me shut up way before I got that far.”

…made him shut up? In the midst of what was clearly a full-blown breakdown?

“Like, as soon as I started talking.” Klaus chuckles, because he really is saying this thinking there’s a joke somewhere in there and not another reminder of how Klaus’ definition of ‘normal’ behavior doesn’t even come close to Dave’s definition of ‘decent.’ He takes hold of Klaus’ hand, but before he comes up with the right words, Klaus reads it all in his expression.

It makes his face fall, makes him look away, and either Klaus interpreted him wrong or ‘I would never make you shut up and no one ever should’ is a statement that makes Klaus’ face fall, which, Dave has a whole ‘nother diatribe his face could say about that. He watches Klaus swallow compulsively a few times in profile and he doesn’t know what to do, because he certainly didn’t intend for this small, bright reprieve from the never-ending horrors of modern warfare to pivot into a sad place. He won’t let go of Klaus’ hand.

But then Klaus turns back to him and he’s kissing Dave, kissing him ravenously, kissing him like this kindness from Dave is the first time Klaus has ever tasted it and he’s starving for more.

To be honest, Dave can’t remember where the peaches ended up.

It becomes another familiarity of Klaus - he’ll make casual jokes that Dave can’t find funny at all. It’s comedy born from a desperately sad life. Sometimes Dave’ll push his upset aside so they can stay in a pleasant moment, but other times, other things, he has to bring up right then so he can make sure that Klaus knows that Dave won’t ever treat him that way, and that he shouldn’t accept anyone else treating him like that, either.

Kissing Klaus is one of his all-time favorite pastimes, but sometimes his wild, reckless, insatiable kisses make Dave want to cry.

The point of it all is that Klaus only ever talked about his family in roundabout ways, snippets in conversation that Dave can add up to make a wavering image of a life, but nothing substantial enough for Dave to have the information he needs to find him. He tries, he does, but the one solid thing he knows, the city Klaus grew up in, is a huge place, so all he can do is watch crowds go by and try to see if anyone looks like they are from a big, shitty family that doesn't value their treasure of a brother in the way he deserves.

He can admit that this is not very effective, and also maybe a tad biased.

It does turn out that Dave can look for him, though. He learns about this from his sister, after she arrives.

It’s the entirety of his little nuclear family reunited. All of them now missing from the face of the earth. It’s weird to think about it like that, so he tries not to. He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t have to try, over here. Or be so irritated about the part where he didn’t know until Rachel got here that he could go and look for Klaus over in the real world.

Things have been getting more vibrant, lately. Dave has been getting sharper at the edges. He’s a little concerned about it, and he doesn’t think he should be able to be concerned, either, which is irritating, and it’s a frustrating, impossible cycle that prickles in the back of his mind.

Everyone comes here, eventually, where it is soft and tender, and sadness is only a memory, but maybe Dave is broken. Maybe that’s why Klaus never comes for him.

Because not to keep dwelling on it, but beyond the fact that Rachel says it’s the new millennia already, there was also that thing where it had sort of seemed like Klaus could talk to the dead. Is there a conclusion he’s supposed to be able to draw that isn’t either 1) Klaus was a liar or 2) what had been the all-consuming true love of Dave’s small life hadn’t been more than a momentary fling for gorgeous, confident, experienced, alive Klaus?

Dave needs to get out of his tiny little house. He goes on walks more often.

The trouble with the walks is that now he knows about the bend in the road that leads to literally anywhere anytime. Rachel didn’t even realize she was showing him something new when she brought him there to go meet his grandnieces. He’d been able to meet his two nephews before he’d shipped out, little babies he’d been scared to hold for fear of breaking them, and her daughter wasn’t born until after Dave had died, but now she has grown girls of her own.

They stop in at a birthday party, a dance recital, a snowball fight. Their ages fluctuate, scrolling backwards and forwards in time, chubby baby fat giving way to knobby knees and then back to a time before Mariah could put words together into sentences. It’s wonderful and amazing and all you have to do is turn left at the end of his street into that spot that always felt weird to him. He’s an idiot for not exploring it earlier because you can go visit anywhere you want, and he’s guiltily a little absent from Timmy’s bar mitzvah on their first trip because he’s mainly thinking about how when they come back, he’s going to turn right back around and go find Klaus.

But then, yeah, he doesn’t really know how to find him. Dave has a well-worn list in his brain, little traits and behaviors he’s collected and filed away under the title, ‘Reasons Why He Doesn’t Need to Worry About Klaus (because clearly he can take care of himself),’ although when he’d originally drafted it back in ‘Nam, it had reached the opposite conclusion, and now it vacillates by the day.

Things like how Klaus could fall asleep anywhere - not well, no one ever slept well, out there, but Klaus could plop down on the soaked jungle floor and catch an instant cat nap even with the violent rain emphatically pelting down on his head. Or how most of the newbies had to go through a phase of hemming and hawing about their small rations before their stomachs shrunk to match, but as soon as Klaus showed up he was already sharing his portions with the others. On the one hand, it showed that Klaus could take care of himself, that he clearly was a scrapper. On the other hand, why?

Now Dave tries to use these details to help fill out a picture of where Klaus might have been, before the war. Sometimes his stories had made it seem like he was from an affluent background, but then he’d crack jokes about how at least the army thought he was a good enough investment to put boots on his feet, and everyone knows rich kids didn’t have to serve.

They were both older than the draft. Dave had volunteered because at least he’d had the chance to hold two of his sister’s babies, he’d been able to graduate high school without knowing he was immediately heading off to die in a merciless foreign war. It was just little kids they were sending off to get killed, and when Dave left, he’d already lived more life than most of them ever got. And it didn’t seem fair, to prioritize his future over theirs, when he knew that his future wasn’t particularly apple pie.

He was never going to get married and have kids, it just wasn’t an option. It wasn’t that he wanted to die, but it did seem like his life was a more practical one to lose, in a logical, cost-benefit sort of way. In theory, when he’d signed up, before he’d actually gotten in country, he’d been comfortable with the idea of cutting short his own empty future if it meant that some 19-year-old kid could make it home to his sweetheart and live to meet grandchildren that Dave could never have.

That’s the heroic sounding reason, anyway. There was also the bit where he had never really come out to his folks and he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but he knew he probably would have to, at some point, unless, well…

He didn’t really have a grasp of what his parents would think. But he figures any father would be prouder of having a dead war hero for a son than a faggot, right? So far, Dave still hasn’t been proven right because it still hasn’t come up. Hasn’t been proven wrong yet either.

