Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Shockingly, Klaus doesn’t notice him at first.

In his defence, he’s still struggling to acclimatize to the parade of ghosts that crowd every room he enters now that he’s clean as a whistle and achingly sober. He remembers, vaguely, what it had been like when he was much younger, before the alcohol and drugs carried him away from it all, and he knows that, somehow, tiny Four must have found a way to survive it. But he’s long forgotten how, exactly, to function as normal with the ghosts pressing in around him, constantly crying and whispering and screaming in his ear, and without his usual fallback, he’s taken to just pretending the ghosts aren’t there.

This is about as successful as can be expected, which is to say, not at all. 

Regardless, he’s always been stubborn, and this particular stubbornness is born out of deep desperation to stay sober and still, somehow, keep whatever sanity he’s managed to cling to over the years. So he strains to ignore the sobbing, the begging, the dripping of the blood and scraping of exposed bone, and he has a lifetime of experience in fooling himself into thinking it’s working. 

(He falters more times than he’ll ever admit, resolve waning as the itch under his skin sinks deeper, flares brighter, and they never shut up, never give him a moment’s peace, and he just wants some goddamn silence, an hour to sleep without hearing them cursing his name, threatening to puncture his flesh and hollow out his eyes - )

(But Ben, infuriating and often unwelcome guardian ghost that he is, always manages to pull him back from the edge. As much as Klaus begs and snaps and needs, Ben is always an unwavering opposition, alternately coaxing and threatening as required until Klaus sits back and breathes. When it’s really bad, when Klaus hasn’t slept in three days and can barely stand without keeling over but still the ghosts won’t let him rest and he knows relief is just a few streets away, tucked away in a grubby pocket somewhere, Ben is enough of an asshole to bring out the big guns. He doesn’t hesitate to say Dave and doesn’t flinch when Klaus answers Fuck you and he stays by his side as Klaus rides it out. Sometimes he apologizes, and occasionally he even means it.)

(Klaus will never admit how close he gets to relapsing to the rest of their siblings, and Ben will never tattle on him.)

Klaus finds it a source of pride that the rest of their fucked up family don’t notice anything amiss in his behaviour, even when they have to repeat themselves or fight to attract his attention. Sometimes they get frustrated and suspicious, and Klaus is somehow both relieved and hurt when Five and Luther assume he’s just high. Ben calls him an idiot, but Klaus is ignoring all naughty ghosties, so he doesn’t deign to respond.

The point is, Klaus is permanently, like, 63% distracted, both determined to pretend the ghosts aren’t there and incapable of stopping himself from twitching at their every move. Most of the time, whatever room he finds himself in is so loud and crowded he can barely tell when a living person enters, nevermind when another dead bastard joins the fray. 

So he doesn’t notice for a while. 

It’s not until the asshole manages to push his way to the front of the crowd on a day when it’s relatively quiet that Klaus realizes he’s there. It’s not a pleasant realization.

“I’m not sure that’s physically possible,” Vanya is saying, curled up in a small insecure ball at the end of the couch. 

Klaus is sprawled out carelessly beside her, but he has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about. He squints and manages to make out Five in the armchair nearby, presumably engaged in some kind of conversation with her, but Klaus has been pointedly not hearing the furious yelling of the old lady with a gaping hole in her cheek for the past twenty minutes, so he’s a little out of the loop. He doesn’t actually remember Vanya or Five entering the room, let alone talking. He struggles to stay focused on them.

Five huffs impatiently. “And yet, I look like a thirteen-year-old boy,” he says, mouth twisted in distaste. “Clearly the equations were off, but if I can find where I went wrong and correct them - ”

“Number Five’s arrogance has always been his greatest weakness,” a voice says from behind Klaus’s shoulder, and for a moment, he can’t help but tiredly agree. “That and his unfortunate predisposition to sentimentality.”

That’s what catches his attention, really, because Klaus has definitely heard Five described as arrogant before - most notably by Diego and Allison - but sentimental?

Klaus jerks his head around, a distant kind of horror sinking into his bones because he’s slowly, too slowly, beginning to realize he recognizes that voice. Sure enough, he spots Sir Reginald fucking Hargreeves himself standing regally behind the couch, frowning at them all.

Immediately, Klaus vaults from his seat.

He spins around, breath catching in his throat, eyes wide, and Reginald is still there, observing him with his signature judgmental detachment. 

“Klaus?” Vanya says, brow wrinkling, and Five is looking at him with open curiosity. 

“Uh,” he says, then laughs, even though nothing about this is funny. But he can’t seem to stop, because Daddy Dearest is glaring at him, expression so familiar that for a wild moment Klaus genuinely wonders if he’s somehow sixteen again (or maybe he’s dead, maybe he skipped the greyscale meadow and bitchy little girl this time), and Five and Vanya are sitting there like this is all completely fine.

“Seeing your powers from this side of the equation is quite illuminating,” Reginald says, cool as ever, and he doesn’t seem the slightest bit fazed by the handful of spirits thronged around him. He does make sure to pitch his voice high enough to be heard over the general din, though, and Klaus really wishes he wouldn’t.

“Nope,” Klaus says, and it comes out a little strangled but he thinks that’s pretty fucking impressive anyway considering he’s currently struggling to remember how to breathe. “No, nope.” He flashes his left hand - goodbye - but their father is and always will be a stubborn bastard, dead or alive, and doesn’t waver.

Klaus has had to adopt a few different strategies to survive his new sobriety, and one of them is that if bad ghosties don’t want to play nice, they don’t get to play at all. He’s still trying to figure out how, exactly, to make them piss off, which is a shame since he’s pretty sure figuring out that neat little trick will improve his quality of life by a metric shit-ton, but until then he has to make do. Him making do generally means turning tail and leaving, even if that means insulting his siblings’ delicate sensibilities, and sometimes it doesn’t even work because ghosts are dicks fully capable of following him. Occasionally they get the message, though, and some of them prefer to hover over Five’s shoulder and yell obscenities at him rather than continue to harass Klaus, which is nice. 

Unfortunately, the chances of Reginald Hargreeves actually doing anything to make Klaus’s life easier are slim to none. One (Four) can dream, though.

Five makes a displeased noise as Klaus spins on his heel and does his best not to run from the room, and it’s entirely possible he’s hurt Vanya’s feelings, which is something they’ve all been trying to avoid since her almost world-ending tantrum, but oh well. By now, Vanya should have realistically low expectations of him, and he can always try to apologize later, preferably with less nosy dead fathers hanging around.

There are no new ghosts in the hallways to the bedrooms, and only a handful of Five’s entourage bothers to tag along behind him, so Klaus finds his room bearably quiet for once. It must be his lucky day, because he doesn’t even turn to find any delusional dead billionaires waiting for him, either. That’s more than alright with Klaus because hopefully it means Reggie will work through all his displeasure and lectures with his oblivious siblings and run out of steam before finding his way back. If the universe is even slightly kind, Reginald will resolve whatever unfinished business he deems so important and disappear back to the afterlife without ever showing his face to the only one who can see it again.

Until then, Klaus can sequester himself away in his room and pray to any little girls who may listen that their father’s visit is a short one.

Chapter Text

“You look constipated.”

Through years of practice, Klaus manages to direct his rude gesture in the right direction without opening his eyes. He knows he’s sent it the right way because Ben blows a raspberry at him, which is delightfully undignified and also incredibly mean because he always waits until Klaus isn’t looking to do childish stuff like that. For a ghost that’s been doggedly following him around for thirteen long, long years, Klaus has rarely been able to catch him in his unladylike moments, even though Ben has seen him from plenty of his own disgraceful angles. Bastard.

“Seriously, don’t blow a blood vessel or anything. This would be such an embarrassing way to die.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Klaus finally says, opening his eyes to glare. 

Ben is lounging against the door without a care in the world, which tells Klaus that a) he has no idea dear Papa has stopped by, and b) that sweet innocent Ben has finally gotten bored of spying on Diego and Luther for the day. He likes to make note of the weird shit they do when they think they’re alone and then announce it to the room during family dinners when Klaus manages to make him corporeal. You’d think by now Luther would have learned to stop picking his nose, but alas, no.

“Banishing or summoning?” Ben asks instead of acknowledging Klaus’s indignation, which is completely par for the course. 

Huffing, Klaus unfolds himself from the pretzel he’d managed to tie himself into and pointedly blows out the candle next to his knee. “Banishing,” he says moodily. “Trying to get a moment’s peace in this place.” He thinks the look he aims at his brother is incredibly eloquent, but Ben, unfortunately, does not rise to the bait, which is boring. 

Ben makes a show of looking around the room, taking in the three spirits stationed around like gargoyles. They’re not screaming, which is nice, but the one in the corner hasn’t stopped murmuring a steady stream of German for the past two hours, and it’s beginning to get a little grating. 

“Right. Making progress, I see,” Ben says, far too dryly for Klaus’s sensibilities. 

Klaus scowls at him but doesn’t flip him off again, because that would be too predictable. 

“I’m pretty sure I gave Margaret over there seasickness,” he says petulantly, gesturing to the old woman by the window who makes a face at him. She doesn’t look happy, but that might be due to the intestines spilling over her hands rather than his general charm, hard to say. “She didn’t leave, but at least she felt something.”

His brother doesn’t look nearly impressed enough by this, which Klaus thinks is entirely unfair, since this is more progress than he’s ever made before.

“So you can make ghosts feel queasy,” Ben says slowly. “Awesome.”

Klaus growls a little bit under his breath, but there isn’t any real heat to it. Ben’s an asshole, but he’s kind of earnt the right to be a dick over the past decade, so it doesn’t really chafe as much as it might otherwise. Besides, it’s no fun to argue with a dead guy - it’s almost impossible to win. How do you trump the dead card? He thought it might get easier, now that he’s actually died himself, but apparently resurrecting somehow negates that. Completely unfair that Ben is the one that makes the rules on this. Bastard.

“You missed lunch again,” Ben says, idly watching as Klaus throws the candles onto his bed and promptly follows suit. “You’re making a habit of it.”

It’s hard to dramatically roll your eyes when your face is buried in blankets, but Klaus makes a go of it anyway. “What’s one more bad habit,” he says breezily, though it’s entirely possible Ben can’t understand what the fuck he’s saying, due to the aforementioned blankets. Ben, however, is practically a mind reader when it comes to Klaus’s bitchy tendencies. 

“You have to be at dinner,” Ben continues. “One, because Diego might actually come up here and drag your ass out if you aren’t, and two, because I saw Five with that mannequin earlier and need to expose the little weirdo’s gooey side.”

Klaus considers. “Fine. But I’m not saying it if I can’t make you a real boy. You could get away with it because you’re the tragically dead one, but Five would actually eviscerate me if I dared besmirch his reputation, even on your behalf.”

“Deal.”

German dude in the corner finally stops his weird soliloquy, giving them a lovely reprieve for precisely one breath before he starts treating them to some truly horrific sounding coughing, deep and guttural like he may hack up a lung, which Klaus really doesn’t want to see. Ben grimaces in distaste and waves a hand between Klaus and the (other) dead guy as if telling him ‘do something, please, before he paints the corner a stunning new shade of red’, except Ben isn’t usually that poetic, so he probably isn’t saying that at all.

“Yugh,” Klaus says, halfheartedly sticking out his hand - goodbye - and shaking it, jazz-hand style. “Take it somewhere else, buddy.”

His fingers feel a little bit tingly, like the beginnings of a deep weed high, and German dude does, in fact, stop coughing to look at him incredulously. His stupid sweaty forehead wrinkles for a moment and his eyes go a little funny, like he’s about to puke, and then he - flickers, just a little. One second he’s as clear as can be, a perfect replica of a living person aside from the various gunshot wounds, and the next he’s the faintest bit transparent, the scribbled eye Klaus had drawn on his wall when he was twelve peeking through the dude’s shoulder. Huh.

“Huh,” Ben says. “Would you look at that.”

Klaus is looking, though he isn’t quite sure he’s believing. German dude looks like he’s having a hard time believing it too, staring down at his hands with a slack jaw. He isn’t banished, but he isn’t coughing anymore, so honestly? Good enough.

Klaus sticks a finger in the ghost’s face. “Not another peep out of you, mister,” he says firmly, ignoring the dazed part of his brain currently screaming what the fuck at him.

“Okay,” Ben says from behind him. “Maybe making them queasy is progress. Well done.”

The praise is unfamiliar and makes him feel all kinds of weird, so he pushes it aside to deal with never. German dude looks sufficiently cowed, so Klaus dares to turn his back on him, eyeing Margaret and the quiet cowboy-esque fucker suspiciously. Neither of them spontaneously starts yelling, though Margaret looks vaguely mutinous and the cowboy might just be quiet because of the gaping wound in his throat that definitely isn’t going to give Klaus nightmares about Allison tonight.

“Well, brother mine,” Klaus says, forcing himself to save the imminent freakout for later. “I think it might be time to try summoning.”

Ben grimaces, which is entirely fair, since previous experience has taught both of them that attempts at summoning usually end in frustration and, occasionally, a spike in cravings and subsequent arguments. Unlike banishing, Klaus has actually made some headway into summoning, and he’s now relatively good at yanking Ben to his side whenever he wishes, though that usually earns him several hours of scowls and insults because Ben’s a little bitch who hates having his ghostly shenanigans interrupted. And while Klaus hasn’t tried summoning many other ghosts, because why would he want to see more of their ugly faces, he’s reasonably certain he could if he wanted to. Unfortunately, he still can’t seem to summon the one ghost he desperately wants to see, which. Really sucks.

Still, if he’s making progress in giving ghosts upset tummies - which is especially impressive considering ghosts don’t technically have tummies - maybe his powers will cooperate with him for once. He could put up with all the feral ghosts in the world, he thinks, as long as he had Dave with him.

Reluctantly, Ben follows him to the floor, where Klaus tucks his legs under himself and shakes out his shoulders. Ben shoves his hands into his hoodie pocket, looking around warily, but doesn’t say anything, which is much appreciated. Klaus much prefers having Ben around when he tries this, because sometimes a nasty ghostie thinks he’s calling out for them and decides to pop up and crash the party, and it’s easier to keep himself from panicking when Ben is there to act as a buffer.

