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The Night Before
“What do you think the future’s like?” Dave asks.
Klaus frowns, though he knows Dave can’t see him. It’s dark in their two-man tent, surrounded by trees and brush and the murmur of jungle insects. The air is too hot and muggy for them to be pressed close like they want to be, but Klaus still feels Dave next to him, his presence. Out here, lying next to Dave, Klaus feels as far from the future as he's ever been.
"Well," Klaus says finally. "I think the future's going to have a lot more air conditioning." Dave laughs quietly at that, so he keeps going. "Everyone has a color TV—not just rich assholes. There's a fancy gizmo for everything. But the future...it's still shit."
"You think so?" Dave whispers. "Damn."
"Yeah. Don't get your hopes up."
"How come you sound so sure?"
"Let's just say I have it on good authority."
"Good authority..." Dave repeats. "Is that the same good authority that had you singing 'Hey Jude' before it even hit our radios?"
"Maybe."
"Do you wanna talk about it?"
He thinks about telling Dave everything—about the academy, about Number Four, about Seance and his father and the briefcase. He thinks about how it would feel, to tell Dave all that. The secrets burn like bile in his chest, like a grenade missing its pin. He wants to tell him. He does, but he knows that as soon as he does, all the ugly will spill out and he's not sure he could stop after he's started.
"Another time," Klaus says eventually. "Soon. I'll tell you all about it, I promise. Just...not tonight. I feel like I could sleep for a decade."
"Okay, okay." There's a rustling of fabric, and then Dave is hovering over him, his warm breath across Klaus's face. Dave presses a small, lingering kiss to Klaus's forehead and whispers, "Goodnight, love."
"Goodnight," Klaus whispers back.
As Dave settles back on his side of the tent, Klaus stares blindly into the darkness overhead and blinks once, twice. The air is hot and muggy, but he reaches out all the same and finds Dave's shoulder in the dark, tracing it down from bicep to elbow to wrist and finally, to his hand. Dave opens his fingers to twine them with Klaus's like it's a habit and squeezes. Klaus squeezes back.
They fall asleep like this—Klaus's left palm pressed against Dave's right.
Five Hours After
The first time he jumped through time, he felt sick, numb, disoriented, and lost. He hated that briefcase for doing that to him, for kicking him while he was down. This time, he denies the briefcase the satisfaction of making him feel like shit. He already feels like shit. In the moments before fate decided to yank him away from Vietnam and toss him like trash back into the dumpster fire of the present, Klaus was already sick to his stomach, numb inside and out, barely able to see, and so lost he could hardly conceive of the concept of being found. The briefcase doesn’t deserve the credit.
There is one difference, however.
The first time, he was used to the world kicking him while he was down. He laughed in the face of death, rolled his eyes at fate's cruel tricks, shrugged at the prospect of global destruction. The second time, he'd spent the last ten months remembering what it felt like to give a fuck. Like the stupid bastard he was, he'd actually started to hope again, to believe that maybe there was something worth living for in this stupid, fucked up world.
Serves him right, he supposes. Only a fool would believe that someone like him deserves to get a happy ending. He should have known better.
Still, doesn't mean he can't go out giving the universe the finger.
He smashes the briefcase to smithereens, slamming it into the concrete until it's little more than shrapnel. There , he thinks. Now we both know how it feels to be broken.
Three Months Before
Klaus has kissed a lot of people in his life. None of those people ever kissed quite like Dave.
Dave cups his cheek in one hand, pressing his lips to Klaus’s like he’s worried Klaus might disappear if he moves too quickly. Every movement is deliberate—every tilt of his head, every slight shift of his lips, every brush of tongue and teeth. Dave kisses like they have all the time in the world, and there’s an irony there that Klaus doesn’t have the presence of mind to appreciate. He runs his fingers through the back of Dave’s hair and holds on, trying to ground himself. It’s almost too much, Dave’s kissing. With everyone else, kissing was just a means to an end—a midway point. Dave is the first person to kiss him just to kiss him, and Klaus has no idea how to handle that.
“Dave,” Klaus whispers against his mouth. Dave chases the sound, licking the seam of Klaus’s lips. “Dave, I...”
“What is it?” Dave murmurs back, his voice barely louder than the wind outside the tent they’re hiding in. God, he’s so beautiful. His face is illuminated by the yellow glow of the gasoline lamp in the corner, and how the hell is this real? How the hell did Klaus wind up in a place where he could have this?
“You all right?” Dave asks, rubbing his thumb across Klaus’s cheek. He realizes he never answered Dave’s first question.
“I’m fine. Just enjoying the view,” Klaus says. He leans in close. “You should go back to kissing me.”
Dave smiles again, warm and brilliant. “Don’t need to tell me twice.”
