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i.
Waking up at the academy is strange. It’s strange mostly because it’s not—he hasn’t been here in like, at least a decade, but it still feels familiar to wake up in his bed or on the couch downstairs. Sometimes, that brings with it the old automatic, familiar feeling of dread that filled his chest up every time he woke up in the academy ages six to nineteen.
Ben is sometimes a helpful reminder of what year it is and how old he is and how dad is dead as a doornail now, just by, like, being there in all his ghostie glory—today he’s just annoying, waking Klaus up with some whining about how bored he is and how Klaus promised he’d help Ben find a way for him to read a book by himself without Klaus having to keep him corporeal for, like, hours at a time. Which he couldn’t actually do yet, which meant a lot of breaks, and also meant that Klaus was mad drained for the rest of the day every time they tried it.
“I’m sleeping, dude,” Klaus complains, half asleep and vaguely offended.
“It’s almost noon, Klaus,” Ben answers.
“And?” Klaus rubs at his eyes, rolls onto his side, “Time is a construct.”
Ben crosses his arms, unimpressed. “Klaus,” he says, “I just spent an hour watching Diego flip knives in his room; I’m so bored that if I wasn’t already dead, I’d probably die.”
“Why’d Diego come over if he’s just gonna flip knives... he can do that at home.”
“Because he can’t just spend time with his family like a normal person?” Ben reads the poor man mercilessly, “I don’t know.”
The guy sounds so frustrated that Klaus kinda feels bad. He sighs, deeply, throwing an arm over his eyes. “Okay, fine. Let me get dressed in peace, and we’ll find a way for you to read your little nerd books.”
“Thank fuck,” Ben says, and, for once, graciously tells him he’ll wait in the hall and floats out through the door.
Klaus pulls some pants on, throws on a tasteful touch of what Ben likes to call his messy gay goth eyeliner, pockets a joint and his lighter, and lets Ben lead the way down to the library.
Ben has a little stack of books in the corner he’s made whenever he has the chance. Klaus decides to just go with the one on the top.
“You read this yet?” he asks, and Ben shakes his head.
Klaus carefully puts the joint and lighter on the table in the middle of the library, and slides into one of the chairs. “Okay,” he says, cracking the book open and waving away the plume of dust that explodes in his face when he does. He sets the dusty thing down, open the a random page, and resigns himself to thinking.
Suddenly, Klaus has an incredible idea. He braces one hand on the book, holding it steady, and then rips out the opposite page. Ben gasps in the background, sounding so scandalized that Klaus has to laugh.
“What the fuck!” Ben says; god, Klaus thinks, if only his siblings knew how much of a potty mouth their dear little Bentacles had. Over a decade with Klaus must just do that to a guy.
“Chill out,” Klaus says, lying the page carefully on the ground. “Look—if I lay out all the pages like that, you won’t have to worry about turning them!”
Ben’s offense melts into his Patented Thoughtful Expression, the same one he used to wear when he was doing math or considering something very deeply after taking Klaus up on his offer to share a joint once or twice.
“That could work, actually,” he finally says.
Klaus throws a fist up in triumph, “My brain is so big!”
Ben snorts, “Sure,” he says, and Klaus takes that as his go-ahead to start ripping more pages out.
He barely even hears Vanya come in, over the sound of his iPod blaring—at a moderate level, of course, since they are technically in a library—what he likes to call his Klaus’ Personal Bath Time Tunes playlist, but can also be used in a number of other situations, such as ignoring a malicious spirit in the corner of one’s room or helping one’s ghost brother read a book; it’s versatile like that.
“Um,” Vanya says, and Klaus jumps mid-rip, tearing the paper up into the text a little bit.
“Oh,” Klaus says, throwing up his HELLO hand, “Hey, Van.”
“Hey,” she answers, looking first at the line of pages Klaus has carefully laid out, and then at the book in his hand, “Um. What are you... doing, exactly?”
Klaus is suddenly glad that Luther’s out doing... something... today. He’s not sure the big guy would react very well to Klaus’ newest endeavor, even if it is for Ben.
“Taking all the pages outta this book,” Klaus answers helpfully, lifting up the book in question.
“Okay.” A pause, “Why?”
“Ben’s been bugging me about finding a way for him to read when I can’t keep him corporeal. So,” he spreads his free hand out, “I figured this way he wouldn’t have to worry about turning the pages!”
“Oh,” Vanya lights up a little in understanding, “That’s nice of you.”
“Thank you,” Klaus grins.
Vanya seems to hesitate, “But, um, how’s he gonna read, y’know, the other side of the pages?”
Klaus blinks. Blinks over at Ben, who blinks back at him.
“Damn,” Klaus says, setting the book down on the table. “I didn’t think about that. You didn’t either!” He says to Ben when the little shit gives him his Patented ‘You Dumbass’ Look.
Vanya grins a little, huffing a soft laugh. Klaus can’t even be annoyed that she’s laughing at them—at him—because he’s hardly ever heard her laugh post age, like, six. Maybe younger. Certainly not post-Ben, or even post-Five.