Maybe Klaus joined up for the same reasons, although he had always seemed so free - so free it made Dave nervous - about his preferences. Maybe his asshole of a rich father was the one with the problem and he’d shipped his son off to keep him quiet.

Because that was another entry on the list - the way that Klaus could take it on the chin, how easily he would accept harsh words and rough treatment and respond with a smile. You could slap Klaus around until he had a shiner and a split lip and he’d still happily get along with you, and that’s not a hypothetical, Dave has seen it happen. ‘Subservience’ isn’t exactly the word, but it’s close enough that it makes Dave uncomfortable to think about where Klaus picked up this dubious “skill.”

The trouble with the name of this list is in the subtitle, then. Dave doesn’t need to worry about Klaus’ ability to keep going, he is unquestionably a survivor, but he’s never seen enough value in ‘taking care of himself’ to bother with learning how.

His walks are as unproductive as they ever were, but instead of carving endless circles through his dreamy perfumed little neighborhood, Dave immediately turns left and spends his days exploring the city. He can’t feel the air there, or smell it, but that seems like a small blessing in some of the dank corners he ends up finding.

He was in the army, he knows how to make and follow a thorough search pattern, and he does. He does and he does and he does, in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, and he must know this place better than Klaus ever has because Klaus apparently never went outside. Dave never finds him, never even spots anyone who feels like they could conceivably be a younger or older version of the man he once knew.

Walking every inch of a city for decades gives Dave a lot of time to think. He thinks about all of those oddities that set Klaus apart as someone who didn’t quite belong. There were the hugely visible ones, like how offhandedly he would call himself ‘pansexual’ as if that was a word that existed and also not a big deal to just say out there in the open, and then the way that he had arrived, literally out of nowhere, with no training, no dog tags, no actual clothes.

But there were small ones, too. Since Dave has apparently taken on the role of Klaus Hargreeves’ unofficial archivist, he’s amassed a readily available collection of these less noticeable quirks. And, obviously the tenses get confusing when you live in a timeless place, including the ways in which you aren’t ‘living’ and you do a lot of spectral time-traveling, but to be clear - Dave has been taking note of everything about Klaus Hargreeves from minute one. It’s a volunteer position, and it’s been filled.

One of the earlier instances, the Beatles thing, is also one of the strongest in support of a theory that was too crazy for Dave to believe, back then. Now it makes too much sense for Dave to let himself believe.

It had started mainly as an excuse to touch Klaus, and a pretty good one, in Dave’s opinion, at least on the scale of ridiculous ways to excuse flirting. He’s humming the song, has been for days without figuring out the reason it got stuck in his brain, when he notices Klaus’ left palm flash into his vision and it clicks.

Klaus looks alarmed when Dave grabs onto his hands, but he’d only been in country for about a week and he still looks alarmed about pretty much everything. “You say goodbye and I say hello,” Dave sings the lyrics out loud, waggling the appropriate hand when they come up.

“Uh, goodbye, I guess? What is going on?” Klaus is looking at him with wide eyes, but the confusion has pivoted from concern to amusement.

Dave keeps going for a few more lines, although it’s not like the lyrics are varied enough that one of them will clear it up for him if he hasn’t gotten it already. “You’re telling me you don’t know this song?”

Klaus shakes his head. “Am I supposed to?”

One of their three previous conversations had been about home, like it usually is with the newbies out here, and Klaus had cooed at Dave for being a sheltered midwestern boy, while also managing not to mention much more about himself than the city he was from. “They don’t play The Beatles in the big city, huh?”

“Oh wow, The Beatles, no, right, of course. With that famous song.” Klaus says it like a question and smiles at him, and the truth of it is that Dave doesn’t care how under a rock this hot, dumb cherry might be as long as he keeps giving Dave smiles like that. Then he sings, unrecognizably at the time, two months before the single was released, “Hey Jude, da da duh dah, take a sad song and duh duh something. Totally got it.”

So now it’s Dave’s turn for confused but amused. “Did you hit your head on the way over here?”

Klaus grins. “Repeatedly.” He says it like it’s an inside joke that he’s sharing with the open air, but then his expression shrinks serious and sad again.

“Who’s the president?” Dave jokes. He wants to coax some more smiles out of Klaus, bring him back to the present and out of whatever sobering memory of the past makes his eyes look like that. It’s a partial success. Klaus blinks back to life and gets busy yanking at the straps on the pack they’d rustled up for him.

“Lyndon B. Jackson? What year is it? Nixon?” Klaus tries. “What year is it?”

It takes Dave a minute to answer. “’68?” It sounds like a question because it is, one that can also be pronounced, ‘Don’t you know?’

Klaus just brushes it off. “Doesn’t help. As if I ever paid enough attention in class. Lyndon B. …”

“Johnson.”

In class?

“Right! That’s what I said.”

It’s not.

“What I meant.”

Dave takes hold of those tattooed hands again, but now it’s to still them as he tries to get a good look into Klaus’ eyes. “Are you sure you don’t actually have a concussion?”

“It would explain some things, right?” Klaus says cheerfully, “but not the things you think.”

Dave’s not a doctor. He’s seen medics checking eyes after hits to the head, but he won’t know how to tell if something is wrong; he doesn’t know what he’s looking for in Klaus’ eyes. But he does find that they are very green, and that he would like to spend a lot more time with them.

Which is why the theory - that Klaus seemed so out of place in ’68 because he’s from the future - is so unacceptable. ‘The future’ is just so big. It’s too sprawlingly, incomprehensibly vast for Dave to succeed in finding one very specific pair of eyes, and he really needs to see them again. He never got enough time.

There is one place, of course, that Dave knows he can find Klaus. It’s not a place he wants to revisit. He’d hoped at least in dying that he’d seen the last of that godforsaken place.

He stops turning left in the morning and goes to the center of town. Takes a pottery class. Only makes it to two sessions before he stops going outside entirely.

He needs to get out of the house, he gets that. He’s frustrated that he needs to do anything, over here, but he’s pretty sure that spending less time alone is something he needs to do.

There’s always these community gatherings in the town center, whenever you want to go to one, carnivals or concerts or cookouts, and he manages to go with his family to a couple. They don’t seem worried about his turn to the reclusive, but time moves differently for everyone here, and Dave gets the sense that it’s bent around him to hide it from them. This place isn’t designed with space for worrying about your loved ones. Not in most cases.
Dave wouldn’t mind getting a bit of the same consideration, if anyone cares.

It’s not true, actually. Sometimes he’ll think that, that he’d like to be set free to enjoy some of the peace that everyone else here gets to have. But as soon as he thinks it, he gets hit by a wave of anxiety bigger than any of the gnawing concern he normally feels. Because there isn’t a cut clean enough that could excise the worry but leave the love in place. He doesn’t think he could feel the second without some of the first, not until - well, not until he has good reason not to worry anymore.

