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“Well—it’s not actually the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Ben mused to himself as he inspected himself for any lingering glowing firefly particle…things. A moment ago they’d seemed to be replacing his entire body piece by piece, and he’d finally been ready to walk into that Light he’d been trying not to think about for the last 17 years. Then instead, he’d suddenly found himself here in the hallway of some opulent yet dated hotel.
Honestly the place seemed vaguely familiar, but in a distant, long-forgotten way. Not somewhere Klaus had recently schmoozed his way into thanks to one of his “benefactors,” but too expensive-looking to be somewhere he stayed during what Ben had taken to calling “the raccoon years” when Klaus had charmed, scavenged and squatted his way through life. Ben couldn’t believe he was reminiscing fondly on those years, but nearly three years of running a cult had a way of putting things in perspective.
At least during the raccoon era he could drop in on his other siblings and watch their lives for a while instead of being stuck with Klaus 24/7.
“Shit,” said an unfamiliar voice, and Ben looked up to see a woman stagger into the hallway from one of the rooms. She was probably around his own age, with darker skin and what was clearly a self-done bleached bob with darker roots growing in. He had the feeling he should probably know who she was, but couldn’t place her.
Before Ben could muse on that too long, Allison rounded the corner and pulled up short at the sight of the other woman. For some reason her hair, which had been long and straight last time Ben had seen her, was also in a short, choppy style.
“Lila? Are you alright?” Allison asked, thankfully providing a name for the stranger. He hated when he had to make up epithets for people when Klaus wasn’t around to introduce (or invent names for) new people.
Also, wasn’t Lila the name of Diego’s new girlfriend?
Lila turned to Allison with a bright (and seemingly forced) smile. “I’m just fine, nothing to worry about!”
Allison appeared dubious. “I thought I heard an explosion or something. The ground was shaking.”
“Really?” Lila gave a short laugh, having already turned away toward the elevator. “I didn’t notice anything, but you know these old buildings; a door slams shut somewhere and the whole place seems like it’s going to come rattling down!”
Before Allison could voice her obvious skepticism, Lila was halfway down the hall with no more than a parting “ta!” tossed over her shoulder.
As much as he really would like to spend some time with Allison, Ben thought his chances of figuring out what exactly was happening would be higher if he stuck with Lila. She was clearly up to something, and if he was remembering correctly Diego had said she worked with that Commission Five had been a part of too. He hurried to catch up with her and just managed to slip into the elevator without having to walk through the doors.
“Speak of the devil,” Ben observed when the elevator doors slid open again to reveal a scowling Five. He was accompanied by a tiny hyperactive dog, but seemed adamantly against acknowledging it despite the way it was ambling around his legs and seeking attention.
“Lila,” Five said evenly, folding his arms.
“Five,” Lila responded in kind, folding her arms mockingly and slouching back against the elevator wall.
Ben noted in fascination that Five had apparently finally changed out of the Academy uniform. It was bizarre seeing him in a t-shirt and flannel, but he did look less like a bittersweet memory come to life.
The tense staring contest was interrupted by the elevator doors sliding shut on Five, abruptly ending the standoff. Lila immediately slid her hand across the entire panel of buttons and bounced anxiously in place until they arrived at another floor, taking the first opportunity to hurry out of the elevator and down the hall.
Five must not have been that invested in whatever confrontation that had been, because even though it would have been ridiculously easy for him to pursue Lila with his powers, he didn’t reappear. Ben had to hurry to keep pace with her as she ducked into a stairwell and proceeded to make short work of several flights by sliding down the railings.
They emerged into the lobby of a hotel Ben was now certain he’d been in before, but he still couldn’t identify. He was so busy trying to remember when and why he had visited this place he almost didn’t notice Allison standing near the aquarium tank until Lila drew even with her and paused.
“Oooh, you do quick work,” Lila said with a low whistle, nodding at the grown-out blond ombre in Allison’s hair. “Love the hair!”
Allison stiffened and turned to meet Lila’s gaze with what Ben recognized as her polite-but-reserved Hollywood smile. “Thanks.”
Just then, Luther pushed his way into the hotel holding a familiar-looking yappy dog and caught sight of them. A strange expression crossed his face. “Allison?” he asked uncertainly.
Allison looked likewise caught off guard, but greeted Luther with a considerably warmer smile than she’d given Lila. “Luther! What are you doing here?”
Behind Ben, the elevator dinged and emitted Five. He was now holding the overly-energetic dog, who seemed to have exhausted its earlier energetic affection and was now whining and scratching its ear.
The dog Luther was holding immediately began barking and squirming anxiously at the sight of the other animal. Luther readjusted his hold easily and called out a greeting to Five, who was staring strangely at the dog in Luther’s arms.
“I didn’t realize the manager had two dogs,” Luther commented as Five drew nearer the group. “Look, they’re practically identical!”
Allison was staring at Five with a gobsmacked look on her face, but Lila seemed to be taking the opportunity provided by this distraction to edge away from the rest of them.
Ben didn’t know any more about what was going on than he had when he’d first appeared in the hall, and was growing increasingly uncertain what he should be paying attention to with how strange everyone was behaving. Hadn’t Allison’s hair been short like five minutes ago?
The dog Luther was holding chose that moment to relieve itself, while Five’s started barking and snapping aggressively. An expression of dawning comprehension crossed Five’s face.
“Um.”
Ben looked around at the sound of a new voice, startling at the sight of the short-haired Allison from earlier. She was accompanied by the sibling Ben had most recently seen trapped in a bizarre dream world and having a mental crisis precipitated by amnesia, torture, and drugs. Thankfully, he looked considerably happier and healthier now.