(The first time Klaus had tried summoning on his own, he’d still been riding the adrenaline high of making Ben corporeal for the first family dinner, and he’d unwittingly summoned a handful of ghosts from downstairs and then made them tangible, which had been very Not Fun. Since then, if he accidentally starts making ghosts real, Ben is typically around to talk him down.)

“Don’t forget dinner,” Ben says.

Chapter Text

Dinner is the usual boring affair. 

Klaus graciously bows and accepts the unending praise from his siblings as he selflessly makes Ben corporeal before taking his seat (well, he spreads his arms and nods at Diego when he hums approvingly, but same thing), and then promptly tunes them all out.

He’s exhausted, both because he’s currently on day two of not being able to sleep and because three and a half hours of straining to make his powers do what he wants for once is a bit of a stretch, but neither of those things is going to be resolved by missing dinner, so. Might as well give Ben a little sibling time, god knows why he wants to put up with them. At least he can carry the conversation without bothering Klaus. He’s absurdly glad to no longer be a dead man’s mouthpiece, even if their siblings would listen now.

Klaus just picks at his green beans, because Mom’s cooking smells as delicious as ever but his stomach has always been rebellious, particularly when he’s tired and distracted. Diego might nag him later, since he’s picked up an annoying tendency to monitor Klaus’s life, but he can go fuck himself because Klaus is completely uninterested in expelling his guts. Maybe he can get Ben to divert Diego’s mother-henning.

Speaking of Ben, he suddenly does his best to break Klaus’s ribs with his elbow.

“ Ow, what the fuck, asshole,” Klaus hisses, jerking away. Ben looks thoroughly unapologetic and unimpressed, pointedly nodding to the rest of the table. Reluctantly, Klaus turns to the others. “Yes, dear family?”

Ugh, their heavy gazes make his skin itch. 

“Are you alright?” Vanya asks, and to her credit, she does look genuine. “You seemed a bit … funny, earlier.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m peachy. Just hilarious,” he says brightly. “You know me.” 

She purses her lips in a way that suggests no, she doesn’t, actually, but she also doesn’t know what else to say because she may have more of a voice lately but she’s still painfully uncertain of her role around them. Usually, Klaus tries to reaffirm her place in their family, because she’s his sister and they absolutely do not need another apocalypse to round off the summer, but in this case, he’d really rather prefer to not encourage further questions.

Alas, his other siblings are decidedly less easy to discourage.

Luther coughs a little awkwardly, shifting in his seat and sharing a look with Allison, who arches an eyebrow at him. 

“Uh, Klaus,” Luther says, and it’s almost sweet how much he’s obviously trying to not sound like an overbearing dickhead. The success is debatable, but it’s the thought that counts, right? “Diego says you’re, you know - sober, which is, uh, great, really. Is that - are you - still?”

He’s like a teddy bear, Klaus thinks fondly. Or like a big puppy dog. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that behind all that brainless muscle is a man with less social skill than a thirteen-year-old pensioner who spent forty years in an apocalyptic wasteland. Twenty years with just his equally stunted siblings followed by a few years with a monkey butler and robotic maid followed by four years on the actual moon - it’s a wonder he ever managed to get that furry to follow him into bed, truly. Although, admittedly he has an unfair advantage with furries: he probably doesn’t even need to open his mouth to seduce them.

Eugh, bad thoughts, move on.

“Regrettably, I am, in fact, stone-cold sober,” Klaus drawls, resting his chin on the palm of his hand. “Or does no one else see little Benny here?”

Ben rolls his eyes, but it’s worth it to see the embarrassed look on Luther’s face.

“Right,” their biggest brother says. “Yeah. Just - you know. Making sure. You’ve been acting weird.”

That’s true, so Klaus just hums in agreement. They can draw their own conclusions about that, their own theories, because unless they outright ask, Klaus has no plans of telling them about his constant headache. Ben always gets all huffy because he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t just tell them, but he also has to admit they’ve never actually asked either of them, so. Two-way street.

“Of course he has,” Five says primly. “He’s Klaus.”

Klaus points a fork at him, nodding emphatically. “Exactly,” he says. “Munchkin gets it, Danke .”

Seeing Five scowl like that never gets old. It’s the same scowl he’d had when they were kids, whenever Klaus asked a particularly stupid question or Luther did his best Dad impression. It’s a bit sharper now, harder, but it’s kind of nice to recognize it, to see it again after almost twenty years without it.

“Don’t call me that,” Five says darkly. “I can kill you in nine different ways right now without even leaving my seat.”

Klaus practically purrs. “Ooh, I love it when you talk murder to me.”

Before Five can follow through on one of those nine ways, which he looks sorely tempted to do based on the look on his face, Ben snorts, successfully drawing their attention. 

(Five probably wouldn’t kill him. He went through a lot of trouble to prevent that end result, after all. It would be a shame to throw away all that hard work.)

“You act all tough guy, Five, but we know that deep down you’re just a big softie,” Ben observes, cool and calm in the face of an infuriated assassin in the way only a dead man can be. “Why, just earlier today I saw you thoughtfully painting Delores’ nails. Beautiful shade of pink, by the way, please tell me your toenails match.”

Usually, Klaus would be all over that. Perfect opening, right there. Besides, Klaus would love having another brother to paint nails with, since Ben is more likely to dump the nail polish on Klaus’s head than play along, and Diego is always unpredictable, just as likely to stab him for suggesting it than join in. 

But, unfortunately, as Five hisses in outrage and Diego perks up with perverse glee, Klaus feels the horribly familiar tingling down his spine that heralds the arrival of another ghostie. He doesn’t always notice it, but today the kitchen is relatively peaceful, and he’s always a bit more on edge after training his powers, like an exposed nerve.

He knows before he turns that it’s the last person he wants to see.

Reginald is standing tall behind Allison, a few inches away from Klaus’s shoulder, which means he has to crane his neck uncomfortably to see him, but also means that Ben hasn’t spotted him yet, distracted by teasing Five. Klaus really, really hopes it stays that way because the last thing any of them need is Reginald Hargreeves fucking with them. It’s too late to stop Klaus’s mindfuck, because he is absolutely going to have nightmares tonight, but with any luck, he can prevent the others from the same fate.

Klaus glares at Reginald hotly, tight-lipped, and tries to recreate the tingly weed feeling from earlier. He’s never successfully banished a ghost before, but getting rid of his father is a fantastic motivator, and even seeing dignified Reginald Hargreeves get nauseous might be worthwhile.

Reginald, rather than spewing his guts, just meets Klaus’s eyes with a measured gaze and decidedly unhappy twist of his lips.

“This behaviour is entirely childish and unfitting of the Umbrella Academy,” he says, voice dark and heavy, a call back to their childhoods of lectures and punishments. “I expected more of you all in my absence.”

“Holy shit,” Ben says, and Klaus spins around to see his brother staring at their father with wide eyes. Klaus barely notices as the familiar blue outlining Ben flickers and disappears, too focused on the horrified look taking over his brother’s face to acknowledge his sudden drop out of visibility and the subsequently confused noises of their siblings.

“Shit,” Klaus says, because this is very Not Good. “Shit, shit, no, hang on - ”

“Dad?” Ben says, a horrible mix of lost and incredulous. 

Reginald barely spares him a look. 

“I see I’ve returned just in time,” he says loftily, casting a disapproving eye over the table, then eyeing Vanya and Five appreciatively. “If this is what’s to become of you children without me. Now that I’m here, we can work on getting you all back into shape to reach your full potential, this time with the full Academy.”

Chapter Text

“What the fuck,” Ben says for probably the fifth or sixth time, which is entirely his prerogative and not really something Klaus can blame him for, but still wishes he would stop doing. “What the fuck. ”

Klaus has a headache. He pretty much always has a headache these days, but this particular brand of headache is more stressful-dead-father-and-freaked-out-dead-brother related than the normal too-many-goddamn-ghosts, and he’s finding that that makes all the difference. 

“Hey, Klaus?” Ben says, still more than a little hysterical. “What the fuck?”

He debates letting his brother keep going until he runs out of steam, but based on what he’s heard from countless other ghosts over the years, it’s entirely possible that ghosts don’t ever run out of steam. It really would be just their luck for Ben to finally get stuck in a ghostly repetitive loop after thirteen years of inexplicably not doing that, all because their asshole father decided to stick his nose back in where it doesn’t belong. 

God, sometimes Klaus really hates his life.

“Ben. Benny. Benerino,” he says. “I hear you. Margaret hears you. Let’s maybe take it down a notch before every other ghostie hears you, hm?”

Ben seems to consider this for a moment, eyeing a silent Margaret, then turns back to Klaus. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, but what the fuck?”

Klaus shrugs. “Daddy’s home,” he says glumly, because he’s really quite freaked out and it’s taking a lot of effort not to show it. They don’t need both of them reduced to gibbering wrecks, after all. They can take it in turns. 

He really hopes it will be his turn soon.

By some miracle, Ben doesn’t repeat his new favourite phrase, though it looks like he wants to. “How long has he been here?” he asks instead, and Klaus isn’t quite sure that’s an improvement because, yep, that’s suspicious judgment in his voice. Ah, just like the good old days.

Klaus doesn’t want to answer. He doesn’t want to be in this situation at all, but, well, beggars can’t be choosers and nothing in his life has ever been easy, so why should it be now? 

“I saw him this morning,” he says miserably. “Hoped maybe I was imagining it.”

The look Ben gives him is entirely deserved, if unwelcome. But, honestly, it wouldn’t be the first time Klaus has hallucinated things, though it has been rarer since he stopped starting his days with colourful pills and white powder. At least back then the hallucinations were predictable and finite: however much he didn’t like what he saw, he always knew it would be over just as soon as his body burned its way through the drugs. Simpler times. Since apocalypse week, though, he’s found reality a bit harder to pin down. Ben calls it PTSD, but Ben is an annoying know-it-all who thinks being dead grants him wisdom beyond his years, so Klaus tends not to listen to him.

Hallucinating Reginald would be a first, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility. Alas, his problems can never be that simple.

“What are we going to do?” Ben asks. “Can you make him leave?”

The idea is so absurd it makes Klaus laugh. “Oh, sure,” he says. “I’ll just go up to dear Papa and politely ask him to return to his stupid barbershop. Thanks for the visit, terrible to see you, let’s do this again never. Au revoir!”

“Barbershop?” Ben repeats, which is entirely the wrong thing to focus on. 

Klaus flaps his hand dismissively, making sure to use Hello just in case he gives his brother the ghostly equivalent of a bad tuna melt. “The point, my dear dead dumbass, is that I can’t do anything except give him gas, and even that might not work. I’m not convinced that man is human enough for such mundane weaknesses, and it may just make him ever so slightly pissed.” The thought makes him shudder, because Reginald Hargreeves is dreadful company on good days, let alone when he has a bee in his bonnet, and the last thing Klaus needs is his irate father deciding to haunt him for the rest of eternity.

Klaus may never relax again, which would be truly tragic for his clear skin and sunny disposition.

At least he’ll have Ben to suffer alongside him. It’s not that Klaus wants his brother to have to endure Reginald’s presence, but he has to admit that it’s a relief not to be alone. He does make a note to himself to keep an eye on it, though, because as much as he bitches and moans, he does care about Ben, and no one deserves to be subjected to Hargreeves like this. Ben died for the man, for god’s sake; shouldn’t that count for something?

(Klaus is never telling Ben any of this. By gods, think of his ego.)

“Well,” Ben says speculatively. “He didn’t follow us up here. Maybe he won’t stick around.”

Klaus winces. “Ah, that could just be because he has more interesting specimens to study downstairs.”

Said specimens are probably none too happy with Klaus right now, but that’s hardly new. If he was feeling particularly charitable, he might give them a pass for their frustration, since from their point of view he just freaked out, dropped the connection to Ben, and then high-tailed it out of the kitchen without offering so much as an apology. Pretty incriminating, he has to admit. But he doesn’t feel very charitable right now, so they can suck it.

Ben wrinkles his nose, conceding to Klaus’s point, which he hates doing on principle. 

“How are we going to tell them? Luther’s only just starting to work through all his bullshit daddy issues, and Vanya still makes the forks shake when she doesn’t play as the top hat in Monopoly,” Ben says, finally joining Klaus on the bed and giving up on his uneasy pacing. 

“Why does she want to be the hat so bad?” Klaus wonders. “The shot glass is clearly superior.”

“What? No, hang on. It’s a thimble, you idiot. Why would there be a shot glass in Monopoly?”

“I don’t know, why is there an iron?”

“Shut up. I can’t do this with you.” Ben raises his hand between them and uses the other to pinch the bridge of his nose. “What are we going to do about Dad, Klaus?”

Groaning, Klaus flops backwards onto his pillows. “Hearing a lot of questions and not a lot of solutions,” he says a little waspishly, nerves frayed. “Maybe if we ignore him he’ll go away. Like a needy boyfriend.”

Ben looks like he sorely wants to throttle him, but politely refrains. That’s quite nice of him, considering Klaus is about 72% sure that would end in some kind of panic attack, and he really doesn’t have the energy for that today. 

“And if he doesn’t?” Ben asks instead, dangerously patient.

“Well, I hear Canada is lovely this time of year,” Klaus offers, only half-joking. There’s no guarantee Reginald wouldn’t follow him halfway around the planet if he had to, if only because Klaus is the only one able to hear his many complaints. Joy.

Ben doesn’t look pleased by this answer, but he’s rarely pleased by anything Klaus says, so he doesn’t take it personally. On the bright side, Ben doesn’t make a move towards leaving, looking content to sit and stew beside him for now, so that’s nice. As much as Klaus would give his right arm for some peace and quiet for once in his life, knowing Ben is around in the event of unwanted visitors does help keep the ever-mounting anxiety at bay. 

Maybe he’ll even be able to catch a few hours’ sleep before the night crew clocks in. He hasn’t slept properly in a few days, and he’s starting to get that familiar strung out feeling that usually ends in some kind of spectacular snap that Ben and Diego hate so much. If Dad sticks around for a while, god forbid, Klaus doubts he’ll get many peaceful nights from this point forward, so he might as well try to get what he can. Ben will act as lookout for once and keep the nasties away, as long as Klaus bats his eyes just right.