Klaus sighs, shaking his head, “I guess your brain is just bigger than mine. And since it’s so big—what should I do? Can't exactly tape the book back together.”
Vanya does her best ‘deer in the headlights’ audition for a few moments, always so surprised when she’s, like, asked her opinion directly (Klaus gets the feeling! The other day Luther asked what movie they should watch, and actually waited for everyone to have a say; he didn’t even scoff when Klaus suggested Dirty Dancing, just nodded and wrote it down. Wild shit these days). Klaus gives her a sec to shake herself a little and step further into the library. She’d been hovering in the doorway, like she was afraid to enter. Always seeming to try to take up as little space as possible. (Klaus gets that feeling, too.)
“Well,” she starts, “you could hang them up somewhere? Somewhere where he could see both sides?”
Klaus snaps his fingers, “Yeah! That’s such a big brain idea, V. I think Five has some competition for the family genius title.”
Vanya shrugs, a little bashful, but her lips do twitch up into a smile.
“How should we hang ‘em up, though?” he asks.
Klaus watched Vanya consider, and mostly just pretends to consider himself. There’s a man who has haunted this library since they were little, with a fancy hat and a permanent cough that has him forever hacking up blood everywhere. Tuberculosis, or something. They called it consumption back then, apparently; the guy mentions it whenever he can get a word in between all the coughing and blood. Point is, the fucker’s a little distracting, and the joint Klaus brought with him is still sitting, tragically unlit, on the table behind him.
“Maybe you could hang up some string or something, like how people used to dry laundry outside...” she trails off, with the uncertain tone of someone unused to contributing.
“Like with—damn, what’s the word—clothespins?”
“Yeah,” Vanya nods, “So Ben could walk around and read both sides.”
Klaus feels his face split into a grin, “That could totally work,” he says, glad to finally have a solution, “Thanks, V!”
“Sure,” she says, a little pleased. “Do you—do you want any help?”
Klaus looks at her, a little surprised by her offer; he can see her about to backtrack, though, so he says, “I would love some help. I don’t even know where the hell to find string. Or clothespins.”
“Mom might have some,” Ben says, “Clothespins, I mean. Maybe string, too—or yarn, technically.”
Mom does, in fact, have clothespins. And string—or yarn, technically, which is nice, 'cause Klaus doesn't wanna have to use his own. When she asks them what they’re for, Klaus and Vanya look at each other, and then Vanya says “A project we’re doing for Ben,” which makes Mom smile warmly and say “how wonderful; I’m sure he’ll love it.”
“He better love it,” Klaus says under his breath on their way back down the stairs. Vanya huffs another one of her little laughs.
So they lug a bundle of string—or yarn, technically—a little box of clothespins and some thumbtacks down to the library, and get to work. One of the nanny ghosts that usually hang around the hallways upstairs tags along, her eyes set on the back of Vanya’s little head. Time to light the joint!
Vanya looks like she wants to say something when he does, but then decides against it. She’d been one of the people in favor of him keeping some grass around to take the edge off—it’s better than anything hard, she had said, firmly on his side, and it’s better than alcohol.
So, Klaus cracks a window open and blows the smoke out into the cool midday spring air.
“You want a hit?” he asks after he feels himself start to relax, brain going just a tad foggy before his thoughts catch up and settle and he can barely hear the fancy consumption ghost coughing anymore. This is that good shit.
To his surprise, Vanya, after only a moment’s hesitation, shrugs and says, “Yeah, sure.” Klaus passes her the joint automatically, and she rolls her eyes at his probably dumbfounded expression. “I did go to college, y’know.”
Which, oh yeah, he thinks. Makes sense. He can almost picture it: quiet little Vanya chilling in someone’s dorm room, smoking weed for the very first time and probably coughing. She only coughs a little, now, and he regrets not grabbing a water bottle or something on their way down. She passes the j back after another drag, and he sets it on the windowsill.
“Okay!” he declares, putting his hands on his hips, “Let’s get this party started!”
They get this party started, untangling yarn and figuring out the best way to hang it up, pinning it to a wall or taping it to a bookshelf. Klaus is hit with the absolute elation of the thought that they can poke as many holes in the wall as they want, and Reginald can’t ever say shit about it.
They toss some small talk back and forth, ‘cause Klaus doesn’t like awkward silence on a good day and the weed seems to do his littlest sister some good, loosening her up enough for her to talk freely about her music and her students and how much they annoy her sometimes, the little shits. That’s what you get for teaching kids, he says, and she tilts her head and says at least kids won’t pay for a class just to manipulate me into unlocking my powers and turning on my siblings.
Her blunt sense of humor shocks a laugh out of him, loud and delighted—and everybody keeps telling me it’s too soon to make Leonard-slash-Harold jokes! he yells.