The problem isn’t with the events themselves. They are always, of course, the perfect blend of winking sunshine and buzzy hubbub. They draw in a lot of people, though. It’s not that Dave minds the crowd, exactly, it’s just that he can’t stop himself from spending the whole time scanning faces. Every time he spots a mess of brown curls is a cruel prank; his brain knows better, but his heart leaps anyway and he has to watch, over and over again, as his doomed hopes come into focus as anyone, everyone, except the person he is looking for.

It bleeds some of the fun out of the festivities.

So he doesn’t go to too many of those.

Powloski pulls Dave out of his little corner of suburbia, just once, and into the sprawling metropolis where he lives in a blocky, towering apartment building. It’s a terrific illustration of that adage about one man’s paradise being another man’s ‘fine for a visit but never for longer than a day.’ In some ways, it reminds him of the city he’s spent so long scouring, but it’s much cleaner, and everyone here can see and hear him, not just a handful of mangled, broken spirits schlepping along their endless, bloody paths. It makes for a nicer neighborhood, not having them clawing around, but Dave’s still not impressed. Once you’ve seen one tall building, you’ve seen them all, really.

What he’s actually come to see is the group of vets that like to meet up and get horrendously drunk every now and then. It’s always growing, slowly but surely, and whenever someone new arrives, it’s cause for a raucous celebration. Powloski says someone new arrives nearly every meeting - maybe whenever one of them moves in, it sets off some unconscious ripple that prompts them to come together.

This time, the gathering is for Dave. He didn’t know that, going in, or he probably wouldn’t have come, but it ends up being a good thing. Gives him a bit of cover, a starting point of ‘catching up’ chatter so when every conversation comes around to the same thing, he can almost believe himself that it’s not the whole reason he came, but just a coincidence.

“Oh yeah, Jude,” Dave will say, calling him by his nickname because that story had definitely gotten around. “I remember him, sure. Have you seen him? Over here, or back there?”

Very casual.

The closest thing he gets to an answer turns out to be nothing. Rapp snaps his fingers a few times, scraping up a memory. “Wait, what was the kid’s actual name again?”

“Klaus.” Dave’s mouth is dry.

“No, that’s not - Hargreeves! Why is that familiar?”

Some guy, he joined up after Dave had died, supplies, “You’re thinking of that actress,” and what does he know about it anyway, this guy’s never even met Klaus. It’s completely irrational anger, and Dave gathers it up at his sternum so he can let it all go in an exhale.

It’s what he had anticipated, that no one would know anything and Klaus would stay just as mysterious as he ever was. It’s a disappointment, but the rest of the get-together is surprisingly nicer than he expected it to be. There’s none of the muddy sadness that Dave thinks would unavoidably smear the sidelines of an occasion like this if they weren’t all over here, where healing is (perhaps literally) in the air. The other key difference is that they never lose anyone. Not everyone’s here yet, but they will be, so there’s no need for mourning or missing.

After they say their goodbyes to the group, Powloski drives the point home in a way that seems just as meticulously unscripted as Dave’s line of questioning. “Everyone gets here, and when they do, it’s a bone fide happily ever after. There’s nothing worth being sad over, if you think about it like that, right?”

Dave thinks about it like that, and it’s true, there isn’t much tragedy in war after all when you know that the casualties were just people arriving early to their happy ending. So there isn’t any good reason for him to be so squirrelly about going back there. Simple as that.

It’s unsettling to be here without feeling the wet air weighing him down and clogging his skin, without needing to swap away a single mosquito. He flinches at the sound of the artillery, but he knows he doesn’t need to.

It’s unsettling, period. He’d always been sure there was nothing that could make him come back. Klaus continues to defy expectation.

He knows this isn’t the argument Powloski was trying to make. In fact, it’s likely the opposite, but Dave’s house is next to a time-traveling tunnel and he hasn’t seen his boyfriend’s face in nearly half a century.

He didn’t have a specific night in mind when he came through, just sometime nearer the end of his tour than the beginning. Not that it matters how close they were at this point. Because he knows, he knows, he does know, that 'visiting' people this way is a one-sided interaction, watching a movie from the inside but still as powerless to effect the story as he’d be on his couch at home. The shitty little hopeful voice inside his head keeps whispering, ‘but maybe,’ and he tells it to fuck off. It doesn’t.

Making his way through the firebase, he sees a couple faces that he saw just the other day at the meeting. Much grubbier and hollower on this side than they are over there. It’s not as sad as it could be, though, because he knows, for an absolute fact, that their faces will fill back out and they’ll all find their smiles again.

He’s got his own to find, so he doesn’t linger, a tether in his center pulling him to the edge of camp. Most of the guys out here, Dave included, didn’t like being outside on the nights they were lucky enough to have an inside to go into. Too many sounds up in the trees and you couldn’t see what was making them. But Klaus liked being out there, and Dave liked being with Klaus, and that - there he is, right there.

There’s that mess of dark hair, facing out into the shadowed night, thin line of smoke threading over his shoulder and folding in with the rest of the country’s smoldering air. Dave stops so fast that he probably would have fallen over his feet if physics still meant anything to him on this side. It’s him, it is, it’s really him this time, but Dave can’t go any closer, because what if it’s not?

And so that’s it then, the thrilling conclusion to the decades-long story of the biggest idiot to ever die, on the hunt for one last glimpse of his lover’s face, and he settles for the back of a head because he’s too chickenshit to move.

Klaus glances over his shoulder. “That was fast.”

He turns his head back around like it’s nothing. This moment has wiped Dave’s brain entirely clear and he can’t even remember how to breathe, but it’s nothing. No big deal.

There’s some sort of autopilot that goes with the self-destruct, at least, because somehow he says, “It felt like a long time.”

Klaus laughs, and holy hell he’s missed listening to that, to the myriad of Klaus’ beautiful variations on the theme. He looks at Dave again, hiding a smile behind his raised shoulder like it’s a fan. “You can think of nothing but me while I’m away,” he says and lazily lifts his wrist to his forehead, playing like he’s a besotted Regency heroine, because it’s a joke, what he’s saying, but Dave is nodding helplessly anyway. Dave doesn’t have to act besotted.

“People have said I have an addictive personality, but I don’t think that’s what they meant,” Klaus says. Realizing that Dave is rooted to the spot, he turns to fully face him. “Think I like this new interpretation better.”

