Archive of Our Own

In the end,

we will conserve only what we love,

we will love only what we understand,

we will understand only what we are taught.

~ Baba Dioum

The boy in the corner won’t stop staring at him. 

At the young age of five years old, Number Four doesn’t have many thoughts about the ghosts only he can see. He certainly doesn’t like them, because nobody likes being stared at and screamed at by random bloody strangers, who constantly beg for vengeance and justice. Though some of the ghosts are at least tolerable, the ones who scream threats and sob uncontrollably terrify him to no end, a fact his dad shows his utmost displeasure for. Four tries to be brave during his special training sessions, honest, cross his heart and hope to die, but he can’t control the fear that erupts within him the moment he’s forced to face the mean, scary spirits. 

He’s had to learn when to ignore the ghosts and when he has to give them his full attention, which, in Four’s opinion, is beyond confusing. For instance, during special training with his father, he has to keep a careful eye on the ghosts he’s supposed to be interacting with, but during lesson times with Pogo and his siblings, he must allow the ghosts to fall into the background in order to concentrate on his studies. Neither task is an easy feat, which is why he often finds himself the subject of Pogo’s stern words and his father’s frustrated eyes, but ignoring the ghosts is relatively the simpler of the two. Still, the louder ghosts, who screech and bellow curses into his ear, drowning out the voices of the living, make his life rather difficult. Weirdly enough, it makes him more appreciative of the quieter, peaceful spirits. 

Such as the aforementioned small boy in the corner of his bedroom. 

Four, in his short life, cannot remember a time when this boy was not around. A constant part of his days, the small boy mostly stays in his bedroom, in that same corner, though occasionally Four will spot him following him from a distance. At least a couple of years younger than Four himself, the boy has curly brown hair and dark eyes that have never been anything but big and sad. He spends nearly all of his time whimpering and crying to himself, glancing up every once in a while so Four can see his teary, red eyes. The fat droplets roll down his cheeks and drip down onto his uniform, which is identical to the uniforms Four and his brothers wear, leaving damp stains that never seem to disappear no matter how much time passes. If Four didn’t know better, he would think the small boy was a resident of the Academy, given his similarities to the children who live in it and contrasted to the other ghosts who seem to not belong in this time. 

However, the boy's head which is bashed in, and the blood continuously gushing down the left side of his tiny face prove otherwise. 

Tonight, as Four climbs into his bed and waits for his mom to come tuck him like she does every night, he is hyper-aware of the small, bleeding boy’s eyes trained on him from his corner, whimpering, sniffling, and simply watching him. Frankly, it’s an abnormal situation because although Four has become accustomed to the feeling of being watched, this small ghost doesn’t usually pay too much attention to him. Which, honestly, rude, because Four certainly didn’t ask this random boy to take up residence in his bedroom out of all the rooms in the house, but he also hates the feeling of being stared at by the eyes of the dead so he has yet to bring up this particular grievance. 

“Hi,” Four says to the boy quietly, as he sometimes does when he gets curious enough to put his fears on the back burner. 

As usual, the boy doesn’t respond, just sniffles and blinks. Four wonders if the boy is even able to talk—he knows for a fact he himself was talking when he was that size, due to everyone telling him he was making noise since the moment he entered the world. Perhaps the boy has trouble speaking as Two does, or maybe he’s just plain refusing to engage in conversation out of annoyance, like Five. Somehow, though, Four has to doubt the latter, as there isn’t a single trace of Five’s stubbornness or annoyance in this small boy's demeanor. 

So, in an attempt to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling he’s experiencing, Four breaks eye contact with the boy and tries to find anything else to look at. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything much better to lay his sights on. There’s the middle-aged man standing by his dresser who is constantly yelling about Four’s father for some reason whilst pointing to the single gunshot wound between his eyes, but Four doesn’t dare give him a shred of attention lest it encourages the man to stick around for longer than usual. The young woman with the bent neck who is usually found in the downstairs kitchen but seems to have followed him up to his bedroom tonight isn’t as loud or scary, but it is rather off-putting the way she mumbles over and over about “the devil girl” with a mix of fear and anger written into the lines of her sullen frown. The friendliest of the ghosts who have gathered around him tonight seems to be the old man leaning against his door frame, clad in clothes that Four has only seen people wearing in old photos found in his history book, but he doesn’t think he’ll be able to make much of a conversation with this ghost due to the fact Four’s pretty certain the words he’s speaking aren’t in English. 

So, yeah, not the best company, but luckily his mom enters his room just in time, stepping through the elderly man and making her way to Four’s bedside. 

“Mom?” Four whispers to his mother as she begins the process of tucking him into bed. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

His mother doesn’t seem phased in the slightest by this, as Four tends to say this almost every single night. 

“And why is that, dear?” his mom questions him regardless because she loves him and cares much about his health and safety. 

“He keeps staring at me,” Four breathes, despite the fact he knows the ghosts can hear him no matter the volume at which he speaks. 

“Who, darling? The man with the bullet wound?” 

It’s comforting, in a way, that his mother is able to not only remember the ghosts that Four tells her about but also be able to keep track of their mannerisms—boiling it down to the ones who are scary distractions and the ones who are not. She is the only one in his life who can do that, and nobody else comes close. His father, while interested in the ghosts, never seems to care about who the ghosts are, but rather their usefulness in Four’s training. His siblings, on the other hand, get rightfully freaked out when he reminds them of the mere presence of the ghosts and always accuse him of making up the many vast, gory descriptions he gives of them. His mom is the only one who has ever shown any sign of truly understanding what he’s seeing. 

“No,” Four swallows, sneaking a quick glance at the man who has now worked himself into a storm of seething rage. His eyes then fall back on the boy, whose gaze has yet to waver. “It’s the sad little boy in the corner.”

“Oh my,” his mom says, her familiar smile dimming because the mother in her is always sorrowful towards the lost children she cannot help nor see. Despite this, she continues to put her son to bed, bringing the covers up to his shoulders and tucking in the sides. Then, she sits at the edge of the bed, near his head, and strokes her gentle fingers through Four’s unkempt hair.

“I tried saying hi, but he just keeps… staring,” Four continues, looking back up at his mom. “It’s creepy.”

“I know,” his mom says, her smile gentle and understanding. “But perhaps he’s just trying to watch over and protect you… in the only way he knows how?” 

“I dunno,” Four is far from convinced, scrunching the features of his face as he tries to picture the ghost of the smaller, teary-eyed boy protecting him from anything in any capacity whatsoever. “Even if he wasn’t a ghost, I don’t think he’d be able to protect a fly.”

His mom hums thoughtfully.

“Well, then maybe he needs you to be his protector,” his mom suggests.

Now, that thought is even more absurd.

“No matter,” his mom continues, patting his shoulder comfortingly. “Either way, do try to show him kindness, won’t you, dear? I imagine he’s likely terrified and missing his family.”

With that, she strokes his hair one last time, leans down to press a kiss on his forehead, and rises from the bed, her heels clicking rhythmically with each step she makes towards the door to his room. They exchange words of love and well wishes, and then the lights are turned off, the door is shut, and his mother’s steps disappear down the hallway that will lead her to the rooms of Five, Six, and Seven. 

The boy is, of course, still in his same spot, and Four can still feel him watching through the blanket of darkness. Huffing with annoyance, Four turns to his other side so his back is facing the corner the boy is in, doing his best to try and forget about his unwanted roommates so he can get some sleep. He is, as usual, only halfway successful, and only wakes from a nightmare once. 

The next day is one of difficulty, filled with so many instances of Four just not being able to do what he’s supposed to, no matter how hard he tries. 

The ghosts are louder than they usually are, screaming, crying, and mumbling through Pogo’s entire lesson so that Four can’t for the life of him focus on what he’s being taught, so when he’s called on and can’t answer his siblings all erupt into giggles and smirks because the dumb class clown Number Four strikes again! And all Four can do is blush and shrink as far as he can in his chair as Pogo, yet again, sternly orders him to pay better attention. Tears pricking at his eyes, Four crosses his arms and looks down at his shoes, and not for the first time in his life wishes he could be ordinary like Number Seven. 

Then, his dad tells him his training is going to be held in a different place today, and his day only gets worse from there. 

The graveyard is only a five-minute ride from the Academy, and those minutes fly by as fear runs through Four’s body, putting all his energy into just not crying because he knows how angry his father gets when he cries. Pogo slows the car to a halt at the front gates of the cemetery, and he only looks Four in the eyes once through the rearview mirror before keeping his gaze straight ahead. His dad tells Pogo to pick them back up in two hours, and— two hours ? Four’s heart begins to thud against his chest as his dad leads them through the old, abandoned cemetery, eyes darting in every direction. There are only a few ghosts present at the moment, but Four knows that will change momentarily, as he can feel hordes of spirits who will soon be alerted to his presence. 

In pursuit of making actual progress, his dad allows them to start “easy.”

“Number Four, summon the ghost belonging to this grave,” his dad orders curtly, pointing to a headstone that reads Elizabeth M Rodley, wife, mother, daughter, sister, 1886-1965. 

Swallowing nervously, Four nods and turns to face the grave. 

“Quickly, Number Four,” his dad adds, sounding just as impatient as ever. 

But of course, Number Four is rarely able to do the things he’s asked of. 

The training session is rocky and his father grows more frustrated and angry by the minute. Meanwhile, the ghosts of people buried in a cemetery untouched for years on end wake quickly at the commotion, and they all begin to surround Four in a horrifyingly quick manner. Their voices are loud, there are so many of them, his father is yelling at him now, and Four just. He can’t. Without thinking of the consequences that come with such blatant disobedience, Four starts to run as fast as his small legs will allow him to go, his hands pressed tightly to his ears, and tears rolling down his cheeks. There are so many ghosts in the crowd that Four can’t even see two feet in front of him, but he just keeps running and running and running, the ghosts just keep screaming, wailing, sobbing—

His left foot gets caught on a rock, and he trips, flies through the air, and lands on something sharp, and suddenly there’s an explosion of pain in his stomach.

When his brain catches up to real-time, Four finds himself laying face down on the ground, his mouth filled with mud that he can’t seem to spit out, and unbearable shooting pains coming from his stomach. He tries to move but it hurts even more to do so, so he simply lays still as the edges of his vision begin to get fuzzy. In front of him, he can see the brown trunk of a large oak tree, with many of its roots sticking out of the ground, sharp and pointed up towards the sky. His eyes are getting heavy, his body feels warm and tingly, and he falls into nothingness. 

Four opens his eyes to a place that feels familiar, but any memories he might have of it are too far out of reach for him to retrieve. It’s the biggest forest he’s ever seen, and despite the lack of color, it fills him with awe and happiness. Grass that is so soft it’s akin to sitting on a cloud, trees that stand tall, blocking much of the sun’s rays with their huge, leafy canopies. 

There are no angry fathers, no mean and hurtful siblings, no demanding ghosts that only he is burdened to see. 

It’s painless and… safe.

As he begins to frolic in the meadow like only a fawn and a child does, the hours feel like minutes and the minutes feel like seconds. 

“It’s time for you to go back,” the little girl, who is both a stranger and an old friend to him, says. She doesn’t beat around the bush and doesn’t sugarcoat her words with false niceties and promises. 

“Already?” Four’s heart sinks, dreading the thought of going back to his father, where he knows a punishment will certainly be waiting for him. “But I just got here.”

The little girl pauses for a moment, seemingly in thought. She then sighs, but on her face is a look of absolute certainty. 

“Alright,” the little girl says, and Four is simply too young to recognize the unprecedented amount of leeway he is being given. “Just a few more minutes, but then you have to go. Understood?”

Four quickly nods and busies himself with picking gray flowers until he’s gathered a handful. About a full foot shorter than the girl, he runs up to her and holds out the flowers. They aren’t the prettiest of flowers in all actuality, simply weeds compared to the bouquet that is resting in the basket of the little girl’s bike. 

Paying this fact no mind, the little girl smooths her sundress down with her hands, smiles, and takes his messy handful of flowers, placing them in her basket next to the others. 

Four’s chest bursts with joy. 

Then, he wakes up in his bed. 

His mom, his dad, and Pogo are all staring down at him, with expressions ranging from concern to morbid fascination. His dad, despite Four’s earlier actions, doesn’t seem as angry as Four was preparing himself for, and only gives a slight grunt with a raised brow before turning on his heel and leaving the room. Pogo follows soon after, but not before resting a hand on Four’s shoulder and murmuring something about being sorry. His mom remains for a few moments longer, telling him she’s glad he’s alright and that he really should get some rest, he must be exhausted. With a promise of bringing him dinner to his room later, his mom leaves, and then he’s all alone with the few ghosts that are regulars of the Academy. 

Four sits up, bewildered by what just happened. Was the meadow simply a dream? A place that only exists in his mind? He surely hopes not—he would love to visit again soon. 

He glances around his bedroom, the bits of sunlight seeping in from the closed window blinds illuminating his surroundings, when he does, he sees two things that make his blood run cold. 

The first thing: the little boy who has been whimpering in the corner of Four’s room is nowhere to be found. 

On its own, this is not an alarming discovery. Every once in a while, there is a ghost who is miraculously able to stumble across the closure they needed to pass on to wherever, and Four doesn’t ever see them again. That is, however, a very rare case, and the majority of the time a ghost disappears it’s because they get tired of haunting the very boring Academy, and decide to leave it behind in favor of the world that lies outside it. In both cases, Four is always happy for them. 

But Four knows this time this disappearance is different from the others, and his evidence is the second thing: in the small boy's place stands another boy, this one taller, noticeably older, and a mirror image of Four himself. 

The boy in front of him wears the same uniform, the same curly brown hair, the same face—so close to being an exact copy, a reflection, of himself. 

The only difference between them is that his double has deathly pale skin, a bashed-in head that leaves blood covering the entire left side of his head and part of his face, a twisted ankle, and an impalement wound smack dab in the middle of his stomach. His double’s uniform is soaking wet with both mud and blood, and there’s a pool of bright red on the ground where he’s standing. 

His breath is caught in his throat as Four slips out of his bed, cautiously taking a few steps forward, reaching out to touch this battered and broken version of himself with a trembling hand, but it’s met with nothing, save for icy cold air. 

It’s like this boy is his… his own ghost. 

Ghost-Four’s brown eyes are wide with terror, and his face twists with an expression of horror even Four isn’t sure he’s ever experienced before. His eyes fill up with tears, and a few fall from the corners, the clear drops paving messy streaks through all of the red. Whimpering, he wraps his arms around his bloody stomach.

Then, the ghost retreats to the corner of Four’s bedroom, curls up into a ball, and cries quietly to himself. 

And this time, it’s Four who can do nothing but stare.

The next few years are those of relative normalcy. As the future Umbrella Academy grows older, their training becomes more advanced, and their personalities begin to take form. All of them unsure of where exactly their training is taking them, some begin to excel while others fall behind, and it’s surely no surprise Four is one of those who simply cannot keep up. Still, he’s determined to try the best he can, even if his best isn’t very good in the slightest, in hopes that soon he’ll be able to catch up. 

Four thinks it would be easier if the ghosts weren’t so loud. There are so many of them, they all have something to say, and most of them don’t have the decency to pipe down during universal quiet hours. They all want something from him, an endless stream of requests and demands, and they hardly ever ask nicely. 

Existing among the dead is lonely. Ghosts are cold, untouchable, and a lot of the time unfriendly, so unlike the living which… he is , right? He is alive, with a beating heart and the ability to touch and feel. Four is a member of the Earth and can pick up a rock and move it instead of simply phasing right through. He wants to live, surrounded by his siblings, but for so long he isn’t able to do so because the whispers of the dead are in his ears, and their voices are so, so, loud. 

So in response, Four simply becomes louder. 

In their strange, twisted family, each member has a vital role. Four has always played the part of the annoying brother, the one who drives everyone crazy, and weirdly, it kind of helps form a sense of comradery between siblings. Some of his brothers and sisters seem to tolerate him more than others, usually behind closed doors when he hangs out with them one on one. 

The court jester has the attention of the king and queen, but they’re hardly ever laughing with him—they’re laughing at him.

On their eighth birthday, their mom gives her children something irreplaceable—names. Four becomes Klaus, and he’s so happy because now he has something else to set himself apart from the rest, something that is only his. He wants to shout his new name over and over again from the Academy roof, just so the world can hear it. 

He shoves himself into his siblings’ lives, making sure to make his presence known, not wanting to become yet another ghost who haunts the halls of the Academy. They yell at him, roll their eyes, shove at and punch him, but any attention is better than none. Klaus’ personality becomes not only louder than life, but louder than death, and he can take the negative reactions of the living as long as he’s able to live among them. 

All the noise tends to drown out the pitiful cries and whimpers that come from the corner of his bedroom. 

The literal ghost of his younger self doesn’t do much more than that. He seems to live in a constant state of terror, possibly more fearful of the other ghosts than Klaus himself. He’s never been much of a talker, and Klaus guesses he just doesn’t have anything to say. That’s fine because Klaus can make enough chatter for both of them. 

“What do you think?” Klaus asks the ghost, sticking out his foot so that the ghost can get the best possible view of the tall heel he’s wearing.

Honestly, it’s not much of a shoe; it’s just a regular fire engine red pump, it won’t win any fashion awards anytime soon. It is, however, very much forbidden, and the exhilaration that fills his body when he gazes upon the heels on his feet is limitless. They signify beauty and power, both of which Klaus in his wildest dreams yearns to one day possess. 

The ghost doesn’t seem to share his enthusiasm, however.

“Four…” the little ghost whispers, looking up at Klaus with big eyes. 

Klaus sighs.

“That‘s not my name anymore, remember?” Klaus reminds the small boy, but there’s not a trace of understanding on his face.

“Four,” the ghost repeats, and his voice is stronger this time. Not by a lot, but still. It’s a noticeable difference. 

“That’s not my name,” Klaus snaps, losing his patience. He then decides to stop arguing, not wanting to ruin a moment that is supposed to be special and fun. Looking at himself in the mirror for a little bit longer, he gives his reflection a nod of approval. In the dead of night, he takes the heels for a stroll down the hallway. 

He falls down the stairs and hits the landing just a tad too hard. Gray is a very different color than fire engine red, and Klaus thinks it holds its own special sort of beauty as he takes in the familiar breezeless forest yet again. Perhaps he is the only thing about this place that is different now because now that he’s grown he’s only a few inches shorter than the little girl with the bike. 

“I don’t like seeing you here,” the little girl tells him, but her tone is mostly made up of pity. 

“Why not?” Klaus frowns, feeling quite hurt she would say such a thing. 

“Because it’s not your time,” she replies cooly. 

“Okay…” Klaus ponders her answer for a moment. “So when it is my time, then will you mind me being here?” 

She doesn’t respond at first. Klaus thinks she knows so much more than she’ll ever let on. (He is, of course, correct.)

“Perhaps not,” is what she finally says. “When it’s your time.”

The forest disappears, but Klaus isn’t too upset—he knows he’ll see it again. 

He wakes and finds himself in the infirmary. He’s alone, except for the ghost of himself—the ghost is once again a mirror image of him, save for the bashed head and bloody torso. Now, however, the ghost has a crooked jaw and a neck that’s twisted unnaturally to the right. 

Klaus reaches up to touch his jaw and neck with his fingers—they’re both where they’re supposed to be, unbroken. 

His dad wires his jaw shut for eight weeks anyway.

Not long after his tumble down the stairs, his trips to the mausoleum begin, and that’s where he finds where true horror lies. Nothing in his life could have prepared him for the many times he’s dragged towards his small, terrifying stone prison, and the person who likes him the least in the world is the one with the key. The Academy ghosts are sweet, beautiful angels compared to the ones in the mausoleum, who seem to be only a few levels below actual demons. 

Hell, maybe if he wasn’t too busy screaming with terror until his throat is raw, he might be able to empathize with them a little more—especially now that he knows what it feels like to be locked up. 

The mausoleum sessions are a constant part of life, now. Regular scheduled programming, and there’s no way for him to flip the channel. The ghosts in the mausoleums find their way into his nightmares, and suddenly they’re there every single night, their screams and wails ringing in his head louder than the ghosts who are right next to him. 

“The nights you disappear… where does Dad take you?” Ben asks a few nights before their eleventh birthday. Ben is the only sibling who either cares enough or has the balls to ask that question, which checks out, honestly. There’s a reason why everybody, even Five, likes Ben. 

At that moment, when they’re curled up on the floor of Ben’s room because the ghosts in Klaus’ room are louder than usual, he almost spills the beans. He wants somebody to know what he goes through multiple times a week if only to have at least one of his siblings feel sorry for him. Not only that, but the way Ben is looking at him with an intense expression makes it seem like he truly wants to know the honest answer. 

But he can’t bring himself to give it, even to Ben. 