Somewhere around chapter four of tearing and hanging, she asks him how the whole sobriety thing is going. At this point, Ben had once again gotten bored and floated up to find someone else to go spy on. Klaus shrugs, uncomfortable as he usually is when his siblings ask about it—usually checking to make sure he still is sober, which, yeah okay he did relapse once, but that was one time—and says, “Y’know, sobriety sucks and sometimes it gets so loud that I wanna run down to Fourth Street and offer my inheritance to Dan the trusty coke dealer, but other than that, it’s going great.”
“Well,” Vanya says, “I’m, um, I’m here, if you ever need help with that.”
She says it like she actually means it, and isn’t just saying it to sound supportive. It’s strange, these days, having his siblings, like, here to help him. All those rehab workers constantly talking about “support systems” might’ve been onto something there.
“Thanks, V,” he says. And then, “Oh! Speaking of sobriety, I’ve been trying to finish off all twelve steps, mostly for tragic lack of anything else to do, since I’ve never actually gotten to the end and had it stick before.”
“Oh,” Vanya says, looking interested, “Which one are you on?”
“Well, I’ve been skipping around, because I’m not in rehab so no one can tell me what order to go in,” Vanya actually laughs a little, which makes him grin, “but right now I’ve decided to be on step nine.”
“Which is?” she prompts after a moment; he keeps gets distracted with untangling the yarn.
“Oh, right—making amends. Step eight, you make a list of people you’ve, like, hurt with your addiction. Step nine, you make amends to them.”
Vanya seems to consider this for a moment, “Maybe I should make amends, too,” she says thoughtfully.
“Hate to cut you out of another club, little sister, but the twelve steps are kind of a recovering addict thing.”
“I mean, I’ve technically been on mood suppressors my whole life,” she says, “cutting them cold turkey kind of made me almost cause the apocalypse.”
That startles a laugh out of him. “You know what, that’s fair. Me and you, sobering up after a lifetime of hard drugs.”
“I don’t know if I’d call them hard drugs.”
Klaus waves his hand, “Hard drugs, weird power suppressing pills—same difference.”
Vanya, graciously, doesn’t argue the point. Finally, someone who appreciates his great sense of humor.
“Well, I’ll go first,” he says, picking up one of the clothespins, “I’m sorry for, y’know, the way we treated you when we were kids. And the way dad treated you, even though that was all him.”
“I know,” Vanya says, holding a page in place for him to clip up, “You guys have all apologized already.”
Klaus shrugs, “Yeah, but this is me making amends—completely different.”
“The way you acted as a kid has nothing to do with the drug thing, though,” Vanya points out.
“I don’t know, I did start using pretty young. And once Dad gave up on me, I just… stopped caring.”
“I don’t think you ever stopped caring,” Vanya says, bolder than she probably would be if she wasn’t a little blazed, “You used to ask me to play violin for you, 'cause you said you liked it. That always made all the practice feel worth it."
He remembers that, sitting on the other side of their shared wall or lounging on her bed and listening to her practice or just play for fun. He did like it; it was soothing, even when she messed up, and somehow seemed to drown out everything else. Still.
“Yeah, and then when we grew up I slept on your couch and stole from you the next morning so I could go buy heroin—which I don’t even like that much. So, y’know, you were mostly right, in your…” in your book, he doesn’t say, “about the whole getting meaner thing.”
Vanya stares very intently at the clothespin in her hand, and takes a few minutes to respond.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“What?”
“About the book—my book.”
“Vanya,” Klaus starts, but Vanya shakes her head.
“It’s my turn to make amends,” she says firmly, or as firm as Vanya can sound, “And I’m sorry I ever wrote it, and I’m sorry for what I wrote about you. And Ben. And everyone. But—but definitely you.”
“Definitely me, huh?” Klaus asks faintly, wandering back over to the window to grab his j; he also wants to sit down, and decides that the floor near the window is as decent a place as any.
“Yeah,” Vanya swallows, carefully tearing out another page, hands a little shaky, “I… didn’t know what I was talking about, a lot of the time. ‘Cause I just didn’t ask—I just assumed things, like, about your powers and stuff, and I get that now. I shouldn’t have written all that stuff about you…lying or wanting attention. And I shouldn’t have written about Ben’s funeral. And I shouldn’t have written about your—your overdoses.”
Vanya had come to the hospital when Klaus OD’ed two separate times. Once, when they were twenty and Klaus was still making an effort to keep in touch with a few of his siblings, and once when they were twenty three and no one else picked up the phone, Allison in LA and Luther on the moon and Diego out probably doing some wild vigilante stuff or maybe seeing the hospital caller ID and just not giving a shit; Klaus likes to think it was the vigilante stuff. Then she wrote about both times in her book, and so Klaus took her name off his emergency contact list.
He still hasn’t added her back, but that’s mostly because he hasn’t taken any trips to the hospital lately, so there hasn’t been an emergency to contact people about. He wonders if he should get on that; technically, he has no one on the list, so if he did get into a tragic car accident or something and fell into a deep drama-film-worthy coma, they wouldn’t know who to call.