At least Margaret and the cowboy are gone. The German dude is back in full force, but he seems to remember Klaus’s new glamorous nausea powers, so he’s behaving for now. Even if he starts up again, Klaus has slept through worse than some garbled mumbling. It’s the screamers he wants to keep away as long as possible.

Well, and asshole billionaires. Nightmares, too, though those are harder. 

Ugh. When did sleeping become such a chore?

(When he stopped using needles to help him along. When he came back from Vietnam with blood on his hands. When he saw his sister furious, rage blinding and destructive.)

(Shut up, brain.)

Chapter Text

Klaus is dead.

He has to be. It doesn’t quite feel the same as last time, but he also doesn’t remember cracking his head open on a sticky dance floor recently, so maybe it’s a variable experience. Keep things fresh and interesting and all that. Thank goodness, because Klaus and monotony are not the closest of pals, and he doesn’t think he can survive an afterlife of permanent apathy. 

Well, ‘survive’ is a bit strong.

What is the correct terminology for the dead? He should ask Ben. Wait, no, he’s dead now, which means he gets to make the rules. Ha, take that! 

Anyway, being dead isn’t so bad. It’s quiet, at least, which kind of makes up for the actual dying part, not that Klaus remembers it. Maybe Ben smothered him in his sleep. Or Five followed through on his psychotic tendencies. Or, hell, maybe Klaus’s body just threw up its hands in surrender and let him go like it’s been threatening to do for years. He decides it doesn’t matter how it happened, anyway, because he’s pleasantly distracted.

Dave feels familiar beside him. 

Something tells Klaus this is more noteworthy than it feels, but he pushes that away because he’s warm and comfortable and doesn’t plan on moving for anything less than the Apocalypse: Take Two. Maybe not even then. Dave is playing with his hair and he’s shirtless under Klaus’s hands and, yeah, nothing is going to make him budge. He’s missed this.

He’s never actually been able to spend time with Dave in relative silence, and he’s finding it a novel experience. In Vietnam, any stolen moment between them, while lovely and hot and amazing, was always accompanied by at least a handful of ghosts, often angry and bloody and so, so confused. Klaus had barely been able to hear himself think, let alone bask in the minutiae of Dave’s existence.

Klaus can hear him breathing, regular and a little raspy, even breaths that soothe the edges of something jagged in Klaus’s chest. Dave’s heart is working under Klaus’s hand, just as it should be, and all's right with the world.

If the little girl tries to kick him out again, they will be having words. 

Klaus traces patterns onto the bare skin of Dave’s abdomen because the man is delightfully ticklish and Klaus is a sadist at heart. He starts with a heart because he’s a secret sap and because Dave loves that lovey-dovey crap. Then, for good measure, he follows it up with a carefully detailed dick. He expects some outcry at that, or a laugh, but Dave stays still and quiet beside him, which really is strange. Dave is a mouthy fucker when he wants to be, and he always wants to be around Klaus. Never gives him a moment’s peace, that one.

Curious and concerned, Klaus flattens his hand onto Dave’s chest and sticks his nose into his neck, since it’s usually a sure-fire way to make the man crack. It’s cute how Dave still thinks he can hold out against Klaus’s machinations, but Klaus lovingly mapped out all of Dave’s soft spots ages ago and he’s never hesitated to use them to his advantage.

Klaus’s palm feels warm and heavy, and something slips out from between his fingers. He pulls back, frowning, to look, and suddenly the room drops away around him, vision tunnelling, because his hand is red. Blood sluggishly creeps out from under his hand, streaking down Dave’s skin, and there’s a steel band around Klaus’s own chest that keeps tightening the more blood bubbles up, squeezing all the air out of him. 

He can’t help the high whine that slips out, desperate and wobbly, and suddenly nothing about this place is calm or peaceful. They’re in the middle of a warzone and there’s blood everywhere, covering his hands, staining his arms as he scrabbles at Dave. His fingers slide in the blood, but he can’t find the injury, can’t see where it’s coming from, can’t stop it. Dave is still and quiet.

There’s no injury, no cause for the blood that keeps coming, even though Klaus remembers gunfire and gaping wounds. For the first time, he looks up, desperate to see Dave’s face, Dave’s eyes, to make sure he’s still there. But there’s more blood the more he looks, tracking up, up, up, and it’s spilling from his neck, a tidal wave, and it’s not stopping because there’s a sickening cut slashed across Allison’s throat and she’s dying - 

He shoves his hands over the cut, trying to stem the bleeding, and he can feel her heartbeat fluttering at the tips of his fingers. Her mouth opens and closes uselessly, but she can’t speak, of course she can’t speak, and she looks so scared, eyes wet and bright and painfully white, searing into him, burning all over, a supernova, and he can feel her fury, her anger, and he knows with a detached certainty that Vanya is going to tear everything apart piece by piece - 

Vanya’s face overlaps Allison’s overlaps Dave’s, the three of them as one, dying under his hand, and he can’t save them, he can never save them. They open their mouth, blurry, distorted, separate but not, eyes locked onto his, and he hears their voice, sister and sister and lover.

“Number Four,” they say, but it’s not them. The collection of their voices sounds like Reginald, and Klaus has never wanted to hear those words, that tone, come out of their mouths, especially not Dave’s. Dave, who never called him Four, who never spoke to him with the same derision as everyone else. Dave, who’s dead, dead, dead.

Klaus is falling, falling, fallen. 

Ben isn’t in the room when he wakes up.

That’s probably why there’re so many ghosts. Ben usually does a good job of keeping them away when Klaus needs a few hours of rest, as long as Ben is in the mood to be helpful, but sometimes he wanders off and the ghosts take advantage of his absence. Eventually, their presence always wakes Klaus, no matter how little he’s slept or how tired he is, and it’s never a pleasant way to start things. 

Margaret’s back at the window, and German dude, and about half a dozen others that Klaus has seen hanging around Five and Diego in the past. He thinks one of them might be one of the few ghosts from Vanya’s own entourage, and seeing her makes his stomach lurch, remembering blinding white and hot red.

Reginald has carved out his own space at the foot of Klaus’s bed, watching him shrewdly through that stupid monocle. None of the other ghosts dare intrude on his personal bubble, which goes to show that ghosts do understand personal boundaries, they just don’t give a fuck about Klaus’s.

Klaus hasn’t cried in front of his father since he was nine, at least not while outside of that heavenly barbershop or purgatory or whatever the fuck that place was, and he feels minuscule and weak to be doing so now. But he can’t stop the tears that spill onto his cheeks, and he doesn’t try very hard anyway, because it’s not like anything matters. Klaus lost his claim to dignity a long, long time ago, and there’s little point in trying to look strong in front of his father now.

The one bright side in all this is that Reginald can’t successfully give him any kind of lecture, because the screaming is too loud to hear him. It makes Klaus’s ears ring, but he’s used to it and he barely flinches anymore. He does take delight in the tenseness of Reginald’s shoulders, though, because the man may be a ghost but he clearly has no idea how to exist among them. It’s a small win, but he’ll take it; Dad can’t handle the one thing Klaus had been largely desensitized to by the time he was five. Who’s weak now?

(Still Klaus.)

Klaus stumbles out of his bed because he may not feel fit to face the world but he’s certainly not going to stay lying in front of his father like a dissected lab rat, and the horror chorus is enough to motivate him to at least try and find other lodgings. He feels gross and sweaty and sick, and he knows there isn’t actually any blood on his hands or clothes but he can still feel it, still see the faint outline everywhere he looks. But he can’t change his clothes, even though Ben will surely comment on it, because his brain is like mush and Reginald is still fucking staring.

The few steps from his bed to the door feel insurmountable. The room spins around him and his balance is so bad he might as well be rolling on molly - god, if only - but somehow he makes it. 

He yanks open the door to find Diego on the other side, fist raised to knock. They stare at each other for a moment before Diego takes a step back.

“You look like shit, man,” he says.

“Thanks,” Klaus says, and his voice cracks about a dozen times. He can’t stop thinking about molly.

“You sure you’re alright? Something I should know?”

Klaus blinks a few times, both to force himself to focus on his brother and to recover from the shrill moan one of the ghosts just gave directly behind him. “What?” he asks, because the world is buzzing and Diego is really talking way too softly. Luckily, a childhood of stuttering has taught Diego to enunciate more than their typical sibling, which makes it slightly easier to read his lips. It would be even easier if Klaus was any good at lip-reading, but he makes do.

Diego frowns severely, shifting his weight and crossing his arms. Oh, God, that’s his lecture power stance. 

“What’s going on with you?” he asks, and Klaus hears him, barely. Two ghosts are peeking over his shoulders, and they look new. Diego must have been out misbehaving last night. “ Klaus. ”

“You still disrespect those in stations above you, I see,” Reginald slots in, and Klaus really doesn’t need his two-cents right now, thanks. “Number Two asked you a question, Number Four. He is still your superior, even if his discipline is almost as abysmal as yours.”

Klaus growls. “I’m fine,” he grinds out, and he knows Diego probably thinks the anger is directed at him, but he doesn’t have the capacity to be diplomatic right now. It would be so much easier to plaster on a convincing smile if he just had a little acid to smooth the way. Not a lot, of course, just enough to make it all fade away. 

Dave, he thinks. I have to be sober to summon Dave.

But Dave’s gone. His dog tags are all that’s left, hanging around Klaus’s neck, the imprint of his blood still stained into the grooves of his fingers. He’s been trying to summon Dave for weeks, and he hasn’t had any luck. Maybe Dave doesn’t want to be found.

Besides, Dave wouldn’t want him to suffer, right? He would understand. Just a bit of weed, one joint, just to make things soft and gentle. Even Dave used to smoke a bit, he’d understand.

Fuck, Ben is so much better at making a convincing argument to stay clean.

Diego’s mouth is moving, but Klaus can only stare helplessly. How does anyone expect him to be able to do anything with all this goddamn noise?

“I am curious,” Reginald says, and for some fucking reason Klaus can make out his voice just fine. “Do you truly believe in this family nonsense? I allowed Grace and Pogo to encourage that childish notion when you were actual children because I believed it would help build trust and cohesion within the Academy, but surely you’ve outgrown it by now.”

Klaus shakes his head sharply. “What?” he asks, and he isn’t sure if he means it towards Diego or Reginald. His head hurts.

Diego suddenly reaches out and grasps his shoulder, shaking him a little roughly, and it does help him focus on the living. Still, ow. Rude.

“Get your shit together, bro,” Diego demands, and he actually looks a little concerned, the big softie. Of course, his tender masculinity dictates he must immediately counter this with an appropriately manly custom. He smacks the back of Klaus’s head. “You better not ruin this sobriety thing you got going on. I kinda like having my obnoxious little brother back.”

“Technically, I’m older than you,” Klaus says. There’s still an itch under his skin and a feral studio audience behind him, but he feels a little less like a shadow stretched between the living world and the dead, so he supposes that’s good enough. Normal, at any rate. 

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Forgive me if I don’t come to you for worldly advice,” Diego snarks, and the world slowly starts sliding back to its usual axis. 

“Your shared delusion is extraordinary,” Reginald notes, but Klaus has had precisely enough out of the cheap seats for now.

He tries to subtly shove his hand - goodbye - out behind him without Diego noticing, and hisses under his breath. Diego seems oblivious, clapping a hand on the back of Klaus’s neck and beginning to steer them down the hall.

Klaus’s fingers tingle slightly, faintly, and he sucks in a startled breath. He risks a look over his shoulder, hardly daring to hope. 

The two ghosts that had followed Diego up are quiet, confused, and transparent. Reginald stands next to them, insufferably implacable and entirely whole.

Klaus’s heart drops. Diego keeps them moving. Reginald watches.

Chapter Text

It’s a bad day. Night. Early morning. Whatever.

Diego’s personal cheerleaders are near deafening, egged on by the incessant bitching and whining of Five’s victims, and they seem to be planning some kind of rager because more of them keep showing up. Maybe it’s some kind of ghostly tradition, or maybe the little girl in the sky is punishing him for daring to exist, but whatever the reason, Klaus is in hell.

He wishes it were socially acceptable to tell his brothers to fuck off. With any luck, they’d take their fan clubs with them and give him some breathing room. But Diego has that stubborn look on his face that doesn’t usually bode well for Klaus’s tantrums, and Five is being suspiciously tolerant of their presence, which sends off all kinds of alarm bells that Klaus is too tired to really look into. In any case, he would feel bad squandering this rare moment of sibling coexistence, even if it would help his headache. It’s fine, though. He can deal with it for a few minutes.

Realistically, they have twenty minutes, tops, before Diego attempts to stab someone or Five peaces the fuck out. Klaus can make it until then.

It would be infinitely easier if their dead father wasn’t creepily watching them from the corner of the kitchen, but Klaus is coming to terms with the fact that the universe clearly hates his guts, and he might as well get with the program. 

Mind drifting, he’s startled by the plate that materializes in front of him. He blinks at it dumbly before thinking to look for the culprit.

“You didn’t finish dinner,” Diego says, and the words are mild but the tone is threatening. An intervention, maybe. Klaus hasn’t actually had one since he was twenty-one and bouncing between couches, so he’s a little rusty.

“Care to explain?” Five asks, and he almost manages to look entirely nonchalant, except for the fact he’s on his third cup of coffee and willingly engaging with two of his brothers at two in the morning. Suspicious behaviour. 

Klaus is tired.

“Not really,” he sighs, and stares morosely at his hastily heated chicken breast. The steam from the microwave is not promising. It probably tastes fine, and he’s eaten far, far worse, but despite the anticipatory rumble in his stomach, he can’t imagine actually putting any of it in his mouth. His appetite has always been finicky, and half his brain is still struggling through the last dredges of his nightmare. He feels shaky and ill, completely unsuited to enjoying Mom’s leftovers.

Five huffs impatiently, which is the first warning sign. There are four warnings in total, and Klaus isn’t entirely sure what follows, but it probably isn’t pleasant. When they’d been kids, it usually ended in black eyes and missing possessions, but something tells him Five’s antics are a bit more severe now.