Four Months Before
Klaus's fingers tremble as he reaches again for the flask on his hip. It's been empty for almost six hours now, depleted after an overnight stay in the field. The new C.O. confiscated his weed last night—the motherfucking killjoy. And now Klaus is out—out of everything. Sobriety grates at his brain like nails scraping against a chalkboard, everything just a little too sharp, a little too loud, but that's not the worst part. No, the worst part is—
"I can't be dead. I can't be dead. I can't be dead," the soldier mumbles, clutching at the bullet wounds in his chest as he stumbles alongside Klaus through the brush. Klaus tries not to look at him, but it's almost impossible not to. The blood has turned his olive green military jacket a muddy brown, and his eyes are more wild than any animal Klaus has seen in the jungle.
Klaus thinks he recognizes him—Private Taylor. His cot was just a couple feet down from his the last time they were back at the main camp. He liked baseball—or was it soccer?
"Oh God, please, I can't be dead. I can't be dead—"
"Would you shut up?" Klaus hisses. "Leave a little regret for the living."
"You okay, Klaus?" A voice behind him asks. They're walking in single file. Shit. There's only one person it could be.
"Sorry, Dave," Klaus says. "Everything's peachy."
He doesn't trust himself to turn around and look him in the eye.
By the time they set up camp, it's gotten much, much worse. Private Taylor has been joined by a couple other familiar faces Klaus doesn't have names for, along with a small Vietnamese woman who screams angry sobs at every soldier she sees. Klaus isn't sure how much more of this he can take. He sits at the edge of camp, covering his ears with his hands.
War does not leave quiet ghosts.
There's a light tap on his shoulder, and he looks up. "Hey," Dave says. He sits next to Klaus on the jungle floor. "You don't look so hot."
"Well, I don't feel so hot."
"You sick?"
Klaus shakes his head. "Nope. Just sober." He racks his brain for something to say, some witty comment he can make to put Dave at ease, but the words don't come. Shit. He sighs and rakes his hands through his hair. "You'll probably be better off chatting with the others. Afraid I can't provide my usual titillating conversation."
"I'm not here for your titillating conversation," Dave grins. "I'm just here for you."
Klaus almost laughs at that. Under normal circumstances he probably would have, but the dead woman crying on the ground a few feet away is a bit of a mood killer. Instead he shakes his head and stares at Dave's boots. "Sometimes I'm not sure you're real."
Dave reaches out and places his hand over Klaus's. "I'm real," he says simply.
And it's impossible not to believe him when he's this close, his hand warm and solid. For a moment he forgets about the mumbling soldier and the crying woman and every other fucked up thing that goes on in his brain and just sits, feels, stares. Dave is smiling at him. Klaus is one lucky bastard.
A few hours later, he almost gets caught trying to steal his weed back from the C.O.—almost being the key word. As the ghosts fade into a haze of smoke, Klaus remembers the feeling of Dave's hand on his over and over again, strong and solid and real.
Klaus has seen a countless number of impossible things in his lifetime, but Dave still seems the most miraculous.
Six Months Before
“So, new guy,” says Gordon. “How were the first few months?”
"Hot. Steaming hot," Klaus replies. "With a nice little dash of mortal terror."
"So it goes," says one of the other guys on his squad. Taylor? Tyler? "I’d tell you it gets better, but it doesn't really get better. You adjust a little, but it's still hot as fuck, and then there's the dying..."
"I think I'll probably get bored to death before someone actually shoots me," Gordon says with a yawn. "Maybe if there wasn't so much waiting around, we could die a little faster, you know? Get it over with."
"Maybe if I die, I'd actually get more than four hours of sleep at a time," Klaus sighs. Gordon and Taylor laugh.
Dave walks over with a plate of mess hall food, taking a seat next to Klaus. "What'd I miss?"
"Nothing," Taylor says. "It's hot. People die. The usual."
"Good to know that I didn't miss a conversation that was actually entertaining."
Taylor clutches his chest. "Ouch. You trying to kill me?"
"I'll have you know we can have very entertaining conversations about death," Klaus says. He taps Dave's foot under the table and smiles.
"You, Klaus—I'm sure you can." Dave smiles. Then he points his thumb to Gordon and Taylor. "It's those two I'm not so sure about."
"Oh, come on, Dave. We all know the new guy's your favorite, "Gordon laughs. "No need to rub it in."
It's strange how well Klaus fits in here. Years of toying with death and stumbling from disaster to disaster in drug-addled oblivion have prepared him for A Shau Valley better than any bootcamp could have. It’s the same game with a new backdrop. What more is war than death and drugs anyway?
“You going to finish that?” Dave asks, using his fork to poke at one of the gray meatballs on Klaus’s plate. Dave’s smile is a little too bright for this dingy olive-green tent, and Klaus wonders—not for the first time—how someone like Dave could wind up in a place like this.