So now Klaus is standing there, right there, looking at Dave, and smiling at him, and right there. And talking to him, because it was all true, it always has been - Klaus is magic and he can see the dead and he can see Dave and frankly, Vietnam doesn’t seem like such a bad place to spend his forever when he doesn’t have to worry about dying anymore and when Klaus is right there and smiling at him like that because Dave can make him smile like that.

“You’re a miracle,” Dave says. He doesn’t intend to, but it’s true.

“Don’t think anyone’s said that before.”

“You’re an angel,” he says, and it’s almost a question.

There’s a crease in Klaus’ brow as he takes a drag. “That one’s definitely new.”

But maybe Dave’s not wrong. The way Klaus arrived, in a burst of radiant light; the way Klaus disappeared from the unit just as abruptly, never to be seen again on either continent. The way he was never able to say much about where he’d come from, but how it was clearly not quite the same world as the rest of them. He was always humming songs no one had ever heard, using slang no one understood, and not understanding theirs. He had that weird connection with death, the way he had survived that explosion, and how he would sometimes pass messages along from the men they had lost. To any outsider who asked, the guys would scoff and say that Jude was full of bullshit, but whenever he had something to say, they would always gather in close and listen carefully.

Maybe he is like Dave’s saying, a softhearted angel, came to their unit for a short time to ameliorate the horrors around them. Maybe that’s why Dave doesn’t fit quite right over on his side, because the scales have to balance out, and he was blessed with his miracle ahead of time.

Maybe when he’s back where he belongs and feeling particularly peeved about his strange disconnect, he’ll wrap himself up in this theory like it’s a blanket and let it keep him warm for as long as he can let himself believe in it, because he knows it’s not true. It’s a flight of fancy brought on by the heady rush of seeing this gorgeous creature after too long apart.

Klaus is all of these inexplicable, magical, wondrous things, but he’s also probably the most human person Dave has ever met, a contradictory mess of devastating empathy constantly bleeding through barbed defensiveness, confident in his fears and failures, an all-too-willing servant to his vices. Not acknowledging his faults is a disservice; it’s like how, even out here, coated in sweat and grime, lit against the backdrop of senseless violence, under the haze and glare of weaponry, his beauty shines so bright. No list of shortcomings can make Klaus a bad person, because in the face of those shortcomings, the way he strives towards good is itself the proof that he is an exceptionally good person.

“I want to know everything about you,” Dave says, because he does, in that obsessive, romantic way, but also because with Klaus being able to talk to him, he can finally get usable information to find him, outside of this war zone. “You never told me enough.”

“It’s usually the opposite of that. People beg me to stop talking.”

Dave shakes his head and holds himself back from tackling that one. Following up on detours like that is at least 50% of the reason why he knows so few actual facts about Klaus’ past. “I always want to listen you to talk. I want you to tell me everything.”

The good humor goes out of Klaus like a popped balloon. “Guess it had to get to this at some point,” he says to the ground. He’s wry as he asks Dave, “So, what? You want to hear about my miserable prick of a father? How none of us could ever do anything good enough to win his approval, but he always seemed to hold a special spot in his rotting husk of a heart for despising me?”

It’s not the first time Dave has heard about this, but it’s always so baffling. “How could he?” He’s know it’s not a question that will get an actual answer, and it doesn’t really deserve one, but he can’t leave it unsaid.

Klaus gestures, first at his chest and then sweeping his hands wide and down to include his whole self. “Pick a reason,” he snorts. “I could give you a list of my many failings, but I always find it’s more fun for people to discover them on their own - I’m the world’s shittiest Jumble.” He grins, but it’s tight and his eyes are hard, an expression of combativeness being locked down.

Dave knows enough to understand that the flare of anger isn’t actually directed at him, and Klaus knows that Dave knows, so the apology is unspoken and forgiven at the same time.

Klaus scratches a grubby hand through his hair. “You know what else is fun, actually, is listening to you test drive those new compliments; maybe we could go back to doing that.” He offers a small, but real, smile, and then his gaze snags. His mouth keeps running, but the stream of words flows unevenly as he watches a VC ghost shamble past them. “My gut reaction is that they might be a bit too worshipful for everyday use, but my mind is open.”

The ghost can’t move too fast with one of his legs warped backward the way it is, and he’s still in shock, whispering some kind of unending mantra under his breath, punctuated by hissing moans when he jostles his fatal injury. And he’s young. So young, like so many of the GIs. Dave doesn’t know why it is that some spirits stay wandering around over here, but the ones he’s seen always seem to be clutching tight to the trauma of a violent death. When they can let go, he thinks, they’ll find their way over, but that’s a particularly cruel irony.

“I’m willing to be persuaded,” Klaus is saying in that distracted way, “or review any other candidates you might have lined up.”

As the kid slips into the darkness again, he has Dave’s well-wishes at his back, hoping that he’ll find his way soon.

But then he realizes that Klaus has stopped talking, and realizes that this is likely because Dave has also stopped talking, and Dave rips his eyes away from the ghost’s path to meet Klaus’ narrowed ones. Dave’s response is stalled while he tries remember what they were talking about, and that’s another hit of irony, a role reversal for a conversation with Klaus.

It’s not too hard to get back to, because it is unfortunately familiar ground. Klaus hates his dad, and Klaus hates himself. The painful swell in his chest is also familiar, so although he means to be on a fact-finding mission, and although it was intended as a joke, Dave does what Klaus asked of him.

He lets loose. “You’re breathtaking. Astonishing. I can’t stop thinking about you and I never want to. I don’t know how I got so lucky. Being loved by you is life-changing.”

Klaus’ face is a shade somewhere beyond red. He’s blinking and his breath is hitching and, yeah, Dave can understand that this might be a lot from Klaus’ perspective. He’s not entirely sure what exact point in their relationship he’s dropped in on, although it doesn’t really matter; Klaus had never seemed fully at ease with hearing bald-faced declarations of love out loud like this.

“Holy christ, Dave,” he stammers, “you can’t just say stuff like that.” He presses a hand to his chest, like his heart is literally effected. He chokes out a giggling chuckle, an effort to push his emotions back out to a comfortable distance, one where he can laugh at them. “Gotta warn a guy before you start in with that kind of dirty talk.”

“Nothing dirty about it, darlin'. Just the truth,” Dave says plainly.

“Filthy,” Klaus shudders. “You’ve got to stop it, Katz, you’re going to ruin me.”

“Not possible. You’re - ” strong, and resilient, and brave, and Dave doesn’t think there are enough adjectives in the English language to capture all of the amazing qualities of Klaus - “incredible.”

“Stop. Talking.” Klaus takes a step towards him, his breathing heavy, his eyes sharp and searching, scared but open.