Here’s the thing: the living and the dead don’t mix very well together. They can coexist only semi-peacefully, the living for the most part blissfully unaware of the ghosts who are more than a dozen a mile, and Klaus has come to learn that’s the way it has to be. The living operate under the same mindset, out of sight, out of mind, and as children grow into adults they become unwilling to believe in anything they cannot see, touch, or hear, for if they did believe they would have no choice but to live in fear. 

When they were younger and at their most impressionable, Klaus’ siblings were more receptive when he told them about the ghosts.

“Dad has so many ghosts around him,” Klaus had once said to Diego when they were smaller. 

Diego’s eyes had gone wider than their mom’s dinner plates as Klaus gave brief descriptions of the shadows lurking behind their father. 

(He didn’t share how unbelievably loud and angry they were, of course. It was a pleasant conversation with his brother that he certainly didn’t want to ruin by making Diego feel so uneasy he wouldn’t want to be around him anymore.) 

“W-well he is p-pretty o-old,” Diego had pointed out. “M-m-maybe he’s m-m-met a lot of p-p-people who are now dead.” 

Klaus no longer has the luxury of his family’s blind belief. 

“Stop being gross, Klaus,” Luther had snapped at breakfast one morning, halfway through Klaus casually telling them about the lady standing behind Allison, staring down at her through the only eye she has because the other side of her face is mangled and bloody. 

“Yeah, quit trying to scare me, it’s not gonna work,” Allison added, her face twisted with clear disgust. 

Klaus shrugged his shoulders, shoved a spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth, and told her to rumor him for the truth. She refused. He took that to mean that deep down, she knew he wasn’t lying and she simply didn’t want to admit it. 

(Out of sight, out of mind.)

So, telling any of them about his nights in the mausoleum would surely do no good. They wouldn’t be able to comprehend why a few “harmless” ghosts would cause him to scream until his voice is nearly gone, or why spending a few hours in a simple, “empty” room would make him panic so badly that he’s driven to scratch and claw at the door until the tips of his fingers are broken and bloody. His response most definitely will be along the lines of “stop complaining, Klaus, it’s not even that bad,” and “that’s easy compared to my special training, I wish I could sit for hours on end—imagine the naps I’d be able to take!” 

And Klaus cannot handle the thought of that. 

So even to sweet, shy Ben, Klaus lies through his teeth.

“Just a special training place Dad made just for me,” he tells his brother, pretending to brag and trying to ignore the way his heart rate has picked up in the last few minutes. “I see more ghosties there, so it’s perfect for me.”

He supposes what he tells Ben isn’t even a lie, but it certainly isn’t the truth either. 

No matter the nature of his words, he still feels guilty when Ben frowns unsurely in response.

Klaus struggles to keep up with the world, finding it harder to stay on the same level as his siblings when he’s consumed with never-ending fear and panic at all times, his nightmares included. A day that doesn’t see Klaus screaming, sobbing, or panicking has always been rare, but the addition of his mausoleum visits to his life has made those days nonexistent. Sometimes, when he wakes up in the middle of the night from a nightmare after a day of being ignored and pushed away by his siblings and father, he can’t help but worry he’s become one of the many ghosts haunting the halls of the Academy. 

(Out of sight, out of mind.)

He’s twelve years old when he realizes he no longer wants to live. 

Klaus is stuck in the mausoleum all. the. time. Even after his dad comes back and begrudgingly allows him to end the session, dragging him back to the car that will take them back home, he does not truly leave. He is still there when he is in Pogo’s classroom, when he is at the dinner table, and when he is doing group training with his siblings. He is in the mausoleum when he goes to sleep in his bed, and he is still there when he wakes up. 

“I think you’re more alive than I am,” Klaus whispers, voice shaky and weak after waking up from his second nightmare tonight, and yet there are still many hours left before the sun peaks beyond the horizon. 

He is, of course, speaking to the ghost of his younger self. Ghost-Klaus, frozen for eternity at the mere age of eight, with all of the fatal injuries and wounds he has, somehow seems to carry far less fear than Klaus does. For a ghost, he is surprisingly calm, and when Klaus looks at his face and can get past the unpleasant broken jaw and bloody head, all that’s left is a look of acceptance and confidence Klaus only had when he was untouched by the mausoleum’s horrors. 

Ghost-Klaus smiles as much as his crooked jaw will allow and begins to slowly dance and twirl around the room, on his tiptoes as if he’s still wearing those fire engine red heels.

The next day starts like the rest, and it ends with Klaus yet again locked within dark, musty, stone walls. His screams are drowned out by the voices of the dead, their hands grabbing and clawing at his pale skin, unsuccessfully trying with all their might to make physical contact. Here he is, curled up into a ball in the corner of an extremely crowded mausoleum, eyes blurry with tears and his body wracked with sob after sob, screaming, screaming, screaming.

All Klaus wishes to do, for the rest of his existence on this Earth, is to freely dance and twirl. 

There’s a burst of blue that lights up the room, and suddenly he’s being touched . Fingers dig into his flesh, tearing his arms, legs, and stomach open, the ruthless faces of the dead showing no mercy—they are incapable of such a feeling, having lost so many pieces of themselves over time. In the next coming minutes, Klaus’ screams begin to die down, and then he’s just sniffling as the pool of red underneath him grows larger, and as his vision starts to blur the permanent chill that resides in his bones is replaced by a comforting warmth. 

Klaus knows where he’s going. 

The gray forest is once again waiting for him, and for as long as he can, Klaus spins and twirls and dances , giggling as the soft blades of grass tickle his ankles, and he knows that at this moment he is free. 

“Is it my time, now?” Klaus eagerly asks the little girl when she makes her way down the gravel pathway, pedaling her bike next to her as always. 

“No,” the little girl answers bluntly as she makes her way through the meadow, busy plucking flowers from the soil. 

Klaus’ face falls. “Does… does that mean I have to… go back?”

“Obviously,” the little girl says curtly. 

And something inside Klaus breaks. He knows he’s not supposed to have this thought, but he really would like to stay here forever, because the gray of the still, empty meadow is better than the gray walls of the mausoleum. He cannot understand why he has to go back to the land of the living when he has just as much impact on it as the ghosts who haunt it. 

“How long until I don’t have to go back anymore?” Klaus is on the verge of tears, an unfamiliar sensation considering where he’s at. 

“When it’s your time,” the little girl says, as she always does. 

Her back is turned to him, and when she turns to face him her brows are furrowed together, her dark, colorless eyes saddened. 

“The world is cruel, Klaus,” she says, “but you mustn’t give up.”

She studies the assortment of flowers she’s collected during their conversation before nodding to herself and placing them into the basket that hangs from her bike. 

“You are needed more than you know,” she tells him.

Klaus isn’t sure he believes her. 

He isn’t in the mausoleum when he wakes, but in the infirmary instead. His entire body aches with pains that are no more than phantom and there’s an icy chill in his bones. The infirmary is dark, but he’s not alone. His mother is sitting in the chair next to him, a concerned smile on her lips. 

Standing next to her is Ghost-Klaus, with the same wounds and disfigurements as before, but now he has deep gashes littered all over his body, a permanent reminder of dead hands clawing at him until he was no more. He has grown since last night, just as he does every time Klaus visits the little girl’s forest, and now is his exact age, just a day younger. 

Ghost-Klaus is standing next to his mother, but he doesn’t seem to be paying Klaus any attention. He is twisting his head, as if he’s attempting to figure out where he is, brown eyes darting to all the other ghosts who are there in the infirmary. Then, he slowly raises his arms, and Klaus thinks he’s going to start dancing as he was last night in his bedroom. 

“Oh good, you’re awake,” his mom smiles, reaching down and brushing his damp curls back so they’re not stuck to his forehead. “I was so worried for you, dear.” 

Instead, the ghost presses his bloody hands to his ears, opens his broken jaw, and begins to scream. 

For a brief moment, before life goes to absolute shit, the sun peeks out from the clouds it’s been hiding behind. 

Their thirteenth birthday is just around the corner, and by the way their father is cracking down on them all more than ever, something big is coming their way. Training has gotten even harder and broken rules are no longer tolerated in the slightest, with the smallest infractions met with the harshest of punishments. It is made clear to them that they are no longer children, and any childishness will be… corrected with as much force as Dad deems necessary. 

Klaus is, to put it bluntly, his father’s second most difficult child. 

His father’s first most difficult child is, of course, Number Five. Klaus often finds himself in awe of his brother’s blatant, sturdy fearlessness, and the way that Five can stand up to Dad, staring down the equivalent of an angry snake in the eyes without as much as a tremor in his hands. His stubborn quests for knowledge and his never satiated thirst to push himself, to jump further, faster, and better are inherently good in their father’s eyes, but Five lacks the patience their father demands, which causes many an argument between the two. Klaus thinks that, if Five had the blind obedience Luther possesses, he would be the Number One instead. 

But although Number Five seems to give their father the most headaches out of all of them, Klaus is very close behind him in that respect. 

After Klaus’ most recent brush with death, the mausoleum visits don’t slow down but become even more frequent, and with no end in sight he has to survive the best he can in the only ways he knows how. The idea that weak, distracted, annoying Number Four could ever gain his father’s approval is laughable, and that childhood dream goes flying out the window, followed quickly by Klaus’ will to care. He builds his walls up, shielding the sad, terrified little boy he is on the inside from the rest of the world, hiding him away, perhaps never to be seen again. He fully embraces the role he was cast in, deciding that if his life is going to be nothing but hell, the least he can do is try and make his father's life as difficult as possible. Klaus breaks rule upon rule, having the audacity to argue and snap at his dad, and he sneaks out a few times just for the hell of it. 

(The world is so much bigger than he ever dreamed it would be.)

Four simply is not afraid of his father as he once was—after all, the ghosts in the mausoleum are far scarier—and so that fact coupled with Five’s stubborn determination is what leads to many rebellious pursuits. Here’s how it happens: from Klaus’ active imagination comes many ideas, most of them the forbidden kind. When they’re out of earshot of their dad, Klaus will voice some of these ideas out loud, not necessarily suggesting they carry out said ideas; truth be told, he feels the need to talk about anything and everything just to try and drown the voices of the dead out. Most of the time, these ideas will go unexplored, with Five considering most of them a waste of his time, but every once in a while, Klaus will give an idea that causes Five’s eyes to narrow in determination and a borderline evil smirk to pull at his lips. 

Once Five has something he wants to do, he sets out to do it, and that’s how Klaus finds himself sneaking out in the dead of night, following Five’s carefully thought-out plan with all of their siblings in tow. 

It’s funny, Klaus thinks, to see Luther, Diego, and Allison, also known as Dad’s Golden Trio, tiptoeing nervously down the street as they make their way towards Griddy’s, a coffee and doughnut shop Five said he discovered a few weeks ago. At the rear, shy Ben and sweet Vanya seem just as terrified, but that’s more in character for the two of them. Five is in front, walking casually with confidence present in every step he takes. 

And Klaus? Well, he’s enjoying every moment of freedom he can soak in. Here he is, free from the shackles of the Academy and the mausoleum, and far from the ghosts who haunt them. There are no clusters of angry ghosts he has to strain his ears to hear over, and there are no wailing screeches he has to yell over. There is a peace Klaus has only known a few times before, and so he fills it with the sound of his whoops and laughter echoing off the empty city street. His siblings shush him, but he brushes them off with a wave of his hand—after all, there are worse things to fear than getting caught. 

At Griddy’s, all seven of them squeeze into a small booth only meant for four people, but they make it work as they always do. On one side are Diego, Klaus, and Ben, with Diego on the edge and Ben squished up against the wall. On the other side are Allison, Five, and Vanya, and Luther sits at the end, his body too big to comfortably squeeze into the booth with the rest of them. 

If it weren’t for the matching pajamas and the fact that it’s so late at night, Klaus thinks they could be seen as truly normal children. Sure, they’re not, given their powers and the unspoken divides between them, but as they sit here, squabbling and laughing as siblings do, Klaus can simply pretend that they’re nothing more than that—a group of kids enjoying a night out on the town. Hell, halfway through eating his first doughnut even serious, rule-abiding Luther cracks a smile. 

Klaus and Diego get into a doughnut-eating contest and start shoving doughnuts into their mouths like madmen. Luther joins the contest around doughnut six although he is easily able to catch up. Allison and Ben both voice their concerns, urging their brothers to cut it out before one of them pukes all over the table, Five rolls his eyes, sips his coffee, and mutters something about not being able to take his “dipshit brothers” anywhere, and Vanya has dissolved into a fit of giggles at the scene in front of her. 

In the end, Diego wins, even beating Luther, but he pays the price—as soon as they start their walk home he has to stop to throw it all up into an undeserving bush. 

“Sweet, sweet victory, huh, Di?” Klaus snorts as he watches his brother vomit. Ben is crouched beside him, a hand on his arm, while Luther unhelpfully pats his shoulder. 

This, Klaus knows, is the best night of his life so far. 

Unfortunately, it’s only downhill from there, as their thirteenth birthday brings the start of the Umbrella Academy. 

On its own, the introductions of the real-world missions and the fame that comes with them aren’t what breaks Klaus’ family. Instead, it’s simply a force that makes deep cracks in the foundation, to the point where the slightest earthquake will cause it to crumble. Overnight, Klaus watches as the children he once knew each of his siblings to be vanish before his very eyes, replaced with bitter seriousness that only exists in jaded adults. For many of them, this is their first time witnessing death in such large masses.

Surprisingly, Klaus does not prefer to relish the fact that finally, his siblings can see a fraction of what he sees daily. 

One night, after a mission that required Ben to release the horror on yet another roomful of people, drenching him in blood, Klaus finds himself standing outside the bathroom door, listening to the running shower water that is only slightly able to drown out the sound of his most timid brother’s sobs. Leaning on the wall next to the door is Diego, arms crossed as he stares at the ground beneath his feet, his shaking hands a sign of his barely contained rage. On the opposite side of the door is Vanya, eyes brimming with tears and lips pursed together in an attempt to reign in her clear upset. Five has been pacing back and forth, as a tiger paces its cage at the zoo, for over ten minutes now, and Klaus can’t fully watch his brother’s movements or he knows he’s going to end up dizzy. 

“This can’t go on,” Five breaks the silence they’ve been in ever since they got home. 

Then, Five comes to a sudden halt. He’s glaring into the dark empty hallway, and Klaus is pretty sure he’s not looking at the man with the bullet holes in his torso and the top hat on his head. He’s posed like a ferocious tiger ready to pounce, fists clenched tightly at his sides, murderous eyes cold and calculating. 

“This has to end,” Five continues after nobody else says anything. They’re all watching him, Diego with cautious curiosity, Vanya with desperation, and Klaus with surprise. Deep inside Klaus’ soul, he feels a glimmer of hope spark within. “We can’t—“

Silence befalls them once again as Five stops talking mid-sentence. The sound of the shower is deafened by the wheels Klaus can hear turning in Five’s head, gears oiled by the sound of Ben’s sobs. Determination flashes in his narrowed eyes, just as every time before this when Four and Five have an idea, but it’s a different kind of determination Klaus has never seen on his brother until now. The childlike, mischievous sparkle is gone, replaced with something darker, more serious, and grave. 

“This has to end,” Five repeats, but this time he says it with an air of finality. “We have to get out of here.”

“How?” Vanya whispers, eyes darting down the hall as if she’s afraid their father will pop out of the darkness at any moment.

“He’ll f-find us,” Diego states grimly. “N-no m-m-matter where we g-go.” 

Five raises his chin and tears his gaze from the darkness. He looks from Diego, to Klaus, to Vanya, before his eyes finally come to rest on the bathroom door. Inside, the water shuts off, and sobs have turned into sniffles. 

“Then I’ll find a place where he can’t find us,” Five says, and it’s a promise. 

There’s a flash of blue, and he’s gone.

“Do you really think he can do that?” Vanya’s voice remains a whisper, her expression a mix of hope and disbelief. 

“I m-mean, it’s Five,” Diego points out matter-of-factly, and the corner of his lips twitch up like he’s trying not to smile. Vanya nods slowly, the message clear: Five has never failed a mission, never given up until he’s achieved his desired outcome. Five says he’s going to get them out, so he’s going to get them out, no ifs, ands, or buts. 

But the hope blooming inside Klaus feels uncomfortably dangerous. No longer being able to focus on Five’s words and movements, the ghosts he’d pushed to the back of his mind begin to reappear. Beyond the hysterical rant of the woman with her head split open by an ax, a man shouting in French, and all of the voices of the mausoleum ghosts who live in his head, all Klaus can hone in on is his own terrified, ear piercing screams, the ghost of himself who is forever trapped in his cage of horrors. 

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Klaus warns his brother and sister, which causes both of their faces to fall a little. “We might be able to get out… but they won’t let us stay. They’ll find us and we’ll be sent back where we started.” 

Swallowing, Klaus starts walking into the darkness towards his bedroom. In the middle of the hallway, just outside his door, stands his own ghost, hands to his ears, eyes tightly shut, mouth open in his eternal scream. Every wound on the ghost's body, from his bashed head to his twisted ankle, is a reminder that no matter how hard he tries, Klaus will always end up back where he started. 

Sidestepping his ghost so he can enter his bedroom, Klaus closes the door, but it does nothing to block out the screams. 

A few days later, Numbers Four and Five are up on the roof of the Academy, the sun beginning to set beyond the city buildings. They will not have very long, they both know before their combined silence will alert their jailers of their absence. Lately, time has not been on their side. 

“There is a place we can all go,” Five says, his jaw tight as he studies the equations he’s written onto the concrete, using the edge of a stone as chalk. Klaus, who has been sitting next to the edge of the roof, gazing out at the city, raises his brows with guarded curiosity, twisting his head to look at his brother. “But it’s not here.” 

“Not… here?” Klaus’s face scrunches with confusion. “Here as in… on Earth? What, we’re gonna go live on the moon or something?” 

Klaus isn’t sure living on the moon would be any better than living here—it’s probably really boring on the moon, and then there’s the smaller issue having to do with the lack of oxygen. 

“No, dumbass, here as in this very point in time,” Five rolls his eyes, as if Klaus was supposed to know that . Then, Five’s eyes snap up to meet Klaus’, baby blues blazing with determination. “We’re going to travel in time, Klaus, far into the future to the day after the old man finally kicks it, and so he can never hurt any of us again. We’re going to burn this hellhole to the ground, and then we’ll finally be free.” 

It’s certainly a riveting pitch, to say the least. Klaus isn’t sure if he’s ever seen his brother this passionate about anything in his life—Five is not usually one to display much emotion, keeping himself guarded and sharp. Perhaps Ben’s sobs are still ringing in his head like they have been in Klaus’ head since the other night. 

“That,” Klaus starts slowly as he processes everything he’s just heard, “would be a wonderful idea if any of us were able to time travel.” 

But Five doesn’t waver, doesn’t so much as twitch. 

“A little over a month ago, the old man said I’m capable of time travel,” Five says, and Klaus feels his eyes widen. “I just have to learn how. Once I do… we’re gone, Klaus. All of us.” 

(For a brief second, Klaus wonders if there’s any world Luther would leave their father’s side to go with the rest of them. He certainly doesn’t think it’s this one.)

And for a short moment in time, Klaus believes Five will be the one to get them all safely to freedom.

He’s wrong, of course. 

In hindsight, Klaus should have followed his gut. He should have at least tried to convince his brother that this plan in particular is too risky, too dangerous. He likes to think there’s something he could have said to convince Five to slow down, although deep down he knows it would’ve been fruitless. 

No matter what, Number Five was bound to run out the front door and disappear. 

Klaus just hopes his brother was able to make it to the future. He hopes that one day, Five will come back for the rest of them. He hopes Five isn’t dead. 

Five’s disappearance causes an imbalance within the Academy. In a way, Five was a sort of adhesive that glued them all together, and without him divides between siblings grow deeper. Klaus is now his father’s most difficult child, and an effect of that is even more frequent mausoleum visits. Vanya pulls away from the rest of them to the point that sometimes, Klaus hates to admit, he forgets she even exists. 

(Out of sight, out of mind.)

Any hope Klaus had for his future, Five took with him. 

Shortly after, the Umbrella Academy responds to a robbery at the city art museum. Klaus, as always, is designated the role of the lookout—his job is to watch his siblings’ backs, and to keep them updated on any approaching enemies. He gets separated from them, however, and is left on the second floor while his siblings are on the third floor, a fact he knows because he can hear the thuds of bodies hitting the ceiling above him. It also happens that one of the robbers was also left on the second floor, Klaus discovers when he realizes a gun is being pointed right at him. 

It is shock, Klaus knows, that keeps his legs from lunging for cover behind a few large crates just feet away from him. He stands vulnerable in the middle of the room, not because he craves the feeling of sweet nothingness that would come from his body being riddled with bullets, but because he is simply frozen. Klaus’s inaction is due to the fact he is like a deer in headlights and is not because he feels an overwhelming sense of relief. 

(Klaus always feels better when he lies to himself.) 

The robber pulls the trigger. 

“What part of not your time do you not understand?” the little girl snaps, the frustration clear on her face. 