The point is, there’s tension there. Not as palpable as the tension between her and Diego that they’ve been slowly sort of trying to work through, but it’s still there. The Book didn’t make him angry the way it did Diego or even Allison. It mostly just made him sad, and a little irritated about the way she just... tore them all to shreds and left all their baggage out for everyone to read and judge.
The stuff she had written about him (and Ben) hadn’t made him angry. But it had made him sad.
He wasn’t really sure what to do about that, since The Book wasn’t really a subject they all actively Discussed amongst themselves, and Klaus wasn’t really sure how to communicate it in a way that wouldn’t sound defensive and whiny. It didn’t matter much, not when Vanya seemed to grow steadily more relaxed around them. So he had mostly just decided to ignore it, like he did many of his repressed issues and general problems. That had always worked fine for him before. Mostly.
With Vanya basically ripping those old wounds open, he’s not sure it will anymore.
“No,” Klaus says, trying to be careful for once, “You probably shouldn’t have. But you did.” Vanya flinches a little, “You did, and that’s just that. I’m not mad at you for it. It happened, and now it’s done, and we’re all trying to move on and be a big happy family, so it's all good."
“Klaus,” she says, voice small. He wishes Ben hadn’t left. What good is having an emotional support ghost if he’s not there to emotionally support you through difficult familial conversations?
Klaus sighs, crossing his legs and lifting the joint to his lips to take another drag, “I’m not sure what you want me to say, Van.”
“I know, it’s just. Diego,” Vanya starts, slowly setting the book down on the table; she lowers herself to the floor and sits down a few feet away from him, “Diego told me that it… it made you really sad.”
“So you decided to, like, bring it up?” Klaus asks, trying for something teasing but falling pretty flat.
Vanya looks thoroughly embarrassed, which is exactly the opposite of what he wants, but before he can say anything else, she soldiers on, “I just wanted to apologize to you. I guess I never really thought about how you’d all feel about it, beyond some sort of embarrassing revenge thing, but I never expected it to make you sad. I knew it would piss Diego and them off, but I… didn’t think it would make you cry.”
Diego, that fucking traitor. What happens on his little boiler room couch at one in the morning should have stayed in his little boiler room. Like, who wouldn’t cry a little bit about finding out what their little sister thought of them through a book she wrote.
Klaus waves her off, now feeling the same level of thorough embarrassment, “You know me, I’m just dramatic,” he forces a laugh, “I was probably super high and just getting emotional. Crybaby Number Four, always overreacting.”
“Klaus,” Vanya says, voice firm, and she grabs his hand and ignores the way he flinches at the sudden contact, “You weren’t overreacting. It was a shitty thing for me to do, and I shouldn’t have said those awful things about you. About any of you. And I’m sorry. You’re allowed to be upset about shit that people do to you, especially your family.”
Klaus, for the fucking life of him, isn’t sure what to say. He searches his brain for some dumb joke, something to diffuse the bomb and lift the tension, but his head is empty. No thoughts. Just an uncomfortably warm lump in his throat he tries to push down before it can pool behind his eyes.
Vanya gives him a moment, hand small and warm over his own.
“Okay,” he finally says, voice breaking like he’s a child again, “Okay. I’m seriously not mad at you about it. I—uh, I forgive you? As long as you forgive me for stealing half your silverware that one time. And for tearing down the wall between our rooms to make mine bigger after you left."
Those are the right words, for once, the phrase that makes the tension drip from Vanya’s little shoulders as she deflates—relief? He’s not used to being the one doing the forgiving, doing the absolving. It makes him uncomfortable. But he also, maybe, feels a little bit lighter for it.
“Can I—?” Vanya cuts herself off, leaning forwards. He assumes the little aborted gesture with her arms translates to hug, so he opens his arms and lets her lean in. She’s so little, he thinks; a decade since they’ve done this, maybe more, and she’s still so little. Makes him feel Luther-sized, almost, except her hands can actually touch at his back. Maybe he should put some muscle on, so that his tiniest sister can't make him feel too skinny.
“Thank you,” she says, clearing her throat as she pulls back. She wipes at her eyes a little, and doesn’t say anything when he subtly does the same. Fuck, his eyeliner’s gonna smear. He wishes Allison would let him borrow her water proof kind.
In lieu of a usual you’re welcome, because he doesn’t think this is the right situation for it, he says, “Now then, if we’ve done enough emotional labor for the day, Ben still needs his book!”
It takes them another hour to hang everything up, clotheslines of book pages criss crossing between shelves and across the room, but in enough of an organized way (thanks, Vanya!) that Ben will be able to read it all in order.
“You better take at least three days to read this,” he tells Ben.
Ben says “fine, fine,” because he’s been reading the same book on and off for like a decade at this point, so he’s probably okay with rereading this one once or twice. He also says thank you, for once, but especially to Vanya.
Klaus communicates this to her—Ben says thank you a thousand times, with all the passion in his dead little heart—and thinks that the pleased look on her face makes the physical and emotional toll this day took on him worth it.
ii.
