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Allison loved her siblings.
She did.
But—and there was always a but—she needed her space. Even when they’d been children she’d regularly pulled herself away from the crowd. Away from the huddle of boys in domino masks, away from the silent girl wearing the same uniform as her. Allison had retreated away to her room, to do her makeup, to stare blankly at herself in the mirror, to dream, and to speak without consequence. Alone in her room she could pretend that she was Klaus and speak to thin air with no fear of who she could potentially hurt.
She'd never stayed alone for long, and her brothers had welcomed her back into the fold gladly. Someone had to moderate Luther after all. They needed her to keep Diego from spontaneously combusting, to tease Ben into talking, to remind Klaus to shut up once in a while.
They’d needed her.
When she was seventeen she'd fled to LA. After months of silent planning—she could keep a secret—Allison had taken one bag of clothes and left without a word.
Once, later, Patrick had asked her why.
She said that she'd had nothing left to say to them.
It wasn't true, but Allison had never been comfortable with admitting that her words often hurt those close to her. Rumor or not.
In retrospect maybe she hadn’t been ready to create a family of her own.
Across the country in a new city Allison had convinced herself that her siblings would be fine. They’d all grow up, maybe even take care of each other. She wanted no part of it, she’d spent enough of her youth taking care of them.
Some part of her wondered if they’d resent her for leaving them.
As a child she’d felt like the oldest daughter.
In moments of weakness she thought of them all, missed them like a limb. Her brothers had been the hands to catch her, her first fans, the familiar voices to laugh and tell jokes in the night. Vanya had been a constant presence, as perpetual and as distant as the moon. They hadn’t been a traditional family, but they’d been hers. She didn’t regret leaving, and rarely reached out to speak with them or catch up, but she thought of her siblings more than she’d admit.
Most of all she missed Luther.
Her first friend, her best friend. In the cold echoing Academy they’d sought warmth in each other. When she finally sought help her therapist told her that they’d been codependent, that they’d coped by clinging to one another, putting each other on a pedestal and letting the other five siblings fall to the wayside. Sometimes it felt like her therapist (Ruth) was being deliberately cruel to her. Privately she’d taken to calling the stern older woman Ruthless .
Still she had a point, and the therapy was court mandated. And in therapy she could speak almost without consequence, as long as she controlled herself.
As long as she kept wanting to do things the right way.
*-*-*-*-*-*-
On March 22nd 2019 Allison returned to the Academy for the first time since she was seventeen. She was 29 years old, wearing designer clothing, her luggage was Gucci, and she felt beautiful. She felt strong in a way that she hadn’t on the night twelve years ago when she’d fled, grieving, down the fire escape and away to some dark dirty bus stop. To LA.
On March 22nd 2019 Allison realised that her siblings hadn’t been fine.
On March 22nd 2019 she realized that maybe she hadn’t been either.
She walked through the front door without a father, without a husband, without her daughter, and the strength she’d felt on the sidewalk vanished as she entered her childhood home.
Then the world had ended.
On April 4th 2019 Allison woke up in her childhood bedroom, she was 31 years old, wearing a t-shirt that she’d stolen from Vanya, and a pair of ratty old sweatpants, she was not fine.
But she was getting there.
The kitchen was warm and her mother was cooking breakfast. The scent of waffles pulled her in and enticed her to sit down. Klaus was sitting on the table again, humming along to the radio and watching Mom. It was alarmingly normal. Overnight a storm had rolled in and rain pattered against the window, providing a second set of percussion to the static-y soundtrack.
Allison thought of the high-end wireless speaker set that she’d had in her kitchen in LA (at home?) and decided that for the given setting the blocky old radio was perfect.
“Hey Klaus.” She said, yawning as elegantly as she could manage.
“Hey Allie,” Klaus smiled, his eyes drifting away from their mother’s perfectly postured back. His voice was soft, probably softer than she deserved. Of all of the siblings she’d left behind he’d fared the worst.
But he was also the one with the most years between perceived cruelties and forced separations—except for Five, who had missed so much that he sometimes felt like a stranger—Allison reflected drowsily that Klaus was now the second oldest of the six of them. She didn’t feel like the eldest daughter anymore. The three years that Klaus had spent in the past had seemingly quieted him, turned their sharp edged broken sibling into a relatively stable human being.
He was still outrageous.
Still seemingly insane.