Scared, but open. That’s really Klaus’ whole thing, isn’t it? It’s a potent combination, poignant in a way Dave can’t even begin to describe. So for now, he says, “I’m in love with you. I never got to say it enough. I love you.”

“If you don’t stop talking, I will make you.” But the edge in his voice isn’t distress anymore. Playfulness gleams in his eyes.

“You can try,” Dave shoots back, forgetting.

Klaus says, “That a challenge, soldier?” and he’s moving forward before Dave has time to fully regret his word choice and he reaches up to the back of Dave’s neck to pull him in for a kiss. Then it’s not playfulness making his eyes shine, because he can try, but he can’t, actually.

He barely brushes up against the edge of where Dave isn’t and he knows. He yanks his hand away so hard and fast that it sends him back a few steps. He lightly rubs his fingertips together as he stares down at them.

Dave hadn’t been purposefully hiding the part where he was a ghost, because it was possible Klaus knew and could tell on sight, and Dave hadn’t actively avoided asking if he knew, except that maybe he had. It isn’t unreasonable, to be a little nervous to bring up your death to a loved one. It’s not very brave, either, and the cost for the shortcut is paid by the people who find out the hard way.

Although, Klaus is calmer than expected. “No,” he says quietly, sounding more disappointed than anything else. When he looks at Dave, he’s wearing almost the same face as when they met, like he’s hopelessly lost. “But you were - I just - how did - ” He reaches out a trembling hand, but pauses halfway there, and then snaps it back, curls his fingers in, like he’s afraid to touch him. And that’s understandable, but it hurts.

He says, “No,” again, emphatic and stern this time, like if his tone is authoritative enough, it can enact the change he wants. Then his lip quivers, and the rest of him falls apart.

It’s his only word, “No no no no,” over and over, blending together into one continuous whine, sliding higher the more his body crumples. He wipes away at his eyes, catching the tears welling there, painting his face with them as his hands move back, clawing through his hair until he’s bunched it up in fistfuls behind his ears, his arms a cage pressing close around his head.

Klaus can see ghosts, but that doesn’t mean he necessarily knows that time-traveling ghosts are a thing that exist. “Oh, shit,” Dave curses. “Hey, no, sorry, it’s not what you think. I really fucked this up, it’s not what you think.”

He doesn’t particularly expect this to get through; he’s seen Klaus shatter before and he gets pretty senseless to the world around him while he pulls himself back together. It lands with an unexpected impact.

Klaus’ fists shoot down to his sides and his entire torso goes ramrod stiff, which isn’t usually a Klaus adjective, and he yells at him, “Oh, right, I’m just confused, like this exact thing hasn’t happened before, exactly like this!” He cuts himself off, and freezes, like his whole self has been put on pause for a moment, which in Dave’s experience isn’t a great sign.

He clicks back into motion, saying, “Yeah. No. Actually, yeah.” Not a great sign. “Yeah, no, this isn’t happening, actually, that’d be too - it’s not.” He keeps making little facial expressions that look like he’s still talking things out, but without sound, and that might be because Klaus doesn’t seem to be breathing anymore. He’s on a constant inhale, his chest and neck straining up and up like he’s going to tear himself apart and float away by force of will.

It’s instinctual, thoughtless, stupid habit that makes Dave reach out to soothe him. He puts his hand right through Klaus’ shoulder. It does at least shock Klaus into breathing again.

He reels back, throws his tattooed palms up as if in surrender, and shouts, “Fuck!”

It’s the final confirmation Klaus never wanted, and he concaves.

Dave has gotten everything royally ass-backwards. He doesn’t know how to fix this, doesn’t know the way to explain that he isn’t actually dead yet but in a few months that will change, and doesn’t think telling him that is likely to make things better, anyway. He’s responsible for the keening sounds Klaus is making, and his chest hurts worse than it did when it had a hole blown through it. He’d suspected (but hadn’t allowed himself to fully hope) that Klaus might be able to see him, but he had known that seeing the dead was a torment for him. Of course it wouldn’t be any different seeing Dave this way - it would be worse.

He’s caught in a panic, unable to decide if it’s better for him to stick around and try to explain anyway or if he should just snap back home and out of Klaus’ life. Then Dave shows up.

The living Dave, the Dave that belongs here, the Dave that belongs with Klaus. He didn’t know it was possible to be this grateful for yourself, and this envious.

“Hey, sorry, I was - ” he says as he walks up to them, although his past self is not aware that Klaus is not alone. He moves right through Dave’s body - his ghost body - and in every possible way, it’s a disturbing sensation.

For his part, Klaus looks like his brain is about to explode as he stares at his two boyfriends. Not that it had ever particularly bothered Dave, obviously, but this whole experience is doing a lot to put Klaus’ odd behavior into crystal clear perspective.

He really screwed this up.

Alive Dave is doing all of the soothing touches that Dead Dave wishes he were able to do. Klaus eventually wrests his horrified focus away from Dead Dave, who is dimly feeling like calling himself by this new moniker might be doing his future self some damage. But Future Dave is still Dead Dave, so it’s not really a top priority.

Klaus grabs on to the hand he can actually hold and presses Dave’s fingers to his lips. Even when he breaks the kiss, he still clings tightly to Dave’s hand. He won’t let go. He tucks their intertwined hands below his chin, close to his heart, like it’s the only thing keeping him upright, like somehow it’s the pillar supporting his entire slight frame.

“It’s true what they say - the weed really is stronger out here.” Klaus offers the explanation with a shrug and a smile, and Dave shakes his head fondly and accepts it. Just accepts Klaus shrugging off his own very real and very visible suffering, accepts it like it’s normal, just ‘Klaus being Klaus,’ not a big deal, a joke if you just look at it like it’s funny. Alive Dave goes with it.

At least he doesn’t say ‘you look like you saw a ghost,’ but his comment isn’t much better. “Looks like a bummer.”

“Awful,” Klaus whispers, and he’s staring at Dave - Dead Dave - as he says it.

Dave doesn’t even remember this night. He wants to, to be able to recall this and reframe things somehow. Come to a fresh understanding of some part of their shared past, so there can be something new that they share that isn’t the awful way Klaus is staring at him.

He’s pretty pissed with himself. Both living and dead. Whichever way you slice it, Dave is responsible for a lot of things going terribly wrong tonight. He never should have come. Which means this is his last chance, the last time he’ll see him, and he’s gripped by a sudden, frenzied panic trying to find the right words to say, to impart something that can fix this, that can help Klaus in a few month's time, when this dumb, obliviously lucky Alive Dave turns into something awful that appears to cause Klaus physical pain to look at.