“It’s all yours,” Klaus says. “Mi meatball, su meatball.”
Dave taps Klaus’s foot back and winks. “Thanks.”
Seven Months Before
Klaus wakes with a gasp, choking on the humid air of the barracks like it's water. He kicks off his blanket. It's dark—it's dark, and he can still hear the voices, saying his name over and over again. He blinks and blinks and blinks but it's no good. His cheeks are already just as wet as the rest of his sweat-damp skin.
"Fuck."
His voice is barely more than a whisper, but it grounds him. If he listens, he can hear the sounds of the other soldiers sleeping in the cots around him, the murmur of the jungle surrounding them, the distance footfalls of the night guard. He breathes. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.
He probably shouldn't find it comforting to wake up in the middle of Vietnam during a war, not when he's really just trading one crypt for another—but childhood trauma doesn't really jive with logic.
"Hey," says a quiet voice to his left. He turns. Dave. He can make out his figure sitting upright in the bed to his left, propped up on one elbow.
"Sorry if I woke you," Klaus whispers back.
"It's fine. You okay?"
"Yeah, yeah. It's fine, I'm fine." He shivers. The sweat on his arms and the adrenaline in his blood makes it almost impossible to keep from trembling.
"You know you're not the only one here who gets nightmares," Dave says after a pause. "It's okay if you're not okay."
Klaus isn't sure how to respond to that, so he doesn't. There's a creak from Dave's bed, and suddenly he's there, poking at Klaus to move over on the cot. Klaus can't see him but he knows well enough now what he must look like, hovering over him with his broad shoulders and blond hair and blue eyes. Klaus sighs. Even in the dark he can't deny him anything.
The mattress is comically small for two grown men, but they shift and arrange themselves until they fit, nestled together like spoons. Dave's arm loops around Klaus's stomach, skin almost too hot to touch. The weather in Vietnam is not ideal for closeness, but Klaus isn't about to push Dave away—not when those arms keep him grounded, and his heart finally slows, and the shaking finally stops. The voices in his head fade just as the world does, dimmed by the overwhelming fog of sleep.
Eight Months Before
"Oh, fuck," Klaus says, looking down at the red hole blooming larger and larger on his thigh. He lets out a laugh. "I think I got shot."
"Klaus?" Dave drops to the forest floor beside him, so fast that Klaus almost thinks he stepped in a pit trap, but no—here he is, crouching at Klaus's side and staring at him with wide, terrified eyes. Klaus frowns.
"What're you looking so scared for?" he asks. "You're not the one bleeding."
Dave shakes his head. "No," he agrees. "You are."
Klaus blinks.
"Just—keep pressure on it, okay?" Dave is saying. There's a sharp twinge in his leg, and Klaus looks down to see Dave's hand soaked red, wrapping the scraps of Klaus's pant leg tight around his thigh. "Stay with me. Don't—Don't leave me here. Not like this. Okay?"
"Jeez. Is it really that bad?"
Dave grips his shoulder suddenly, forcing Klaus to meet his eyes again. Klaus stares. Dave is crying, tears clearing tracks in the dirt on his cheeks. "I mean it," he says. "Don't you dare die."
"I won't." Klaus's lips form the words before he can give them permission. "I promise. I won't."
It's the first promise he's made in a long time that he truly intends to keep.
Klaus has courted death for years. He's thought of it as imminent, a debt he owes after one too many lucky breaks. There were times when oblivion itself seemed like his light at the end of the tunnel. Dying young wasn't the consequence of living fast—it was the reward.
But now Dave's gone and ruined that, hasn't he?
The jungle isn't safe; the distant sounds of gunfire and voices yelling still shake the trees. With the way the jungle throws sound, they have no way of knowing whether they'll be running towards or away from it. Hell, they might be in some poor guy's scope right now for all they know. Still, Dave doesn't seem to care. He just slings Klaus's right arm over his shoulder and half leads, half carries him back in the direction their camp might've been.
"You really shouldn't have given me a reason to stick around," Klaus mumbles. His vision is starting to black out around the edges, and his whole body feels sluggish. "Most people end up regretting it."
"Good thing I'm not most people," Dave replies, like it's easy, like he's not a giant wrecking ball smashing holes in all of Klaus's preconceptions of worldly disorder.
"Careful," Klaus says. "People might start to think you actually like me."
"Well," Dave's voice says somewhere far away. Klaus's vision is all black now, and there's a soft ringing in his ears. "Maybe I do."
It's the last thing he hears before he passes out.
When he wakes up, his head hurts like hell.
“You’re awake,” Dave says, because of course he’s there. Klaus opens his eyes and sees him smiling in that goofy, lopsided way of his. He looks tired—or at least more tired than usual. Klaus sighs.
“Dave,” he exhales. “Dave, Dave, Dave...”