But without the interference of hard drugs, Klaus’ presence was once again a comforting one, something like he had been when they were children. The sort of presence that made her think of tight spontaneous hugs, and secret nights huddled in her room painting each other’s nails and reading trashy gossip magazines. Of cold shaking hands that grabbed at her’s in the dark.
Vanya had mentioned to her late last night, when they’d run into each other in the kitchen, that somehow in the past years Klaus had gained a level of control over his powers. That he’d done so in order to survive sobriety, and that she suspected that he needed to be sober in order to maintain that control. Allison had been impressed.
Vanya had also said that Klaus was asleep in the sitting room, and that they’d spent the afternoon together.
If Ruth(less) had been around to overhear her thoughts she’d have noted down that Allison was jealous.
Now Klaus was here, right in front of her, and the years of silence between the two of them might as well have been an uncrossable chasm. She had no idea what to say.
Allison’s eyes ghosted over the dog tags around her brother’s neck, as her own fingers lingered on her wedding ring. Yearning for Raymond twisted sharply in her chest. She needed him, she needed his cool head and measured words. He’d been worlds better at moderating tense situations and fraught relationships than she’d ever been.
Allison wondered if this was how Klaus had felt for the past three years without his soldier—Dave—she wondered if the pain ever dulled. She didn’t ask and Klaus continued to hum, oblivious, or lost in space.
They both flinched simultaneously as their mother placed their plates in front of them with a clink of ceramic on unvarnished wood.
“Thanks Mom.” Allison said suddenly, recovering her composure with a familiar defensiveness.
“Yeah thanks!” Klaus echoed, his mouth already full. Somehow he’d already gotten syrup in his beard.
Rain pounded against the window, and the radio crackled as wind batteries the sparse greenery out in the courtyard. Allison took the time to cut her waffle into even bite sized pieces and carefully apply the correct amount of syrup on each piece before taking a bite.
Their mother really did make the best waffles.
Allison wondered if it was part of her programming.
Now that he had been figuratively pulled back into the world of the living Klaus was a cloud of movement. He rocked as he chewed, free hand twitching hello , occasionally steadying his plate as he speared another piece of waffle. Even his feet moved, his bare toes literally curling as he ate.
“Mom this is so good !” He exclaimed, as Allison rolled her eyes in a way that she thought was good-natured. She agreed, but was too dignified to gush. Somehow they’d managed to slot right back into their childhood roles over (or on top of) the kitchen table.
Allison had always been good at self sabotage.
*-*-*-*-*-*-
They made plans to go out later, to go shopping. Klaus had brought up that they were almost out of ingredients and that Pogo had always been the one to coordinate grocery delivery.
There still had been no sign of him. Allison wondered if the Commission had simply erased him from existence somehow. She hoped that he had chosen to disappear, he might have been their father’s greatest supporter and accomplice, but he had also been something of a surrogate parent to them all. A warm smile and an encouraging word when Reginald gave none.
Allison had cleared the idea of shopping with Five when he’d strolled in to pour himself a cup of tar-like coffee.
So Allison Hargreeves the Movie Star (mother, wife, activist, ex-superhero) and Klaus the homeless junkie (veteran, spiritual leader, medium, ex-superhero) were going grocery shopping. It was an odd thought. She made a point to dress as inconspicuously as possible for the trip.
Upon meeting in the foyer she realized that she should have known better to expect the same from Klaus. Her dark jacket and understated gray slacks matched the weather but contrasted sharply with her brother’s scarlet skinny jeans, and sleeveless apricot button-up. They left the house anyway, arm in arm with the sort of put-on friendliness that Allison had often practiced with other members of the Hollywood set. They'd walked like that as children, but then it had been genuine. Now Allison had her credit card ready and was braced for the worst.
They walked arm and arm through the rain, huddled under Klaus’ ridiculous umbrella. As a child Allison had only snuck out of the Academy to visit a few specific places; most of which had been scouted out beforehand by Five, and later by Klaus who had always been prone to wandering. Letting him take the lead was familiar despite the somewhat daunting history that had grown between them.
The grocery store that Klaus led her too was almost alarmingly normal looking, it was just an average run-of-the-mill Trader Joe’s. There had been a similar store not far from the apartment where she and Patrick had lived before getting married. She had never been in, but she’d gotten her groceries delivered from that store every week, and missed their specific brand of granola in the years that she’d spent in the past.