This is when Klaus realizes she’s a total fucking bitch. 

“I don’t care if it’s not my time,” Klaus argues, his body trembling with anger. “I’m not going back.”

“You have no choice, Klaus,” the little girl tells him, annoyed eyes narrowed. “You do not get to rewrite the narrative that’s been set in stone just because you want to stay here and avoid your true fate.”

“What narrative?” Klaus hysterically asks, a humorless laugh bubbling up his throat. “You’re really going to look me in the eyes and tell me I’m so important to the stupid narrative that I have to go back?” 

“Yes,” the little girl says blankly. 

“Just rewrite the dumb narrative,” Klaus says, gritting his teeth to stop himself from bursting into tears. 

“I don’t have the power to do that,” the little girl tells him. “But even if I did… I would not. I cannot give you any special treatment, as much as you think you deserve it.”

Klaus breathes sharply through his nose, turning his head to look out to the monochrome forest. There is no sign of Five, Klaus notes, but that isn’t definite proof his brother is alive. With Five’s endless ambition, who knows where he wound up?

All Klaus knows is Five was able to escape, and Klaus is still a captive of the stupid narrative. 

“It’s not fair,” Klaus breathes shakily. A few tears escape the corners of his eyes, and he reaches up to wipe them away with the back of his hand. 

“It will never be fair,” the little girl says. 

When Klaus opens his eyes, he finds Diego leaning over him with his brows furrowed worriedly. Allison is hovering on the other side of him, looking down at him with her head tilted, like she’s trying to figure out exactly what happened. Luther and Ben are nowhere to be seen, but if Klaus has to guess, he’d say they went back to the car to keep the public from seeing a blood-soaked Ben too many times, something to do with image or whatever.

“Hey, you okay, b-bro?” Diego questions, a hand resting on Klaus’s shoulder. 

Swallowing, Klaus pushes himself into a sitting position painlessly, touching the spots on his stomach he knows one or two of the bullets landed. There are holes in the fabric of his uniform, and it’s soaked with blood. The flesh underneath the holes, however, is smooth and untouched.

“Yeah,” he forces himself to answer because he’s been silent for just a moment too long. “I’m fine. Peachy.” 

Diego frowns, and Allison looks puzzled.

“Are you sure?” Allison asks unsurely. “Because you’re sitting in a giant puddle of blood.”

She’s right, Klaus sees when he glances down and sees the pool of red surrounding him. 

“Can’t be mine,” Klaus says emotionlessly. He gets to his feet, taking care to keep his feet from slipping on the wet floor. “I have no injuries. Not even a scratch.” 

Diego makes him get checked over by Mom, which is a waste of time because there’s nothing at all to find. After getting the all-clear, Klaus leaves a dumbfounded Diego in the infirmary, slipping into his room and immediately rolling a blunt. Then, later that night, when the entire house is asleep, Klaus sneaks down to the library and breaks into his dad’s alcohol cabinet. 

He takes a swig of something clear, not bothering to read the label, and almost gags when the liquid burns his throat. 

“It will never be fair,” Klaus hears a familiar voice whisper from behind him. He looks over his shoulder to find his ghost standing in the middle of the library, fresh bullet wounds added to the ghost’s collection of injuries, but now, Ghost-Klaus isn’t screaming. He’s not whimpering, dancing, or crying—instead, he’s standing completely still, arms limp at his sides, brown eyes hopeless and lost. 

Klaus drinks from the clear bottle until the ghost disappears.

(Out of sight, out of mind.) 

Klaus Hargreeves and the ghosts. One cannot exist without the other, just as what goes up must come down, as well as there is no left without a right. Luther cannot exist without scraps of praise, and Diego cannot exist without the burning fear of inadequacy that drives him. These are laws of nature, unchangeable facts of life. 

So when Klaus takes a gulp of alcohol, or pops a couple of pills, or snorts a line of powder, and the ghosts vanish, so does Klaus. The person he once was becomes tucked away under a blanket of drugs that are never able to leave his system before new ones enter his bloodstream. It takes control of him, shoving him into the passenger seat of his mind, and suddenly he’s nothing but a spectator of his own life. 

The beautiful silence he gets as a result of the drugs makes it all worth it.

At first, his dad’s reaction to Klaus’s newfound love for self-medicating is to double down and dole out harsher punishments. Forced withdrawals, longer mausoleum visits, and extra physical training, but none of it works. Down the rabbit hole Klaus goes, gaining momentum the longer he falls until he’s barreling through and causing more damage than an asteroid does while tearing through the atmosphere. His tolerance increases, and as a result, so does his intake. 

An at peace Klaus cannot exist without the drugs, and so he spends the majority of his hours contemplating where he’ll get his next fix from. 

He finds himself sneaking out multiple times a week, his pockets lined with stolen valuables he’s swiped from around his father’s house. It does not make Klaus feel guilty in the slightest when he trades those items at the local pawn shops for cash which are then given to the nearest dealer in exchange for powder and pills. He does not find himself bothered by the disappointed glares his father gives him every time they cross paths, brought on by a likely realization that, unfortunately, Number Four was yet another wasted investment indeed. 

It’s so much simpler to just not care.

“Klaus? Where are you going?”

Klaus has his body halfway out his bedroom window as his bedroom door, which he left cracked open like an idiot, is pushed open, revealing a wide-eyed Ben standing in his doorway. His brother is in his pajamas, looking confused and so, so innocent, and all Klaus can do is force a smile. Like the Grinch who stole Christmas, Klaus opens his mouth and prepares to lie, lie, lie. 

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, mi hermano,” Klaus says, leaning his body on the edge of the windowsill. “I’m, uh, making sure the fire escape isn’t broken or anything. Fire safety is very important, Ben.”

But like the rest of their siblings, Klaus overestimates Ben’s innocence. Ben is naive, sure, but he is not stupid. It is difficult to remember that within his sweet, shy brother lives a ferocious, otherworldly beast that causes almost as much destruction as a drug-addled junkie. 

“You’re wearing makeup, Klaus,” Ben points out, and then his face crumbles into an expression of disappointment and sadness. “You’re sneaking out again.” 

It is a statement, not a question. 

“I—no, Ben, I just told you—“

“Just promise me you’ll be safe,” Ben interrupts him, and Klaus recognizes the look of hopelessness in his brother’s eyes—he’s seen it in his reflections, and the ghosts that wear his face. “Okay, Klaus?”

Klaus swallows hard, and he thinks he would prefer for his brother to just stab him with the knife and twist it around—it would hurt less.

“Okay,” Klaus says, giving his brother his best reassuring grin. 

Klaus tells more lies than Number Three, these days.

That’s the night he discovers heroin, finding that injecting the drugs straight into his veins makes the world go quieter faster—cuts out the middleman. 

Less than a week later, Klaus overdoses for the first time alone in his room.

Gray trees have been replaced with dark nothingness.

Nothing is clear anymore. Klaus' life is a blur of dark, dreary colors, disappointed and angry faces, and muffled voices. This is the closest he can get to death, to escape, and he relishes the sensation. Pretends he’s not angry at the little girl and the stupid dumb narrative. 

The disgusted faces of his siblings are lost in the permanent haze, and that’s exactly how Klaus likes it.

(Out of sight, out of mind.)

He has now been banned from Umbrella Academy missions, something that Klaus thinks should’ve been done a long time ago, to be honest. Klaus is practically just as useless as ordinary Number Seven, and he was at worst, a hindrance, and at best a pretty face for the media to hone in on. His exile is certainly overdue. 

This means he’s not there when Ben dies. 

When Luther walks through the door of the Academy, his face wet with tears and their limp, bloody, lifeless brother in his arms, Klaus doesn’t think he reacts like he’s supposed to. Somewhere behind him, he hears Vanya scream, and when he turns around he finds she’s fallen to her knees. Allison is crying and Diego is motionless save for his trembling limbs as he stares into space. If Klaus didn’t know better, he’d think his siblings had turned into ghosts, but ghosts aren’t visible to him right now, hidden behind the veil of intoxication. 

Reginald nonchalantly orders Luther to take Number Six’s remains to the infirmary, and Klaus isn’t sure why his siblings are so upset. After all, Ben will surely be sent back by the little girl any moment now. If someone as useless and horrible as Klaus is important to the narrative, there isn’t a chance Ben‘s time is up. Even at the funeral, Klaus stares at the coffin as he waits for Ben to return from the monochrome forest, ignoring Reginald’s speech that must be straight-up evil because Allison starts arguing with him. 

(Reginald is not argued with enough anymore. With Four too doped up to care and Five lost to time or space or wherever he ended up, the house has become far too quiet. Figures his two most difficult children would be the first to fall silent.)

Ben doesn’t awake, his body is buried, and Klaus comes to the horrific realization that his brother isn’t coming back. 

He deals with it by going on a week-long bender. His devastation tears right through him, worse than the pain he felt when bullets ripped through his flesh, and if Klaus had to choose he would rather be shot at for all of eternity, but that’s not how it works. Every day Klaus curses the little girl for taking Ben far too soon while Klaus is made to stay here and rot away. 

He of course would be lying, though, if he wasn’t the slightest bit jealous that the little girl let Ben in. It’s a horrible feeling, Klaus knows, but he’s a horrible, selfish person whose brother just got the eternal peace he’s been begging for his entire life. Two of his brothers were able to escape… when will it finally be his turn?

(“It will never be fair.”)

The high he’s riding almost blocks out Diego screaming at him until his brother is red in the face. At this point, even the voices of the living are pushed away by the claws of Klaus’ addiction, so he’s not quite sure what Diego was upset about, and he honestly no longer cares. Klaus wonders if this is the narrative the little girl had in mind. He thinks if it is, it’s a shitty story. 

Klaus’s whirlwind week is cut short when he goes too far (because that’s what Four and Five do, they push it too far until they find themselves lost), and he shoots up one too many times. He finds himself laying on the ground in a random alleyway, blinking slowly as the darkness of death closes in on him once more, eyes trained on the starry sky above. The city is uglier than Klaus remembers it being when he was younger, or maybe he’s just begun to hate the color gray. 

The city is the only world devoid of color he sees that night. 

He’s brought back to Reginald, as he always is, the shackles that tie him here always placed right back in place. Tied to the bed in the infirmary, he’s forced to detox, because what goes up must always come back down. He sees colors, and then as time passes the shadows turn into blurred faces. At one point, Klaus finds a shape that can only be Diego, sitting in the chair next to his bed, and he’s saying things—noticeably not yelling anymore. He blinks, and there’s Allison and Luther, and they’re talking too, but it’s as if they’re adults in the universe of Charlie Brown, “ wah wah, wah wah wah,” and then he closes his eyes, only to reopen them and hear the sound of Vanya crying. Neither the living nor the dead can get through to him, and Klaus is alone with just the drugs to keep him company. 

“Klaus,” he hears a voice whisper in his ear. It’s almost too quiet to hear over the rain that’s pouring on the roof. He snaps his eyes open and he’s still stuck in his haze, but the room is the tiniest bit less blurry. The colors have started to take shape at least.

But then his eyes land on Ben, who is standing in the middle of the infirmary, his image as sharp as Diego’s favorite knife. 

“Klaus?” Ben says softly, eyes filled with worried concern. “Can… can you see me now?” 

Klaus blinks, stares, reaches up to rub his eyes, blinks again, Ben is still there. 

“Not possible,” Klaus mutters, mostly to himself. Ben furrows his brows in confusion. “You made it, why would she send you back now?”

“Uh, what?“ Ben frowns. Then, he shakes his head and starts again. “Klaus, I—I’ve been here since my… since my funeral. I don’t think you’ve been able to see me until now.”

Klaus takes a sharp breath, and as he does he can start to see the shadowy figures reappear, the worst part about being sober. 

Well, if the other ghosts are coming back… Klaus’ eyes widen in horror, not because of the shadows, although he does hate those too, but…

Ben is a ghost, and he’s suffering a fate worse than Klaus—stuck among restless spirits, with only Klaus as a bridge to the living world, and Klaus starts to tremble with rage because how dare the little girl have the audacity to not only take his brother but not even give him the peace they all know Ben deserves. 

“Damn you, little bitch,” Klaus chokes out behind the tears that are rising in his throat. 

Thunder cracks and booms from above. 

At least he knows she’s listening. 

His siblings don’t take well to Klaus’s claim that he can see Ben. Quite frankly, he’s not too shocked—he has no track record of being a trustworthy human being. Hell, he himself was suspicious at first, but Klaus has lived with his shitty powers long enough to be able to tell the real thing from drug-induced hallucinations. 

“You’re pathetic, Klaus,” Diego bristles angrily. “Using our d-dead b-brother’s name for attention is low, even for you.” 

“Do you think we’re stupid?” Allison accuses, disgust clear on her face. “We all know you can’t see ghosts when you’re high. God, you’re the worst!”

“Get a grip, Klaus,” Luther’s voice is ice cold. 

Vanya just stands there, watching.

And Klaus just thinks it’s funny that the one time they show an ounce of comprehension for his powers, it’s used against him. Still, maybe it’s the drugs, but Klaus isn’t too bothered by the fact that they blatantly refuse to trust him. Maybe that’s because it’s been like that for as long as Klaus can remember. 

“It’s a hard pill to swallow,” Ben says to him later, when they’re alone in Klaus’ bedroom. Klaus is sitting by his cracked window rolling a blunt, and Ben is perched on the edge of the desk. “That I’m still here but they can’t see me.” 

“Makes sense,” Klaus’ words are muffled behind his lips, due to the blunt hanging from them. He lights it, careful not to look up at Ben because he can hear how sad he is by the tone of his voice. He takes a deep drag, holds it in his lungs, and blows it out with a content sigh. 

“Klaus?”

Klaus hums in response, trying not to think about how all the ghosties like to do is say his name over and over again. 

“There are a lot of ghosts,” Ben says, sounding small and so damn young. Klaus snorts. His brother might as well have told him the sky is blue. “I always thought there were a couple ghosts here and there. I never imagined there’d be this many.”

At first, Klaus remains silent, and Ben’s words hang in the air unacknowledged. Studying the joint balanced between his fingers, because he knows if he looks anywhere else in the room he’ll end up crying, all Klaus can think about is how shitty it is that this is the way he finally got one of his siblings to fully understand why his powers are practically life debilitating. He used to daydream various ways his siblings finally came to comprehend why Klaus is who he is, and what he does to simply keep afloat, but this scenario he’s living, his favorite brother dead and stuck in the space between life and death with only Klaus to talk to, is a nightmare.

It’s also pretty typical for his life, he supposes. 

Klaus takes another drag from his joint, and he sees Ben’s image flicker out of the corner of his eye. 

“Crazy, right?” The grin on his face is forced. 

Having seen the realities of Klaus’ powers, Ben finally gets the reasons for the drugs. However, annoyingly enough, he seems to have no issue voicing his clear distaste for Klaus’ lifestyle, following him around like a lost puppy and making never-ending comments. Ben is concerned for his general wellbeing, which Klaus would find hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that Ben is always there, finding something to criticize or scold him over. 

It’s not that Ben is wrong, he’s just annoyingly persistent. 

One by one, his siblings leave home. Allison gets on a plane to Los Angeles, and Klaus honestly doesn’t think he’ll ever see her again. Vanya leaves for college, walking out of the Academy with the few items she owns and never looking back. Diego goes to cop school and finds an apartment. Luther stays. 

“Klaus?”

“Klaus!”

Klaus snaps his eyes open and instantly regrets it, the afternoon sun shining through the window and right into his face. He has a raging headache, and all he wants to do is curl back up and go back to sleep. He shifts, but then the same voice that woke him calls his name again, and he cracks his eyelids open once more to see who the hell is making that noise. 

The fear and worry he finds in Ben’s wide, brown eyes are enough to wake him up a little. 

“Klaus… are you okay?” Ben whispers, and he seems horrified. “You—Klaus, you weren’t breathing, I couldn’t hear your heartbeat. I—I thought you were dead!”

Oh, right, Klaus remembers, he went out last night and likely took things a tad too far. Actually, now that he thinks about it, he does have the familiar signs of just having died—his head is foggy, he has a faint ache in his whole body, and he’s chilled to the bone. It was worth it, though, because Ben is the only ghost in this room. 

“Do I look dead to you?” Klaus asks his brother pointedly, putting his pale, trembling hand to his chest. “I’m breathing, and my heart is definitely beating. Those things are exclusive to the living, you know.”

Ben still doesn’t look convinced, his brows furrowed with hopeless confusion. 

“I know what I saw, Klaus… you stopped breathing for almost five minutes.”

Klaus doesn’t want to think how his brother would react if he told him he has a lifelong history of dying and being sent back.

“It’ll take a lot more than five minutes of no breathing to kill me,” Klaus says, ignoring the fact that five minutes of no breathing is, in fact, enough to kill a person. 

Ben is dissatisfied clearly, but in the end, lets it go. 

Three days later, Klaus finally packs up his most treasured belongings and becomes the last sibling to get the fuck outta dodge—save for Luther, but does it really count if the big oaf never ends up leaving in the first place? It’s weird, because all Klaus’ life he expected when he did finally get out, he would have to fight his way to freedom. He even leaves right out the front entrance, with Pogo gently closing the door behind him, and he just… walks along the sidewalk away from what he can only describe as a lawless prison for children. 

Finally, Klaus has escaped with the ghost of his brother in tow.

But he is never meant to be free. 

The streets are cruel. This is no surprise to Klaus, who has been frequenting them since he was twelve years old. Ben, however, has hardly known anything outside of the Academy and the few places they were when they were children going on missions, and was probably not prepared for the things he has to watch Klaus get into. He is fearful and panicked at every twist and turn Klaus makes, but hey, Klaus never said his brother had to follow him everywhere he goes. Ben could very well go haunt Diego or Vanya. Though, if Klaus himself was a ghost, he’d pick Allison to hang around. 

Drugs are quite an expensive lifestyle, and Klaus burns through the money he was able to steal from his father within a week. He sells his possessions, including his shoes to Ben’s absolute dismay, and he burns through the money he gets from all that in four days. Klaus has nothing, but the shadows start to whisper after a few hours and he decides he’ll do anything to get his next fix.

His body is his greatest money maker. The gift that keeps on giving. He starts exchanging it for cash and drugs.

Klaus finds his usual nightmares are joined by images of loveless hands and hungry eyes. 

At some point, Klaus isn’t sure if it’s day or night, he finds himself in the bed of a man who is too rough and too intoxicated, and he has large hands wrapped around his throat pressing too hard and they won’t let go . Familiar darkness takes him over, and Klaus, as usual, just floats for a while. When he wakes he’s still in the bed, the man passed out on the pillow next to him, and looking into the mirror there isn’t a single bruise on his neck. 

Klaus swallows a handful of pills dry, exiting the bedroom but not before swiping a twenty that’s sitting on the nightstand. He’ll call it a death tax. He finds an extremely nervous Ben sitting on the couch in the living room, waiting for him to emerge, and then they both walk out of the apartment and back out onto the street. 

Well, then. 

Next.

Time, Klaus feels, is both too fast and too slow. 

He quickly loses track of the days, and soon the years are blurring together. His siblings are moving up in life, moving on . Allison is the easiest to keep track of, given her face is on the front of every other issue of People magazine. She gets married, and none of her siblings are invited to the wedding. Meanwhile, Vanya graduates from college and begins playing violin professionally. Diego gets kicked out of police academy, and Luther is still going on missions for Reginald. 

Five is long gone. 

Klaus and Ben are stuck. 

“This doesn’t have to be your life, Klaus,” Ben tells him one day, and he’s angry, an emotion that Klaus has rarely seen his shyest brother have before. “You are choosing to live on the streets, you are choosing to slowly kill yourself with drugs, you are choosing to sit in this alleyway and shoot up over and over again. Do you know what I would do to have the life you’re throwing away?”

“If you keep playing the dead card, it’s gonna start losing its effect,” Klaus drawls, looking back down at the needle in his hands. 

Silence.

“Fuck you, Klaus,” Ben spits. “Fuck you.”

After that, Ben disappears for three days, but honestly, Klaus doesn’t notice his absence much. He makes bad decisions, hangs out around the wrong people, and finds himself bleeding out from a stab wound that night. Disappointment is made up of darkness and the noticeable lack of gray trees. It is not yet his time, so Klaus opens his eyes once more. 

The timer leading to his final release is ticking excruciatingly slow.

Ben comes back. Allison has a baby girl, Luther goes to the moon, and Diego gets into his first long-term relationship. Vanya is no longer in the public eye, and Five is still long gone.

Klaus continues to stay right where he is. 

Tick, tick, tick. 

(Out of sight, out of mind.)

Vanya’s brief radio silence makes sense when he passes by the bookstore and finds the sad, dreary face of her younger self in the display window. 

Extra ordinary: My life as Number Seven, reads the title, followed by the name at the bottom: Viktor Hargreeves. Coming out to the world using the same book that also tells the secrets they all assumed would stay within the walls of the Academy is a rather bold move, one that Klaus rather admires. Ben, on the other hand, makes it clear that he has his own, more negative, feelings about the book. 

