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Klaus is depressingly sober this morning.
He has been for the past three months now, and there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t ache for something that could dull his mind, dampen his powers, do anything to make the world blur around the edges, soften the voices, keep away the ghosts that flicker in and out of his sight.
But no, no, he has to keep his resolve.
He doesn’t do that anymore.
Klaus has clawed his way to sobriety, day by day, breath by breath, telling himself it’s for Dave. Always for Dave. His hand finds its way back to the dog tag around his neck, the one with “David Katz” etched into the metal. It’s warm from resting against his skin, though it feels heavier than it should. He holds it gently between his fingers, the impressions each letter reminding him why—but the longer he holds onto it, the more it reminds him of the one thing he hasn’t seen.
Dave. Three months sober. Not a single glimpse of him.
He’d thought that without the drugs, Klaus would see him again. He’d tried summoning him, but to no avail. He wasn’t surprised. He had spent so long trying to block out his powers that attempting to get a rusty wheel to turn. Klaus wants so desperately to believe, as ghosts flock to him, that one of them will be Dave. That this could be worthwhile. That the world could give him one good thing and let him keep it.
Klaus sighs, and lets himself fall onto the kitchen table.
He turns over to face an arrival without footsteps.
Klaus offers a half-hearted wave. “Morning, Fivey.”
His brother offers an absent wave in return, but his attention is mostly focused on the coffee machine. Klaus squeezes his eyes shut. He’s too sober for this, too sober for Five’s entourage. His siblings have a trail of bodies, and Klaus tends to lose himself when they’re all together. Even just Five. It’s a lot. He tries to force them away. He can’t.
He wishes Ben were here, just to shoo off the rest, but Ben is off doing whatever he does when he’s not hanging around Klaus. He’ll be back later, Klaus knows, but he desperately wants Ben here now. He peeks past mostly-closed eyes and catches slivers of people who used to be. Blood drips from one man’s chest; a woman stares blankly with half her face missing; a child stands with hollow eyes and a torn dress. But that’s not what takes his breath away in the worst possible twist of fate.
Because there’s a figure at Five’s heels—“Dave.”
His name escapes Klaus’s mouth like a plea, near soundless, and he grips the dog tag around his neck so hard that the metal digs into his palm. Five half-turns to cast him a curious look, eyebrow raised, but attention still mostly fixed on the brewing coffee. Dave is not like Ben. He has not aged. He looks exactly as he was the day he died, with the terror in his eyes, and the soundless gasps from his mouth, and the bullet wound in his chest bleeding, and bleeding, and bleeding as a medic does not arrive.
“Five,” he says, and he has his brother’s attention now. He tries to continue, but the question sticks in his throat. He tries again. “Were you—” he begins. His voice wavers, but Five doesn’t comment on it. Five notices, though. Klaus knows he does. He forces the question out. He doesn’t want to know. He needs to know. “You were an assassin.”
Dave sits there, almost in reach, and Klaus cannot make himself step forward.
“I was,” says Five, and his voice is so very careful.
Klaus could drop it. He could back out right now; change the subject.
But Dave is right there. And Klaus is unable to.
Klaus waves a hand around them, at all the ghosts that Five cannot see. He tears his eyes away from Dave, in his permanent state of dying, and scrabbles to keep his sanity together. Five stands before him, guarded, his expression unreadable. Klaus has seen Five kill before, seen him dispatch enemies with cold efficiency, but the thought that maybe, just maybe, his brother’s hands are stained with Dave’s blood is so sickening that he wants to get on his knees and beg to be told that it isn’t true.
“1968,” says Klaus, and his voice is on the edge of a whimper. “Katz. Was there…?”
“Katz,” echoes Five. “David Katz, I—” his eyes flicker over Klaus, over what that answer might entail, surely trying to work out why Klaus would want to know so badly, but it doesn’t stop the response a moment later, “Yes, there was.”
Klaus lets out a broken laugh, one on the edge of a sob, because it would have been less painful if someone had ripped his heart out of his ribs and presented the raw, bloody, still-beating organ to his face. He sinks to the floor, shaking, falling apart, and through the tears he can see Five with an expression twisted into despicable concern. Five, his brother, the assassin through time.
Dave, beloved. Dave, shot. Dave, bleeding out in Klaus’s arms. Dave, the one person that Klaus had loved so dearly, so wholly, that to lose him was to gouge out a piece of Klaus in his absence. He wasn’t absent any more. Three months of sobriety. Dave had never appeared. He had never, never, never shown in Klaus’s attempts to summon him. Because he’d been tied to his murderer.
Dying, and dying, and dying, always. Dave hadn’t gone into the light.
“Klaus…” says Five, tentatively.
He grabs Dave’s dog tag by its chain. Holds it up between them.
It only takes a moment for Five to glance over the name and understand.
Klaus does not know if it would make it better or worse if Five had hesitated, had tried to apologize, had expressed remorse—
—and he would never know.
Five blinks away without protest, without justification, without excuses.
Dave disappears with him.