“You’ve been acting strangely for weeks,” Five continues, and honestly it’s kind of amazing that he’s willing to expound further. He usually isn’t one to waste words. “Initially, I assumed it was just you , but after speaking with our siblings and seeing your display at dinner tonight, I’ve reassessed. So, I’ll ask again. Would you care to explain?”

Hm, dead-eyed smile. Second warning sign.

“ Klaus, ” says Road Rash Randy from behind Five’s shoulder. He’s immediately echoed by three others.

Now, generally, Klaus can ignore a little name-dropping. It isn’t fun, and sometimes it really pisses him off because hey, that’s his name, don’t fucking wear it out, but overall it’s pretty tame. He could even say he prefers it over being called ‘Four’, but only because ‘Klaus’ hasn’t entirely lost the novel shine to it just yet. However, this time he can’t help but tense immediately because, well. This isn’t just the usual crowd.

“If you had learned to control your powers as a child, you wouldn’t be subject to their presence now,” Daddy Dearest says dispassionately. 

Klaus pointedly continues glaring at his plate rather than acknowledging any of the ghostly concert. It makes him feel a little like a moody kid again, but it’s better than the alternatives.

The fwip of Five’s teleporting almost scares him out of his seat. He saves himself, if not his dignity, only to have his personal bubble rudely invaded, this time by one of the living for a change. Five looks grumpy.

Sudden teleporting, either away from or closer to the object of his ire? Third warning sign. 

Klaus really does not have the mental capacity for this.

“Are you even listening to me, asshole?” Five asks testily. “Are you high?”

“Hey,” Diego protests, which is both heart-warming and vaguely irritating because Diego doesn’t really have the moral high ground here. Klaus is pretty sure he’s been about an inch away from accusing him of the same thing for ages. 

“I fucking wish, ” he says, because it’s true. “Do you know what I would do for some cocaine right now? You’d probably have to avert your virgin eyes. Are you a virgin? Does Delores count?”

Klaus really wishes Ben were here, because he’d probably be more likely to actually explore this question with him. As it is, he’s stuck with two brothers who don’t appreciate his genius.

It’s Diego that grunts unhappily at him. “Not funny,” he says, and he’s probably not referring to their older-younger brother’s sex life. Which, fair. It’s not really something Klaus wants to think about too long anyway.

Randy is still vying for his attention, a steady stream of klausklausklaus that is incredibly distracting, and Klaus is just waiting for another spectator score from their father. His attention is, as always, divided, and just once he would like his brothers to get a clue.

He sighs heavily, theatrically, and throws himself back in his chair. “I’m not high,” he says patiently, because there is a time and a place for riling up his most murderous siblings and two in the morning in the Hargreeves’ kitchen probably isn’t it. Now, if they were out on the streets in Klaus’s domain, different story. Alas, he has to act at least semi-civilized nowadays, though thankfully politeness has never entered into this house. 

“Then why did Ben disappear at dinner?” Diego asks, and it suddenly makes more sense. 

Ben has been a touchy topic between them all since the day he died, and now that he’s back, in a manner of speaking, the others have been both cautious and ecstatic. Of course they’re peeved that Klaus’s perceived failings and incompetence cost them some oh-so-important dead brother bonding time. Still, they would have noticed if Klaus popped some pills with the potatoes. 

“I was distracted,” Klaus says delicately. “Put off my game. Took unawares. Caught with my panties - ”

“By what?” Five interrupts impatiently. What, did no one in the apocalypse teach the boy manners?

Here, Klaus hesitates.

He can see Reginald out of the corner of his eye, though he’s working very hard not to give the man an inch. He hasn’t deigned to grace them with more of his wisdom just yet, but the assessing look on his face is not promising, and it’s probably just a matter of time. Klaus has a few options here, but none of them are good ones.

Unfortunately, he’s tested Diego and Five’s patience too much and silence is no longer an acceptable answer. Fuck.

“I - ghosts,” he finally says, rushed. “There were ghosts, okay?”

As usual when ghosts come up, his brothers are patently underwhelmed. Five pulls back, out of Klaus’s face, disinterested, and Diego frowns in that familiar I-don’t-understand-and-think-you’re-stupid way. 

“What do you mean, ghosts? Like, other than Ben?” Diego asks.

Klaus opens his mouth, maybe to explain that ghosts aren’t anything new but the spirit of their asshole father back to ruin their lives again does tend to put a bit of a damper on the evening, but Five beats him to it.

“Why does it matter?” he asks, pissy. “Clearly Klaus still hasn’t been taking his powers seriously. If you actually tried to train them, you wouldn’t be startled by every grandma you see.”

Five has always been a bit of a dick. Mostly, Klaus can’t even hold it against him, since they’re literally all assholes and kindness is a foreign concept. Forty years as the only man left alive in the entire world really only adds to that lack of compassion, even if Klaus pictures the silence as a sort of heavenly retreat, and also the little psycho is still coming down from averting the apocalypse and achieving his lifetime goal. His life’s probably feeling a little aimless nowadays.

But Klaus isn’t exactly up to form right now, so he’s struggling to brush it off as he usually would. He’s grieving Dave, sober as a pre-teen, and fielding Reginald’s bullshit. Five’s words echo a little too closely to Reginald’s, and maybe it’s the sleep-deprivation but he’s feeling a little cornered, a little panicked.

Klaus can feel his pulse in his eyeballs.

“Exsqueeze me,” he manages with an impressively even voice. “I have been practicing, thank you. You can ask Ben!”

“Really?” Five says, raising an eyebrow. “Make him visible, then.”

Klaus blinks, mouth opening and closing. Well, fuck. 

“He’s - He can’t come to the phone right now. He’s probably watching Luther sleep like a stalker or something,” he says, helpless. It’s a losing battle and he knows it. Of all the times for Ben to go MIA.

Diego’s disappointed look isn’t unfamiliar, but it cuts deep.

“Look, bro, it’s okay,” Diego sighs, and Klaus can’t even appreciate the understanding tone. “This is all new, yeah? We don’t expect you to master it overnight. But we all need to train, and it could help. How about you join me tomorrow?”

“I do train,” Klaus protests, because, god, he can’t even count how many hours he’s spent trying desperately to summon Dave, or even to get the others to shut up. He’s gone without sleep night after night, worked for hours until Ben made him stop for a break. It’s the hardest he’s ever worked in his life, and of course no one believes him.

Klaus is giving it his all already, and he doesn’t think there’s anything left to give. But he can’t say that, and they won’t listen anyway, so he just closes his eyes and nods, ignoring Reginald’s approving noise beside him.

Chapter Text

Everything in Klaus wants to try summoning Dave.

It’s been like that for months, ever since he made Ben visible in that theatre, a deep-rooted desire to find Dave and never let him go. It stays with him all day every day, a constant pull on his thoughts, occupying some corner of his brain at any given time. It’s why he pushes himself to train all the time, even though it reminds him of unpleasant things and childhood fears, even though he’s spent decades carefully cultivating a many-faceted fuck no response to any and all things to do with his powers. Dave is the exception, has always been the exception.

The desire to see Dave overshadows almost everything else. Klaus would happily go back to the streets, personally visit every ex-fling and dealer with a sunny smile and bared throat if Little Girl Above told him that’s what it would take to have his soldier back. Don’t tell Five, but a dark gremlin in Klaus’s brain sometimes whispers that he might just be willing to risk the apocalypse for a certain curly-haired farm-hand from Wisconsin. 

The only other thing Klaus has ever wanted this much, like a physical burning under his skin, is the drugs. And he gave them up for one man and one man only. 

If not for Ben, Klaus would probably spend every waking moment looking for Dave.

He doesn’t want to say he’s discouraged. Admitting that feels like admitting defeat, like as soon as he acknowledges it out loud it means Dave’s really gone, lost to time and death and little girls who hate Klaus almost as much as he hates himself. So he doesn’t say it, not when his joints grow stiff and migraines bloom behind his eyes, not when he squeezes the dog tags so hard Dave’s name imprints into his palm just to get through the night, not when Ben looks at him soft and sad and not at all like the resentful bastard he should be. Klaus doesn’t say it and he doesn’t let Ben say it and he never, ever tells their siblings about any of it.

Most importantly, Klaus never stops trying.

With his nightmare clouding his brain, taking up space and settling in for the long haul, with the memory of Dave’s hand in his own, soft and warm and bloody, Klaus wants to summon Dave more than he wants to breathe. 

But he can’t. Because his siblings are with him, speaking and laughing and teasing, completely unaware of the man Dave had been and the mark he left on their brother, and Klaus is a discarded experiment once more under scrutiny, flayed open and hardly human.

Trying to summon Dave now feels like a disservice to his memory. Because Klaus wants him, wants him desperately, but right now he wants the comfort Dave provides more than he wants the man himself, and that isn’t right. When he sees Dave again - and he will see him again - it will be when he’s whole and real and able to touch his lover without shattering. 

And it won’t be with Reginald fucking Hargreeves breathing down their necks.

So for the family training session Klaus has been roped into, he works on banishing with a fervour completely alien to him. He’s pretty sure it unnerves his siblings just as much as it unnerves him, but they hardly matter right now. He’s doing this for them too, damn it, even if they’ll never know.

They haven’t all trained together since they were thirteen, and never with Vanya. It’s loud and boisterous and nostalgic like they’re scrawny adolescents in comic books again. Complete with their father’s observation, even, though Klaus is determined to keep that little tidbit to himself. It would do no good to give his siblings performance issues now. 

He’s doing his best to ignore them, both because he really is trying to train (like he’s Five at nine-years-old, god) and because he’s just the slightest bit bitter. Well, maybe more than slightly. He’s still burning a bit over the fact that Diego and Five basically manhandled him into joining this little family session and the fact that none of them have noticed that he’s actually trying here. They know he’s clean, kind of, but only Diego knows why, and even he only has the barest of info, and they all doubt it at least once a day. But it’s not like Klaus has been going out of his way to hide it. They even mentioned that he’s been odd lately, yet they choose to believe it’s because he’s relapsed and throwing everything away again.

Klaus doesn’t usually do resentment. It’s bad for his complexion and he doesn’t want wrinkles. But he’s feeling a little pissy and Ben isn’t here to take up the bitchy mantle instead, so Klaus has to pick up the slack. 

Besides, his siblings are just inconsiderate. Can’t they take their ghosts elsewhere for once? Check them at the door? Find a spirit-sitter for just one morning? Luther and Five want them to train, but it’s like they’re trying to set Klaus up for failure with all these distractions. Unbelievable.

“Banishment should be just as easy as summoning,” Reginald says imperiously.

For a second, Klaus seriously considers making his stupid father corporeal just to sock him across his stupid face. Teenage Four would have pissed himself laughing, and it might relieve some of the tension Klaus has been carrying in his shoulders. He misses Mikhail. Now that was a man with magic hands, able to loosen the tightest of knots. He also carried the best MDMA, but right now Klaus would be happy with just the massage. Well. Relatively speaking.

“Your powers are a gateway, Number Four, a door between the land of the living and the dead. If you can bring the dead through one way, you can push them out another.”

Klaus doesn’t appreciate these helpful little hints. It’s the kind of shit he imagines dear old Dad probably scribbled in that dumb notebook, bite-sized philosophies that sound smart but don’t actually mean anything. Dad probably patted himself on the back for that one while baby Number Four screamed himself hoarse in the mausoleum. Besides, Reginald has to know full well that Klaus is aiming all of his banishment efforts at him , and the fact that he’s so willing to “help” suggests that he feels no threat at all.

Bastard.

Unfortunately, Reginald seems to be right in this regard. As much as it pains Klaus to admit, he hasn’t been able to give his father so much as a funny turn, even though he’s had permanent weed-tingly-fingers for, like, half an hour now. They’re feeling a bit numb, actually. Like inflated condoms.

He can’t even feel pleased about the half a dozen transparent ghosts peering around in confusion. It looks like he managed to take away their voices, too, which is a trick he’d be outright ecstatic about if it wasn’t for Debbie Downer shadowing him. He thinks maybe he fully banished one ghost, because he vaguely remembers seeing a miserable teenager scowling at Allison amongst the throng who is no longer around, but maybe they just wandered off while Klaus was dealing with his insurmountable daddy issues. Come to think of it, maybe there’d never been a moody teen at all.

Ugh. He misses Ben. He doesn’t know where that fucker is but he better show his face soon. Klaus’s sanity demands it. 

(He better not be hiding from Reginald. It’s not like Klaus would blame him, but he would be kind of pissed. What happened to having each others’ backs, huh? Geez, you spitefully shoot up in front of a guy a few times and suddenly no one’s heard of loyalty. Coward.)

Klaus is tired. He hasn’t slept peacefully in weeks, months, the memory of withdrawals still sometimes sucker punches him at intervals, and his brain feels like putty, kneaded and wrung out from nonstop summoning and banishing and giving ghosts indigestion. He hasn’t felt quite this strained, power-wise, since he was eleven and still trying to follow Reginald’s grand plan. 

Also, he has a headache.

His siblings have left him in a secluded corner of the courtyard while they train their own powers, and he’s a little annoyed that they think the place they held funerals for both their brother and father is an appropriate place to force him to open casting calls for the dead. It isn’t stone walls and cobwebs, but it’s close. 

It does give them a handy little arena with plenty of targets for Diego and open space for Vanya, he supposes, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.

Shaking out his hands, trying to get proper warmth and feeling to return, Klaus squints at the others. They’re several feet away, swept up in the living world, and Klaus briefly wonders if this resentment is what made Vanya go nuclear.

To be fair, she looks happy enough now. Five has her set up with her violin (and who agreed to that? Klaus certainly hadn’t been consulted. But sure, give the bomb the detonator too, that’s fine, what does he know?) and she’s playing softly, a wrinkle in her brow. Klaus can’t really hear her but he trusts it’s something beautiful.

“Seven’s powers are untrained,” Reginald says, drifting closer. Klaus tilts his head back in defeat. “She has no control, no ability to temper her emotions. Left unchecked, she is a danger to the world.”

“And whose fault is that?” Klaus grumbles, but of course, he’s less than the dirt on Reggie’s ghostly boot, so he goes unheard, unacknowledged.

“Number Seven is far more dangerous than you can imagine,” Reginald says.

Klaus is tired. He doesn’t argue.