“How fucking dare he?” Ben snarls as Klaus skims the pages of the copy he used valuable drug money to purchase—so Ben better not ever say Klaus hasn’t done anything for him—, reading aloud the paragraphs that happen to catch his eye. “What gives him the right to air all our dirty laundry like this? Fuck.”

(In death, Ben has been becoming less fearful, no longer pulling metaphorical punches.)

And look, Klaus understands where Ben is coming from, and maybe the drugs in his system are making him more tolerant of the whole situation, but there’s something he loves about his smallest, quietest sibling becoming so unapologetically loud. 

Sure, the part detailing Ben’s death pains him to reread, and the very negative descriptions of Klaus and his powers sting. And yes, after he reads those parts he tosses the book in the trash and uses whatever cash he has left to buy as much heroin as possible. Maybe he overdoses on the street and falls a little bit too deep into the darkness, waking up in the hospital the next day with a still furious Ben sitting at his bedside, but Klaus doesn’t think much of all that.

He reads the rest of the book in his court-mandated rehab. 

And honestly, save for a few paragraphs, Klaus doesn’t think it’s half bad. 

Tick, tick, tick.

The timer is still counting down, and Klaus is beginning to wonder if it’s ever going to stop. He can’t imagine there’s much he has left to offer the world. At this point, he’s just a body the city has to scoop off its streets every once in a while before he gets right back up and is back on his bullshit and the cycle continues. Like a cockroach, they simply cannot get rid of him. 

On the sidewalk, he’s in plain sight of people walking up and down the street, and the timer freezes for a few minutes as his heart stops. It’s long enough for someone to call an ambulance, and before he knows it he’s in the hospital once more and the timer continues counting down. Tick, tick, tick.

Each time this happens, they call Diego. 

“Damnit, Klaus,” Diego breathes when Klaus wakes. He’s sitting in the usual chair next to the bed, hair messy and clothes disheveled, and he has his head in his hands so his face isn’t visible. “I just—damnit.”

Klaus doesn’t dare say a word and waits for his brother to break the silence. The only sound is that of the heart monitor, proof of Klaus’ continued confinement to his prison of existence. Tick, tick, tick.

“I don’t get it,” Diego says, and he lifts his head to reveal an expression of pain and upset. Klaus looks away, instead staring down at his hands on top of the stark white hospital blanket. “Why do you keep doing this to yourself? All this shit you're doing, it's gonna end up killing you, man. Does it not scare you that your next overdose might be your last?”

“It does,” Klaus lies, just so he doesn’t make Diego regret coming to visit him. 

“Well, it sure as hell doesn’t seem like it does,” Diego says, crossing his arms across his chest and leaning back in his chair. “Sometimes I feel like I care more than you do.”

Klaus doesn’t think that’s much of a sentiment, due to the bar for that being on the floor. 

“You don’t have to keep coming,” Klaus tells Diego, the guilt from wasting his brother’s time prickling inside his chest. 

“I know,” Diego says. 

But next time, Diego is in the same chair he’s always in. 

Tick, tick, tick.

Voices. Darkness. Sirens. 

This time, Klaus snaps back to life in the ambulance. He grins at the paramedic, gives him a high five, and hears the sound of a breaking news broadcast. Out of muted curiosity, he turns to the mini television on the ambulance table and finds a familiar face glowering back at him. 

Sir Reginald Hargreeves is deader than a doornail. 

(Out of sight, but never out of mind.)

The Academy doesn’t seem so scary, now that the old man has finally kicked the bucket. Despite the ancient, gothic designs and decor, it does have the potential to be quite a lovely home. Granted, Klaus is floating right now so he can’t see the ghosties he knows are here, and perhaps that’s what’s contributing to his optimistic point of view. 

Knowing this will be the last time he ever steps foot in this house, Klaus sets to work rummaging through all of Reggie’s things. He’s searching for anything that looks like it could be worth a buck or two, and he finds a few trinkets in the study rather quickly. Too bad Luther knows this side of Klaus better than Klaus does, and he orders him to drop everything. Not wanting to get pummeled today, Klaus unhappily complies, allowing the items to fall to the floor. 

Not all is bad, though—he was able to hold onto a fancy ornate box.

That’ll come in handy later. 

It’s interesting, Klaus thinks as he smokes and drinks his way through the pre-funeral meeting Luther is holding in the library, how little each of his siblings have changed since leaving the Academy all those years ago. That’s not to say they haven’t physically changed—they have, very much so. For starters, Luther is huge, a fact Klaus isn’t too sure the use of steroids didn’t have to do with, and Allison has the confidence only an A-list celebrity can have judging by the way she dresses and carries herself. Viktor now has short, choppy hair, with his outfit far from the skirts and dresses he had to wear throughout his childhood. Diego, despite still wearing that stupid mask they all wore when they were children, now has the scars and anger that came from never being quite good enough to be Number One, always stuck in second place. 

Hell, even Ben has changed, his image changing over the years. Klaus has no idea why that is. Ben has a theory that Klaus is doing it subconsciously, but what does he know? Maybe all ghosts change over time, and Klaus has never looked at any one of them long enough to notice.

But as much as they might’ve changed on the outside, on the inside none of them are much different than the children they used to be. The ever-loyal Luther insisting foul play was involved with Reginald’s death, even though the autopsy report stated it was a heart attack. Diego arguing with Luther over every other sentence. The lack of surprise and the twinge of disgust in Allison’s voice when she stated, not asked, but stated, “you’re high.” Not that his dearest sister is wrong, of course, and he’s not sure how any of his siblings are standing being sober right now. 

Later, he does try to summon his father, when he’s alone at the bar, but nothing comes of it. Maybe it’s because he’s way too intoxicated to even be able to see the dead, much less conjure them, or perhaps Reggie doesn’t see a point in answering his biggest disappointment of a son when he’s made it to blissful fields of gray. If it’s the latter then, well, Klaus can’t say he blames the old geezer. 

When a blue portal appears in the sky and thirteen-year-old Number Five falls from it, Klaus immediately has two ideas.

“Does anyone else see little Number Five, or is that just me?” Klaus questions aloud because his first idea is the worst of the two—that Five never actually made it to the future all those years ago, and he died before got the chance to do what he set out to do. His stomach churns uneasily as he awaits a response because Klaus really can’t stand the thought of any of his other siblings being dead, doomed to follow Klaus around for the rest of his life. 

He is relieved when it turns out that Five is, in fact, very much alive. 

This leaves him to ponder over his second idea, as he’s sitting on the kitchen table watching Five make himself a sandwich: that Five successfully teleported to the future, but decided to not take the rest of them with him. After all, a thirteen-year-old Five has appeared the day after Reginald died—just like he told Klaus he would all those years ago. Perhaps he couldn’t bring the rest of them with him, or maybe he simply decided he didn’t want them accompanying him to the future. This theory is disproven in Klaus’ mind, though, when he remembers the way Five had told them he was going to get them out of their house of horrors, with the eyes of a lion getting ready to chase down its prey, success being the only option for survival. 

Further proof of that is when Five tells them he’s been gone for forty-five years, so Klaus is pretty sure something else is at play here. 

“Get up and put something nice on,” Five orders the next day without room for much argument after suddenly teleporting into Klaus’ room, causing him to startledly drop his knitting needles. 

“What the fuck,“ Klaus curses, his heart still beating fast after what can only be described as a jump scare. His brain finally catching up, he processes Five’s words. “Um. No thanks, I’m good.”

“I’m not asking,” Five says sharply.

So, unfortunately, Klaus ends up accompanying his smallest brother, randomly enough, to a prosthetics manufacturing company. Five is promising him twenty bucks for when the job is done, and that’s enough for Klaus to be at least semi-invested. At first, he simply tags along, allowing Five to do all the talking as instructed, and all Klaus can wonder while his brother is arguing with Grant is why they’re going through all this hassle just for a dumb glass eye. 

The thought of having a crispy twenty-dollar bill in his hand is what pushes him to step in and help get this over with.

“Well, what about my consent?” 

The way Klaus sees it, they’re ultimately successful in their quest—they get the information on the eye. The eye hasn’t even been manufactured yet, so it belongs to no one. Yet another foolproof plan has been carried out by Four and Five, and Klaus is gonna get his twenty dollars any minute now. All's well that ends well, right?

“Klaus, it doesn’t matter ,” Five growls unhappily when they exit the building, and Klaus is surprised to see his brother looking less satisfied than he was when they entered. 

“What, what’s the big deal with this eye anyways?” Klaus asks because he hasn’t seen Five so worked up about anything since… well, since he decided he wanted to time travel. The fact that he’s acting the same way as he was in the months before he ran away over a random glass eye is weird. Perhaps Five’s brain isn’t quite all there, it has been forty-five years spent who knows where. 

“There’s someone out there who is going to lose an eye in the next seven days,” Five’s eyes flash with manic desperation as he holds the eye up in front of Klaus’ face. “They’re gonna bring about the end of life on this Earth as we know it.” 

Oh. Bummer. 

“Yeah, can I get that 20 bucks, like, now, or what?”

It’s not Klaus’ intention to be rude or callous in any way, but if life on Earth is about to end he wants to get a huge stack of waffles before then. After all, he doesn’t think the afterlife has food of any kind. Five, however, rears back as if Klaus struck him in the face before his expression settles into one of angry disbelief. 

“The apocalypse is coming, and all you can think about is getting high?” Five is practically seething, and he’s gripping the glass eye so tight in one hand that Klaus is afraid it’ll shatter under the pressure. 

“Well, I’m also quite hungry,” Klaus shrugs, putting his hands on his stomach for show. “Tummy’s a-rumblin’.” 

For all of Five’s claimed fifty-eight years, he looks so damn young when his face crumbles into horrified realization, his eyes searching Klaus’ face for something only to come up empty. 

“You’re useless,” Five says, before turning away and throwing his hands up into the air. “You’re all useless !”

Klaus thinks such an accusation is extreme, even if it is every bit accurate. 

It’s just, it’s been a very long time since the last time Klaus can remember caring about something as much as Five cares about this eye and the alleged apocalypse its future owner will bring in seven days. That version of Klaus is buried under years of his father’s abuse, mausoleum visits, drugs, the loss of not one but two brothers, and a decade spent living on the city streets, which is full of its own trials, tribulations, and horrors. He is scraping through life, floating on a high to numb the pain he feels with each and every tick of the timer that is still going, tick, tick, tick. 

Five has clearly come to realize this about him, which is probably why he disappears only to reappear in the backseat of a moving taxi cab, leaving Klaus in the dust noticeably without his rightfully earned twenty bucks. 

He guesses he’ll have to get his waffles another way. 

Here’s the thing: Klaus loves his siblings, and has always loved his siblings. Despite their blatant distaste for him, all he’s ever wanted was to be around his brothers and sister, to bask in the limited amounts of attention the living are willing to give him. Sure, he’s had Ben by his side for almost thirteen years, and he’s crossed paths with Diego sporadically over the last decade, but there’s something exhilarating about Five having returned and all of his siblings being under the same roof once again. Klaus is even able to pretend they’re still the kids who sat in that booth at Griddy’s and ate doughnuts to the point of sickness. 

But they’re not those kids, of course. They’re adults who make their innocent brother get out of the van just because he’s not “adding anything to the conversation,” as Ben tries to explain to him on the taxi ride home, a pile of stolen goods resting in Klaus’ lap. They’re more serious than Klaus apparently even has the capability to match, and that’s why he’s so often left behind or forced out. 

In a way, though, it’s just like old times. 

Klaus’ upset at Luther is, on the surface, why he agrees with Diego against turning Mom off during the family meeting later that day. There’s also something to be said for the fact that hell will freeze over entirely before Klaus agrees with Luther instead of Diego, just like it will before Allison agrees with anyone other than Luther. Deep down, though, the little, frightened boy Klaus used to be cannot stand the thought of his mom getting turned off, the only person besides Ben who has ever truly understood Klaus himself and the nature of his powers. 

It takes Klaus by surprise when Ben voices his agreement with Luther, and it suspiciously sounds like Ben simply refuses to admit that Klaus is right in any type of fashion. Klaus and Ben’s argument over this drowns out the sound of their living siblings once again, and the rest of what’s said at the meeting is unheard by either of them. This kind of thing is what always leads to a chain reaction of sorts. The too loud voices of the ghosts lead him to drown them out with drugs and alcohol, and when those don’t work, music, which leads to him not being aware of his surroundings, which usually leads to something bad happening. 

This time, that “something bad” is getting kidnapped by a couple of masked goons wearing nothing but a towel around his waist.

Typical. 

Klaus realizes, while tied to a chair in a dingy motel room as the lady with the pink dog mask holds a gun to his head and demands answers he most definitely does not have, he’s supposed to be taking this situation seriously. Their determination to torture Five’s location out of him is impressive, but their methods are nothing more than mundane like they got them straight out of a book called “Torture for Dummies.” Unfortunately for them, they have two things against them at the moment—not only does Klaus have no fucking clue where Five is because he’s always made to exit the van, but also Klaus has spent over a decade living on the streets, meaning he’s faced much worse than anything these guys can throw at him. 

Oh, and his lifelong desire for death is a third thing, he supposes. 

They aren’t as dumb as Klaus at first perceives them to be, however, and they find the various pills and special chocolates he carries with him at all times. Each time the guy with the blue mask stomps on his pills hurts Klaus more than a gunshot, and he’d honestly prefer they keep breaking his fingers. They keep going, and then they’re gone and Klaus is stuck in a closet, and the chipped drywall disappears and is replaced with the dark, cold walls of the mausoleum.

After a while, withdrawal begins to set in, and Ben is being a rather big piece of shit, in Klaus’ opinion. The moving shadows are taking the shapes of people, the muted colors of death becoming clearer with each minute that passes by, and they’re whispering, talking, crying, wailing, screaming. Klaus is twelve again, and he’s stuck in the mausoleum and Dad won’t let him out, won’t he please just let him out? 

Meanwhile, the timer continues to count. 

Tick, tick, tick. 

“Talk to them, Klaus,” Ben urges him from where he’s crouched next to Klaus’ chair. 

In hopes of getting out of here and popping every pill he can get his shaking hands on, Klaus for the first time in a very long while makes eye contact with the Russian woman and asks for her name. 

Interestingly enough, the old woman isn’t actually that scary. 

Klaus holds onto hope that at some point the door will be kicked open and at least one of his siblings will appear to rescue him, but in the end, it’s the lady cop, a woman who Klaus thinks he saw holding hands with Diego while walking down the street about a year ago, that shows up to save him, gun pointed into the dark motel room. The guy exits the bathroom with his hands held up, and Klaus wonders if now is the right time to tell her that she should probably keep an eye out for the woman because she’s definitely the scarier one in the masked partnership, but it’s too late. She crumples to the ground and Klaus crawls through the vent to safety, hoping the briefcase in his hands will hold enough money in it to compensate for the shitty night he just had.

Then, he opens it and he’s whisked into a world far from the city he’s spent his whole life in. 

It doesn’t take long for Klaus to realize he has just time traveled from 2019 to some point in the 60s, and he has every intention of going home. Really, he does. However, he quickly finds himself distracted by the soldier with beautiful, kind blue eyes and a soft smile. 

Dave introduces himself, and as Klaus does the same he hardly notices the ticking of the timer quietly fade away. 

Surrounded by death in the middle of the A Shau Valley, the Vietnam war well underway, Klaus has never felt so alive. After spending his entire life being tossed to the side after he wasn’t what the world wanted him to be, Dave, who is unbroken, at least in the way Klaus knows himself to be, sees him for who he is and wants him, not despite everything, but because of everything. Each footstep he takes in the jungle littered with bodies and blood is nothing short of electric, for he has Dave and nothing else matters. The place Klaus grew up in was a prison holding him captive, but he has never felt more at home anywhere than he does in the 173rd Airborne Brigade. 

Klaus is kissed lovingly for the first time in the back of a Saigon bar, shielded from the cruel, harsh world by curtains, alcohol, and the gorgeous, gentle Dave. At this moment, Klaus cannot remember why he ever wanted to die. He has finally found something, some one more beautiful than motionless gray trees. 

After twenty-nine years, he has escaped. 

But Dave is the freedom Klaus isn’t meant to have. 

When the claws of war sink into his one and only love, extinguishing the bright light in Dave’s pretty blue eyes, Klaus dies with him. Not physically, of course, because that’s a luxury the little girl still refuses to grant him. No, what dies is the life Klaus had planned on living out by his soldier boy’s side, because at this point, although he’s held onto the briefcase, he’d had no intentions of using it again. 

The narrative has shattered Klaus irreparably into millions of tiny, broken pieces. 

Klaus returns to 2019, but he leaves his heart in 1968. He’s back on the moving bus, going about its daily route, carrying its usual passengers to each of their destinations. He wonders where the bus takes people without a destination. 

He gets off at the bus stop near a busy intersection. In a fit of rage, he slams the stupid, dumb briefcase into any solid surface he can find, until sparks fly from it and there isn’t any doubt it will never be able to be used again. The briefcase is now a fraction as broken as Klaus is. 

It is weariness, not hope, that propels Klaus to step out into oncoming traffic, the car barrelling towards him moving too fast to stop in time. His body slams into the windshield and he goes flying off the back of the car, landing on the hot asphalt. Familiar nothingness encases him, but then he wakes back up as he always does. Surrounded by a crowd of shocked, horrified onlookers, Klaus pushes himself off the ground and walks away.

The timer ticks on deafeningly. 

Klaus curls up on the hard concrete ground of a deserted alleyway and cries. 

Klaus, a husk of who he once was, goes back to the Academy and takes a bath to wash away Dave’s blood, as well as his own. He is a ghost, wandering aimlessly through this ridiculously large house, which has always been too big for it to ever be filled with love. The part of him who ever cared about anything is dead and gone, and now he’s a ghost, but his beating heart allows the living to see him and interrogate him over things that Klaus doesn’t fucking give a single damn about because Dave is gone.

He blocks Five out, and Ben appears in his place. 

“Klaus, where the hell have you been? You were gone all night, I looked everywhere but it was like you vanished. What did—” Ben immediately starts questioning him, but he abruptly cuts himself short once he gets a good look at his brother. “Hey, are you okay?”

Klaus is too exhausted to lie, so he decides not to respond at all. He makes his way downstairs and runs into Diego, who despite clearly being on a mission with no time at all to waste on anything else, waits in his running car until Klaus climbs into the front passenger seat, hoping that by not sitting by Ben he won’t have to listen to any more useless, meaningless questions. Unfortunately, Diego has never failed to show up, always found next to Klaus’ hospital bed, because Diego has always cared enough for the both of them. 

“Well, would you look at that,” Diego says as he drives down the wet, rainy street. “My brother Klaus is silent.”

It’s a concern disguised as a joke because that’s how they show emotions in their family, but it falls flat. 

Ever since Klaus was small, the need to be louder than life was more than a desire—it was necessary. In a bid to separate himself from the screaming, wailing ghosts, he had to drown them out by any means possible. Now, he has fallen silent, a breathing corpse walking among the dead. 

Seeing Dave’s face in the photograph hanging in the city’s veterans bar ignites sparks of fury that fly up within him, getting him and Diego into a fight with a few of the bar’s patrons, but the sparks dissipate before they even get back into Diego’s car. Now, Diego wants answers, and stubbornness is a Hargreeves family trait, so his brother keeps pushing and pushing. Klaus, just wanting the yelling to stop, gives in. 

“‘Cause I lost someone!” Klaus bursts, and admitting the words out loud makes it feel even more real. Diego falls silent, eyes growing wide, and Klaus is able to soften his voice and elaborate. “I lost someone, the only person I’ve ever truly loved more than myself.”

It goes unsaid that the bar for that is so low it’s practically on the floor.

“Cheers,” Klaus murmurs, blinking back tears as he swallows a pill dry. 

And for a single, heartbreaking moment, Diego, for the first time in a very long while, has a look of pure understanding on his face. 

“Well, you’re luckier than most,” Diego says quietly, his words laced with pain that can only come from overwhelming grief. “When you lose someone, at least you can see them whenever you want.”

If only Klaus’ powers worked in the way his siblings assume they do. It would be nice if the only ghosts Klaus ever sees are the friendly ghosts he wants to see. Diego seems so genuine that Klaus doesn’t have the heart to even attempt to correct him. 

Instead, Klaus just gives his brother a sad smile, and they fall into silence. 

Amidst the rest of the day’s activities, at the forefront of Klaus’ mind is one question: what if he could actually summon Dave? That would require sobering up and then staying sober, which is a mountain he’s of course never even thought about climbing before. He never had a reason before, because peace from the ghosts was what he used to love the most. 