Dumbass Dave slings his arm across Klaus’ shoulders like it’s nothing to him and says maybe they should head inside. The two of them turn to go.

“Klaus. Klaus, wait, hold on,” Dave says, because this can’t be it, this can’t be how it ends with them. This can’t be it, it can’t be. “Klaus, please, Klaus!”

If looks could kill, Dave would be twice as dead as he is already. The fucking look Klaus gives him.

With deadly conviction, soft and strong, Klaus says, “Leave me alone.”

Soft and strong. Scared but open. Eminently fallible, unconditionally perfection. Dave loves him more than he can even understand, and now he’s hurt him in ways he can’t fully understand, either. Some of love’s paradoxes are infinitely more beautiful than others.

“Not you,” Klaus says, nuzzling into the shoulder of Fucking Blissfully Ignorant Lucky Bastard Dave.

Dead Dave lets them have their time. They didn’t have enough of it. He fizzes out, leaves his world behind. “Okay,” he says.

So he makes his eggs in the morning, digs in his garden in the afternoon, drinks when the sky gets dark. One thing he can’t do is cry, and that’s not some macho bullshit. He really can’t cry. His brain’ll bring up Klaus’ murderous look and then dart away before he gets the chance to sort any of his feelings out. Whoever designed this place really is not getting the best review from Dave.

He’s just got to work harder. Put in any work at all, really; he’d carried on as though his obsession was healthy simply because he’d been able to fall into it so deeply. Over here, where everything from the grass growing to the air itself filters out anything wrong or difficult, purifies and polishes until there is only simple positivity. But he knows better - he always had known. Something about Dave causes a fault in the system.

Something. Not someone. It’s a mystery, of course. His magic boyfriend with a connection to the dead and who seemed pretty pissed with him the last time they saw each other has nothing to do with any of it.

He doesn’t. He wouldn’t. Genuinely. Dave doesn’t believe that Klaus is capable of that kind of viciousness. He likes to pretend he’s aloof and unaffected like a flashy supervillain in a comic book, but he’s a real bleeding heart. As angry as he may have been with Dave, he would never do something to ruin Dave’s afterlife, forever, to hurt Dave for the rest of eternity.

'Not on purpose,' adds a bitter, cynical voice in his head. Which he shouldn’t even be able to have over here! That is added by the same impossible voice.

It doesn’t matter. The fact of it is that everyone gets here eventually. It’s the most basic tenant of this place, the first bit of knowledge that you gain when you arrive. It’s an immutable, unchangeable, universal constant. Either Klaus will find him eventually, or he won’t want to, and either way, there’s nothing Dave can do about any of it. Everyone dies.

It’s just a matter of time, which he has plenty of. It’s just waiting, believing that Klaus still loves him. Mostly, that’s not hard to do. He can replay with perfect clarity everything about that moment, the hard inflection of, “Leave me alone.” But he shouldn’t. So. Events. Spending time with other people, who he doesn’t need to wait on. Getting out of the house, but not by himself, not turning left.

He can go left if he’s got a chaperone, he decides. Rachel wants to go for a visit with him, to relive time spent with her grandkids, a perfect autumn afternoon spent splashing about in leaf piles. It does sound like a beautiful memory to slip into, and it’s the early 2000s, so it’s pretty unlikely that he’ll run into any devilishly handsome mediums.

Also, the 2000s. It’s crazy to think about. It’s not as though he didn’t think the world was going to make it this long, except maybe, some of those nights in country, that’s exactly what he thought. It doesn’t look that different, the people and the trees and all that. Different haircuts, new styles, but it’s still all just people, not robots or flying cars or anything.

He teases Rachel about her haircut. He always sees her the way he remembers her, in her early thirties, but at the time they visit, she has short cropped grey hair, an old lady hairstyle. She - the she from then, the grandma version of she - is raking, or coming in and out the house with cookies and cider, just generally busying herself so that she can keep an eye on the kids and the imaginary battle they are carrying out. Dave can understand why she wanted to come back to this. Even without being able to feel the air around them, some level of his brain is telling him that deep in his bones or his soul or his somehow, he can smell nearby chimney smoke and feel the promise of colder days soon to come in the bite of the occasional wind.

She has a lot more memories than he does, and he wonders if she still holds onto that one summer week, when Dave was 9 or 10, and one of the neighborhood kids had cousins in town and they all got along, the whole lot of them, for one magical week. They’d spent days out at the creek together until something about their truce snapped and it was back to petty kid squabbling, but while it had been good, damn it had been great. His memories of it are all golden.

It’s really incredible, that they can do this. That they can share this. Bringing Rachel or someone back to that moment, sharing not only the facts of it, but the truth of how precious that moment is to you - it’s a beautiful thing.

She nudges him. “What are you thinking about?”

“Memories. You must have so many of them.” He wonders if that’s as overwhelming as it seems. With only half of what she has, he already feels like he’s got too many to handle.

“Dave,” Rachel starts, right as the kids break into a shouting match.

“He got you!”

“No, he didn’t, I jumped away,” Michelle corrects her younger sister, in a tone of voice that says this imaginary tactic should be obvious. “He didn’t get me.”

“You can’t just always do that all the time, it’s not as fun,” Mariah whines.

The Rachel who was actually there with them intervenes, pointing at the far side of the yard and exclaiming, “There’s more of those bad guys over there, look!”

She’s an expert bubbe; the girls rush over, shrieking about how, “They’ve got four! Come on, we’ve got to save him!” They crash into Rachel’s piles and send leaves fluttering all over the lawn again. She rests her chin on the rake and watches them fondly, the yard work entirely devised for their entertainment.

As they run past again, Dave notices. “Are they wearing ties?”

“Old ones. Their father’s.” One has pineapples and the other one is rainbow striped. “They’re playing superheroes.”

“Capes go out of fashion in the future?”

“I don’t think capes were ever really ‘in fashion,’” Rachel teases. “There were these superhero kids, not too much older than the girls. They were always popping up in the news, stopping heists, always very dramatic crimes, in their school-kid uniforms. It was a big deal at the time. The girls were obsessed.”

“You mean, real superheroes? Not just in the movies? And they were kids?” His mouth is hanging open a little but he can’t help it. He’d just been thinking that the new millennia didn’t even look that different, but evidently if he picked up a newspaper, there’d be a couple of places to spot the difference.

“The world got weird,” she says with a laugh.

The last time he was on this side, his boyfriend talked to both an alive and a dead version of himself, and that had been 1968. “Maybe the world was already weird,” Dave says. Apparently, time-traveling ghosts have been a thing as long as there have been dead people - the world has always been weird.