Across the courtyard, Vanya’s hand slips and the bow jars against the strings. The ensuing screech is accompanied by a change in air pressure that makes his ears ache and shatters several windows. Reginald looks gravely smug.

Klaus closes his eyes and thinks of Dave.

Chapter Text

Vanya’s timeout corner is, coincidentally, right at Klaus’s side and not a corner at all.

She and Allison probably think they’re sneaky, or that Klaus is entirely oblivious, or both, because it’s almost entirely casual how they find their way over to the spot he’s staked out for himself. He debates calling them out on it but decides against it, partly because teasing Vanya too far is like kicking an emotionally-repressed puppy and partly because Allison is not a woman to be trifled with. 

Mostly because the two of them have the least ghosts, comparatively speaking, and he’s dying for a distraction.

Klaus expects more commentary from Dad as his sisters approach, perhaps about Vanya’s risk level or Allison’s wasted potential, but for the first time in a while, it’s quiet. Almost eerily so.

(Well, there’s still a handful of vocal assholes around, but honestly, Klaus might just prefer an enthusiastic dead marching band over judgmental fathers. ‘Quiet’ is relative.)

Allison doesn’t hesitate to drop down beside him and lean into his side, enough to feel the warmth of her skin but not to wrinkle the delicate silk of her blouse. It’s nice, that lack of hesitation, because he knows without a doubt that it never would have happened a few weeks ago. It kind of reminds him of when they were kids, young enough that his breath didn’t smell like booze and Allison’s clothes didn’t smell of disgust and cigarette smoke, back when she would rest her head on his shoulder, slip her hand in his when the nights dragged on and the stars fanned out. 

He’s changed a lot since then, in many ways and many directions, and she has too, but he likes that they’ve started to find their way back to this simple coexistence.

Vanya’s a little more timid, which is painfully normal, but at least she’s willing to sit with them at all, which is a marked improvement from when they were actual kids.

“Well, isn’t this a cozy little sister sesh,” he says, throwing an arm loosely around Vanya’s shoulder. Pins and needles prickle across his skin as it comes into contact with whatever weird supernatural mojo she has cooking in her tiny form, but he’s used to losing feeling in his extremities and it makes her smile at him, so his circulation can go to hell.

“How’s your training going, Klaus?” Vanya asks. 

He waves the hand dangling off her shoulder dismissively. “Oh, same old, same old,” he sighs dramatically. “Cursed with the stale gossip of decades-gone fuddy-duddies and the tragic pleas of long-lost Romeos. Nothing interesting, really.”

Allison clears her throat a little roughly, grimacing a fraction but bravely soldiering on. Mom keeps trying to tell her to stop straining her voice, but Allison is stubborn and their brothers are knuckleheads who keep forgetting the fragments of sign language they try to learn, so it’s a losing battle. Luther and Vanya usually argue or guilt-trip her into limiting her speech to a few sentences at a time, and Allison makes sure to check in with Mom regularly, so she doesn’t seem to be doing too much damage, at least.

Klaus is one of the few among them who can actually keep up with the sign language, but Allison herself prefers trying to talk anyway, so what is a brother to do?

“Any luck conjuring?” she asks, and her voice doesn’t actually sound as painful as it did last week so hey, progress!

For a split second, he stupidly thinks she means Dave. His shoulders drop and his arm slithers away from Vanya, and suddenly his sisters are too close. But she doesn’t know about Dave, of course, doesn’t know about the sleepless nights, the nightmares, the so-much-worse good dreams where Dave is alive and Klaus is happy. She doesn’t know and he isn’t going to tell her, so he has to get his act together.

He hums idly, stretching out his legs and tilting back his head to avoid their eyes. “Sure,” he says. “Loads. I’m a real spirit phone, baby, who are you trying to reach?” He wiggles his eyebrows and bats his eyelashes, making both sisters roll their eyes. Double points.

“What about making them real? Like Ben?” Vanya asks, and that’s a whole other ballpark that he is firmly not interested in. He’s never really been a sports guy, more of a band kid without any of the instruments or spirit or skill, and he thinks he’s confusing his metaphors.

“Why would we want that?” he asks lightly. “Far too ugly for one room, trust me. Might give poor Luther nightmares, you know how sensitive the big guy is.”

Allison shoves his shoulder, sending him tipping into Vanya, and he considers sprawling across her lap like an overwhelmed Victorian hostess, but ultimately decides not to try his luck. She’s still faintly buzzing, and there is a not impossible chance she might send him careening across the courtyard at one wrong move.

“You should try,” Vanya suggests, and he’s glad he opted against claiming her as a fainting couch because her ‘nicest sibling’ privileges have officially been revoked. 

(Granted, calling the sister that literally almost brought about the destruction of mankind due to deeply harboured resentment towards the rest of them his “nicest sibling” is probably some kind of oxymoron anyway. He’s not sure who the nicest is. Ben’s a bitch, Luther’s an idiot, and Five’s a little psycho. Diego, maybe? God, their family’s a mess.)

“I don’t want to,” he says delicately, and no, he is not pouting. He’s being very mature about this, actually, because all he really wants to do is stick out his tongue and tell them to fuck off. 

Allison doesn’t say anything, but the disapproval practically oozes off her in waves. He feels like a little kid refusing to put away his toys, and that isn’t fair because they never even had toys growing up.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Diego says, because apparently the others have finished their own training and have decided to gang up on him. They’re all making their way over to the three of them on the grass, Diego with his stupid empty knife belt, Luther pulling his stupid trenchcoat back on, and Five with his stupid schoolboy shorts.

“You still haven’t been able to manifest Ben today,” Five says, the little shit. “Have you even tried?”

“Five,” Vanya says reproachfully, which immediately wins her nice status back. Klaus is a big fan of Vanya, actually, she’s his favourite, Ben can suck it. Well, if he were here, anyway.

Klaus really wants to tell Five where he can shove it, because he may not be as sweaty as Diego or as buzzy as Vanya, but he’s been training just as hard as any of them for the past few hours, even if they can’t tell. But it won’t get him anywhere, he knows, and besides, he is kind of curious where Ben’s gotten to.

“Benjamin hasn’t been around,” he says, unfolding himself from the ground. “But since you’re all so pushy, I can try to give him a call.”

They’re not as graciously appreciative of this as they should be, but Klaus lives a thankless life, really, and it’s all very martyr-like of him. Resigned to his fate, he takes a step away from them, because he’s never entirely sure where Ben’s ghostly ass will show up when he’s summoned and it’s only polite to make sure it doesn’t end up being inside one of their siblings. Talk about awkward family dinners.

“Do you, uh, need anything? Like one of those spirit boards Dad had?” Luther asks. 

Klaus stares at him blankly for a moment, just to watch him squirm. Slowly, he raises his hands, palms out, Hello, Goodbye . Luther flushes a little and shuffles his feet, which honestly serves him right. Klaus hasn’t tried to use a spirit board since he was eight, when Dad decided the more efficient way to reach the spirit world was to just chuck him in their tomb, save some time.

He sees Allison smile at him just as he closes his eyes, and it makes him feel oddly guilty, so he decides to ignore it, as well as the assortment of ghosties present and accounted for. They’re not who he’s looking for right now, so they can feel free to head out anytime now.

Summoning Ben is always a strange experience. He’s usually not too far away, so all Klaus really has to do is think about him really hard and pretend he can feel his brother’s deathly presence at his side, all set to start bitching and being all-around ungrateful. Sometimes, if Ben is being stubborn, Klaus has to kind of tug at the pit in his chest he’s come to associate with his powers, but that usually does the trick.

For some reason, it doesn’t happen as easily this time. Maybe it’s because he has an unwelcome audience, even more so than usual, or maybe it’s because he swears he can still feel Dad’s gaze on his neck even though he hasn’t seen the old man since his sisters distracted him. Maybe Ben is just in a mood and is extra resistant to being bossed around. Whatever the reason, Klaus really doesn’t want to give his siblings yet another reason to think he’s failed completely, so he tugs harder.

“Klaus?” 

Success.

Now to make the little twerp tangible. Klaus wrinkles his brow and settles in to wrangle Ben’s wayward form back into the land of real boys and poltergeists. It feels like trying to pull a bag of cats through a keyhole, way harder than he’s grown used to doing for family dinners, but Klaus has always been the stubborn one, and he refuses to keep being the failure, too.

“Klaus, how did you - I think you did something, I couldn’t - ”

Finally, Klaus feels the faint flicker that tells him he’s done the miraculous and brought Ben to corporeality.

“What the fuck ,” Diego says loudly, which is not the usual reaction to seeing their beloved brother.

“Oh, my God,” Vanya squeaks, which is a little much. Klaus knows he’s amazing and everything, and a little appreciation for once is nice, but this feels a little performative.

Opening his eyes reveals all his siblings, dead and alive, staring with absolute horror, which, rude. He opens his mouth to say something, annoyed, but gets distracted by Ben, who surges forward to grab his arm tight, which is an absolute no-no and goes against pretty much all of the ground rules they laid out those months ago.

“Klaus,” Ben says tightly. “They can see them. Not just me. You made them all - ”

Luther stumbles away from Margaret, looking a little like Klaus’s glamorous nausea powers have evolved to affect the living, too. 

Shit.

Klaus whirls around, seeing all the ghosties that have been roaming the courtyard now outlined in the familiar blue.

Shit. 

This is where Klaus’s mind falters to a stand-still, however, because he recognizes the five ghosts, has become reluctant bosom buddies with them, and they’re horrific, sure, if a little boring, but there had been six ghosts in the courtyard.

Making a handful of ghosts visible to his siblings is an idea that Ben has floated by him before. He’s never really given it much consideration, though, because the thought of that many ghosts being tangible, however briefly, is not enticing. When Vanya mentioned it, his gut reaction was fuck no , but honestly, he might have been a little tempted, if only because he’s sure it would get him out of training more, and also because the past few hours of straining to banish one asshole have made the remaining ghosties quieter and almost docile, which means his siblings’ little pea brains are less likely to explode if he did make them visible. However, Klaus lacks fine motor control, both in real life and with his powers. Making multiple ghosts visible means making all of them within radius visible, including Dad.

Dad, who had definitely been in the courtyard when they’d started training.

Dad, who Klaus can’t see right now, but whose presence is palpable, looming over them like a shadow.

Dad, who his siblings don’t know is hanging around, and the sight of whom may actually cause several mental breakdowns and, potentially, another apocalypse.

If Vanya ends the world (again) because of Klaus’s reckless stupidity, Five will never let him live it down. Or live at all.

“Klaus - what - ” Diego says, but doesn’t continue any further, possibly because Margaret starts keening, loud and shrill, and it seems to put him off his game.

Ben’s fingers are still digging into Klaus’s arm, and if he wakes up with a bruise tomorrow he’s going to be pissed.

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck, I didn’t mean - goddamnit, hang on, I’ll - ”

“Make them shut up!” Five yells, hands clamped to his ears, eyes big and wild. He keeps staring at Margaret with a hard look, even though Road Rash Randy has to be the bigger concern since he’s inches away from taking a swipe at the psycho’s guts.

Klaus’s heart feels like it’s about to explode, jack-hammering away in his chest, and his vision is tunnelling a little bit, air getting sucked out of his lungs, but now is really not the time for a panic attack so he has to fight it back. He squeezes his eyes shut and copies the others, covering his ears in a futile attempt to get just enough peace to think for a fucking moment.

The thrumming in his chest reminds him of Vanya’s weird static electricity, and that’s a good sign, maybe, because he just has to focus on suppressing it. He feels it expand, spreading from his heart to his fingertips, setting his whole body ablaze, and only Ben’s vice grip on his arm reminds him what a human body is supposed to feel like. 

The thrumming takes over everything, blocking out the sounds of the ghosts, the cursing of his siblings, the beating of his own heart, and Klaus can feel each ghost as it moves, like a fly on a spiderweb. He focuses on the static, gathers it all together, and squeezes.

Ben’s grip disappears from his arm.

Klaus sways where he stands, eyes falling open, feeling like a balloon that’s lost its tether, and the ghosts are still there. But they’re not blue anymore, and his siblings look relieved, and Ben is saying something that Klaus can’t hear.

He closes his eyes and falls.

Chapter Text

Ben is talking to him. 

It’s a familiar murmur, indistinct and soft, which means he isn’t really trying to get Klaus’s attention. Klaus had discovered years ago that Ben likes to fill the silence, hear his own voice, and he doesn’t know if it’s meant to drown out the other ghosts or just to satiate Ben’s boredom, but either way, it’s soothing in its normality. There’s been so little of that in their life lately.

Ben will probably want him to open his eyes and actually communicate, but that seems like an insurmountable challenge and Klaus is quite enjoying this peace, actually. 

He can hear crying somewhere in the room behind him, broken German in a raspy voice that tells him it’s probably that asshole with the goddamn frog in his throat that won’t shut up, and there are one or two other ghosts around, shuffling and moaning as desired. But it’s all distant, safely apart from him as Klaus focuses on Ben’s idle chatter, words still unknown, floating between consciousness and darkness.

Of course, since his life is rarely kind and he has an eyewitness account proving that the Higher Power genuinely dislikes him, this blissful brain break doesn’t last long.

Ben’s voice drops off and something subtle in the air changes, meaning someone else has entered the room. Klaus’s first thought is ghost , immediately followed by the worst thought of Dad , but Ben must have known he was awake the whole time because he quickly moves to reassure.

“It’s Diego,” he says softly from somewhere around Klaus’s ear. “Get up, Klaus. He’s not going to leave.”

With great reluctance, Klaus opens his eyes.

He’s vaguely surprised to find himself in his own room, safely tucked into his bed, under the covers and all. Luther must have carried him, since the last thing Klaus remembers is falling like a bag of rocks in the courtyard after a lovely little performance that he is carefully not thinking about. He can’t imagine the big guy actually tucking him in, though, so maybe Mom was here, or Allison was feeling particularly maternal. 

Warily, Klaus turns his attention to the doorway, where Diego stands rigid, all tense lines and shadows. Feeling like there are weights tied to his arms, Klaus waves.