But Klaus loves Dave more than anything he’s ever loved before, including the silence that comes with the blissful highs. He loves Dave so much that he flushes his pills down the toilet, and he loves Dave so much that he endures horrible withdrawals, in hopes that he’ll be able to see him again one day. If he’s not allowed to go to Dave, he’s going to bring Dave to him. 

Whether he’ll have enough time to do that isn’t exactly certain, because Klaus is called to a family meeting to be reminded of something Five told him both ten months and a few days ago: the owner of a glass eye is going to bring about the end of life on Earth. Five appears above the library bar and crashes into their meeting, telling them that if they band together, they can find Harold Jenkins, the alleged perpetrator of End of Days, and stop the apocalypse from coming. Despite everything, Klaus hopes they’re successful—as much as he wants his own timer to end, he knows his siblings and likely everyone else on this planet wants to live, and perhaps it’s possible he’s become less selfish after his time with selfless, loving Dave. 

Not that he plans on helping them. Klaus doesn’t think hunting a guy down and assassinating him requires a lookout. He’s never once been anything more than a burden on missions and such, what would change that now?

Klaus finds himself wishing he’d gone with Diego, though, when he’s walking through the downtown part of the city, passing by many spots where his lights were temporarily extinguished, shivering and bleary from withdrawals, on the hunt for an extremely drunk, upsettingly broken Luther. 

“If you were in trouble, there is nothing in this world Luther wouldn’t do to save your scrawny, little, junkie ass,” Ben tells him when Klaus wants to give up and go home. If Klaus weren’t so damn sick, maybe he’d call out Ben’s obvious naivety when it comes to their siblings and their moral compasses. Perhaps, he’d even go as far as to suggest Ben’s only saying that because he subconsciously wishes Luther or any of them had been able to save him from dying a horrible death thirteen years ago. 

But looking into Ben’s desperate, worried eyes, Klaus gives in. He continues searching, trying to ignore the hand-shaped bruise which is forming painfully on the top of his throat and his jaw. He does it for Ben. 

Honestly, though, when he jumps onto the back of the angry dude pursuing a fragile but actually not so fragile Luther with murderously angry eyes, it’s for Number One. 

Skull, meet floor. 

The gray forest Klaus opens his eyes to is the same as he left it when he was thirteen years old. The peaceful stillness is a welcome change to the loud rave he’d been navigating soberly for the first time, and part of him is relieved this place actually exists. It’s been so long since he’s been here, he’s started to worry it was just a hallucination he’d concocted as a child to cope with life before he found the drugs and alcohol. 

“You are the most annoying creation I’ve ever made,” the little girl says as she slows her bike to a halt on the dirt road, just as Klaus remembers her doing each time he came here as a kid. 

He also remembers how much of a bitch she is. 

“Your blatant disrespect for my time is astounding,” the little girl continues, her colorless eyes narrowed with contempt as she glares at him. “Your disregard for anyone but yourself is infuriating.”

Klaus sighs, shrugs his shoulders, and doesn’t move to argue with her. 

“Hey, this time was an accident,” Klaus points out, hoping that will help his case a little. 

It doesn’t.

“Accident, on purpose, it doesn’t matter,” the little girl huffs. “What does matter is you keep bothering me with your presence before your time.”

“Yeah, I know,” Klaus says, but it’s hard to seem guilty when he’s very much not. Then, something catches his attention, and he tilts his head in curiosity. “Hey, wait, did I come here even the times I died when I was high?”

The little girl rolls her eyes. 

“When a tree falls in the middle of a dense forest, it still makes a sound regardless if anybody was around to hear it,” she says. 

Klaus isn’t too sure that even answers his question, but he decides not to further this part of the conversation—the little girl seems more pissed off than usual. 

“Now, stop dawdling,” the little girl tells him. “He’s waiting.”

She points her finger in the direction of the meadow, and when Klaus looks he sees a pretty cottage that definitely didn’t use to be there, and he knows. Klaus takes off towards the cottage in a full sprint, running faster than he did in the A Shau Valley, and throws open the door. The barbershop inside is a bit confusing, but then again, everything about this place is peacefully confusing, or so he thinks. 

Peacefully confusing turns into just confusing when he hears the cold, stern voice of Sir Reginald Hargreeves. 

“Everything I put you through,” Dearest Daddy says after a whole lot of meaningless conversation is exchanged between the two of them, “was to prepare you, all of you, for something bigger than yourselves. You never understood that.”

Klaus thinks of Five’s desperate, manic young eyes, and hears the sounds of a sobbing Ben accompanied by running shower water. Thinks of Luther, scrambling for scraps of praise, Diego trying so hard only to never get the approval he was searching for. Allison’s horrified, upset voice at Ben’s funeral, Viktor’s sad melodies floating from the end of the hall.

His own long, terrifying nights stuck in a cold, dark mausoleum. 

“We were just kids,” Klaus whispers, grabbing his father’s hand, forcing the man to meet his eyes. “Little kids.”

Reginald fixes him with a long, empty look.

“You were never just kids.”

Klaus’ eyes snap open, and he’s back in the rave, surrounded by a crowd of partiers who confusedly watch him wake. Luther is noticeably absent, so with the directions a very dumbfounded man gives him, Klaus stumbles outside into the chilly March air. There is no sight of his brother, and Klaus has to swallow his disappointment and hope he at least made it home safely. 

Slowly walking away from the rave and towards the Academy, Klaus can feel Ben’s worried, unsure eyes following him the whole way. Ben’s desperate need for Klaus to confirm the answers he surely already knows has never really gone away, even after all this time, and over time he stopped asking Klaus questions he knows won’t be answered truthfully. Ever since Ben became a ghost and realized Klaus’ powers were not what he thought they were, Klaus has sensed his brother’s overwhelming desire to understand. 

Klaus isn’t ready to discuss the dying thing, because he doesn’t have the energy to unpack it right now, but maybe he can share with his brother the most beautiful and heart-wrenching part of his life. 

“When I disappeared,” Klaus starts, swallowing hard to stop the tears from rising, “I landed in Vietnam. In 1968.”

Klaus talks the whole way home, and Ben quietly listens.

Dave’s memory is a truth that deserves to be told. 

At first, the impending arrival of the end of the world is almost a rather helpful distraction for Klaus and his newfound struggle with self-imposed sobriety. After all of the running and chasing and thinking that’s been happening, there’s not much time to even think about going out and getting high. The morning after his and Luther’s night out on the town, all he can think about is telling his siblings exactly what Dad told him last night: that he killed himself, so all suggestions of foul play are hereby rendered false. As Luther and Five stare up at him disbelievingly, Klaus tells them those truths, stacking them atop his foundational lie—he would hate to throw his siblings off by telling them about his afterlife visits, so instead, he states he simply conjured their father last night. 

As Pogo steps into the room and corroborates Klaus’ claims, Klaus can feel Ben’s unwavering suspicion wrapping itself around his lungs from across the room, squeezing so hard he at times is unable to breathe. Ben has no doubt been able to sniff out his lies by now, and he’s getting closer to discovering the whole truth if he hasn’t already. Perhaps his brother has known since the start that Klaus has a habit of falling too hard only to get right back up minutes later like nothing happened, and is just waiting for the day Klaus will finally confess. 

Too bad Klaus has no intentions of letting that happen. 

Anyways, a distracted Klaus has a better chance of being a sober Klaus, but then the distractions become a bit too intense. Finding his sister unconscious on Harold Jenkin’s cabin floor, bleeding out due to her slit throat, shakes him in a way he hasn’t been shaken in a long time. The idea of another one of his siblings dying horrifically and being stuck by his side for all of eternity doesn’t sit well with him, and in a moment of panic, all Klaus wants to do is to be numb again, to block everyone—living and dead—out. 

“You know, I’m tired of seeing you wallow in self defeat,” Ben says as Klaus rummages around his bedroom, searching for any substance that might take the fear and pain away. 

And for a moment, Klaus feels a flash of tired annoyance due to Ben’s words. 

“Well, then, avert your gaze,” Klaus tells his brother, standing upright to look Ben in the eyes. Sobriety means he’s not as carefree as he once was, and as a result of that Klaus is starting to become exhausted by Ben’s constant metaphorical backseat driving. Klaus never asked Ben to stay, never demanded the ghost of his brother stay by his side and attempt to fix what simply cannot be fixed. If Ben doesn’t want to stick around to see Klaus live his life the way he wants, well, nothing is stopping him from moving on to the colorless afterlife. 

But ghosts are nothing if not stubborn, and Ben is the most obstinate of them all. 

“You’re better than that,” Ben argues, arms crossed and eyes narrowed with unsurprised disappointment. “And Dave?”

Klaus swallows and feels the sharp knife of grief stab his heart. 

“He knew it, too.”

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t bother Klaus how he’s constantly disappointing his siblings, never failing to prove them right time and time again, because that’s how it’s always been his entire life. Dave, however, is in a completely different ballpark, and as he stares at the pile of pills buried within the fibers of the stuffed animal, he feels a sense of shame that he’s hardly ever felt before. Guilt has never been a common feeling for him, but right now it’s abundant as he thinks of his soldier boy and his disappointed face.

There is, deep down within his soul, a part of him that wants to fail now while nobody’s expecting a single thing from him, and that’s what leads him to yell “sike!” and toss the pills in his mouth. On the other hand, maybe it’s the sliver of him that desperately wants to succeed, to make everyone proud—to make Dave proud—that sends his power pulsating through his veins and makes Ben solid for the first time. Ben punches Klaus so hard that the pills get knocked from his mouth, but Klaus doesn’t even care, the both of them so astonished by what just happened that their argument is completely forgotten. 

For the first time in his life, Klaus is introduced to a spark of potential in himself. 

It is soon revealed that Klaus is not the only sibling with untapped potential. As Klaus stares, horrified, at his smallest, quietest sibling, who is currently locked in a cage in the basement with tears in his eyes, he at first doesn’t know what on Earth to do. No matter what Luther claims Pogo told him about Viktor being “dangerous”, Klaus knows that locking someone up is never the answer—does Luther not know how it feels to be trapped in a small, dark room, scared and alone, and the only person who holds the key to your freedom refusing to let him out, Dad please, please let me out ? No matter what Viktor might’ve done, let’s be honest, the rest of them have surely done worse to a lot more people, a fact Klaus is sure of judging by the hordes of ghosts that follow each of his siblings around. The thing is, Luther stands alone, and the only thing stopping the rest of them from simply side-stepping their severely misguided Number One is his physical size, and he tries to herd them all out, to leave Viktor in this awful basement like he’s a prisoner and not their kindest, most tender-hearted brother. 

Klaus doesn’t think he wants to know what might’ve happened if the basement hadn’t been, at that very moment, illuminated by a flash of blue, leaving a rather bewildered Five standing in its wake. He blinks at the sight of Viktor in the cage, screaming, looks back at the rest of them, and then back to Viktor, who has now stopped pounding on the door at Five’s appearance. Ever since Five ran away all those years ago, their family ties have continued to crumble without their adhesive. Now, Five is back, and Klaus can almost feel the fragile pieces begin to be glued back together. 

As Five pulls the wheel on the door to let Viktor out, baby blues cold and never leaving Luther, who oddly enough doesn’t make a move to stop their most murderous sibling, Klaus wonders if he can feel Ben helping turn the wheel from the other side. 

Viktor and Allison fall into each other's arms, and they go from there. 

So, Viktor has super powerful abilities that stone cold Reggie found himself deeply afraid of, and the old man’s solution was to have Allison rumor Viktor to think he was ordinary—which, after Klaus learns this, he thinks it’s fairly obvious that no matter how much his siblings play the blame game, this is all Daddy Dearest’s fault, plain and simple. He’s honestly rather ticked that in the time Reginald had to talk to him, this information wasn’t the first thing to come out of the geezer’s mouth, but then what else is new? 

Old Reggie certainly had a flair for the dramatics. 

The day of the apocalypse comes and goes without as much as a peep, and Klaus finds himself having to shove his disdain for the timer continuing to tick, tick, tick deep down so nobody else catches wind of his disappointment. The rest of his family begins to put itself through the healing process, which seems like it’s going to be a rather lengthy journey, and it’s centered around Viktor, for obvious and aforementioned reasons. As difficult and impossible as it may seem for their family to regain the love they once had for one another, for once there’s a mutual determination in all of them to fix this to save the world, and themselves. 

With everything that’s going on with Viktor, Klaus falls below the radar of the others. Don’t get him wrong, he fully understands that after everything, it’s time for Viktor to finally feel like he’s a part of their family, this entire time having thought he was nothing more than ordinary. It’s just, as Klaus falls into the background, he feels his grip on the living slip further and further through his cold, pale fingers. 

At least he’s able to work on his powers in peace, or at least relative peace. While Five, Diego, and Allison help Viktor train his powers almost daily in the courtyard—Luther, for reasons most would understand, is not allowed to participate in any capacity whatsoever—Klaus shuts himself in his room and plays patty cake with Ben over and over again. The days crawl by slower than they ever have, and with each moment that passes he’s even soberer than the one before, meaning the ghosts begin reappearing one by one. For the most part, the ghosts are familiar, and Klaus recognizes a lot of faces whom he used to see daily when he was a kid, including the old French man who hangs out in his bedroom doorway and the sobbing woman with the bent neck who can be found in the kitchen. Every time he walks down the hallway towards his room, he has to sidestep the middle-aged man with the top hat and the bullet holes littering his torso. 

Perhaps it's his imagination, but Klaus swears that sometimes, in the middle of the night, he can hear the screams of the ghosts who reside in the mausoleum. Those nights are the most difficult, and often he has to curl up in the corner of his room, head buried in his knees as he listens to the comforting sound of Ben’s familiar voice. To stop himself from crawling out and down the fire escape to find something— anything to make the dead go away, he pictures Dave in his mind, focusing on his kind eyes and beautiful smile. 

“You don’t have to do this alone, Klaus,” Ben says softly on Klaus’ third sleepless night in a row. Klaus is sitting in his corner, his hair gripped in his hands as he rocks back and forth, the voices continuing to grow louder and clearer. “The others can help you, like they’re helping Viktor.”

The humorless chuckle that escapes past Klaus’ lips isn’t intentional, but it’s a genuine reaction. It’s just that the thought of his siblings even attempting to help him is laughable. After all, how would they be able to help him if they don’t even believe him when he tells them about his powers? 

“All they’d do is constantly call me a liar,” Klaus mutters. 

Ben sighs, but he doesn’t refute that statement. 

Towards the end of the night, all Klaus wants to do is get some fucking sleep, but he can’t because of all the voices, and he’s seriously considering giving up. His cravings are stronger than they’ve ever been, and he feels his body start to crawl towards the window, in the direction of his much-desired fix. Grabbing onto the windowsill, Klaus begins to pull himself up onto his feet, but before he can get into a complete standing position, a hand grabs his shoulder and pushes him back onto the ground. Glancing up in surprise, Klaus finds a pale hand gripping his shoulder, and looks further upward to find an equally surprised Ben staring down at him. Then, Ben’s expression morphs into one of determination.

“I’m not going to let you ruin everything you’ve been working so hard for,” Ben tells him, his solid fingers firmly remaining on Klaus’ skin. 

Klaus swallows thickly, glances back down at Ben’s solid hand, and thinks of Dave once more. 

“Thanks,” Klaus breathes, wide-eyed. 

He doesn’t get any sleep that night, but he gets five hours the following night, which is a win in Klaus’ book. 

After making solid contact with Ben once more, this time for longer, it reignites Klaus’ motivation to wrangle his powers just enough so he can summon Dave. He spends half his time trying to make Ben solid again, and the other half he spends attempting to summon, having more luck with the former than the latter. Each time Klaus attempts to summon Dave, he ends up accidentally summoning a considerably less friendly and pretty spirit, adding it to his entourage of ghosts that live within the walls of the Academy—without the ability to banish ghosts, there’s no way for him to get rid of them, and so the collective voices of the dead grow louder and louder, and it’s getting harder to hear the sounds of the living over them. 

Perhaps one of the things Klaus hates most is family meal times his siblings have insisted they have every day. It was Allison’s idea, written down on her notepad with her eyes big and hopeful, and despite everyone’s clear disdain for the suggestion, none of them were able to tell their injured sister no, not even Diego or Five. It’s just, Klaus hasn’t been this sober around his siblings since he was thirteen years old, and all of them have built up quite a ghostly following in that time, especially Five, which, damn—that’s a huge body count. He’s never been a fan of any ghosts, of course, save for his dearest brother, but seeing bloodied, screaming dead people directing their curses, rage, and wails towards his siblings is something he hates so, so much. It’s difficult to look at Five the same way when there’s a small girl standing next to him, a bullet smack dab in her forehead and tears in her eyes. 

The meals are very important to Allison, though, so Klaus tries to make it to as many of them as he can metaphorically stomach. 

“Uh, so, um, how was training today, Viktor?” Luther asks from across the table as Mom is placing their plates in front of each of them. They’ve begun eating in the dining room, and after the few weeks they’ve been sharing meals together here, Klaus has to admit this room doesn’t seem as horrible as it used to be. Luther is still awkwardly trying to fumble through repairing his relationship with Viktor, and it’s painful to watch, to say the least. Not that Viktor isn’t polite or kind, because he definitely is, but he’s not the most socially equipped person in the world, so watching him attempt to make conversation with the man who never left his father’s home and lived on the moon for four years is dreadful. 

“Better than usual,” Viktor answers, but after he does he seems to hesitate for a moment, his eyes sliding to land on Five, who is scribbling feverishly about God knows what into a notebook, whilst ignoring his dinner plate as typical. “I think.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Five says, not bothering to tear his eyes away from his notebook, his pencil continuing to fly across paper. 

“Yeah, only two windows were shattered today,” Diego adds before sticking a forkful of chicken into his mouth. It’s not abundantly clear whether Diego is being a sarcastic asshole or truly genuine, but either way Allison tears off a piece of paper from her notepad, crumples it up, and lobs it at his head with the dirtiest look she can muster. Diego makes a noise of protest behind the food in his mouth, rubbing the spot on his forehead where it struck him. 

“Sorry about that,” Viktor apologizes sheepishly, his cheeks beginning to turn red from embarrassment. 

“Don’t be,” Five finally glances up from his notebook. He leans his head forward a hair to fix Luther a pointed glare. “Luther needs tasks to occupy his time. The more broken windows for him to fix, the better.”

Luther has in the last half minute busied himself with stabbing his fork into the giant mound of chicken on his plate, but when he realizes Five’s talking about him he whips his head up and grins nervously, bobbing his head up and down in quick agreement. 

Allison holds her notepad up in Viktor’s direction: you’re doing great!! 

Viktor gives a proud smile in response.

This scene right here, the seven of them sitting around the table like a family is one Klaus knows his thirteen-year-old self yearned for, and perhaps he’d be able to truly enjoy it if he wasn’t stone-cold sober. Without the drugs, the room is way too crowded for Klaus’ liking, and almost every single ghost that hasn’t gone completely bonkers has their eyes trained on him, hungry for the second chances he has no way of giving them. They’re all speaking or crying or screaming and they never shut up—and once again, Klaus decides he’s going to make them shut up, using the only method he’s ever known. 

“Don’t even think about it, asshole,” Ben says without even having to glance up from the page of the book he’s currently reading while sitting in the chair next to Klaus. 

Klaus opens his mouth to say something along the lines of get bent, dickweed, but before he has the chance, every single glass of water on the table explodes, sending shards of glass into the air, and after the pieces land Klaus turns to see Viktor frozen in his seat, eyes blown wide. 

“Oh, hey, Viktor, it’s no big deal,” Klaus attempts to comfort his brother, picking up the few pieces of glass that landed on his lap and placing them on the table next to his plate. “At least it’s not another window Luther has to fix. You’re getting so much better!”

Viktor is motionless, doesn’t even blink, and Klaus goes to share worried glances with the rest of his siblings, but he only finds that the others are wearing the exact expressions as Viktor. 

“Um, what are they staring at?” Ben frowns, straightening in his chair and closing his book. He glances behind his shoulder and finds nothing. 

“B-B-Ben?” Diego whispers, his fork that was once in his hand clattering onto the floor. 

They can see Ben. They’re all looking at Ben, who is somehow visible to them for the first time, and the only person in this room capable of doing that is Klaus. His powers are growing stronger, to the point where he’s able to make his dead brother visible, and that should be a good thing, right? Hell, for over a decade he’s tried to convince his siblings of Ben’s presence, only to be met with scorn and disbelief, and now he finally has proof that he’s not a total liar. The problem is if Klaus is now able to do this, what else will he be able to do? The thought of the ghosts in the mausoleum being brought forward into the world of the living sends a shiver down his spine. 

“Well, shit,” Ben says, the book in his lap completely forgotten. 

After that, Klaus is no longer under his siblings' radars. 

“Why didn’t you mention you’ve been working on your powers?” Five demands to know later that night when the initial shock of seeing his dead brother for the first time in decades has partially worn off. Ben is once again invisible and sitting crisscrossed on Klaus’ desk, but unfortunately, Klaus is very much visible and currently squirming under Five’s scrutinizing glare. 