She stepped away to let Klaus shake out and fold the umbrella, watching as raindrops soaked the shoulders of his apricot shirt and pressed the waves of his hair flat against his head.
"Did I ever apologize to you?" She asked abruptly as they walked through the automatic doors, once again arm in arm.
"What?"
"Did I ever say that I'm sorry?” Allison started again, trying to reign in her own sheepish expression. She knew that she was ruining the mood, but continued anyway. If she didn’t get the words out Allison was afraid that they would sit inside her and fester forever, poisoning her relationship with Klaus. “For leaving you to struggle for so many years. I had so many resources and more than enough money. I could have helped you but I didn't.”
She’d always assumed that if she’d used her resources to provide for Klaus then he’d just greedily take whatever he could get and what he didn’t use himself he’d sell for more drugs. It had been easy to write him off, to consider that a good enough reason to allow her brother to suffer for over a decade. It was much easier than confronting the fact that it had really been because she was too ashamed of what people might think if they knew that Allison Hargreeves the celebrity still associated with and helped her junkie brother.
In her head Ruth was scolding her. Allison made a mental note to give her a call when they got back. Apparently even two years later she still needed her therapist to remind her to be a good person.
"You mean enabled me.” It was a statement rather than a question. Klaus simply looked resigned as he chose a shopping cart and steered it towards the vegetable section. “That's what you thought right?"
"Making sure that you had something to eat every day and somewhere to sleep wouldn't have been enabling you.” Allison half-jogged to catch up with her long legged brother, and met him by the tomatoes. “It would have been the humane thing to do!”
Klus was silent, choosing a carton of cherry tomatoes before moving on to pick through a pile of avocados.
"Allison even if you'd rented out an apartment for me— or hell even let me live in your house — there's no guarantee that I would have stayed. I'd probably just have wandered off."
"Then I could have made sure that there was a place for you to come back to." She’d had more than enough resources. Even if he’d stolen from her every time they saw one another she would have still had more than enough to provide for herself. Allison was well beyond the point where she would have been able to justify cutting Klaus out of her life for financial reasons.
“Maybe.” Klaus grimaced, moving from vegetables to dry goods. There was some familiar eighties tune playing on the overhead speakers, Klaus drummed his fingers against the handle of the shopping cart in time to the electric drumbreat. “Maybe, maybe, but I don’t blame you either way.”
“Why not?” She picked up a package of crackers and placed them in the cart just for something to do.
“Because it’s over. And because no one wanted to help me after a certain point anyway.” Klaus took a breath, looking oddly grim in his luridly colored outfit. “I had a million chances to go live with Diego, or like, find a job and live with friends, but in the end the ghosts and the drugs were too much.”
He walked as he talked, looking at the food on the shelves rather than meeting Allison’s eyes.
“Even if I hadn’t been trying to self-medicate my powers away I wouldn’t have been able to stop.” The cereal was on sale, and Klaus crouched down to pull a box of store brand cheerios from the bottom shelf. Over his head the fluorescent lights shone down, reflecting against the rain soaked strands of his hair. Allison took the cart.
“If I hadn’t literally lost every single one of my living loved ones I probably would never have gotten sober.”
And that was true wasn’t it? For three years Klaus must have thought that all of his other siblings had died or otherwise been lost. She remembered her two years as though it had been just a few weeks ago—it had been—Allison had simply been forced to come to terms with the idea that she would never see her family again, if she’d had the power to see ghosts maybe she would have strived to learn to control that power too.
If only for the closure of knowing whether or not her family was dead.
The song on the overhead speakers changed.
At first I was afraid, I was petrified-
“Oh my god!” Klaus clutched at his cheerios, bouncing gleefully on his toes “Allie I was just thinking of this song!”
And with that the conversation was over.
Dismissed.
Klaus swung his hips as he strode down the aisle singing under his breath and Allison followed, smiling in bemusement. Maybe years ago—a month ago—she would have been embarrassed, rolled her eyes and hissed at him to stop, but now she laughed and pushed the cart as he filled it with a variety of store brand and on-sale junk foods.
Really it was for the best, Allison mused as she turned a corner just in time to watch Klaus collide with a display of granola bars, it didn’t seem as though Klaus had needed her to apologize.
She had been the one who had needed herself to say that she was sorry, Klaus was already over it.
Did you think I’d crumble, did you think I’d lay down and die?
Oh no, not I!