Diego breaks from his statue impersonation and steps inside, thankfully into the soft light from the fairy lights that someone must have been kind enough to turn on. Klaus is guessing Vanya’s responsible for that one, though it’s amusing to picture Five thoughtfully arranging the string of lights that he’s called childish more than once before. The psycho vehemently denies being soft in any way, but Klaus knows better. He’s determined to prove it, too, he just has to get the old-timer to cooperate for once in his stubborn life.

Ben coughs lowly, snapping Klaus’s attention back to the brothers currently with him, which is good since Diego’s looking pretty murderous. Considering the state of his thoughts and the lack of sensation in most of his extremities, Klaus highly doubts he’ll be able to make Ben corporeal anytime soon, which might make things particularly awkward if Ben has to sit back and watch on helplessly as Diego finally murders Klaus. He will quite literally never live it down. 

“Klaus,” Diego says in a carefully measured voice, which is so unlike him that Klaus immediately knows he must have been coached. “You’re awake. Good.”

Diego does not sound pleased. Klaus debates whether to feel offended or not, but ultimately decides he’s too tired for that right now. Besides, the sooner Diego leaves, the sooner Klaus has to confront what led to this point, and he will happily put that off for as long as Ben will let him.

“You know I need my beauty sleep,” Klaus says, which, as far as avoiding fights goes, might not be the best path. Diego’s jaw tightens.

“That wasn’t sleeping, Klaus,” he says, still in that stilted, foreign voice. “You passed out.”

Klaus waves a hand, aiming for careless and achieving more of a drunken wobble. “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” he says breezily, ignoring Ben’s eye roll.

It’s almost a relief to see Diego’s anger as his fragile mask cracks because it assures Klaus that he hasn’t woken up in some alternate universe where any of his siblings are capable of handling their emotions like mature adults. Now that would be awkward.

“Did you hear me?” Diego growls. “You passed out . Not to mention the whole - ghost thing.” For a moment, he wavers, looking queasy. Klaus is vividly reminded of the German dude and can’t help glancing to the corner, where the guy is watching the proceedings with a vaguely malevolent curiosity. At least he isn’t coughing. 

Abruptly, Diego changes tracks, perhaps deciding that the ‘ghost thing’ is so far outside his comfort zone that he’s willing to abandon it entirely. Klaus sympathizes. “When was the last time you ate, dipshit?” Diego asks in righteous fury.

Klaus squints at him for a moment. Tilts his head to the left, then to the right. Opens his mouth, closes it. Gives up and turns to Ben.

Ben raises an eyebrow. “I haven’t been around, Klaus. You banished me,” he says, which is news to Klaus and sends him reeling, but Diego interrupts before he can recover or explore that little claim any further.

“You’ve been missing meals, barely eating at dinner. You look like you haven’t slept in weeks, and you’ve been so damn jumpy lately. Now you - you do that , with the ghosts, and you’ve been unconscious for hours, man, we’ve had Mom look you over three times - ”

“Aw, all that for little old me?” Klaus says, only half paying attention. He’s staring at Ben, who’s looking back coolly, and nothing is making sense. His thoughts feel slow and incomplete, like he’s missing something.

“All that because we weren’t sure if you were going to wake up and conjure all the ghosts again,” says a new voice, sharp and pissy. Klaus must be distracted if he missed Five’s little zappy noise.

“Five,” Diego grumbles unhappily, scowling.

“Shut up, Diego,” Five says. “You were supposed to retrieve me immediately when he woke up, not waste time chatting .”

“ He is right here,” Klaus puts in, because it’s quite rude to exclude him from the conversation in his own damn bedroom. 

Five turns to him sharply, expression dark enough that Klaus regrets drawing attention. Diego sags in the doorway, looking defeated. 

“Diego,” Five says tightly, not taking his eyes off Klaus. Klaus squirms, trying to earn some sympathy off Ben and getting nothing. “Go away.”

Diego bristles. “Hey,” he says. “No way. I was here first, Five, and I want to know - ”

“I don’t care what you want,” Five cuts in. “ Go. Away. ”

There is no room for argument in Five’s tone. For a guy in schoolboy shorts, he can be very commanding.

Diego frowns and looks at Klaus, searching his face for something. Klaus doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but he shrugs, spreading his hands, and Diego seems to take that as acquiescence. 

“You’re coming downstairs when you’re done up here,” he says, and it’s not a suggestion. He glares at Five again, who doesn’t even turn to acknowledge him, and reluctantly leaves. Interesting.

“So,” Klaus says, just to break the tension, because Five is just silently radiating pent-up energy and malcontent. “Lovely weather.”

“Stop talking,” Five says immediately, which, so rude. “And just listen to me, asshole. That little stunt you pulled in the courtyard is the exact reason I said you had to train - why we all have to train. I’ve been telling you for weeks now that you need to join the rest of us, with Vanya, and you’ve ignored me. The others said to leave you because your powers have always been useless, but we saw what you were capable of at the theatre. I should have realized the danger then, and certainly should have realized when you started consistently manifesting Ben - ”

“Okay, hang on,” Klaus interrupts, feeling a little pissy himself. “There’s no danger , alright, it’s fine, I’m fine. I have been training, I’ve gotten better at conjuring - goodie for me - you just haven’t bothered to ask - ”

“Ingrid Svensson,” Five says suddenly, eyes burning. It’s random enough to make Klaus pause in his own defence. 

“Excuse me?”

Five stalks closer to the bed, looking eerily similar enough to that murderous Cha-Cha that Klaus can’t help but shrink back a bit. Five doesn’t seem to notice, but Ben does.

“Ingrid Svensson,” Five repeats, which is just as informative as the first time, i.e. not at all. “One of my targets. I was assigned to a mission in 1938 that required Ingrid’s death. It was years ago, relative to my personal timeline, but I remember her face. She was in the courtyard.”

Klaus blinks. “Ah,” he says as he tries to think back. There had been a few ghosts, but Klaus had been a bit distracted by trying to get rid of them and hadn’t paid much attention to which ones his siblings found particularly interesting. Although -- 

“Hang on, you mean Margaret ?” Klaus asks, things clicking together. Ben looks surprised too, turning to Five with an appraising eye. “You’re the reason her insides are on the outside?”

Five frowns. “Margaret,” he repeats, tactfully sliding past the thinly veiled accusation.

Klaus waves a hand dismissively. “She never told me her name,” he explains. “Not much of a conversationalist. It got tiring referring to her as ‘the disembowelled one’ all the time, and kind of confusing when more of them were around. Hang on, just how many people have you rudely killed like that? It’s not a fun way to die, trust me. They never stop complaining.”

Five opens his mouth, but Klaus doesn’t let him speak, suddenly overcome with another thought. “Oh, my God, Five, did you kill German dude too? Are you the Kotzbrocken he’s always bitching about?”

The look on Five’s face suggests that, yes, he is in fact the reason German dude is around to chew at Klaus’s ear, but he doesn’t offer any other information. This is a shame, Klaus thinks, because it would be nice to have a name for the guy. Maybe he’ll let Ben choose one later.

“How many of my past - targets,” Five’s mouth twists but he soldiers on, “do you see? How many of them are hanging around?”

Klaus feels incredibly awkward. This was never a conversation he wanted to have with any of his siblings, least of all the one with the biggest entourage. “Um,” he says. “Ah. Well.”

This is, apparently, enough of an answer. Five’s face darkens and he turns away, tucking his hands deep into his pockets. He wanders over to the window and stares out, shoulders bunched up tight under his uniform blazer. Klaus desperately scrambles to find something to say.

(Sorry your legions of victims are tied to you forever? It’s okay, they blend right in with the rest of the riff-raff? Congrats on the high score?)

Ben’s stern gaze keeps Klaus’s mouth shut.

“I didn’t realize,” Five says eventually, stiffly. “Clearly I should have, but I - Well, doesn’t matter now. I’m sorry, Klaus.”

The words sound entirely alien coming from Five’s mouth, and just as alien for Klaus to hear. The apology hangs between them, entirely too large and heavy for the room, and Five makes no move to take it back or reduce its weight. Klaus struggles to push it away.

“Thanks, buddy,” he says awkwardly, steadfastly ignoring the agitated exasperation coming off of Ben in waves.

“But don’t you get it,” Five says, heated again. “This is even more reason you have to learn control of your powers. It’s dangerous, you’re dangerous. You have to learn to control them before you bring about another apocalypse. We only just stopped Vanya from ending the world, I won’t let you be next.”

Klaus’s hackles are immediately raised. Usually, he’s pretty good at brushing past accusations and implications, because they’ve sustained him his whole life, but he’s tired and touchy and freaked the fuck out and no way is Five going to sit there and tell him he’s the reason the world dies.

“I am not like Vanya,” Klaus hisses. “Things got a little out of hand today, but that isn’t - it’s not - I am not going to cause the fucking apocalypse, Five.”

“You unknowingly summoned half a dozen ghosts without trying,” Five says forcefully, full steam ahead. His remorse is no longer to be seen. “What if next time it’s more than that? Ten ghosts, twenty, fifty, all tangible and angry, out of your control? Or,” he pauses, wrestles with something. “Or maybe next time isn’t an accident. Something happens, something you don’t talk to us about - you’ve been acting weird, secretive, I know there’s something - and you decide to take it out on us, on the world. Like Vanya.”

“Fuck you,” Klaus seethes. “I wouldn’t.”

(But just this morning didn’t he say he would do anything for Dave? Even risk the world? He imagines never seeing Dave again, imagines finally getting the confirmation that his soldier is gone forever, that he doesn’t want to be here, that he can’t be, that Klaus can never see him again. That the Little Girl will never let him see Dave, never let him finally die. That he’s stuck with Daddy Dearest instead of the love of his life. He imagines an eternity of ghosts and nightmares and never getting to hold Dave’s hand, never hearing his laugh again. He imagines how easy it would be to feel all that anger and grief and fear and let it swallow him, let it swallow everything.)

“I can’t take that chance,” Five says, and there’s something hard in his voice. His eyes are distant. “I can’t, Klaus.”

Klaus shivers. Pictures the similar conviction on Luther’s face as he shut Vanya in that cage. Pictures the heavy door of the mausoleum. Imagines his siblings’ apologetic faces. It’s for the best, Four. It’s too dangerous. It sounds like Dad.

“I’m not the only dangerous one,” he says, and only Ben notices the wobble in his voice. Ben’s been watching the two of them like an anxious sports spectator, bouncing from one brother to the other with an uneasy silence. He shuffles closer to Klaus, reassuring, but Klaus is too far gone. 

Five nods. “I know. We all are. That’s why we all have to train. But you’re the vulnerable one, the one with new, untrained powers that have already slipped out of your control once.”

The weak one, Klaus thinks. Always the weak one.

“Get out,” he says.

“Klaus,” Five says, impatient. “Listen to me, you idiot - ”

“Get out of my room, Five,” Klaus repeats, lowly, coolly. His hands are shaking. Ants are marching up his arms. “Take your ghosts with you.”

That stills the mutinous look on his brother’s face. Five’s back straightens, expression falling carefully neutral, and he nods sharply. He hovers for a split second, looking like he wants to say something more, but then thinks better of it. He snaps away without bothering to use the door.

Klaus stares at the now empty space where Five had stood and reminds himself how to breathe. The ghosts continue to talk.

Chapter Text

After several minutes, Klaus finally feels mostly human again and his breaths come a little easier. Instead of savouring it, however, he swings to the only brother he feels reasonably equipped to face right now.

“You,” he says, jabbing a harsh finger in Ben’s direction. “Are in so much trouble, mister.”

Ben has the absolute gall to look completely innocent, as if he has no idea what Klaus could mean.

“Where have you been?” Klaus seethes, altogether too disoriented from Five’s latest accusations to bother with being polite or reasonable. “It’s been a circus here, and the last I saw you, you didn’t say anything about taking a vacation.”

Ben narrows his eyes. “Klaus,” he says slowly, as if testing something. “You mean it wasn’t intentional? You banished me. Or, at least, I think that’s what it was,” he adds fairly.

Klaus blinks at him, hoping his brain will kick in any time now to process that in any meaningful way. No dice.

“No, I didn’t,” he says. “I can’t banish ghosts, Ben, we know this. It’s been one of the bigger pains in my ass, actually – or it was, before Daddy Douche popped up for a weekend visit and Five decided to make me his new apocalypse trigger.”

“You did,” Ben insists. “You were asleep, and I was trying to keep most of the ghosts away, but you know how they are. It got really crowded and Dad – ” For a split second, Ben wavers, something flickering behind his eyes, but he composes himself quickly. “I think you must have – I don’t know, heard him, maybe? You were still asleep, but your hands started glowing again, except it didn’t feel like it usually does when you manifest me. Suddenly everything was just… blue, and far away. Like you were pushing us somewhere. I managed to hold on, I think, but everything was kind of fuzzy for a while. Sometimes I could hear you, but I couldn’t get through until you summoned me in the courtyard.”

Klaus shakes his head, but less in denial and more in disbelief. “No-o,” he says again. Pauses, horribly quiet. Then, “Oh, Christ on a cracker. I really banished you?”

Ben nods mutely.

Klaus draws in an unsteady breath. “Fuck,” he says. “That’s not – Ben, I have no idea how I did it. I wasn’t even awake! I just – did that, in my sleep?”

“At least we know your training’s working,” Ben inputs, entirely unhelpfully.

This, unfortunately, unleashes a whole new tidal wave of panic. Klaus almost doubles over from the force of it, stopped only by the fact it would likely send him tumbling out of bed. He wheezes. “Ben,” he says faintly. “That means – they’re getting stronger. My powers. In my sleep. If I can banish, then that means – what if I manifest them? In the courtyard, that was an accident; I was trying to focus on you, but it got out of hand, and I didn’t even notice. Ben. Benny. What if I do that in my sleep?”

“You won’t,” Ben is quick to assure, but he sounds twice as uncertain as is healthy for Klaus’s mental health. “Klaus, it’s okay.”

It isn’t, though, it isn’t. It’s so far from okay. Klaus is still so new to his powers, even after thirty years; he’s decades behind his siblings, all except Vanya, because he’s done everything he can to stifle and smother the ghosts under a steady stream of chemicals since he was a teenager. He has no idea what he’s doing, no idea how much he can do or how to control it, and he thought he could handle it, thought he could push through and force himself to adjust, just so long as he had the promise of Dave on the other side of it all.