Dave has not been doing ‘being a ghost’ to its full potential. He should go back and see the dinosaurs, or visit the far-flung future. Doesn’t even have to go too far in the future to see fantastical things; he’s technically in Rachel’s past, and he could go see super-powered children fight bank robbers or something.

“I can’t imagine what it was like,” she says haltingly.

He thinks she’s still talking about superheroes until he looks at her face. Ah. It had to come up eventually, he supposes.

“I thought about it, a lot. About you.”

The war.

Now that she’s got going, her words flow steady and serene. Dave can’t look up from his hands. “I would think a lot about how scared you must have been, how awful to be there in such a terrible place, with such frightening people trying to kill you every which way. How alone you must have felt out there when you died. It wasn’t until much later on in life that I realized how terrible it must have been not just to be fighting for your life, but to take theirs, too. I couldn’t decide which one would have been worse.”

Dave could never decide, either. If she’s looking for an easy, clear-cut answer about the nature of humanity in a war zone, well, that’s probably a malformed question, with a faulty expectation for answer. She’s definitely got the wrong guy. Having fought in a war does not mean Dave understands war.

“But now, after coming over to our side of things - I’m not saying it wasn’t bad, and that what happens before doesn’t matter, but, it just changes your perspective on things. Oh, I’m saying this all wrong.” She worries at her lower lip, a nervous habit Dave has never seen on her before. Must have picked it up in 40-odd years since he died. “If only there was a - not that there would be likely anything quite like a support group to exist over here, but maybe if there was someone you could talk to - ”

“No, there is. They’ve actually said pretty similar things about it.” Like Powloski, back before ‘leave me alone.’ “It’s not a support group, exactly, but a group, of people from there.”

The fact that she’s bringing this up, that whatever unrest he’s been feeling hasn’t been hidden from his family as successfully as he thought - it makes him feel like an infection, a pollutant in everyone else’s happily literally ever after. Ruining someone’s forever, especially a someone you care about, it’s an uncomfortable feeling to sit in, to say the least.

It shouldn’t work that way. It shouldn’t be possible for him to do this to her. It violates the entire premise of this place, rule one, the certain knowledge implanted in your consciousness as soon as you arrive. Over here, for all of eternity, things are soft and kind and nothing hurts. That’s how it should be.

There’s no loss in death when death is a gift. Life is the tragedy, on this side, but it’s a temporary one. These are the truths of the universe. Everyone gets here eventually.

“Some of the people,” Dave says.

“It’s not about the war, then,” says Rachel. He looks away from the girls racing across the yard and arranges what he intends to be an innocent, confused face. “I am so much older and wiser than you will ever be, you can’t pull one over on me,” she teases, but then she softens and suddenly Dave can feel those extra years, sees her both as the big sister he’s always known and as a perceptive older woman sanded smooth by decades of time and pain. “This is about a person.”

“Yeah,” he sighs out, and although he would have thought it would be more violently sad to finally put voice to it, it’s actually rather soothing. It flows gently like a creek of cool, clear water.

“She must have been very special.”

Dave takes a deep breath. “He was.” He hears Rachel say, “Oh,” as if from a distance while he watches the autumn leaves dance in the wind like flames. “We soldiered together.”

“And he hasn’t made it over yet,” Rachel fills in.

Now the hurt cuts through a little sharper. He doesn’t know what he can say. He shrugs.

“It’s not a bad thing,” Rachel says, “that he’s living a long life. He’ll get here eventually, Dave.”

“I know,” he says, like he means it, like he doesn’t tell himself this every damn day and like the unease always gnawing at him isn’t a flaw that undermines the whole system. Everyone gets here eventually, and here there is no pain.

And yet. He is intimately aware that there is at least one exception to that second rule.

He stays quiet, and she squeezes his hand, and they watch the girls play.

“Wait,” he says. “Did you imply that there are actual, costumed child superheroes, but then that somehow stopped being a big deal?”

The world did get weird.

If Dave had set out that morning with the intention of coming out to his sister, he would have gotten much too nervous to actually do it. He would have spent ages endlessly revising his plan, and then he would have chickened out. It would have been easy to let the pronouns slide, so easy, the easiest possible option, because all it took was staying quiet, which he has done for his whole life and then some.

But he couldn’t, because staying quiet about Klaus feels like disrespecting his memory, which is odd, given that he’d been the only one involved in the conversation who, presumably, is still alive. Dave just can’t pretend that Klaus is anything besides himself, and he doesn’t want to. Nothing about Klaus and what they shared needs to be secretive or shameful.

That’s one of the things he loves so much about Klaus, how he is just so much himself, brave and confident in a way that makes Dave want to be brave, too. He had gone off to war thinking that there was nothing to be gained from being truthful about who he was, that he was finding a faster end to a life that was destined to only ever be empty.

Klaus had shown him that it wasn’t a defect. Klaus had never carried his capacity to love as a burden. It wasn’t something that ever could make him unhappy.

Klaus made Dave happy. Klaus made Dave believe that happiness was a thing he could have.

In the worst place in the world, in his last year alive, Dave had started to think that he could have a full life. Klaus had shown him, in a million precious lessons, that with the right person loving you, it is so easy to be yourself and be happy, and that happiness is worth more than hiding.

There is something wrong, then, about being sunk in sadness because of Klaus. It’s incompatible. However ‘Leave Me Alone’ Klaus might feel, ‘Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ Klaus wouldn’t want this for Dave.

He has a whole eternity stretching out before him, but it doesn’t need to feel so long. An everlasting future and nearly as much past, all full of new things to learn, like, for instance, superhero kids. He won’t be able to beat Lewis at his reading goal, but he can at least join him. He’s got the time. He re-reads some of his favorites first: C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Oscar Wilde.

He reads about the war. It turns out that the official answer to how it ended is, ‘we won,’ and that the generally accepted answer is, ‘we just eventually gave up and everyone agrees that getting into it was a terrible mistake.’

He doesn’t think about how that could be a metaphor for his own time in Vietnam, specifically that last time.

Lewis and Mrs. Hughes team up to give him modern book recommendations, and they’re thinking if they can find a couple more readers they should start a book club. Dave makes a peach pie for a family picnic in the park and it’s so good he decides that baking is going to be his new, healthier hobby. Trading in endless walks for eating sweets is the kind of healthy that matters.

He helps his mom bake a whole mess of rugelach for a town event; he’s working on coming to more of these. This one reminds him of a state fair, with community contests for best desserts, local bands performing, and carnival rides staged all around the square. It’s packed so full of people that Dave mostly stays hovering around the pastries table at the edge of things. He hasn’t figured out yet why the crush of bodies pressing in all around him brings on such difficult memories. Maybe the next book he reads should be about psychology.