Once, when they were little, he and Allison tried to grow a watermelon together; he had asked if she could rumor it to grow, and she said she obviously couldn’t cause it wasn’t alive, so they had tried to grow some the old fashioned way. It didn’t work, mostly because they forgot about it a few days later. One time, Klaus had thought about trying to grow some weed back there, but decided against it—it’d be too much work on his part.
Now, years later, he decides that he might as well try again—not weed or watermelon, but maybe some flowers or something. Dave always talked about showing Klaus some of the fields he had back home, about the wildflowers that would grow there, about how he’d get Klaus some nice roses or something on their first Real Date. Klaus decides to go with roses.
He asks Allison to drive him to the store, mostly because Diego is at work or something and Allison is finally visiting from LA, and she only looks marginally skeptical when he says he wants to go get some real official gardening supplies, which he thinks is nice of her.
“You remember that time we tried to grow a watermelon?” Allison asks on the way there.
Klaus doesn’t know why, but he’s a little surprised that she remembers that three day venture of theirs—he doesn’t hesitate in laughing, though. “Yeah!” he says, “We gave up pretty fast, huh.”
“To be fair, we were, like, eight.”
When they get to the Home Depot that Allison chose—which was smart, because Klaus was just planning to go to, like, Walmart or something—they make a beeline for the plant section. Gardening section? Neither of them have spent much time in Home Depot, so their beeline ends up being more of a General Wandering until they remember to read the signs hanging from the ceiling (both of them were too proud to ask an employee; Allison also has her big sunglasses on to avoid getting recognized, so they had no desire to draw attention to themselves by being two grown adults who couldn’t follow some arrows).
“Do we have shovels at home?” Allison asks, squinting at the shelves of gardening tools.
Klaus considers. “I mean, probably. Didn’t Mom used to garden?”
Allison tilts her head in agreement, “We did rip up her flowers to make room for our watermelon.”
Klaus huffs a laugh, weaker than he meant it to be. There’s a woman standing in the corner who looks like she stepped out of a sixties magazine that nobody else has looked at since they walked in, and she hasn’t taken her eyes off of him; she hasn’t made a move to approach yet, but he’s still a little tense about it. Allison doesn’t comment, just ushers them in the direction of the actual plants. Klaus, for once, lets himself be ushered.
There are, like, a bunch of different kinds of flowers, with packets of seeds nearby, nicely labeled with little pictures on the front.
“The tulips are nice,” Ben says, hovering over his shoulder. Klaus jumps.
“Nice of you to show up,” he gripes.
Allison glances over at him, crouched down to look at some cute little yellow flowers. “Is that…” she trails off. None of his siblings seem to know how to approach the Ben Subject. Klaus thinks it’s kinda funny.
He nods. “Ben Ten finally deigns to grace us with his presence.”
“I was finishing my book,” Ben says. Probably for the third time. Klaus hasn't much been up to ripping another book apart lately. Hasn't really been up to doing anything other than try to find Dave and then getting upset and frustrated that he can't. He needs some healing gardening (god knows he could go for something a little stronger, but he's been clean for forty eight days, now, so the gardening will just have to do.)
“How’d you even find us?”
He feels more than sees Ben shrug out of the corner of his eye, “The usual way, I guess.”
Ben, inexplicably, always knows where to find him. He tried to explain it once, but Klaus was too high to really get it, and then never remembered to ask again.
Allison smiles, a little delicate, “Does Ben have any flower preferences?”
Ben perks up the way he does when one of their siblings actively acknowledges his existence. “The tulips are nice,” he repeats.
“He says he hates the tulips,” Klaus says.
“Asshole,” Ben says, and so Klaus laughs and says, “Kidding, kidding—Ben fucks hard with the tulips.”
It makes Ben grumble but it also makes Allison laugh, so Klaus counts it as a win.
Ultimately, they decide to go with getting some pre-potted roses instead of any of the seeds—he’s self aware enough to know that if he starts off with the seeds he’ll lose interest after the first few days pass without notable progress. He’s a visual person, okay! You can’t see seeds grow until the plant starts to poke out of the ground; he’ll remember to water the flowers he can actually see need watering.
It’s sound logic, and Allison agrees with him. She pays, when they drag the box to the register, and waves him off when he tries to say something about it. (Not seriously though. Like, he doesn’t actually have the cash for it—flowers are expensive!—and doubts Diego does, either, which is another reason he’d grateful he asked Allison instead.)
“Did you invite me for my money?” She asks, teasing, as she digs through her purse.
“Oh course not!” He says, doing his best to sound extremely unconvincing, “I was gonna ask Diego—I’m just super lucky that my mega-rich sister was the one I ran into instead.”
“Your lucky day,” she jokes.
“Yours too, baby—you get to spend some quality time with moi.”
The funny thing is, she doesn’t disagree with him. Just smiles, all knowing, and swipes her credit card.
When they get home, Allison helps him drag all the shit they bought to the place that used to be the garden, out back. It’s mostly just grass and some vines by now, but there’s still plenty of good looking dirt. They also bought a bag of soil, at Ben’s insistence. Klaus isn’t sure when Ben became a gardening expert, but Allison agreed with him, so whatever.