“I haven’t,” Klaus lies because it’s better than admitting he’s been tirelessly trying to wrangle his abilities into place for weeks with very little to show for it. 

And besides, Klaus knows better by now than to give any of his siblings more than a single sliver of truth. 

“So you’re telling me that after only a few weeks of sobriety, you were able to subconsciously both summon Ben and make him corporeal today on a whim, something you’ve never been able to do before?” Five asks in a tone that sounds a lot like, how stupid do you think I am? “Clearly, you must have been doing—”

“I didn’t summon Ben today,” Klaus cuts Five off with a frown. 

Five blinks. 

“Actually, I’m pretty sure I never summoned him at all,” Klaus continues, taking advantage of Five’s unprecedented stupor. “He just kinda… showed up, and he’s been following me around ever since then. He’s been a real pain in the ass, you know.”

“And you’ve been a perfect angel, right, Klaus?” Ben shoots back, rolling his eyes. 

“So how long has he been here?” Five questions confusedly, head slightly tilted as if trying to connect the dots in his mind. 

Klaus gets up from off the floor he’s been sitting on and stretches before answering, “uh, at least since the funeral, I think.”

He looks over at Ben, who nods, his eyes dark and sad. Klaus and Ben rarely speak about Ben’s death, unless one wants to make a cheap shot at the other, which honestly doesn’t happen as often as one would assume. Much of their past goes unacknowledged and unmentioned. perhaps in hopes of a brighter future they both know will never come. 

“It’s hard to know for sure, though—those days were sorta a blur, if you know what I mean,” Klaus grins and elbows Five in the arm in an attempt to lighten the mood in the room.

“Klaus, that’s impossible,” Five says, narrowing his eyes with suspicion. “You can’t use your powers when you’re high and Viktor said in his book you were most definitely high during those days.”

Klaus can’t help but chuckle, because it’s once again the same old story: his siblings are so sure in their untrue perceptions of his powers. It’s not completely their fault, of course. Klaus has always kept his cards extremely close to his chest ever since he was young. Still, they’ve always viewed his powers through a black and white lens—if he’s sober, he can see ghosts, and if he’s high, he can’t see ghosts—but as Klaus has come to realize, his powers aren’t as black and white as the afterlife. 

“Fivey, Viktor’s book was good and very entertaining,” Klaus says, thinking back to when he read his brother’s book in rehab after some less than stellar choices, as Ben would describe his whirlwind bender. “But a lot of it was pure fiction. You can’t believe everything you read, mi hermano. ”

Klaus walks out of his room, telling Five that he’s going to take a bath, so unless he wants to see him naked this conversation would have to be over. He goes into the bathroom, and it takes him several minutes to get the water temperature right (scalding hot), fill up the tub, strip out of his clothes and sink into the tub. He sighs with relief when the hot water makes contact with his cold skin. 

Only then does Klaus hear the sound of Five blinking away.

Tick, tick, tick.

“Maybe you’ll be able to do it again?” Ben ventures later, at about half past midnight when Klaus is out of the bath and back on his bedroom floor, every light in the room switched on as Klaus prepares to search for Dave again. 

And as self-centered as Klaus may seem, he very much has not forgotten the look on each of their siblings’ faces when they were reunited with their beloved, deceased brother for the first time since they were sixteen years old, and for Five even longer. Klaus never intended to keep Ben from them, and if he could have given them proof back when they were sixteen he definitely would have. Now, they have proof, and with that will surely come the careful requests and hopeful demands, but the problem is Klaus has no idea how he brought Ben forward in the first place. 

Even fresher in his mind is the disappointment all his siblings were wearing when Klaus stopped doing whatever the hell he was doing and Ben became incorporeal once more.

“Yeah, yeah, of course, brother mine.”

As much as he wants to help his siblings and Ben have more time with each other, however, Klaus can’t help it when his thoughts stray to Dave as he sits on his bedroom floor, trying with all his might to bring his love to him. For as fresh as his siblings' faces are in his mind, Klaus begins to panic when he realizes his memories of Dave are beginning to lose their sharpness. He flounders for a few moments, sinking into deeper and deeper focus as he works to rebuild Dave’s image in his mind. 

Soft blue eyes. Strong, loving arms. Beautiful laugh, gentle voice, kind lips. 

Klaus, eyes squeezed shut, sifts through soul after soul, flicking through them like papers in a file drawer. There’s a trace of Dave, hidden far off in the distance, and it’s extremely faint but it’s there and that’s enough. A flicker of hope blooms in his chest when he realizes for the first time the trace is growing stronger.

“Ben, I think I’ve found him,” Klaus dares to breathe, unwilling to open his eyes or move a millimeter lest a shred of his concentration slips and he loses all traces of Dave forever. 

“Reach out to him,” Ben’s voice encourages from somewhere in the room. “You can do this, Klaus.” 

And Klaus does just that, or at least he tries, but just as he’s about to grab hold of Dave’s soul he’s stopped by what can only be described as a wall. Brows furrowing together with desperate confusion, Klaus tries with all his might to break through the blockage that is for some reason keeping him from the only thing that keeps him going these days—hearing Dave’s voice again. Surely the blockage isn’t being caused on Dave’s end, is it? No, Klaus refuses to believe anything of the sort. 

After making it this far, there is no way he’s going to let a single thing stop him. He gathers every ounce of power within him, focuses so hard he’s sure he has a funny look on his face, and pushes with his powers as hard as he can. He feels something crack and break apart, and not wanting to waste a single moment, Klaus grabs hold and pulls. 

Without even opening his eyes, he can feel the retrieved presence in his room. Dave. Klaus lifts his eyelids and searches eagerly for soft blue eyes. 

That is not what he finds.

There is a new figure in his bedroom, but it is not Dave. It is another ghost, one that Klaus has never laid eyes on before, and given that this is the most disfigured ghost he’s ever seen he’s sure if he had he would surely recognize it. Bruised, bloody, and torn apart, Klaus tries to think of how it’s even possible to die in such a way—and he’s seen ghosts who have died in extremely violent ways. 

“Uh… is that…” Ben is sitting on Klaus’ bed, staring at the ghost with pure bewilderment. 

“No, that’s not Dave,” Klaus says, scooting back to put more space between himself and the ghost. “I don’t know who—or hell, what —that is.”

“Okay, well, I guess this is a good time to practice banishing?” Ben suggests shakily. 

“Yeah, I think so,” Klaus nods quickly, not daring to look away from the ghost. 

He’s more disappointed than anything, as he adjusts himself and gets ready to banish the ghost that isn’t Dave. He’s trying to figure out what went wrong because he’s sure that was Dave’s soul he was sensing. He would never mistake another for his trust love. 

With an annoyed sigh, Klaus looks at the unwanted ghost and begins the process of banishing. It’s interesting, Klaus thinks, that as disfigured as the ghost is, both of its eyes are securely intact. Dark and brown, the eyes are shining with tears and staring directly at him from the corner of the bedroom. 

And slowly, Klaus comes to a petrifying realization.

He knows this ghost. 

Klaus is suddenly three years old and stands only a few feet off the ground, his entire perception of the world limited to the walls of the Academy. He’s running as fast as his small legs will carry him, hardly able to keep up with his father, who has already told him twice to go back to his bedroom, but he can’t —not until he can get someone to finally see the unnaturally pale, still, sleeping infant that’s been in his room for a week now. He’s trying to get his father to understand, to come look at the baby so it can get out of his bedroom and perhaps even get put into its own bedroom, but his father refuses to listen to a word he’s saying. 

“Number Four, that is enough, ” his father barks, whipping around to tower over him with a seething glare. “I have had quite enough of your obedience to last me a lifetime! You will speak not another word of your foolish, childish delusions, have I made myself clear?” 

Shrinking back, he can feel tears rising up his throat and welling up in his eyes, but he just has to make his father understand. 

“Please, you just have to come look, I swear I—“

It happens so quickly that he doesn’t register what’s happened until after his father has smacked him across the face so hard the force of it sent him tumbling down the stairs, the upper left side of his head slamming into the edge of the bottom step. His head explodes with pain, and all he can do is lay on the bottom landing of the stairs and gasp for air.

“Good riddance,” he hears his father mutter annoyedly from the top of the steps. “Grace! Clean the blood up quickly before it stains the wallpaper.” 

Tick, tick, ti—

The world fades away, and he finds himself in a new world, a gray forest that spans forever into the distance. 

“I’m Four, who are you?” He questions the girl with the bike as she steps through the meadow to approach him.

“I’m the creator of all life on Earth,” the little girl responds. 

“Oh, cool,” he smiles, pretending to understand what the girl meant by that when in reality he has no clue. “I like it here.” 

“I know,” the little girl says, reaching up to pluck a flower off of the branch of a tree. 

“I don’t like being at home,” he admits, and for a moment he’s worried he’s going to be smacked for saying such a thing. “It’s dark, and scary, and father yells at me a lot.” 

The little girl pauses, turning her face to gaze at him through big, sad, regretful eyes. 

“I know,” the little girl says quietly. “You should know, I am so very sorry about that, and for the journey you are about to embark on.” 

“That’s okay,” he shrugs, again not understanding what her words mean. Then, he has a new, wonderful idea. “Hey, do you want to be my friend?” 

The little girl laughs, the mournful look in her eyes almost wiped away. 

“Someday, you will come to live here for the rest of eternity,” the little girl says, “and when you do, yes, I will be your friend.” 

She crouches to his level and hands him the flower she had just plucked. 

He is sent back home, looking forward to when he can go back to the gray forest and be the little girl’s friend. With his head bashed in and tears welling up in his eyes, he curls up in the corner of the bedroom, trains his vision on the version of himself that’s still among the living, and there he sits, watches, and waits. His timer is frozen, mid-tick, and it will never tick again. 

“Klaus? Hey, what’s going on?” Ben’s voice brings Klaus back into the present, his brother now standing at his side, brows furrowed with worry. “Aren’t you going to banish the ghost?”

Right, banish the ghost. Klaus has to banish the ghost that’s in front of him and send it away never to be seen again. He’ll banish the ghost, and then he’ll go on with his life, pretending he has no idea who the ghost is until maybe he himself truly believes he doesn’t. 

If Ben were to look closer at the ghost, would he be able to recognize those tearful, sad, brown eyes? 

“Yeah, I’m gonna, give me a sec,” Klaus hears himself say on autopilot. 

Klaus clenches his trembling fists, composes himself as much as he can considering the circumstances, and wills the ghost away like he’s learned to do with every other ghost he’s managed to banish. He draws upon the power inside himself, grabs hold of the spirit once again, and pushes… but the ghost doesn’t budge. Klaus’ hands begin to glow blue like they do when he’s using an exorbitant amount of power, and the ghost begins to glow as well.

There’s a flash of blue, and then nothing. Klaus, his fists normal colored once more, stares at the spot where the ghost was and is relieved to see it’s nowhere to be found. Heaving a sigh, Klaus drops his face into his hands to try and calm himself down. 

“Um, Klaus?” Ben breaks the silence, and Klaus’ heart sinks because what now ? “Is it just me or does that look like you when you were young?”

Klaus looks up and finds Ben looking at the corner of the bedroom, where a little ghost Klaus is curled up in his pool of blood that’s coming from his bashed in head, sniffling and crying. 

A blood-curdling scream erupts from outside the bedroom door. Klaus shares a look with Ben, gets to his feet, and slowly pulls the door open. The eleven-year-old ghost of himself has his hands pressed to his ears, eyes shut tight, brown curls messy and torn, and deep wounds littered around his entire body. 

“Ben, have I ever mentioned that I’ve died a… few times?” Klaus says, knowing full well he’s never said a single word about this to anyone. 

“It’s never came up, no,” Ben’s eyes aren’t as angry as Klaus thought they might be at the reveal of this secret. Instead, he looks sad as he sits back down on the edge of the bed. “But after you stopped breathing for five minutes that one time a long time ago, I wondered. When you went down at the rave, I was even more sure, but you never said anything about it so I didn’t want to ask.”

Klaus can‘t even blame his brother for not asking when he himself has always been a big fan of the if-you-pretend-it’s-not-a-thing-it’s-not-a-thing strategy. 

“How many times have you—“ Ben cuts himself off before he can say died, but Klaus can connect the dots. 

“Honestly?” Klaus huffs out a laugh, although he doesn’t think it’s funny at all. “I lost count.” 

A thick blanket of silence falls between the two of them, and all Klaus hears is the screaming on the other side of the door.

“Klaus, how—“ Ben starts to ask, but chokes up for a moment. Taking a deep breath that he doesn’t even need, he tries again. “How young were you?”

Then they’re both looking at the small ghost boy in the corner, and not wanting to say, Klaus simply turns his head away. 

But Ben, like always, doesn’t accept that as an answer.

“Klaus,” Ben pushes, he’s speaking more gently than Klaus has ever heard him speak before. “Tell me. Please.”

“I was three,” Klaus says finally before forcing a smile onto his face. “Daddy dearest sure did pack a killer backhand.” 

“You are unbelievable,” Ben shakes his head out of disbelief. “Goddamnit.”

The ghost boy in the corner doesn’t even crack a smile. 

The next morning, Klaus can pretend that last night's events didn’t happen, at least for a short amount of time. Sure, the boy is still crying in the corner of his room, but when he steps outside his room he realizes the screaming ghost is nowhere to be found. Look, if the only one Klaus ended up summoning was the smallest one, well, then, he’s pretty sure he can deal with that. 

Good morning! :), is what Allison’s notepad reads when Klaus saunters into the kitchen. To her right sits Luther, who is shoveling spoonful after spoonful of the scrambled eggs Mom is currently cooking at the stove into his mouth, and he kindly spares Klaus a nod of hello when they make eye contact. To her left, at the head of the table, is Five, the gremlin seeming to lose all interest in the newspaper in front of him when Klaus walks in, opting to stare him down while he sips his cup of coffee like he’s been doing ever since Ben made his surprise reappearance last night. 

Viktor and Diego are both nowhere to be seen, likely because the two of them have actual jobs to occupy their time. 

“Good morning, dearest sister,” Klaus beams, always glad to see one of his less murderous siblings. 

“Is, um,” Luther starts to say after he swallows his mouthful of eggs, and he looks kind of nervous, which usually only happens when he’s the subject of Five’s direct scorn. “Is. Is Ben here, today?” 

Allison begins to write something onto her notepad, but she keeps scratching words out like she doesn’t know what she wants to say. 

“Yup,” Klaus sits down in the chair across from Allison because he doesn’t want to sit next to Five or across from Luther. “As he always is. Our knight in a black hoodie.” 

Luther and Allison both cringe at that, and Klaus feels something within himself soften. 

We should have believed you, Allison finally shows him her notepad, her eyes guilty and sad. 

“Hey, it’s okay, I’m not sure I would’ve believed sixteen year old me either,” Klaus shrugs, smiling when Mom places a plate of waffles in front of him. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Well, what’s done is done,” Five interjects, setting his coffee cup down on the table. “Klaus, I’d like it if you’d start training in the courtyard with Viktor. That way, I can keep an eye on your progress and training process.” 

“Yeah, Five, I think I’m good,” Klaus chuckles, hoping he’s not betraying his nerves. “Not that your party doesn’t sound like a rager, because it totally does. But conjuring the dead doesn’t really mix well with an audience.” 

Not that he has any evidence to back that claim up, unless Ben and all the other ghosts count as audience members. But look. Klaus has already had a family member overseeing his training and that ended badly, to say the least. Besides, the last thing Klaus wants is for his siblings to get impatient with him because his powers aren’t tangible like theirs. 

“Stop with the stupid excuses,” Five rolls his eyes. “This isn’t up for debate—I don’t want any more untrained siblings causing the end of the world.” 

Klaus opens his mouth to argue, but then he catches a glance of who’s standing next to the back door, and anything he might’ve said instantly dies on his tongue. The ghost, older than the ghost in the corner of his bedroom but much younger than the screaming ghost, can only be described as disheveled, with twigs and leaves sticking out of his curls, and holes and rips in his Academy uniform. The gaping impalement wound in his stomach is what the eye is first drawn to, but all Klaus can register is the wild animal-like fear and panic on his little face. 

And then, Klaus is running through a graveyard, tears blurring his vision as he sprints best he can away from the voices that keep yelling and moaning his name. 

“Four,” the little ghost whispers. 

Klaus suddenly feels nauseous. He mumbles an excuse about forgetting to do something and hurries out of the kitchen, ignoring the confused voices of his siblings and the untouched stack of waffles on the table. He makes his way up the stairs, into the room, and dives into his bed, hiding under the covers.

Even under the covers, though, Klaus can still feel a pair of his own brown eyes watching him through the blanket. 

Unfortunately, Klaus can’t stay under the covers forever. For the first time in his lifetime, his siblings are actively pulling him into the realm of the living whether they’re aware of it or not. They want him to talk to them, eat with them, go on outings with them and generally be a participating member of the family. 

Later that day, Allison practically yanks him out of bed to take him to the mall to shop. 

As they're standing in a store at the mall, Allison's hands are too full to hold a notepad and pen, so instead, she holds up a blouse and a skirt with a questioning expression on her face. Unfortunately, Klaus is rather distracted by the teenaged ghost standing a few racks over wearing heavy makeup, bright, glittery clothes, and a shaky smile. Dollar store mascara is streaked down his face, but it doesn’t take from the dark strangulation bruises on his throat. Suddenly, Klaus is fresh out of the Academy, penniless and willing to give anything to keep the voices at bay. 

Hands are on his throat, a body is crushing his lungs, and Klaus can’t breathe. 

Allison nudges him with her elbow, her face twisted with concern, and Klaus remembers he’d been asked a question. 

“Oh, sorry,” Klaus says, and he is only able to manage a small, wavering grin. “Anything you pick out looks great, sis. Just like always.” 

Klaus tries not to look at the ghost for the rest of the trip. He tries not to think that when he was that age, he dreamed of going on a shopping spree with his sister. He tries not to think in general. 

The next day, Luther somehow ropes Klaus into helping him with window glass duty. They’re out in the courtyard, Viktor’s training done for the day (Five hasn’t bothered him anymore about training with them, thank God), and Klaus is holding the dustpan while Luther sweeps up the glass. Actually, the sight of giant Luther using such a tiny broom is borderline comical, so Klaus isn’t minding this as much. 

But then, he notices a ghost his own age standing a few feet away from them, a handprint on his neck and a large dent in his head. This ghost isn’t looking at them and doesn’t seem to even notice them standing here at all. He’s muttering something Klaus can’t hear. 

Strobe lights. Loud music. A burst of panic makes him run towards danger for someone else’s sake for the first time in his life. 

“Hello, anybody home?” Luther waves his hand in front of Klaus’ face, and Klaus starts back to the present. 

“What? Yeah, I’m here, big guy.”

“Didn’t seem like it,” Luther says, before pointing at the pile of glass and dust he’s swept up. “Anyways, help me sweep this up?”

Klaus agrees, and they get to work sweeping every shard into the small bin. 

“Luther,” Klaus hears the ghost say as it moves within earshot. “Luther!… Luther?”

At one point, the ghost passes right through Luther’s big frame, yet continues to call his name.

“I’ve counted six ghosts,” Ben says quietly as he follows Klaus up to his room. “So… six times?” 

“Yeah, sounds about right,” Klaus says because he technically has died at least six times. Also, he doesn’t have the emotional energy to correct him. 

Then, they reach the top of the stairs and find a ghost boy wearing fire engine red pumps and dancing happily, despite his broken jaw and twisted neck. 

“That’s seven?” Ben questions, though Klaus thinks his brother already knows the answer. 

And then Klaus is small again, happier than he’s ever been, relishing the feelings of joy and adrenaline, unaware of the pain that awaits him soon. 

“That’s seven,” Klaus echoes wearily. 

The family decides to go to Griddy’s for dinner that night. Allison insists they walk, claiming it’s for exercise, but Klaus doesn’t miss the smile on his sister’s face as they all walk the city sidewalk in the same formation they were in all those years ago. Klaus also doesn’t miss the various ghosts lining the city streets, their skin deathly pale blue and eyes glassy—common symptoms of overdose. 

Eight, nine, ten, eleven.

“This is the longest you’ve been sober, right, bro?” Diego points out when they’re all crammed into a Griddy’s booth, the plate of doughnuts in the middle of the table half gone already. 

“Huh, I guess it is,” Klaus says, and takes a big gulp of his chocolate milk. “Since I was thirteen, anyway.” 

“Thirteen?” Luther chokes on his bite of doughnut, eyes wide with shock. 

Five’s grip on his coffee mug tightens ever so slightly, eyes trained on the black liquid inside of it like he’s having a staring contest. 

“Or something like that,” Klaus says nonchalantly. “Maybe I was older, maybe I was younger. Who really knows?” 

Besides the little girl, obviously. 