Dave’s brow furrows a little. “Hey. You feeling okay?”
Klaus nods, even though he actually feels like shit. His leg stings like a motherfucker, and he feels like he could sleep for a week.
“Listen—you got lucky,” says Dave. “You didn’t get shot—it was just some debris that got you when the bullet shattered that log we were hiding behind. Nicked an artery, though. Which is why you bled so much. But you’ll be good as new in a week.”
“Huh.” Lucky . It’s not the first time he’s heard that. He looks around the tent he’s found himself in, recognizing the familiar signage and equipment of the medical tent. Right now, it’s empty—not even a ghost in sight. They must have drugged him up. Good , he thinks. They’re the only ones here.
“Dave,” he says again. “I need to ask you something.”
“Anything,” Dave replies, and Klaus closes his eye because fuck this, fuck this entire broken messed up world because Dave is really, really not making this any easier for him.
“What was that back there?” Klaus asks. “When I got hurt, you acted like... And you said...”
“I really was scared shitless,” Dave says. “I thought I was going to lose you.”
Klaus rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms and laughs. “That... That just doesn’t make sense.”
“What about that doesn’t make sense?”
“What about this does?” Klaus waves his arms, gesturing to the tent around them. “We’re in a war. People are dying every day for no good reason. I’ve only been here for two months! I’m just a nobody here. But you— You’re a good guy, Dave. If I die—”
“Don’t say that.”
“—you’re not going to be alone. You can always find someone else to make out with behind the curtain at the dance hall.”
Dave’s frown deepens. For the first time since Klaus met him, he looks angry . “I don’t want someone else,” Dave insists. “I want you . I love you . You’re the one who makes all of this worth it to me. Why won’t you believe that?”
Klaus feels like the floor beneath them is crumbling away, plunging him down to the center of the earth. He’s not quite sure he trusts himself to move, and it’s not just because of the meds they put him on. His throat is tight. His eyes sting. He swallows, then swallows again.
“I...I don’t know.”
It’s not the full truth. It’s far from the full truth, actually, but he has no idea how to explain without confessing his entire patchwork of dysfunctional coping mechanisms and childhood traumas and improbably sci-fi bullshit and non-existent self-worth and—
“Klaus,” Dave says softly. “You make me smile, you know that?” He puts his hand on Klaus’s arm. “No matter what’s going on, you make me laugh. You have a good heart. You don’t think you do, but you do. And I know that you try to push me away sometimes, that you’re terrified of caring about someone you might lose. I know because I’m scared, too. But I also know that you’re good at living in the moment, Klaus.” There’s a little smile on his face at that, just the corner of his lips. “That’s one of the things I love most about you. You make this moment the best one I’ve ever lived in. So, Klaus...” He takes Klaus’s hand. His fingers are trembling. “Do you think you can keep living in this moment with me? Find out where it’ll take us?”
Klaus squeezes Dave’s fingers harder than is probably comfortable and inhales a shaky breath. He feels like he’s teetering at the edge of a cliff, a feather’s touch from tipping forward and hurtling down to the rocks below. It’d be so easy.
“Klaus?” Dave murmurs.
“Okay,” Klaus breathes. “Okay.”
He steps off the cliff and falls.
Three Seconds After
“Christ on a cracker, that was a close one, huh, Dave?”
The guns fire. Dave says nothing.
“Dave?”
Another shot. A yell from somewhere behind them.
“Dave?”
Ten Months Before
The bus jolts on the rocky unpaved road, and Klaus’s knee bangs painfully against the seat in front of him. He sucks in a breath and winces. This sucks. This fucking sucks.
He doesn’t know what the hell is going on, or why the fuck he’s in Vietnam, or why he’s got a gun in his hand. He hasn’t any kind of drugs in hours and he’s feeling way too sober and Ben, Ben still hasn’t showed up. Ben always shows up. It’s really starting to freak him out.
A hand touches his shoulder.
“Hey,” says a voice. Klaus turns a little. It’s the guy with the blond hair and blue eyes and handsome jawline. “You just get into the country?”
“Oh, uh.” Klaus nods. “Yeah.”
They both chuckle softly.
“Yeah, shit’s crazy. I know,” the man says.
“Yeah.”
“You’ll adjust.” He smiles a little, and it’s a cute smile, which is hardly fair. Hot people aren’t supposed to be cute, too. The man doesn’t seem to comply with rules like that, though. He extends his hand for Klaus to take and says, “I’m Dave.
He takes Dave’s hand. “Klaus.”
And Klaus still doesn’t know what’s happening, still isn’t sure how he got here, still isn’t sure if he’ll ever be able to go back—but something about the warmth of Dave’s hand, the strength of it... Maybe his questions can wait. Maybe he can stay here, if only for a little while.
He’s good at living in the moment.