Klaus thanks her kindly, kicks off his shoes, and gets to work on his fucking roses. He’s gonna make this garden look fantastic by the time summer comes around. Maybe they should plant some strawberries or something, too.
He expects Allison to go do whatever it is Allison does when she’s at the house, good deed done for the day.
Instead, Allison, big superstar LA actress, kicks off her shoes and rolls up her probably expensive pants, and steps into the dirt with him. It’s probably symbolic or something, but he’s considerably less high than he usually is (read: tragically sober), which means he’s also considerably less poetic about this sort of thing.
“So,” she says, patting the ground around a newly planted baby rose, “why roses?”
Klaus opens his mouth to say something deflective and probably annoying—something about true love and romance or maybe the Titanic movie—but then he remembers that he’s trying to do less of that because they’re trying to like, mend their distant relationships and Be A Family. Which usually involves talking about things that mean something to you, and being vulnerable and all that. It’s hard to do sometimes (read: most of the time), with the house they grew up in, with the man they grew up with, and the fact that they haven’t seen each other much in the past decade or so, but they’re trying.
The other day he held a full conversation with Luther without either of them getting overtly irritated with each other—sure, it was about how they both preferred their eggs, but hey! He found out that the big guy hadn’t ever tried a deviled egg before, and that he likes them scrambled. The kind of small, humanizing details you forget after a while.
The point is, he’s trying to be less cagey and more, like, emotionally vulnerable beyond his usual quick-to-cry-at-sad-movies shit.
So he swallows, and looks down at the little baby flower on the ground in front of him, dirt under his nails and under Allison’s nails, too, and says: “Dave liked roses; he always said he was gonna buy some for our first, um, ‘real date’,” he lifts his hands for the air quotes, and then drops them again. “So I just—I thought maybe it might help.”
“Help... conjure him?” Allison asks, voice soft and warm and sympathetic in a way it never quite was when they were kids; it’s so easy to forget that she’s a mom now, no matter how much of a roller coaster that particular journey has been.
“Yeah,” he answers, carefully packing the soil around the rose’s delicate stem. “I still haven’t... been able to do it yet. I don’t know why.”
Allison lifts another little pot out of the box, and turns to hand it to Klaus.
“He’ll find you eventually,” she says, and she sounds so confident that he sort of believes her, “I mean, you’re planting a whole garden for him.”
He finally dares to look her in the eye, and she smiles at him—not the tight kind he used to get the few times he ran into her, usually when she dropped by to pay a check in rehab, but something soft. He knows she’s always had a soft spot for his fun little antics—he knows he’s funny, and he’s glad at least one of his siblings appreciates it!—but he’s starting to think that maybe that’s not all their relationship has to be now. They used to paint each other’s nails and gossip about boys and cute actors and how annoying their brothers were. He has the sudden urge to drag her to his room and gush about Dave for an hour, but he wouldn’t wanna make her feel bad about not having a nice hot handsome man of her own, what with the whole divorce thing, and it also might make him cry too much.
Instead, he smiles back, and takes the flower pot. This little rose has bloomed a bit more than the rest. There are two thorns on its stem.
“Yeah,” he says, “I guess I am.”
Allison hesitates for a moment, smooths out her pants in an absently nervous way he’s never seen from her before, “What’s he like?” she asks, and he deeply appreciates the present tense. “If you—if you don’t mind me asking.”
Klaus considers. Looks at the flower pot in his hand, and the dirt tracked all over his sister’s nice clothes. “Well,” he says, letting his mouth curl into an easy grin, a real one, “if you’re gonna meet him, I guess you should know a little bit about him—just so you don’t embarrass yourself.”
Allison cracks a smile, “We wouldn’t want that.”
Klaus picks up the little garden shovel to dig his next hole, and finally talks about his soldier boy.
iii.
Two nights later, he finds Luther down in the kitchen with a glass of what looks like that weird carbonated seltzer shit Allison keeps buying to give you all (heavy side glance at Five... and Klaus, on a bad day) something a little lighter in his hand—because she worries in her own way and Five seesaws between being irritable as all fuck and funny as hell when he’s plastered, and that’s not as fun as it sounds. It’s sweet of her, and he would probably appreciate it a little more if the stuff didn’t taste like shit.
Luther’s head shoots up when Klaus walks in; Klaus pulls his headphones off instead of just waving and going about his business, because Luther looks kinda... rough. His eyes are a little red. And he’s willingly drinking nasty coconut flavored seltzer. Klaus wonders how many of them the big guy would have to drink to even feel a buzz—and also finds it a little charming that he decided to pour it into a glass instead of just... drinking it from the can. God, this guy is gonna kill him someday.
“Hey, buddy,” Klaus says, voice pitched high and calm.
“Hey,” Luther croaks back. Klaus suddenly and deeply wishes Ben had come down with him. The last time he dealt with an emotional Luther didn’t exactly end with the best night ever.