But he can’t, he can’t control it, and the fear and disgust that’s been lingering on the edges ever since he first sat down to purposely stretch the boundaries of his powers are larger than ever, threatening to overwhelm him.

Dad warned him, he thinks distantly. Back in that barbershop. Only scratched the surface, that’s what he said. But Klaus never thought – not like this. Five can’t be right. He can’t be.

Ben is talking again, but Klaus is too busy to listen, too far gone, spiraling ever further in a dizzying freefall. His powers are growing, and it’s his own fault because he chose to train them, chose to throw himself into it headfirst without stopping for a moment just to think, distracted by the memory of blue eyes and the best damn smile Klaus has ever seen and horrifically bright red staining his hands.

Klaus had every warning in the world. Dad, talking about his potential, the way he poisoned himself (isn’t that better, though? Isn’t it better to let himself rot from the inside out rather than lose control completely until he proves Five right, until he finishes what Vanya started?). Hell, they all saw what happened to Vanya after years of suppressing her powers, and he actually chose to do that to himself. They stopped her from going nuclear, barely, but that doesn’t mean they can stop him in time. But they’ll try, of course they’ll try, and the solution will be obvious, reasonable, even. Luther has already locked away one sibling out of fear and caution, and the basement cell is destroyed (he can still see Seven behind the glass, crying and begging for help, nails scrabbling – ), so the easiest place to keep him, the logical choice, would be the mausoleum –

“Klaus!”

He flinches away from the sharp voice before he fully remembers where he is. Slowly it trickles back, the sight of Ben anxiously hovering going a long way to untangle the thorny web he’s fallen into. Klaus has to take a minute before he can uncurl himself from the ball he’s scrunched himself into.

“It’s going to be okay,” Ben says firmly, and to his credit, he lies very convincingly. “But you have to talk to the others. They can help.”

Help, Klaus knows, is a subjective term. Dad almost definitely thought he was helping when he stole Seven’s powers, when he threw Four to his worst fears. Who, exactly, it was helping is largely up for debate, but Dad would have thought it was the right thing, the best choice.

Klaus doesn’t know what his siblings’ help will look like for him. With Vanya, they’ve banded together, however reluctantly, to acclimatize to themselves and each other. They make sure there’s always someone for Vanya to turn to if her powers get too much, and they’ve even implemented tentative family practices in the hopes of easing some of that resentment she still has burning away, and Little Girl help them, it’s working. But that’s help for Vanya. Help for Klaus, for Number Four, for the unreliable one, the unstable one, the weak and vulnerable one – what will that look like? Stone walls?

“Think I’ll pass on the family care and share,” Klaus says. His voice sounds raspy, unfamiliar. “But thanks for the offer.”

“We need to talk about this,” Ben insists in a warning tone. “All of us. You made a bunch of ghosts real, Klaus, that’s a big deal.”

“Nope,” Klaus says, and it takes everything he has to make himself sound cheery. “No, nein, nyet.” He shoves the blankets away from him, ignoring the way his hands shake, and shuffles to the end of the bed.

Ben looks dangerously mutinous, so Klaus hastens to interrupt whatever reprimand his brother is formulating.

“Hey, if I can banish the big bad ghosties now, do you think we can get Tuberculosis over there to fuck off?” He waves a hand emphatically towards German dude, who graces him with an impressive stink-eye. “Get some practice in before I send Dad back to lecture the little girl.”

Ben’s eyebrows draw in tight over his eyes, confused, but Klaus wasn’t actually looking for a response anyway, because he has no intention of letting Ben speak freely until he gets the memo that some things are better left undisturbed.

(Klaus knows he’s on a tight time limit, here. He has very few options, and one of the most appealing and obviously helpful is to immediately hit the pavement and slide back into familiar habits. At this point it wouldn’t even be much of a moral struggle. It’s no secret that 90% of Klaus’s drive to stay sober has been the promise of Dave, but – it’s been so long. And at this rate, there’s every chance his powers will eat him alive before he ever sees his soldier again. Wouldn’t it better if he just gave in? Easier, certainly. He’ll be saving his siblings from the risk of him raising an army of undead, too, and that just seems polite. They can’t say he never does anything for them when he’s willing to take one for the team so that they don’t have to hold a gun to his head next.)

(But, fuck, maybe Klaus has grown in the past few weeks – months, maybe, if he counts Vietnam, and he always counts Vietnam – because he doesn’t know if he wants to fall back into the drugs. He still has cravings like nobody’s business, and sometimes the thought of just one more hit threatens to bring him to his knees, but he’s been slowly fumbling his way through learning who he can be without the drugs, and he – hasn’t hated it. There are people counting on him now, kind of. Ben needs him to be with their family, and the others are slowly opening up again, and, always, DaveDaveDave. Klaus doesn’t know if he’s willing to give that up. He’s just – he doesn’t know what to do. What if Dad sticks around forever? What if he can’t control his powers? What if – )

Ben trails behind him, thankfully quiet, if deafening in his disapproval, as Klaus picks his way out of his room. He hovers in the hallway, straining to hear signs of his siblings, but it’s a lost cause. There’s a throng of ghosts around him, an exclusive party, and Klaus can’t hear a thing over their complaining. He debates turning around and going out the window, but he still feels shaky enough that it’s not unlikely that he’ll slip and fall. Which, while not entirely unappealing a thought, probably won’t do any good, since Klaus really doesn’t want to add a lecture from the Little Girl on top of everything else.

As he hits the stairs, Klaus wonders if there’s any way he can bypass the confrontation and interrogation his siblings are doubtlessly planning. Considering his luck lately, not to mention the universe's apparent opinion of him, he reluctantly comes to the conclusion that the odds are not in his favour. When are they ever?

Chapter Text

As soon as Klaus hits the stairs, all bets are off. He has Ben at his side and a growing troop at his back, and the volume is starting to reach critical levels.

He can’t help but spare a longing glance for the front door, blessedly unguarded. He’d be working against a ruthless agent with teleportation abilities and a vigilante with intimate knowledge of city streets and countless weaselly informants, but he’s faced worse odds. Klaus knows this city like the back of his hand, has cultivated the ability to disappear over the years. If he can evade multiple drug lords, the police, and at least a dozen slighted flings without so much as a chip in his nail polish, he can probably keep out of his brothers’ clutches long enough to procure a gram of something, surely.

Ben would doubtlessly present an annoying and persistent problem, but it’s not like they haven’t been down this road before. Disappointment is old hat, as familiar as any high.

Klaus makes it to the bottom of the stairs without incident, which is impressive considering how shaky his legs are and how often he jerks away from adventurous ghosties. He carefully does not look towards the front door. This turns out to be remarkably easy because, amazingly, whatever fun argument that’s occurring in the sitting room is lively enough to be heard over the ghosts, presenting a handy distraction.

Ben and Klaus hover quietly just out of sight of the occupants in the room. It’s kind of hard to focus, what with the ghosts getting more and more insistent, but Klaus has a good idea of what, exactly, his siblings are oh-so-loudly discussing, and he has a vested interest in hearing it, if only to make sure no one’s making plans to flip through Dad’s old instruction manuals on rearing mediums.

“—his face, Five. He wasn’t doing it on purpose!”

“That’s the problem, it was entirely by accident, he wasn’t even trying—”

“He said he’s been practicing, maybe—”

“So, wait, do we have to worry about this happening every time he makes Ben visible?”

“—What do we do if he can’t control it?”

And Klaus knows where that question will lead, knows before it happens that Five is going to open his mouth and draw the obvious conclusion, can see the look on Luther’s face as it clicks, the decision made.

(And it’s not that Klaus doesn’t see the logic. He is out of control. He thought he had a handle on things, but as usual, Four’s failed when it comes to his powers, and he knows the safest option is – containment. Maybe he’ll still make the ghosts real behind the stone walls, but at least he’ll be away from his siblings, from the living, so it’ll only be him for the ghosts to see and touch and torment, Dad and the usual hordes and, god, the mausoleum ghosts, ancient and rabid and furious. At least his siblings won’t be there.)

(It’s inevitable anyway. Mausoleums are where you put dead things, and it’s been patiently waiting for Number Four to return for years.)

Klaus knows what the answer will be, and he respects it even as it terrifies him, but he thinks if he hears it out loud there won’t be any ghost in the world, not Ben or Dad or Dave, that will prevent him from turning around and crashing headlong into every drug he can get his hands on before his siblings catch him. If he’s lucky, he’ll get a few minutes to scream some choice words at the Little Girl before she condemns him.

So, he doesn’t let them say it.

“Oh, goodie, are we late for the family meeting?” he asks, as brightly as he can manage, striding into the room. He walks through two particularly gruesome ghosts as he does so and is inordinately pleased when he manages to keep from flinching. “Sorry, you know how Ben primps.”

The hasty silence that falls over the assembled gossipers would be satisfying if it weren’t for the uneasy (frightened?) looks they swing his way.

Then Five, stubborn and terrifying and capable of killing anyone in this room in the blink of an eye, takes a deliberate step away from Klaus. A tiny part of Klaus’s brain can’t help but panic, thinking Five’s going for some sort of weapon, this is it, but the rest of Klaus’s admittedly addled swiss-cheese brain manages to shove that thought down in time for Five to—

Zap away.

(Thankfully, the gruesome twins go with him.)

Klaus blinks. “Uh,” he says, laughing a little nervously. “What’s up with short stack?”

“He thinks—Well, we all think you need help training your powers,” Luther says. A few months ago, this would have been an order, a judgement. Now Number One sounds awkward and sheepish, and he doesn’t meet Klaus’s eyes. Oh, how the mighty fall when their track record includes kickstarting the apocalypse by imprisoning a sister asking for help.

“No thank you,” Klaus says pleasantly. “Is that all? Only, Ben and I were thinking of an evening stroll. Fresh air, good for the soul, you know.”

“This is serious, Klaus,” Luther says, and he’s frowning now. “How long have you known your powers are getting stronger? Is this the first time you’ve—done that?”

The thing is, Luther really does regret how he handled the whole Vanya-and-her-powers-almost-killing-Allison thing. Klaus knows he does, because for the first few weeks, he moped endlessly, and quailed easily every time one of them told him to back off when it came to teaching Vanya and forgiving Vanya and trying to get Vanya to forgive them. Luther is desperately trying to be better than he was, to stop being like Dad, but Klaus still hears it anyway.

Sure, he regrets locking Vanya up because it had a rather messy outcome, but Klaus doesn’t for one second believe that will stop him from doing it again, at least to a sibling with a lesser chance of blowing up their prison and captors.

“I’ve got it under control,” Klaus lies easily.

“No, you don’t,” Ben hisses, outraged.

“No, you don’t,” Diego says, stubborn.

Klaus scowls.

“Fine,” he says. “There may have been a few hiccups. The occasional unintended visitor. But nothing like what happened in the courtyard, that was—” Abruptly, Klaus decides there are no words to describe what, exactly, that was. “It’s fine.”

“Fine?” Diego repeats incredulously. “You can’t be—”

Vanya, who has thus far stayed quiet and frowny beside Allison, interrupts Diego’s promising tirade. Her forehead is all wrinkled like she’s thinking deeply, and unlike their brothers, she doesn’t seem particularly angry at the moment, which is nice.

“Those ghosts, outside,” she says slowly. “Is that normal? Not making them real, I know, but are they always… like that?”

“Like what?” Klaus asks. “Dead?”

For some reason, this makes Vanya frown harder.

“Loud,” Allison says, voice rougher than it should be. She must have been an enthusiastic member of the earlier debate. “They were so loud, Klaus, and they looked… There were so many of them.”

Klaus doesn’t have the heart to tell her that no, there weren’t. Five ghosts is practically an empty house.

“I didn’t know they came off the set of a zombie flick,” Diego says, a little stiffly. “And they kept yelling, saying your name.”

Helplessly, Klaus spreads out his arms and shrugs. “What can I say, they’re my adoring fans.” He can’t really hear Ben anymore, attention on hearing his living siblings and blocking out the ghostly barrage, but he’s pretty sure he has to be reading him some kind of riot act for this performance. Klaus sees many lectures in his future.

“You never said anything,” Diego continues, ignoring him. “You never told us they were like that.”

“I know you don’t like to talk about them,” Allison adds. “But this… Klaus, I had no idea.” She looks genuinely upset about it, too, and Klaus has no idea what to do with that.

“You can still see them,” Vanya says. The others freeze, as if this thought hasn’t occurred to them, which is so predictable it’s almost laughable. “They’re not corporeal right now, but you can still see them.” It’s not a question.

“Well, not the same ones,” Klaus says reluctantly. “There’s a few regulars that hang around, but it’s a diverse crowd.”

“They’re here?” Luther blurts, looking around as if expecting Casper to jump out at him.

Klaus wants to roll his eyes, but something stops him. Luther really does look uneasy and surprised, and a glance at the others yields similar results. Diego’s so tense he could be made of stone, Allison has drawn in on herself, looking at Klaus with something like (regret? defeat? horror?), and Vanya looks deeply sad.

It clicks suddenly, so obvious that Klaus could kick himself.

His siblings are scared.

They’ve never seen the ghosts before, not like that. They’ve only ever seen Ben, familiar and whole and sane. They’ve never seen the bloodied corpses, never heard the way they scream, like they’re trapped in the agonizing moment of their death and want everyone around to hear it.

Fuck, it’s obvious, Klaus should have realized immediately. He hates the ghosts, is terrified of them for his own reasons, but he’s largely desensitized to the more general horror of their being. He’s seen them around since he was tiny, since before he can barely remember. That fear he felt when he was a child, waking from one nightmare into another, that’s what his siblings are feeling now.

And he’s the cause of it, the one who can bring back what they’re so scared of at the drop of a hat.

Christ, Klaus knows that fear, knows it better than almost anything else. Even the smallest reminder of the mausoleum and the ghosts trapped there is enough to send him spiralling, terror so acute he’d rather eviscerate himself entirely than risk going back there.

“Tell them the rest,” a voice says, and it’s Ben, of course, and suddenly Klaus hears the other ghosts too, the ones he’s been trying to ignore, the ones his siblings are so afraid of, the ones he made his siblings scared of.

