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Klaus wakes with a gasp.
There are people around him, and he immediately flails in surprise at the crowd as they step back, surprised by his sudden reawakening. His hands touch something warm and sticky on the ground, that he vaguely recognizes as his own blood, but everything is too loud and bright, in a sickening red, yellow, purple, green, back to red again, ad infinitum, and there’s a throbbing ache in the front of his head. Everything’s just too much. He looks around for Luther, because his brother was about to get his head smashed in with a pipe, but—
Luther had left him, he reminds himself. He’d already left.
His ears are ringing, like it did that one time a bomb went off two meters to his right and he hadn’t been able to hear properly out of that ear for a week. Standing is difficult when his muscles feel leaden and uncooperative, but he manages, somehow, even though the floor feels like it’s being tugged out from beneath him as his stomach turns. For a moment, he wonders if he’s going to spill the meager lunch he’d had onto the floor, but the nausea passes.
“Klaus,” Ben says, but his voice is muffled, like cotton is stuffed into Klaus’ ears, and he doesn’t acknowledge him. He just needs to get out, because he feels like he’s suffocating. “Klaus, what just happened to you?”
Tongue feeling too heavy, Klaus stumbles out of the rave, pushing past people as they watch him, everything blurry around the edges. There are paramedics entering when he gets to the door, the flashing lights of an ambulance outside, and one of them tries asking him something, but he just shakes his head. A hand grabs his arm, but he recoils, a pang of shame rolling through him, and the paramedic releases him immediately,
He exits out onto the rainy street, and he can breath again.
Muscle memory takes him along the street, because he’s been homeless long enough that he knows most of the city by heart. He tries to ignore the cloying scent of perfume and blood and sweat sticking to him like a second layer of skin, because it’s just making the headache worse, and he can distantly hear Ben talking, but he doesn’t want to listen to Ben right now. Listening to Ben was what got him into that rave, what ended up getting him killed, even if it didn’t stick. He thinks about the elation he felt when he thought he was going to see Dave again, and feels like throwing up.
Between one footstep and the next, he’s suddenly home again, fingers and toes numb from the chilly night rain, although everything feels distant, like he’s watching himself through a camera. The front door’s locked, the gate closed, but he remembers how to get inside of the mansion from when he used to sneak in and out before morning.
The basement window is small, but Klaus is thin as a slip of paper, even when he’d somehow put on muscle and weight when he was in Vietnam. That just shows he was eating better in the middle of an active war zone that he was at home. When he pries the window open, it’s easy enough to lower himself through feet first. His knees buckle when he lands, and his wrists are jarred as he catches himself before he can smash his teeth against the concrete floor, but the warmth, contrasted against the coldness outside, is comforting.
Klaus briefly considers the merits of sleeping on the floor, exhaustion seeming to weigh down his bones, but he knows he should at least bathe himself before he falls asleep, because if he doesn’t, the others would see the glitter and sweat and assume he’d been out partying when it was Luther getting into trouble. He laughs at the thought, that for once, he wasn’t the fuck-up, and tears leak from his eyes as he curls into himself.
He just wants Dave. God should’ve let him stay.
Eventually, he drags himself to his feet, because the floor is uncomfortable, even if he doesn’t think he wants to ever get up again. There’s screaming, somewhere in the house, but he doesn’t know when there isn’t screaming anymore, because the only moments of quiet he’s ever had are when he’s either drugged to oblivion, or clinically dead.
It takes him a little while to escape the basement, because he doesn’t know which exit is the one that leads upwards towards the main building, and he finds an elevator that seems out of place in the house and what he thinks is Pogo’s bedroom before he manages to locate the staircase. It takes an embarrassingly long amount of time to build up the strength to climb them, but when he does, it seems almost like he’s gliding more than walking up the steps.
He walks through the foyer, and he knows that he’s dripping water and diluted blood on the floor, but he doesn’t particularly care about ruined floorboards. He clumsily walks up the second flight of stairs, turning left towards their bedrooms, and squeezes his eyes against the pattering of raindrops against the glass that sounded too loud, like gunfire in the jungle, and he can’t breathe past the smoke and the smell of fire and the screaming—
Forcing himself back into the house, he’s standing in the bathroom his legs carried him to. Peeling off the tank top, stepping out of his pants before he’s even started to fill the tub, he turns the faucet to the hottest temperature, dropping to his knees in his underwear on the cheap checkered linoleum floor before pressing his brow against the ceramic ledge.
He’s okay. It’ll be alright. If he says it enough, maybe it’ll become true.
“Klaus,” Ben says gently, and he feels the faintest brush of a hand against his shoulder, cold enough to almost be tangible, but not quite solid enough to be corporeal because he knows he can’t do that, “you can’t fall asleep here. The water’s running, and you might have a—”
“Shut up, please,” he whines. Ben‘s talking in a hushed tone, but his voice is still too loud. The headache is like someone’s drilling into his skull, and he presses his palms shakily against the pressure points on his forehead, the places he knows will help soothe it. There are other voices in the building, and their Sergeant’s orders echoing through his head, and a woman’s sobbing in the corner, and it’s too fucking loud. “Please, please, please—”
“Klaus— Klaus, calm down.”
The room was rattling, the mirror on the wall and the tub’s feet against the floor. He sucks in a shaky breath, and releases it, then repeats the action, and it stops. The woman continues her sobbing, but she seems more subdued.
“I’m okay,” Klaus mumbles, “I’m okay.” He repeats the words in his head, wraps them tightly around his heart. He’ll be okay eventually, even if he isn’t. Ben looks at him, and maybe he’s really seeing him, now, not just as the junkie brother he was forced to follow around for the rest of his un-life.
He takes a bath, and the water turns red with the blood he washes from his hair, massaging his scalp and cupping water in his hands before bringing it over his head. The water is scalding, but it keeps him grounded, even as it turns his pale skin an irritated shade of red. He doesn’t allow himself to sink below the surface, knowing that he might fall asleep and drown if he does that, but after the incident in the rave club, he doubts it would be able to permanently kill him. He didn’t want to think about what their père might’ve done to him if he’d known about that particular ability.
When he gets out of the bath and dries off, walking towards his bedroom with his clothes tucked under his arm and a towel wrapped around his waist, he can hear the sounds of moaning and a bed thumping against the wall, coming from Luther’s room. It would be entertaining to know that Luther was finally getting laid, if he hadn’t died so he could take her home. Sighing, he enters his own bedroom, and hopes he’ll be able to get some sleep. He’s too damn tired.
“I’m sorry for making you chase after Luther,” Ben apologizes, walking into the room even after he’s already shut the door on him. He’s the last person that Klaus wants to talk to, besides Luther. “I should’ve known that a nightclub would be a trigger for you. I can’t believe he just— abandoned you there.”
“C’est la vie,” Klaus yawns, the words slurring together. He tosses his dirty laundry in a pile, and pulls on a striped tank top, and some clean underwear from his drawer. He doesn’t bother with pants. “I’m fine, Ben. Just let me sleep.”
“You shouldn’t sleep with a head injury,” Ben warns. “Maybe you should go to the hospital.”
Klaus laughs breathily, closing his eyes. “I hate hospitals, Ben. You should know that.”
“I just care about you,” Ben says, sitting on the edge of his bed.
More than the rest of our siblings, Klaus thinks bitterly, then immediately feels guilty for the thought. He’s the one who’s forcing Ben to stay, but Ben’s the one who chose to stay with him. They’re a team, even if they argue sometimes, or if Ben almost gets him killed saving their other siblings’ asses. They’re a team.
“We’re okay.”