Still. They’re trying to be... better. His siblings have given him plenty of second chances—Allison’s quietly paid for his rehab at least three times—so he can extend one to his big, big brother, who’s sitting there hunched over the table like it’ll make him any smaller.
So, he walks to the fridge, hoping the buzz from the fat blunt he smoked earlier will be enough to carry him through this conversation and block out the complaints of the bank robber who’s followed Luther around since age thirteen, slaps two of the leftover waffles he saved from breakfast earlier onto a plate, and slides into the seat across from Luther.
“So what’s up, captain?” He asks, ripping off a little piece of waffle; he’s too lazy to, like, heat up the syrup or anything.
Luther blinks back at him, like he’s surprised Klaus is still here. Klaus is also kinda surprised that Klaus is still here.
“What do you mean?” He has the audacity to answer with.
Klaus raises an eyebrow. “Well, I’m usually the only one up at,” he glances at the clock on the stove, “three in the early AM—other than Five, but that little gremlin doesn't count. And you’re down here, drinking that truly awful five-percent-alcohol travesty instead of sleeping the night away in your room. So, y’know,” Klaus shrugs, trying his best to keep it casual, “what’s up with that?”
Luther swallows. Looks down at his drink, takes a long sip, and then grimaces. “That does taste pretty bad, actually.”
Klaus snorts, and decides not to be annoying about Number One agreeing with him about something, ‘cause he doesn’t wanna piss the guy off when he’s in that... fragile drunky mental state of his. If he’s even actually drunk. He mostly just seems kinda tired, which isn’t a side of him Klaus has seen very often.
“No whiskey this time?” he asks instead, deciding he can tease him a little.
Instead of reacting in any number of normal Luther-like fashions, Luther just glances back down at his cup and shrugs a massive shoulder.
“I don’t… the last time I drank whiskey didn’t end very well.”
Klaus shoves another piece of waffle into his mouth. Can’t argue with that.
“Well. Everyone’s allowed to be a little messy their first time around. Lord knows I puked my little guts out the first time I tried vodka.”
Luther shakes his head, frowning. His movements do seem a little slower, a little off-tilt; Klaus wonders how many shitty seltzers he must’ve gone through to get enough of a buzz to stop tasting it.
“No. No, I... I shouldn’t have done that. Acted like that.” Luther finally looks up at him, looks straight at him, intense enough that Klaus freezes mid-bite, “I’m sorry I threw you around like I did.”
Klaus swallows, feeling suddenly very out of his depth, almost on par with how he felt when Luther started crying on him that one time. All these weird apologies lately keep throwing him off his game.
“Oh,” he says eloquently, “It’s—it’s okay, man. Really, it’s fine. Already forgotten about.”
Which is mostly true. Klaus isn’t really fond of anyone sneaking up on him or, like, looming, not just Luther.
Luther looks like he wants to push it further, but stops himself. Another un-Luther-like action. He has been reading a lot of self-help books lately. And talking to Allison on the phone. Vanya showed them all a few websites, a few weeks ago, that have a lot of Helpful Info on shit like child abuse and PTSD and all that other fun stuff Dad loaded them up with, and one where people can, like, talk about it with other fucked up people. (Survivors, Vanya said, the website said, abuse survivors. Not victims, because Diego hates that word.)
“Alright,” he nods, and pauses. “Thanks.”
Klaus reaches across the table to pat one of his hands, “No problem, brother of mine.”
There’s a moment or two of silence, where Klaus finishes off the first waffle and starts on the second, and Luther takes another long drink.
“I went to get groceries earlier,” Luther suddenly tells him.
Klaus, aware that he’s waiting for some kind of answer to, like, let him keep telling the story instead of soldiering forwards like he always used to, stops chewing and says, “Well, that’s exciting. Make any new friends?”
Luther shakes his head. “Do people... make friends at grocery stores?”
Klaus shrugs, “I know a guy who works register at the gas station down the street; mostly ‘cause I used to buy acid from him, though… never mind, I don’t think that counts.”
Luther, graciously, doesn’t get on his case about his teenage acid purchasing—just frowns a little, shoulders slumping a little more.
“Well, I—I didn’t meet anyone. But. I was picking out some apples...”
“Very nice apple selection, by the way,” Klaus fills the silence, because that’s one of the things he does best. He has the feeling this is something Luther has to work up to, for whatever reason.
“Thanks,” he mutters, “Anyway. I saw this lady, and she had a kid with her. He looked about Five’s age, maybe younger? And I don’t know why, but. I tried to imagine him... training. Or fighting, like we did. Being stuck in the future, like Five. Or... mixing himself a drink,” Klaus stills, “and he was just... so little. He was so—young. We were—“ his voice breaks, and Klaus stares down at his waffle.
He suddenly isn’t very hungry anymore.
“We were so young,” Luther continues, “We were—we were kids.”