“Well, hey, we’re proud of you, Klaus,” Diego says, nudging him with his elbow, and a chorus of agreements comes from the others as well. 

Klaus’ eyes stray to the bar, where the ghost of his thirteen-year-old self sits hunched in on himself. His body is riddled with bullet wounds, a steady stream of blood dripping onto the floor around the stool he’s on, forming a dark red puddle. His eyes betray a type of grief and hopelessness that Klaus cannot believe he experienced so young. 

“Thanks,” Klaus says, albeit distractedly. 

Because Klaus is now staring down the barrel of a machine gun, and he is not afraid, not because he is brave, but because he is proudly a coward. He has just recently been promoted to his father’s most difficult child because Five ran away and hasn’t come back and maybe won’t ever come back. His family is crumbling to pieces, it doesn’t look like things will ever get better, and Klaus wants nothing more than to run away from life and never come back, just like Five. 

That makes twelve, but the count goes up so often that Ben’s stopped adjusting it out loud. Which is good, because it was honestly starting to get on Klaus’ nerves. 

Finding two more deaths as a result of an overdose on the walk back home brings the count to fourteen. 

Back at home, each family member settles into their own spaces to hang out for the night. Klaus is disappointed to find the screaming ghost is back outside his bedroom, seemingly unaware of just how much noise he is making. With a sigh, Klaus sits on his bed, draws his knees to his chest, and presses his own hands to his ears in a feeble attempt to block the noise out. 

And for a few moments he’s twelve again, and he’s sitting on cold, damp concrete, and he’s sobbing, wailing, and screaming because he just wants out please Dad won’t you let me out, I’m not scared anymore please help me let me out.

The sound of a familiar violin piece slowly brings him back to the present. 

“Can I listen to you play in here?” Klaus requests as he stands in Viktor’s doorway, who has momentarily stopped playing to blink at Klaus in surprise. “It’s just—it’s really loud in my room, tonight.” 

Viktor’s eyes soften.

“Yeah, of course, come in,” Viktor ushers him into the bedroom, over to the bed, where Klaus plops down on the edge. “I’m just practicing this piece for my concert next week, so it may sound kind of rocky still, but I’m getting better I think.”

“I think you sound amazing, brother dear,” Klaus tells Viktor, and he means it.

Viktor smiles and continues to play. Klaus leans back against the wall, closes his eyes, and focuses on the melody. It’s peaceful and it’s quiet and it’s alive. 

It doesn’t last forever, though, and at some point, the music stops because Viktor has to go to bed. Most of the Academy lights get flipped off one by one until the living are sound asleep, leaving Klaus to exist amongst the dead. He was beginning to grow used to the constant ghosts that live within the Academy walls, especially the ones who trail his siblings around everywhere they go, but to have to see his own face and tortured brown eyes on so many ghosts around him is a completely different ballpark. 

And to think that all he wanted was to see Dave. 

It’s not fair, Klaus decides as he sits on his bed, surrounded by the ghosts of his life. All his life, he’s looked for a way out, for an escape, but now that he’s finally found a reason to stick around the little girl refuses to let him have it. Has he become nothing more than a sick joke, a plaything for the little girl to point and laugh and entertain herself with? What more does he have to do to finally prove to the universe he deserves even an ounce of happiness? 

Well, if the universe won’t let him be at his happiest with Dave, then Klaus will have to settle for the next best thing: being so high he can’t remember his name. He’s finished trying to make things better because he had evidence to prove to himself that things only get worse instead, so really, why is he even bothering? Maybe he had the right idea with the drugs all along—after all, he was at his second most happiest when he was higher than a kite. 

Tick, tick, tick.

“Klaus? Where are you going?” he hears Ben’s voice ask just as he’s opening the window, preparing to step out onto the fire escape. 

It’s an almost identical scene to the one they both lived years and years ago. Almost . Because when Klaus turns to find Ben across the room, he isn’t met with a small, naive boy who still has hope that maybe one day, everything is going to be alright. Instead, he is met with a ghost who has been sixteen for a long time and can see right past all of Klaus’ lies. 

They are now adults who both carry the realization that death is not what they’d hoped it would be, far from the children who used to dream of their futures.

“It’s too loud, Ben,” Klaus tells him, his voice quiet and small. “I’m done trying with all this—it isn’t worth it.” 

For once, Ben doesn’t look disappointed, angry, or anything like that. 

“Klaus, please, just…” Ben trails off, eyes filled with fear and sadness and perhaps even a hint of understanding.

Ben looks hopeless. 

“Stay here,” Ben’s plea is soft, and for the first time in a long while he speaks with the helplessness of a sixteen-year-old. “That’s all you have to do, Klaus. Just, stay.” 

For what it’s worth, Klaus felt guilty when he was fourteen and turned his back on his brother, and he feels guilty now when he climbs out the window, using his powers to keep Ben from following. 

He’s always felt guilty. 

His plan at first is to go find the closest dealer he can find and block out all the noise by numbing himself until he’s no longer Klaus, but that’s not where he ends up that night. Instead, he finds himself standing on the edge of the city bridge, looking down into the murky, dark waters below. In the distance, he can see the mouth of the gulf that spills into the ocean and watches peacefully for a moment as a cargo ship makes its way out of the gulf and escapes into the sea towards wherever its destination is. 

Then, the ship is long gone, and Klaus is still here, on this bridge, staring wistfully into the distance.

“Four.” 

Out of all the ghosts haunting the Academy—his siblings' ghosts, the house’s ghosts, his own ghosts—the only one that followed him here is the little one with panic in his eyes and a bloody hole in his stomach. Big, brown, pools of terror are looking up at Klaus, steadily watching him. The boy is surprisingly motionless for a ghost that died running, Klaus thinks, but then he remembers running for his life and realizes the boy has nothing left to run for in the first place. 

Tick, tick, tick.

Klaus turns, jumps, and falls.

As if his visits to the afterlife have become like clockwork to her, the little girl is already there when Klaus comes to on the same spot of grass he usually does, sitting on the gray bench with her bike propped up beside her. She’s deep into a book, eyes sweeping across the pages with ease, and she doesn’t bother to look up from it even though Klaus knows she knows he’s here. Either the book is really interesting, or she hates Klaus being here so much that she’s attempting to ignore him for as long as possible. 

In all likelihood, it’s probably both.

“You know, you could’ve warned me last time that it was Reggie waiting for me inside that cottage, and not Dave,” is the first thing Klaus tells her because, to be honest, he’s still not over that. 

“You’re right, I could have,” the little girl says simply. She flips a page and keeps reading. Klaus is starting to get annoyed. 

“And you know what else?” Klaus shifts on his feet, continues to stand there and glare at her. “Every time I end up here you always say things like ‘you’re a big pain in my rear end, Klaus,’ and ‘ my most annoying creation is you,’ but guess what, sweetheart— you are the biggest pain in my rear end. All of this bullshit that’s happened is because you just have to send me back just because you don’t like me? How petty is that, huh? Is letting me stay such a horrible thing that it’s worth sending me back?” 

“We have had this conversation many times before, Klaus,” the little girl states calmly, though by the slight creases in her forehead Klaus can tell she’s starting to get bothered. “When it is your time, you’ll be able to stay.” 

Klaus huffs exasperatedly, feeling as frustrated as he felt when he was thirteen years old.

“So? Is now my time?” Klaus challenges her, and he’s ready to start an argument, itching to protest and maybe make her existence hell for the few minutes he’ll be up here.

The little girl finally glances up at him.

“Fine,” she says. 

She goes back to reading, and Klaus is left dumbfounded.

“Uh, what?” Klaus gives a breathy laugh, more confused than anything. 

The little girl drops the book into her lap and fixes him with her signature look of annoyance. 

“I said fine, you can stay this time,” she says in a tone that conveys she thinks he’s stupid. “Clearly, sending you back is a waste of my time and energy when every time you’re just going to come back. So if you don’t want to go back, that’s fine. I’d rather keep reading my book anyway.” 

With that, she picks her novel back up and goes back to reading like the conversation never even happened. 

And that’s just… huh.

Finally, Klaus is here to stay, and he’s met with multiple things he can do right now. He can go searching for Dave, or he can explore the afterlife so he can, at last, see what’s beyond this small sliver of the forest he‘s always found himself in, or he can simply go for a walk and enjoy the peace and quiet he’s always dreamed of. The war he’s been fighting for since the beginning has finally ended—and he won. Now, he is truly free.

Instead of doing any of the things he’d thought he’d do at this moment, Klaus sits down on the bench next to the little girl. While she continues to read her book, Klaus simply sits there and takes in his surroundings. The monochrome forest is the same as it always is, not a tree branch or blade of grass out of place. It’s as if it sits frozen in time between each of his visits. 

“This place is really quiet,” Klaus comments after straining his ears to hear any sounds of nature at all and coming up empty. 

“Not anymore, it’s not,” the little girl grumbles, shooting him a side glance. 

“Ha, ha,” Klaus says sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “Whatever, this place needs a little more noise—I’m doing you a favor, alright?”

“This is going to be a long eternity,” the little girl sighs. 

“Yeah, especially when Ben gets up here,” Klaus chuckles goodnaturedly, “he’s always nagging, droning on and on about doing the right thing, being a good person, yada yada yada. And that’s only one of my siblings—just wait till we’re all here.”

“Hmm,” the little girl hums. “Can’t wait.” 

Klaus has nothing left to say, so he instead allows them to fall into silence once more. Takes in the gray forest once more. Realizes that in his dreams, this same forest always had brightly colored flowers. 

“You are going to find somewhere else to be annoying soon, right?” the little girl asks, brow raised in question. 

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” Klaus nods and glances at the pathway that leads to Somewhere Else. “Soon.” 

The little girl is a lot of things, Klaus has come to learn over the years. She is an all-powerful, all-knowing being, and she is a holder of ancient knowledge and wisdom. She is the creator of everything in the living realm, including him and she is a bitchy little girl who loves picking flowers and reading books, but when she lowers her book to look up at him with an inquisitive yet understanding expression on her face, he realizes that what she is not is a stranger. 

“You’re hesitating,” the little girl tells him, tilting her head slightly to the side. 

“What? No, I’m not—I’ve been wanting this since I was a little kid, why would I be hesitating?” Klaus denies, shakes his head, and forces his body to relax against the back of the bench. “No, I’m just hanging out with you, my new best friend, that’s all.” 

“When we want something, we run towards it,” the little girl muses, ignoring the last part of his words. “Have you been running towards this place? Or have you been running from something instead?”

Klaus opens his mouth to ridicule that idea, to tell her she’s making stuff up because she doesn’t want him around, but not a single word comes out. He thinks of all the times he’s wound up here, and what led to those visits—he was running from danger in that graveyard, he was running from the ghosts in the mausoleum, he was running from the pain he felt when Five ran away and didn’t come back. Only minutes ago, he was running from his scars and mistakes that have finally come back to haunt him. 

“Isn’t escape a good enough reason to want to be here?” Klaus asks her instead, shoulders deflated. 

Her young, ancient eyes are soft like Klaus remembers them being when he was a little kid. 

“Like I said, you are welcome to stay here now, if that’s what you wish,” the little girl tells him. “But if escape is what you’re looking for, you won’t find it here.” 

Klaus swallows, looks at the dirt path that weaves itself through the forest and comes to the understanding that his time is not yet here. 

Besides, how can he leave his siblings behind like this, when they’re all trying so hard to put the pieces of their broken family back together? 

“Can I just ask one question?” Klaus leans forward, puts his hands on his knees, and waits for her nod of approval. “Dave. Is he here?”

The little girl smirks and rolls her eyes. 

“If he was here, don’t you think he would’ve come to you by now?” 

Klaus knows she’s right, and so he has to go back.

For Dave, for Ben, for his other siblings, for himself. 

“See you next time,” Klaus says with a grin and a wave.

“Don’t rush,” the little girl says before she snaps her fingers.

But Klaus doesn’t miss the small smile on her face before the black and white forest fades away. 

He gasps awake on the shore of the city gulf, sand in his mouth and his clothes soaked. He pushes himself up and is met with the slightly dirty, loud, colorful city and the pitch black night sky that overlooks it. Headlights from the cars and trucks driving on the bridge above throw bursts of light down below.

The headlights give Klaus a glimpse of the ghost standing just a few feet away. He can see the ghost’s blue, oxygen-deprived skin, his clothes that drip a steady stream of water, and the red mark on the right side of his face, probably from the force of his body hitting the water. Not to mention the typical hopeless brown eyes that so many of his ghosts wear. 

“Sorry,” Klaus swallows, peering up at the ghost sheepishly. “I… I changed my mind.” 

The trek back to the Academy is long and cold, and he hugs himself in an attempt to bring himself any amount of warmth. His journey up the front steps and through the front door is even harder, the harsh air conditioning hitting his cold, wet skin as soon as he’s in the entryway. The most difficult part, however, is his trip up the stairs towards the bedrooms, where he knows most of his siblings are asleep. He sidesteps the dancing ghost at the top of the stairs, dodges the screaming ghost standing outside his bedroom, and continues making his way through the hall. Only one door has a light emitting from the bottom of it, and that’s the door Klaus was making his way towards. 

He lifts his fist and knocks lightly three times.

“Come in,” Five’s voice says. 

Klaus pushes the door open, the light from the room spilling into the hallway behind him. Five is sitting at his desk, multiple textbooks open both on the desk and the floor around him, and he’s scribbling quickly into the book directly in front of him. In typical Five fashion, he doesn’t spare a glance from his work as Klaus steps into the room, and it reminds him so much of a certain little girl that it calms him to a slight degree. 

“Hey bro, w-what’s up?” Klaus tries to start the conversation off light, forcing a smile onto his face. He’s still shivering, which sucks, but this was the first place he needed to go after getting home. Everything else can wait. 

“Klaus, what are you—“ Five starts to ask with a sigh, but when he glances up at Klaus he stops abruptly. He furrows his brows questioningly at the sights of a soaked-to-the-bone Klaus. “What happened to you?” 

“Oh, you know,” Klaus says goodnaturedly, and wonders if Five is seeing through his false act or not. “Just went on a stroll, fell in a pond, saw an old friend who’s kinda a bitch but is actually secretly a softie, a normal Wednesday night for me, really.” 

“Okay,” Five says slowly, his confusion not letting up. “So… why are you in my room?” 

“Yeah, right, so, remember the other day when you said you wanted me to train in the courtyard with Viktor and the others?” 

“I do,” Five nods his head, “and I still stand by that, Klaus. Training on your own is dangerous, even your powers, and it’s best if you have someone there to spot you—someone who isn’t Ben.” 

“Yeah, so, you’re right about that, for sure,” Klaus continues, ignoring the brief look on Five’s face that says of course I’m right, I’m always right, and pushes past his nerves to get his next words out. “But I need more than a spotter. Now that I’m sober, my powers—they’re always on, and they’re so loud, and I can’t deal with it anymore, not by myself. I’m hanging on by a thread and I need your help. Please?” 

Klaus has always kept his cards close to his chest, a defense mechanism that he’s used since he was young. Growing up in an environment that punished weakness and vulnerability taught him to constantly hide the truth and cover up those hidden truths with countless lies that built up over time. At times, it was even necessary for survival. 

This may be the same building he grew up in, but when Five clicks his pen shut and closes the textbook in front of him, his focus entirely on Klaus, it’s clear that he is no longer living in his father’s Academy. 

“If I’m going to help you,” Five starts and Klaus can see the spark of interest in his brother’s eye, “I’m going to need effort and honesty from you. Got it?”

Klaus nods quickly in response.

A lot has changed since the days when Four and Five would sit on the Academy rooftop and scheme about various things, from doughnut outings to escaping to the future and everything in between. One has been tortured by the streets and the ghosts that haunt him, and the other went to hell and back and back to hell again. They are now adults simply trying to scrape through life, and yet, as Klaus watches the gears turn in Five’s head, a plan being formulated by the second, it’s like they’re thirteen again. Only now, nobody is patrolling the hallways to try and stop them. 

Not that they’ve ever let that stop them before. 

“Okay,” Five says. “Go change out of those damn clothes and meet me downstairs in ten minutes. I’ve got a plan.”

Klaus turns around to do exactly that and is happily surprised to see Ben leaning against the wall, a relieved smile on his face.

“I’m proud of you, Klaus,” Ben tells Klaus, maybe for the first time ever, as he’s stripping out of his soaked clothes in favor of dry ones. It’s a welcome change after years of arguments and fights. Ben pauses, and then adds, “Dave would be proud, too.”

Klaus imagines a smiling, proud Dave, and warmth spreads through his body. 

Ten minutes have passed, and Klaus finds himself sitting at the kitchen table, with Ben sitting in the chair next to him. Across from him is Five, who was already seated with a mug of steaming hot coffee and a simple notebook and pen in front of him when Klaus arrived, and the gears Klaus can see turning in his head are louder than any of the ghosts in the room. There’s a spark of determination in Five’s eyes, just as there always is when he is met with a challenge he cannot wait to take on. 

“We’re going to figure this out,” Five then promises, and Klaus believes him.

After all, there has never been a problem Number Five wasn’t able to solve. 

(“Everything I put you through was to prepare you, all of you, for something bigger than yourselves. You never understood that.”)

Today is the day after Klaus’ tumble off the city bridge, and it is also his first training session with his siblings. After getting bits and pieces of information from him last night, Five decided that the best way to figure out Klaus’ powers is to simply learn by doing, so they’re starting right away. Klaus is, to put it lightly, nervous as hell, and as he stands out in the courtyard awaiting Five’s instructions he begins to think that this is a horrible idea. Perhaps this is why he should never make decisions mere minutes after coming back from the dead. 

He does not feel unwelcome when he joins the others, as he thought he might. Allison spots him first, and when she does she grabs his hand, excitedly pulling him to the middle of the courtyard where Five is coaching Viktor through moving stones with his powers. Diego is standing just outside Viktor’s designated training radius, offering up shreds of advice every once in a while, and Luther, his banishment from these sessions having been rescinded only days ago, stands much further away, broom and dustpan propped up conveniently right next to him. 

“Well, shit,” Diego’s eyebrows shoot up with surprise at Klaus’ arrival. “You actually showed.” 

“There’s a first for everything, right?” Klaus gives a sheepish grin, awkwardly scratching the back of his neck with the hand Allison isn’t holding. 

“Yeah, I guess there is,” Diego happily admits, clapping him on the back good-naturedly. 

That’s the moment Klaus notices the wall of distrust between all of his siblings and himself slowly start to chip away. 

(He pretends not to see Diego dumbfoundingly fish a twenty out of his pocket and give it to Allison.)

While Diego and Allison train with Viktor, Five is with Klaus on the other side of the courtyard. There isn’t much Klaus’ siblings know about his powers, but they know about Ben, so that’s where Five concludes they should begin. At first, they go through trials and errors, with Five slowly beginning to understand how exactly his powers work and how he channels them. 

In less than thirty minutes, Ben is visible to the living once again and stays that way for another whopping eleven minutes. 

The next few days go the same way, with small bouts of progress made, and before Klaus knows it a week has gone by and Ben is participating in Sunday night family dinner for the first time. There isn’t any catching up because each of them wants to forget the last decade and a half even happened, but Allison does tell Ben about Claire. Klaus has to credit his brother—Ben does a wonderful job pretending he hasn’t watched his niece grow up via magazines and tabloids. 

“I wish we hadn’t lost so much time,” Luther says wistfully. Klaus can tell he doesn’t mean anything by it, but it still feels like a stab to the gut—a comparison Klaus is confident he can make. Hidden behind the innocent desire to express a “what if” lies an accusation clear as day. 

“Who knows what these last ten years could’ve looked like if—“ Diego is at least self-aware enough to stop himself from saying anything further. Multiple pairs of eyes flick over to Klaus before they instantly get redirected elsewhere, and awkwardness is back.

And look, Klaus gets it. He’s always wished for a better grip on his powers, and every single time he tried to tell the others of Ben’s presence only to be able to come up with no proof whatsoever, it was the most horrible feeling in the world. He never wanted to keep Ben for himself, and if it weren’t for all the other ghosts, maybe he would have tried harder to bring his brother forward sooner. 

“—if I wasn’t off my rocker,” he finishes Diego’s sentence, faking a light-hearted smile as if to ease the tension. 

“Yeah, that,” Diego says quietly, and Klaus wonders if his brother is thinking of all the times he showed up on his doorstep high as a kite. 

“Hey, at least I’m here now,” Ben tells them all and glances down at the impaled ghost boy who’s standing just outside of Five’s crowd of ghosts. 

“Four,” the ghost boy whispers, eyes big and frightened like always. 

“We’ll never know what tomorrow will bring,” Ben adds, his tone laced with a type of sadness he only expresses when he sets his sights on one of Klaus’ many ghosts.

("We were just kids… little kids.”)