Rachel eventually is able to cajole him into venturing into the fray a bit, to take a turn on the ferris wheel. It’s true, it was always his favorite part of the fair when they were kids, and what could be more of a safe distance from the crowd than 50 feet above the ground? The festive spirit and jangling chords of the rhythm and blues band can still reach him up here; it’s the perfect spot to soak up the sensation of socialization without being smothered by it.

He picks out messy haired brunettes on each revolution and watches until it becomes clear that they aren’t who he is looking for, and then he keeps watching as they throw darts or get an ice cream cone, watches to see them spark alight in joy until he can genuinely feel glad that they are here and they are happy. He’s training himself to quit holding an irrational grudge against innocent, familiar strangers. A new idea, but he thinks it’s working.

At the crest again, he spots another one at the far end of the square, darting past people queued up for grilled sweet corn. The guy is moving quickly, as though with purpose, but not stopping at any of the booths or going in a straight direction. His loose, gangly gait also reminds Dave a lot of Klaus, and the longer it takes to get a clear glimpse the guy’s face, the higher his heart crawls up his throat, against all advice from his brain.

This one might tap him out on ‘training’ for the day. It’s going to take a lot of work, more work than Dave wants to admit, to forgive this one for the unfair crime of being not the person he wants them to be.

And for taking so long about it - the wheel has spun down low enough that Dave’s about to lose sight of him when he hops up on a curb and casts his searching gaze fully in Dave’s direction.

It doesn’t make any sense that he can hear Klaus shout, “Dave!” because of all the distance it has to travel.

Then Klaus is leaping off the curb and shoving his way through the crowd to get to him and Dave has to just sit there as the wheel lowers and this man he loves slips out of sight, drowned in all the bodies between them.

His brain kicks back to life when he’s a few carts above the very bottom. His hands shake as he unbuckles the safety belt that doesn’t need to be there anyway, everyone is all already dead, and he tumbles out onto soft clover and starts running.

He makes it all the way to the corn on the cob stand. It doesn’t make sense that he missed him, how could he have missed him? But he must have missed him. Dave spins on his heel, heads back through the crowd, pointedly moving slower, less franticly, looking closely at every face, although, again, there is no way he could have gone past without recognizing him.

He makes it all the way to the Ferris wheel. There’s no way he could have missed him. For a while, he just stays standing frozen nearby, like a child who lost their mother in the grocery store. If he just waits here, Klaus’ll come and find him.

Dave walks the square, over and over, different routes, skirting the edge of the festivities, peeking into every tent, spiraling his way from the center and out, circling back in. Shadows are casting longer in the warm, fading light when a hand grasps his elbow and once again he hears his name.

“Dave.”

It’s Rachel.

“You look like a man on a mission. What are you up to? It’s been ages.”

His eyes have been roving the crowd so long that it takes effort to focus on someone close. “Rachel, hi. Sorry. I didn’t mean to make anyone nervous.”

She looks at him funny, because of course nobody here does ‘nervous’ anymore. Nobody except for him. “I had been hoping you’d found someone to enjoy the day with.”

“I didn’t find anyone,” Dave says.

“That’s too bad. Your rugelach was a hit, though; there’s only a few left and those are the ones dad hid away for himself.” She keeps going, chatting about cookies and recipes and the square is emptying out, and the twinkling string lights have come to life in front of the violet sky, and Klaus was here, he had been right here and Dave had missed him. He misses him. But he had been here. And now he’s not.

He grabs the hair at the base of his neck for something to hang on to because he can feel the spinning of the earth under his feet. Although of course he isn’t really on the earth.

Maybe this is hell.

“I’m going to stay here for a bit,” he says, and he can’t blame her for being taken aback. He doesn’t know what she was saying but he’d cut her off right in the middle of some story. He abruptly walks away and settles onto a park bench. She’s got her perceptive face on, the closest expression to concerned that she has these days. “I just - I’m going to sit, for a bit. It was a full day, you know.”

“Sure,” Rachel says. She says something more about seeing him soon and maybe more things but he just nods and makes affirming noises until she goes away.

The sunlight goes away next, and then the rest of straggling crowd, and then the carnival rides and games, all of it somehow fades away without him noticing it. He’s only got eyes for one thing, one perfect face, but Klaus doesn’t come back and Dave is left senseless.

Klaus is here. He’s over on this side, anyway. Klaus knows where Dave is and how to find him, but he simply doesn’t want to. Dave spent so much time thinking that somehow he was special, that he’s the one exception to the rule, because he’d rather imagine some kind of twisted, breakable system than accept that Klaus just doesn’t want to see him. That ‘leave me alone’ truly is the end.

Maybe that’s proof enough that Dave isn’t in the place he thought he was. If the afterlife has a filing system for people based on their goodness of heart, Dave’s too selfish to score high points. Or maybe he’s being extraordinarily dramatic, because Klaus was his first love, and Klaus no longer loves him, and Dave died too young to learn how to handle heartbreak.

Enough is enough with this, he tells himself. He’s gone through this, over and over again, thinking that this time he could fix it, or this time he could move past it. Moving on is the only thing he can do, now; it’s no longer a question of waiting for Klaus to get here. He’s here already, and just not interested. The romantic reunion where they fall into each other’s arms again is not a mutual desire. He’s got to be done with this.

He tilts his head back and says it up to the softly clouding sky. Maybe if he says it out loud, he’ll finally be able to listen. “Enough is enough.”

It’s dark and silent out here. It’s time to go home.

He loves his sister, he truly does, but it is much too early the very next morning when she comes knocking on his door. It’s only been a handful of hours since he climbed into bed and thought very hard about falling asleep, and feels like only a few minutes since he actually managed to do it. She’s no doubt got some visit planned out, on the other side or theirs, to see something breathtaking and beautiful and distracting. It’s a kind instinct, and Dave appreciates the thought, but time is so entirely meaningless over here that he is absolutely positive that whatever it is really can wait.

The quick raps come again, quieter this time. If he really does mean it, about moving on, now is the time to prove it. Step one of moving on is getting up out of bed and doing whatever activity Rachel has planned.

It’s not Rachel who is standing on Dave’s porch, looking off down the street like he isn’t quite sure he’s got the right house.

Like you do when what you want most in the world suddenly arrives after you’ve waited so so long, Dave eloquently says, “Holy shit.” It makes Klaus smile like you wouldn’t believe.

“Yeah,” Klaus laughs.