It’s a bitch of a revelation to have, Klaus knows. One he had his second round of rehab, listening to an orderly talk about how many victims of abuse turn to substance abuse as a Way To Cope. Listened to someone talk about their own shitty time as a kid. Mentioned some of the fun times he and his siblings had (read: fucked up not normal doomsday cult shit) and saw everyone’s faces and realized that maybe it was actually his dad who had been fucked up and wrong the whole time and not him. That he wasn’t just overdramatic or weak-willed. He hadn’t been. He had just been a child. They had all been children.
“Yeah,” Klaus agrees, swallowing heavily. His throat feels very dry. “We were kids.”
Luther breathes, something heavy and wet. Klaus looks up in alarm, afraid he might be crying again—he’s not, but it looks like a near thing.
“How could he do that to us?” Luther asks him, sounding incredibly young and smaller than he’d been since age twelve, and he says us and not me and somehow that makes it hurt more, “How could he—why did—?”
“I dunno, big guy,” he admits, “To be honest… I don’t think I want to. He did bad shit to us, y’know? I think maybe he was just a shitty person who had a lot of money and a lot of time and a whole lot of power.”
Luther sniffs. Lifts his glass to take another sip, and then seems to realize that it’s empty.
Klaus gives him a moment.
“There’s always just... been a clear reason for things,” Luther finally says, “Or, I thought there was. Dad trained us hard because he wanted us to be good heroes. Five left ‘cause he was selfish. Vanya didn’t train with us because she didn’t have powers. You—you did drugs because you were too weak to handle yours, or-or you wanted attention.”
Klaus flinches back against the words, stomach dropping; he hasn’t heard the attention-whore line in a while. He’s surprised to find it stings more than he used to; maybe that’s just the sobriety.
“But—but it’s all just bullshit,” Luther continues, “It was all just more of Dad’s bullshit—all of it, my whole life. And I feel so stupid. And I feel so—so embarrassed, that I just believed it. I seriously spent seventeen years convincing myself that Five was selfish and ungrateful for disappearing.”
“Luther,” Klaus tries weakly, because Luther’s working himself up now, seeming torn between being angry and being sad, settling for some strange combination of both that seems to be genetic to their family.
“And I—I never cared enough to ask why you...” he trails off, “Or to talk with Vanya before I decided she was dangerous. I just listened to what dad said and never thought any different. What kind of person does that make me?”
“A kid who loved his dad,” Klaus says, because that is, at the heart of it, what Luther was. What he is.
That just seems to make the poor guy feel worse, swiping angrily at his eyes.
“Thirty years into my life and I’m barely starting to think for myself.”
“Luther,” he says, leaning forwards in his chair and reaching across the table to grab at his hand; Luther graciously lets his hand be grabbed, and pulled down from his eyes and settled under Klaus’ on the table, like Vanya did for him a few weeks ago in the library, “It’s like you said: you were a kid. What else were you supposed to think? It’s not your fault Dad fucked you up in your own special way. He fucked all of us up, dude.”
That, somehow, seems to settle Luther down a little. He breathes deeply, shoulders slumping.
“I’ve been an awful brother.”
“C’mon, we’ve all been pretty shitty to each other,” Klaus makes his lips curl up, like it’s a joke. Their whole damn lives, one big fucked up joke. Little Girl God must’ve had a field day with them.
“You haven’t.”
Klaus blinks. “Uh, I’m pretty sure I’ve stolen from all of you at least once—except for Five, obviously. And Ben. Actually, I think I might've taken one of his jackets.”
Luther shakes his head, “No, I mean, you’re just… good at it. You make everyone laugh, y’know? Cheer them up. Even when we were kids.”
Klaus feels himself flush a little—him! Embarrassed! About something nice that Luther said! Something nice about him. He wonders if he’s dreaming. If he’s been transported back to that time before everything went to total shit, before they were old enough for Reggie to really kick things off, and they had all mostly liked each other and played together and been siblings. He thinks Luther used to laugh himself sick over some of the dumb shit Klaus said.
“Oh, well,” Klaus stutters, picking at his waffle, “You know me, I live to please.”
“I’m serious,” Luther says, “You…I’m glad. That you’re around again. “Everything was so quiet, after everyone left, so it’s…nice.”
Klaus, because he thinks he’s reached his limit on emotional vulnerability for the night even though he’s barely done any talking—listening to your brother verbalize his revelation about your shitty abusive dead prick of a dad totally counts—smiles and says, “Damn, Luther, you saying I’m loud? Me?”
“Yes,” Luther says, so quickly that Klaus snorts a laugh, “But not in a bad way—sometimes.”
“But in a bad way most of the time?”
Luther rolls his eyes—but there’s no dismissive annoyance, this time, not like Klaus is so used to; there’s something uncomfortably fond in it. “It’s like fifty-fifty.”
“I’ll take it,” Klaus concedes easily for once. Luther smiles at him, oddly shy, and Klaus lifts the rest of his cold waffle off of his plate and tosses it at him, just to watch the guy fumble with it and say what the hell, Klaus, and thinks that, maybe, they might all eventually be okay. Probably not anytime soon, but, y'know. Eventually.
Eventually is much better than never.