Dinner ends, Ben fades back into invisibility, the sun sets beneath the horizon, and lights turn off one by one until Klaus is once again existing alongside the dead. The voices always grow louder in the night, and as always Klaus lies awake in his bed, staring up at the ceiling, attempting uselessly to block it all out and failing miserably each time. The only thing that’s enough to finally lull him into a few hours of sleep is the thought that soon enough, he might be able to make all the voices go away. 

He might soon be able to see Dave.

The next day is filled with sunshine and laughter. The family is healing as they grow together, foundations that once crumbled apart are now being glued back together. Sir Reginald would very much hate this scene if he were here, Klaus thinks to himself as he watches Viktor freely train his powers across the courtyard, not an ounce of fear in sight. 

“Can we see Ben, Klaus?” Viktor cautiously asks of him, as Ben’s appearances at these training sessions have become regular. 

“Anything for you,” Klaus winks at him, and Viktor’s unease is immediately replaced with excitement. 

Klaus sits down on the ground, closes his eyes, and channels his powers forward. He waits for the ping in the back of his head that alerts him that Ben has been brought forward, but for some reason, it’s taking longer than usual today. Brows furrowed, Klaus focuses harder. 

It takes him a moment too long to identify the screams and shouts of his siblings amidst all the other voices loitering in the courtyard. 

“What the fuck?” Diego yells.

“Oh my God,” Viktor chokes out.

“Klaus, hey, we’ve got a problem,” Ben’s voice comes from right next to him.

Klaus blinks his eyes open and glances around him. His siblings are all wide-eyed, pale, and clearly horrified, but he isn’t able to see anything out of the ordinary. Is there something standing outside the crowd of ghosts that litter the courtyard and his view is simply blocked? 

Five, looking alert and alarmed, is looking right at Klaus, knees bent as if he’s ready to jump or run at a moment's notice. 

“Uh, what’s the problem, Ben?” Klaus looks at his brother, whose brows are furrowed together with worry, in hopes of some sort of explanation, but Ben doesn’t get the chance. 

“What do you mean, what’s the problem?” Luther demands rather hysterically—he’s holding the tiny broom like a weapon. “You just summoned all these ghosts, don’t you see them?” 

“Wait…” Klaus’ heart plummets from his chest as he realizes what’s happening. He glances around at the dozens of ghosts standing in the courtyard, all of them of varying ages and goriness, and they all have something to say, just as they always do. Mixed in the crowd are of course all of his own ghosts, some screaming, some crying, and some staring into space with a glazed look in their brown eyes. “You guys can see them?” 

“Of course we can, genius, you brought them here!” Diego exclaims, a knife gripped in each hand. 

Viktor is frozen, his jaw dropped in horror, and Allison is huddled up close to him, the same expression on her face. 

Klaus swallows hard, and his shoulders fall as he realizes what he’s done. His siblings can see it all, the blood, the gore, the anguish . This is an event that he used to have nightmares about when he was young, because he never, ever, wanted them to get a glimpse of the ugliness that is Klaus Hargreeves and his gross, weird power. 

He makes eye contact with Five, who is still staring at him, but now his brother has that look on his face when he’s met with a problem that needs solving. Five looks away in favor of gazing at the ghosts around them, taking in the entire sight. Then, he turns back to look at Klaus once more, and an idea seems to dawn on him. 

“No, he didn’t,” Five says as if he’s coming to the realization as he’s speaking. “He didn’t bring them here.”

“What do you mean, Five?” Luther questions confusedly. “If Klaus didn’t bring them here, then who did?” 

Five glances over at Ben, and something akin to understanding slowly washes over his features. 

“Nobody did. These ghosts are always here, Klaus is just making them visible right now,” Five says as quietly as he can and still be heard over all the noise in the courtyard. “For Klaus, they’re always here.” 

The next few moments are the most uncomfortable moments Klaus has felt in a while. His siblings are all looking at him, truly looking at him for the first time in their entire lives, and the dots are connecting. The proof is directly in front of them, and so they cannot deny it anymore. 

“Oh,” Diego says, his face troubled by what he now knows, and maybe he’s thumbing through every memory he has of Klaus talking about the ghosts and retrospectively getting why he said or did all the things he said and did. 

“Klaus,” Viktor interjects, his face drained of all blood as he looks into the crowd of ghosts, and Klaus knows what’s coming. “Why do some of these ghosts look like… you ?” 

Viktor’s looking at the waterlogged ghost from only a week ago, but when Allison nods her head in agreement and points into the crowd, her finger is directed towards the ghost of Klaus’ first overdose at fourteen. Diego’s face is overwhelmed as he begins to recognize overdose after overdose, and Luther is looking down at the small impaled ghost with panicked, tear-filled eyes. Five is looking at the ghost of a museum heist gone wrong who has bullets in his gut and an emptiness in his eyes, and Ben… well, Ben’s eyes are closed, as if he cannot bear to look at the sight in front of him for one more second. 

“I, uh, those are… well, it doesn’t really matter,” Klaus stands up, desperately wanting to regain his siblings’ attention to distract them from the things he never wanted them to know even existed. “Five, can you just… help me make all of these ghosts invisible again…?” 

Five doesn’t respond, and instead takes a step forward towards the thirteen-year-old ghost, studying him intensely, and Klaus realizes that ghost is exactly what Five left behind, and he can tell his brother has figured that out by the haunted look in his eyes. 

“Answer the question, Klaus,” Diego demands, voice low, turning his head to fix him with a sharp glare. 

“Okay, fine, but it’s not really a big deal, you know,” Klaus sighs. “Sometimes, I die, but it never sticks and I always get sent back. So, it’s like it never even happens… but for some reason I leave behind a ghost each time. It’s like a really morbid collection I have going on.” 

No matter how his siblings might want to call him a liar and write his words off, they can’t, not with tangible proof in front of them, and so for a minute they just stand, stare, and process. 

Allison lets go of Viktor and quickly walks over to where Klaus is standing, reaching out, grabbing hold of him, and engulfing him in a hug so tight he’s barely able to breathe, but he couldn’t care less about that. 

“I’m so sorry,” Allison whispers into his ear, her tears soaking through his shirt. 

And Klaus, for once, is speechless, so all he does is hug his sister back. 

(“You were never just kids.”)

The ghosts fade from visibility during their hug, but his siblings don’t forget, given the sad, confused looks they constantly give him in days after it. Five locks himself in Reginald’s office for two days and two nights, only emerging for coffee every once in a while, and when he finally joins the real world again Klaus can tell he has extensive knowledge of Klaus’ childhood training. Klaus wishes Five hadn’t done that, for obvious reasons, but now that Five can truly understand his powers, Klaus’ training takes a steep turn, with making Ben visible no longer the central focus. Instead, they work each day on banishing and getting rid of all the hundreds of ghosts that live inside the Academy walls. 

“I tried to come back,” Five says out of the blue one day when he and Klaus are training alone on the roof. 

“Huh?” Klaus tilts his head and cracks one eye open. 

“When I ran away, I tried to come back home,” Five elaborates, gaze fixed on the concrete ground beneath them. “I spent decades trying to figure out how to get back to you guys. I’m sorry it took so long.” 

Klaus can picture himself sitting at that dinner table all those years ago, watching Five run out that door and disappear. He remembers sitting on this very rooftop weeks later, for the first time completely alone, his partner in crime gone. He recalls standing in front of that machine gun, the horrible idea that Five might not come back in the corner of his mind. 

A few feet away from them stands a teenaged ghost with holes made by bullets in his stomach and holes made by grief in his heart. 

Klaus looks over at Five, taking in the fact that his brother came back, and he’s right here .

“But you did come back,” Klaus points out. “And now you’re here.” 

“Yeah,” Five finally looks up from the ground, a confident half-smile on his face. “Now, I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.” 

Klaus almost goes back to training, but out of the corner of his eye, he sees a glowing shape. Turning his head to look in that direction, he finds the bullet-ridden ghost glowing softly. Most surprisingly, however, is the fact that the ghost’s hopeless expression has melted away, replaced with a content, happy smile. 

And then the ghost is gone.

Klaus closes his eyes and begins to train once more. 

Diego wants to say something to him about everything, a fact Klaus can tell by the way he keeps looking at him like he’s attempting to work up the courage to talk to him. Maybe he knows exactly what he wants to say but he can’t bring himself to say it, or perhaps he has no idea what he wants to say but he knows he wants to say something. Either way, Klaus finds himself growing increasingly bothered by all of this runaround, so he decides he’s going to be the first to bring the topic up. 

“Sorry for making you come all those times I OD’d,” Klaus says as Diego is driving the two of them to the grocery store so they can grab a few things for the dinner Mom is cooking tonight. “I should have taken you off the emergency contact list when I knew nothing was ever going to stick.”

“You had no way of knowing it wouldn’t stick,” Diego reminds him, voice tight and eyes trained on the road ahead of him. Then, in a quieter, more honest sounding tone, he continues. “Besides, I was always relieved when they called, to tell you the truth. Those were the few nights a year I knew you weren’t dead in a ditch somewhere.”

“I liked it when you came,” Klaus admits, fiddling with his dog tags while he speaks. “I didn’t want you to stop coming because that meant I would see you even less than I already did.”

They sit in silence for a few moments, Diego driving and Klaus looking out the window, their confessions washing over them like tidal waves. 

“Man, how fucked up of a family are we?” Diego suddenly chuckles, shaking his head in disbelief. 

“Very,” Klaus grins. “But at least we’re interesting.” 

As they drive, Klaus catches a glimpse of multiple ghosts glowing that same soft glow the ghost from earlier was emitting.

He never sees any of the ghosts left behind from any of his overdoses on the streets again. 

That night, Klaus has a very much anticipated night in with Allison. After dinner, he spends hours in her room as they do each other’s makeup and nails, as well as rummaging through her old clothes to see what might work together as an ensemble. When they come up empty, they take a chance and check out Mom’s closet. 

“We should do this more often,” Klaus says to Allison as he slips on a shoe that he found discarded in the back of Mom’s closet. 

She nods excitedly, and Klaus has no doubt she means it. 

Klaus slips on the other shoe and moves to stand in front of the mirror, admiring the fire engine red pumps on his feet. He smiles and pretends to walk the runway in the outfit he’s chosen, Allison clapping the whole way down. Then, it’s her turn, he claps for her, and he realizes he’s never felt happier or freer than in this moment. 

A gentle glow appears, and the dancing ghost with a broken jaw and a twisted neck is gone. 

Later that night, when Allison has fallen asleep and Klaus is still awake, he finds himself downstairs in the kitchen. When he enters, he sees Luther’s giant frame standing at the stove, and Klaus almost backs away but before he can Luther turns and spots him. He’s making something in a pot, a carton of milk sitting on the counter next to it.

“Hey, uh, want some hot chocolate?” Luther asks, seeming as uncomfortable as Klaus feels. 

But they’re all trying to get better, so Klaus accepts and sits at the table. He takes the offered mug of hot chocolate when it’s ready, takes a sip, and finds that it’s really good. They sit at the kitchen table in silence for a little bit, and it starts to get less and less awkward as time goes on. 

From upstairs, Klaus can hear the sound of a ghost calling out “Luther? Luther! Luther?” 

Maybe facing uncomfortable things is necessary. 

“Hey, big guy, mind if we talk about something real quick?” Klaus asks his brother. Luther’s eyes go wide, but his growth as a person is quickly proven when he agrees nicely. 

What was supposed to be a ten-minute talk quickly turns into three hours. They begin to discuss a night in their recent history involving loud music and strobe lights, and it segues into a mature conversation about their childhood. Luther at many times is upset by the things he hears, and apologizes profusely, and while Klaus doesn’t find any joy in making any of his siblings genuinely upset he very much appreciates seeing such an honest, understanding version of his brother he’s never seen before.

By the time the sun has risen, the ghost from the rave with the dented head is nothing but a memory.

Klaus doesn’t know where exactly ghosts go when they disappear like that. He’s seen it happen a few times over the years, where a ghost suddenly gained clarity and peace and was able to move on. Perhaps they go to the little girl’s black and white afterlife, maybe they go somewhere other than that—or, it’s possible that they don’t go anywhere, and they simply vanish from the universe, never to be seen again. No matter what, Klaus can only hope that wherever they end up, they’re in a better place than the realm of the living. 

Taking life week by week, the family continues to heal. Both Klaus and Viktor gain more and more control of their powers as time passes, and it’s a wonder how much they’ve been able to accomplish now that Sir Reginald is out of the picture. With every successful milestone either of them passes, Five gets a triumphant look in his eyes, a step closer to victory. Windows go weeks without being broken (which, unfortunately, puts Luther out of a job, but he seems to be carrying on regardless), and Klaus has finally learned how to banish the ghosts he wants to banish, as well as make certain ghosts corporeal without having to worry about the hordes of other ghosts appearing and making a mess. So, all in all, things are getting better. 

With that, more of the ghosts of his mistakes and trauma vanish in bursts of white light. 

Klaus finds himself able to sleep easier most nights, but after having a nightmare about his time in the mausoleum that shakes him to his core, he makes his way down to the kitchen at four am, wide awake. It isn’t unusual to find at least one of his siblings awake at this hour, as most of them deal with things that keep them awake at night, but it isn’t often Viktor is one of those siblings, due to him having actual real-world commitments that require him to keep a relatively normal sleep schedule. Tonight, however, Klaus finds his shyest brother in the kitchen, his eyes tiredly gazing into a cup of something hot and dark.

“Good morning, mein bruder,” Klaus greets Viktor cheerfully, and Viktor startles.

“Oh, um, hi, Klaus,” Viktor smiles shakily after he gets over his initial shock. 

Despite the smile on Viktor’s face, Klaus can see the sadness and unease behind it clear as day, and he can only guess what might be causing it. He’s learned a lot more about his smallest brother in the last few months than he’s ever learned about him before, and Klaus has come to discover that perhaps he and Viktor have more similarities than he’d ever realized. It begs the question: if it hadn’t been for their father’s poor parenting abilities or the powers that each of them suppressed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, would they have been closer, growing up? 

It’s pointless to speculate about meaningless what-ifs, Klaus knows, and so he decides his time is better spent getting to know Viktor now. 

“Is something eating at you?” Klaus casually asks him as he puts on a pot of coffee to drip—he wants a cup mainly to have something to hold, and he’s sure Five will be making his way down here soon anyway. 

“Just a nightmare,” Viktor confesses, looking back down at his coffee, eyes becoming slightly glazed as he mentions it. 

“Tell me about it?” Klaus requests, hopping up to sit on the counter next to the coffee pot. 

At first, Viktor hesitates, probably because they don’t typically discuss nightmares in their family, but after a few moments of intense contemplation he, to Klaus’ surprise, agrees. Viktor tells him about a small, soundproof cage that once sat in the basement (they got rid of it right after the apocalypse almost happened). He tells Klaus about the fear he felt while trapped in that small, dark room, and the horrifying idea that he might be stuck in there forever, left to rot while his siblings continue with their lives. In Viktor's nightmare, he never gets let out. 

It all hits a little too close to home for Klaus. 

“I’ve been there,” Klaus admits, drumming his fingers on the countertop to relieve some of his anxieties. “But Vik, you have to know that as long as you live, you never have to go back in there. I promise.”

“Yeah, I know,” Viktor says, eyes misty. “Thanks, Klaus.”

“Anytime,” Klaus tells him, and he means it. “You’re safe, now.”

At the far end of the kitchen, a constant scream suddenly gets cut short. Klaus looks over in that direction just in time to see the eleven-year-old ghost of himself finally lower his hands from his ears, the permanent sheer terror that once molded his face melting away, replaced with the slow realization that he will never have to go back. He is safe from the monsters that live within the mausoleum. 

Viktor is fully unaware of the glow that fills the kitchen for a full minute, whisking yet another ghost away to wherever he is destined to end up. 

Klaus tells Ben about the vanishing, glowing ghosts later that morning as they sit on the roof, watching as the sun begins to rise above the horizon. 

“You’ve never told me where exactly you went when you died,” Ben says, eyes big and curious. 

“Honestly, I don’t really know where I went,” Klaus tells him, using the edge of a rock to draw random lines and shapes on the concrete next to him. “But there’s no color—everything’s gray—and it’s operated by a little girl who is quite rude, in my humble opinion.”

“Huh,” Ben says, brows raised as he processes what he’s just heard. 

Silence and sunshine wash over them. 

“She was gonna let me stay, the last time I went,” Klaus admits quietly, eyes trained on the concrete in front of him. “But I decided to come back.”

“I’m glad you did,” Ben says. 

“Me too,” Klaus says. 

Mom makes a huge breakfast, with waffles and pancakes and eggs and bacon, and the whole family sits at the table, in the spots they were designated as children because that’s what feels right to them, but where Sir Reginald once sat, sits Mom instead, gazing happily as she watches her children feast together. Diego and Five are arguing about something stupid, with Luther occasionally chiming in with something stupider, and Allison watches them, rolling her eyes when the conversation calls for such an action. Ben is visible, as he is for almost all meals now, and he’s discussing something quietly with Viktor, probably about a book or something Klaus is pretty much completely disinterested in, so Klaus simply tears into his waffles. 

As everyone begins to finish up their meals, the conversations begin to die down, and Allison writes a suggestion on her notepad and holds it up so the whole table can read it. 

Let’s do something fun today as a family!

Suddenly, Klaus has an idea. 

“What if we went to the beach?” Klaus asks the table, glancing over at Ben because he knows fully well Ben’s been wanting to make a trip to the beach for a long time.

Yes!!!, reads Allison’s notepad. 

“I’m down with that,” Diego shrugs.

“Me too,” Viktor agrees quietly, and Ben echoes the same. 

“I’ve never been to the beach,” Luther admits, and it’s sort of nuts that the person who’s been to the actual moon hasn’t been to the beach just a few miles outside of the city limits. 

Everyone turns to look at Five, who looks more than unimpressed by the prospect of a family day to the beach. 

“Alright, I’ll go,” Five sighs, and cheers of victory sound from around the table.

One by one, everyone gets up from the table. Diego takes a stack of plates from Mom and heads into the kitchen to start washing dishes, and everyone disappears upstairs to get ready for the beach. Soon, Klaus is the only one left sitting at the table. 

“It’s so lovely, having all you kids back home again,” Mom beams as she collects the rest of the plates from the table. “You’d better go get ready, Klaus, dear—you know how the others don’t like to wait.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Klaus says, and he gets up from the table. 

For the first time in his life, Klaus realizes something: he is fully confident that his siblings will wait for him, regardless of how long he takes. 

“Four,” whispers the impaled ghost boy who’s standing near the edge of the table, sad, fearful eyes trained on Klaus.

Then, the boy does something unprecedented. 

He smiles. 

And then he vanishes.

Drenched in a gleeful daze, Klaus makes his way upstairs, walking down the hallway of bedrooms. There is a lot of noise, as there always is, but the noise is no longer coming from the endless amounts of ghosts haunting the halls. Instead, all he hears is the sounds of his siblings shuffling around in their respective bedrooms, pulling open drawers and closets, and it’s almost like when they were kids getting ready for a mission. Only, now, there are no missions at all, and everyone is included, and everyone—even Five, no matter how much he tries not to show it—is happy. They had to wait until they were all grown up to finally be kids, but Klaus thinks it’s worth the wait. 

The small ghost boy in the corner of his bedroom, the one with the bashed in head and tears in his eyes, is the only ghost besides Ben that remains in the house—the rest have been banished or sent off over the last few months. He has stayed right there since the very beginning, curled in on himself as he watches the world of the living pass him by. Klaus remembers being five years old and finding this ghost creepy, borderline scary, but now after everything, he finds him rather endearing. 

No matter—this small ghost has waited long enough, and it’s time for him to move on. 

Kneeling on the floor in front of the ghost, Klaus looks him in the eye and smiles. 

“Go,” he says softly, not unkindly, and uses his powers to gently push the spirit towards the light. It works, and the ghost is illuminated by the peaceful glow, engulfing him in its safe, warm embrace. The boy blinks once, and then closes his eyes, allowing the light to take him where all the others have gone. 

Klaus is only alone in his room for a mere moment before he feels something within himself shift, and he senses with his powers that something has broken apart, but not in a bad way—more like a dam bursting through a wall that never should have been built there in the first place. 

“Klaus?” a voice calls quietly from behind him, and Klaus knows who it belongs to before he even turns around. 

Big, brown eyes meet soft, blue ones. 

“Dave,” Klaus breathes, and the ghost of Dave, his beloved soldier boy, smiles.

Tick, tick, tick.

The light begins to lose its intensity, and when it dissipates, the monochrome forest takes form in its place. It feels like it's only been mere moments since Number Four was last here, and with how still his surroundings are, it’s not inconceivable to think that that’s the truth. With his tiny gray arm, Four crouches down and brushes his hand against the grass, giggling when it tickles his skin. 

He will miss his siblings, but as the little girl reaches her hand out to him from where she stands on the dirt path, a small smile on her face, Four knows this is where he is meant to be. 

With his new friend in his sight, Four straightens up, smiles back, and runs through the colorless meadow to her.