Ben glanced between the two Allisons, who both had frozen expressions of shock on their faces. Luther swore abruptly and, for some reason, looked first at the Allisons and then the pair of dogs.
“So uh. Something weird is going on.”
“Something weird is always going on, Viktor,” Five said grimly, helpfully providing a name for Ben. “Where the hell did Lila go?”
“What did she do now—Allison?”
Aaaand there was Diego, apparently also jumping on the short hair bandwagon.
Great, we’ve got just about the full set, Ben found himself thinking, before his thoughts crashed to a halt as he caught sight of the most disturbing thing yet: standing next to Diego, an unpleasantly haughty sneer on his face, was…himself?
“What the fuck!” Ben blurted out, though no one else batted an eye, either at his exclamation or the fucking mirror-verse clone of himself accompanying his brother. Another Allison was one thing, but why were there two of him?
“Who’s this asshole?” he demanded, waving a hand through the shoulder of his lookalike. It felt no different from passing his ghostly limbs through anyone else, without even the strange buzzing sensation he got from Klaus or other ghosts, which implied that this imposter was actually present and in the flesh.
“Nope, we can talk about this once we’ve separated them. I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t want to see what happens when the sibling with the reality-warping powers progresses to the ‘homicidal rage’ stage of paradox psychosis,” Five said briskly, thrusting one of the squirming dogs into the short-haired Allison’s arms and waving the blonde-haired Allison away. “Go on, shoo. Luther, get some distance between them and explain this at the park or something, I need to find Lila and see what catastrophe she’s set off now.”
“Yes, because none of you assholes have a history of setting off catastrophes so clearly it was Lila,” the fake him drawled obnoxiously. Diego shot him an annoyed look, Viktor a sheepish one.
Ben glowered.
As Luther, one of the dogs, and the Allison from 2019 left through the hotel’s front door, Five seemed to be taking stock. He was frowning.
“Shit. Where’s Klaus?”
☂
“Huh.”
Ben squinted down at the sight before him, trying to ignore the wave of fondness that was tugging at him.
To be honest, when they had tracked Klaus to one of the hotel rooms with the thought of a possible duplicate running around, this was not what Ben thought they’d walk in on. He kinda wished he had a camera handy to capture the moment.
Five seemed particularly amused. “Klaus, when I warned everyone about possible doubles and you said you were going to sleep with them—”
“Shhh sh sh,” a Klaus hissed drowsily, flapping a hand as if he were shooing away a mosquito. “Can’t you see how desperately I needed sleep in 2019? Let them rest.”
“Why are there three of him?” Viktor asked plaintively, looking both weary and alarmed.
There were, indeed, three Klauses. Even curled around each other as the closest available source of warmth, they took up most of the bed; skinny though he might be, Klaus was not exactly a small man, and three sets of stupidly-long limbs in turns starfished across the whole mattress and tangled around one another like the most narcissistic puppy pile Ben had ever seen.
There was the Klaus Ben most clearly recognized, with his gaudy accessories and white coat, and that stupid mystic beard that made him look like a goat. Another one of them had short hair and wore the laced leather pants that Ben remembered from the first apocalypse (and from countless weeks of listening to Klaus bitch about being cold while refusing to compromise on his outfit). The last Klaus, the one who had spoken, still had the more recent long hair, but was dressed in a vibrant yellow top that was too tasteful to have originated from the cult days.
One of them, Ben noted in amusement, was drooling.
“What about paradox psychosis or whatever?” Diego demanded. “Why isn’t he paranoid and homicidal like you warned us about?”
Ben scoffed, although no one could hear him. As if Klaus would ever do something as plebeian as be predictable.
“He doesn’t really seem like the type to conform to expectations,” The Imposter cut in. “Also, I could see the paranoia but I’m not sure he’s capable of anything even close to homicidal feelings. He’s just so…wimpy.”
Ben immediately felt the urge to shove this asshole’s head in a toilet for having the nerve to voice the thoughts Ben had been having. No one was allowed to give Klaus shit except for him, and Bargain Bin Ben was not included in that. “I’d like to see you go from homeless junkie to spending ten months in a jungle warzone, only to come home to the literal apocalypse and still manage to land on your feet halfway across the country three decades before you were born. We’ll see who’s wimpy then,” he muttered mutinously.
And damn it, now he was defending Klaus. What had the world come to?
Goat-beard Klaus let out a sleepy giggle and blew him a halfhearted kiss. “Cheers, Benjolina Jolie.” At the disruption, 2019 Klaus snuffled sleepily and resettled his leg across the assorted pile of limbs.
Allison rolled her eyes. “It’s never been more obvious you didn’t have to share a bathroom with a teenage Klaus. Homicidal does not begin to cover it.”
Knockoff Ben let out a huff of offense, though Ben noted self-righteously that Klaus had actually been talking to him.
Colorful Klaus lifted his head from goat-beard’s shoulder and scowled blearily at the assembled crowd. “Alright, assholes: take a picture, it’ll last longer.”
“Well at least if they kill each other they’ll just come back,” Five said, looking both aggrieved and amused and already flickering with tell-tale blue light. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to find Lila and figure out what the fuck she did with that dead briefcase that caused all this.”
With a few rolled eyes and parting glances, the others slowly dispersed, though not before Ben spotted Diego snapping a picture on a cheap disposable camera. Now that he knew at least sort of what was going on, Ben found himself considering the cluster of Klauses napping on the bed as he thought about what he wanted to do next.
“Yeah. Still not the weirdest day in the life of a Hargreeves,” he mused.
“Not even in the top ten,” agreed a sleepy voice from somewhere in the pile.
FIN