It’s deafening and awful, and Klaus can see his siblings, oblivious to it all but growing concerned the longer he stares at them in dumb silence.

What if he does it again? What if he makes them real again, makes them afraid, makes them hear and see what he does?

Distantly, Klaus hears Ben urging him to tell the others about the banishing, about Dad, about Dave. But Klaus can’tcan’tcan’t, he sees the mausoleum everywhere, sees the ghosts that reside there, feels the fear he saw on his siblings' faces, and he can’t go there again, Jesus Christ he can’t risk making them real, the mausoleum ghosts, they really will tear him apart with their nails and their teeth and their hatred.

It’ll happen again, he thinks. He’s out of control, he said it himself, and everyone knows it. He’ll make the ghosts real again, maybe he’ll make Dad real, and his siblings will see and they’ll be scared and they’ll be oh-so-sorry but they’ll have to do it, they’ll have to stop him, shove him back, make him learn how to control it through trial by fire or let the mausoleum ghosts shred him to pieces, either way, the problem will be solved—

Klaus has to fix it. He has to learn how to banish them, once and for all before it’s too late, and he has to keep away from his siblings until then. He needs to get rid of Dad, the most obvious detonator for any and all future apocalypses, and then he has to get a firm lid on his powers. Even if that means locking them down and never stretching his reach again. Even if that means he stops learning how to summon them.

Even if that means losing Dave, completely.

Chapter Text

Klaus doesn’t sleep anymore.

Granted, his sleep schedule has been less than stellar for years, and even more so these last few months; once he settled in one place for long enough, the ghosts came a-calling and just never stopped. It’s one of the things he misses from his days on the streets—yeah, finding food and shelter could get tricky, but at least when he was constantly on the move the ghosts didn’t accumulate like this. Plus, the drugs. The drugs helped.

They’d probably help now, too, if anyone were willing to explore that avenue.

Fuck, life was so much easier when he didn’t care about staying sober for anyone.

Anyway, his terrible sleep habits have actually gotten worse, these past few days. Between stretching himself thinner than ever with banishing and summoning, Dad’s hellish return, and this lovely new revelation that Klaus’s powers are stronger than his flimsy control can handle, Klaus isn’t sure he could sleep even if he were willing to try, which—well, he isn’t. His powers have already gotten away from him once while unconscious, and led to shoving Ben into the void, the great beyond, and who’s to say Klaus will be able to fix that a second time?

(Third time? For the first time, Klaus is thinking about the funeral, about the horrible absence that ached and ached until he… filled it. His first summoning, and he didn’t know what he was doing then, either.)

The solution, he’s determined, is to learn control over his powers. Easy-peasy. He just has to achieve the one thing he’s consistently failed at since he was a wee babe. And, hey, the good news in all of this is that he has a direct line to the man himself, Reginald Hargreeves, the self-fashioned expert of all the wacky abilities his adopted children manifested. If anyone can drill control into Number Four, it’s dear old Dad.

“This is the stupidest idea you’ve ever had,” Ben says flatly.

“Fuck you,” Klaus says, perfectly pleasant.

“You’d rather go to Dad than ask any of our siblings for help. Seriously?”

See, on paper, Klaus knows this sounds completely insane. He hates Dad, Dad hates him, happy family all around, whatever. But Klaus has a secret, an unsaid incentive to turn to Dad before anyone else, and he knows Ben has to know what it is, but neither of them are saying it.

(All roads lead back to the mausoleum. It’s like he never left.)

(Because Dad was always a huge fan of the mausoleum, threw him in and locked the door every chance he got, but he’s deaddeaddead now. Klaus has no idea what he’s doing but he knows that’s ghosts are, well, his thing. Dad can’t throw him in there anymore, no matter how reasonable he makes his argument.

His siblings, alive and entirely out of his control, are another story.)

“Benny,” Klaus says, instead of saying any of that. Ben knows it all anyway. “You saw their poor little faces after the courtyard. I can’t ask them to help with this. What if I slip again?”

“Because it’s so much better to risk that happening when you’re alone,” Ben says. It’s his patented disapproving voice, the full-force one he usually reserves for when Klaus has a needle in his hand. It’s almost nostalgic.

“Oh, but Benerino, I’m not alone. You’re here.” Klaus tries to smile his sweetest smile, batting his eyelashes for good measure. He doesn’t know how successful it is, considering his eyes are stinging so bad his eyelids feel like sandpaper. God, he misses sleep.

Bright side, he can’t see the impressive glower he’s sure Ben is aiming his way. Look at him, being optimistic and everything. This is what they call mental health, he’s pretty sure. Admittedly, he usually tuned out the myriad of counsellors at the various rehabs he’s frequented when they started spouting that stuff because it never really seemed applicable. What does his mental health matter when the ghosts scream regardless?

(He told that to one therapist and promptly got his stay extended by two weeks. He can, actually, learn from his mistakes.)

“You know Five wants to help,” Ben continues, because he’s a stubborn bastard and loves to make Klaus pay for his many sins. “He figured out how to train Vanya.”

“Goodie for Vanya! In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not her—taller and prettier, you know.”

Ben growls. “They know you’re avoiding them.”

“Mm, not making it a secret. I could be more obvious, though, if you think that’ll help. Big sign on the door, maybe. Caution tape, hazard symbols.”

“You have to leave your room sometime. It’s been days, Klaus, and you have to eat at some point. Diego’s told Mom not to bring dinner to your door anymore.”

This is frustrating, though not entirely unexpected. Oh, well, if their siblings think they can force him out through starvation, they have another thing coming.

“Ben, I appreciate your concern for my dietary habits, but I’m afraid I’m terribly busy at the moment. If you’re not going to give me any helpful tips with your deathly wisdom, kindly buzz off.”

Silence. Glorious, beautiful, wonderful silence.

Klaus dares to peel open one eye and squint around the room. No ghostly brothers, and only two regular ghosties. Good old Margaret and German dude, eyeing him speculatively and a little hatefully. Hey now, if they’re so bothered by his glamorous new nausea powers, they don’t have to hang around to be test subjects.

(No Dad, which means he’s probably chilling downstairs. Hopefully Ben has better sense than to hang around with the old man, especially since he’s being so pissy about Klaus’s plans for quality parent time.)

Klaus heaves a great, dramatic sigh, simply because he can. His head spins a little and his chest does not thank him for it, but Ben isn’t around to see it, so technically that means it never happened. His body is threatening mutiny, probably, but Klaus isn’t ready to stop.

(Two ghosts in his room, countless throughout the Academy, Dad downstairs and the mausoleum ghosts hovering right at the edges of his senses. Klaus can’t stop, not yet.)

He closes his eyes and gets back to banishing.

-

Okay, Klaus has been doing a pretty spectacular job of frying his own brain for years now. Ever-evolving varieties of chemical cocktails to really knock the cobwebs loose, more than his fair share of bumps and bruises on the noggin, and enough alcohol to drown a fish. Ben’s a little shit, but he does have a point: it’s a borderline miracle Klaus has any functioning brain cells left.

He’s stopped dousing himself in fun-time chemicals now, but it still feels like his brain is steaming. He kind of wishes he could ask Vanya what it felt like to go supernova, because he imagines it might have felt similar: an almost audible sizzling, nerves on fire, feeling like you’re collapsing from the inside out. Asking would probably be insensitive or something, though.

Klaus doesn’t know what day it is.

His thoughts are hazy, obscured by the dying fumes of his brain, probably, and his body feels like someone wrung him out and set him out to die.

(Maybe, potentially, there is the slightest little possibility that Ben had a point, earlier. Banishing and banishing and banishing without end is—perhaps a little bit not good. If Klaus ever remembers how to use his tongue again, maybe he’ll even tell the little twerp.)

The thing is, it isn’t working. Klaus is throwing everything he has into this, and it’s doing fuck all. He knows he can banish ghosts because he’s done it before, both intentionally and, uh, otherwise, so he has the theory, he just doesn’t know how to apply it.

He’s been at this for days and the ghosts just keep coming. He can’t see past them now, can barely tell them apart. It’s just a seething mass of deadangernoise, and Klaus has no idea how to stop it. He just has to keep trying. If he stops now—

He doesn’t know where Dad is. He could be right in front of him, listing his many failings, or even detailing exactly how to wrestle control for once in his life, and Klaus is completely, terrifyingly oblivious.

(Ben has faded and blurred and become more concept than reality. This is, probably, the most terrifying thing of all.)

Eyes closed, hands ice cold, the pit in his chest threatening to swallow him whole, Klaus could easily find himself in the mausoleum again. A horde of mindless, furious ghosts, insensate screaming, the threat of ceasing to exist entirely—it’s his most familiar childhood memory.

He can even hear the grating of the heavy stone door, the pounding of his heart as it echoes around the tomb, the only sound other than the voices of the dead, the only thing that assures him he isn’t one of them, not yet. Dad’s around somewhere, he can feel it, just on the other side of the door, impassively waiting until Four screams himself out, until he achieves the impossible and finally learns how to breathe past the hands in his chest.

Klaus hears him, Dad, outside his bedroom door, out in the graveyard, calling to him, reprimanding him, and any minute now he’s going to burst in and they’ll claw him to pieces, the vicious mausoleum ghosts.

His heart nearly stops, nearly explodes in his chest, when a hand, strong and tangible and horrifically real lands firmly on his shoulder and yanks.

fourfourfour, the ghosts wail.

They won’t go away, they won’t stop, and Klaus doesn’t have anything left to give, no more energy to throw into banishing, no more motivation to look for a new solution when one readily exists already. He just wants to sleep, just wants it to be quiet. Mom still has morphine in the infirmary.

klausklausklaus, the ghosts keen.

Klaus blinks, trying to think past the cobwebs cocooning his brain. He feels like he’s aged several decades, like he’s turned to stone, like his brain's been scooped right out of his skull.

“Diego?” he says, once he discovers he’s still in possession of an alive human body, with a tongue and everything.

Diego slowly comes into focus in front of him, blurred around the edges. Not particularly happy looking.

“You with me, buddy?” Diego asks, but his words are all funny. It takes a long time for Klaus to straighten the letters out in his head, to slot them into some order that makes sense.

“No,” Klaus manages. “Diego, why—”

Oh, God, did he do it again? Is this it, the final warning sign, the last hurrah before Five’s foretold apocalypse? Why else would Diego be here, why would he look like that, what did Klaus do, did he manifest them, no, he can’t fix it, he’s trying, he’s trying, but nothing’s changing, and Diego doesn’t look any calmer and he’s calling Klaus’s name and it’s happening, Klaus can’t stop it, Five was right—

“That’s enough,” Diego says sharply, and the grip on his shoulder tightens painfully. “Whatever you’ve been doing locked away in here for the past few days, that’s done. Look at you, man, what the hell?”

“Was—training,” Klaus says. He even manages to sound a little petulant, so the world probably isn’t ending. He’s also pretty sure he isn’t actually in the mausoleum, so that’s comforting. He can feel his pulse start to approach normal levels again, and the stickiness of his thoughts is receding, slowly.

“Yeah, no,” Diego says. “I’m vetoing that. From now on, no one trains alone. We’re a family or whatever, I don’t know, just stop with this before you kill yourself.”

Klaus has a plethora of reasons for why that’s a horrible idea, really, he does, he just… is having trouble piecing any of it together right now. The thought of being left alone to fall back into the miasma of ghosts is—not pleasant. With his brain coming back online, Klaus is nothing but sickeningly grateful for Diego’s presence, bruised shoulder notwithstanding.

“You’re lucky I was the one to crack first and come drag you out,” Diego says, leaning back on his heels now that Klaus has proven himself aware and mostly cognizant. “Five’s been antsy for days. I’m surprised he didn’t tear your door down himself.”

Diego doesn’t notice, too busy balancing Klaus on wobbly, sleepy feet, but for a nauseating moment, Klaus can’t breathe. Five. The apocalypse.

I won’t let you be next.

I can’t take that chance.

Five would do almost anything for his dysfunctional family. But he’s done so much, sacrificed so much, to stop the apocalypse. It’s his two driving motivations in life, the things that have sustained him, and they’ve conflicted before. It’s only sheer dumb luck (and miraculous returns of dead brothers) that stopped them from having to put a bullet in Vanya’s brain to save the world on Five’s orders, and that’s coming from the guy who was the closest thing their sister had to a friend growing up.

If they conflict again, with Klaus as the catalyst—

Well, in his experience, miracles don’t strike twice.

Chapter Text

Klaus’s reluctant emergence from his room acts as a homing beacon for wayward Hargreeves.

Not all at once, of course, because that would be too obvious. It’s a gradual process, almost entirely natural, except for the part where it’s the most obvious ploy in the world and Klaus’s siblings have never been subtle about anything in their lives.

It starts with Diego, obviously, because he’s the one who plied Klaus from his room and unknowingly extricated him from the suffocating mass of ghosts, which earns him enough brownie points that Klaus decides to forgive him for sending out the summons to the rest of the house. He also steers him to the kitchen (familiar) and all but forces a plate of food into his hands, which should probably also secure him more brownie points, if Klaus is being fair.

(Klaus has never been known as the fair one, though.)

The problem is that Diego, knight in shining leather that he is, happens to have quite the neat little kill count. He doesn’t have the highest in the Academy, since that lovely honour goes to the murderous gremlin himself, but Number Two probably comes in second, which Klaus is absolutely never telling him, for obvious reasons. He should really work on that inferiority complex at some point.

So Diego always attracts at least a few little ghosties, which is normally just fine, totally fine, but Klaus is just a wee bit on edge, still feeling like there’s a gaping hole in his chest, still feeling the presence of countless of the dearly departed weighing down on him, just out of sight. He can’t stop seeing Diego’s face in the courtyard, the unease in the debrief afterwards.

“Why don’t you take a picture,” Klaus says, a tad too prickly.

Diego, completely unrepentant, does not try to hide how hard he’s scrutinizing him.

Klaus shoves a heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes in his mouth and chews as obnoxiously as he can. It feels a bit like a rock settling in his stomach, but it’s worth it for the look of disgust on Diego’s face.

“Look,” Diego finally says, cracking like an egg. Score. “I get that the last time I said we should train together didn’t go… great.” Understatement of the fucking century, Two, thank you. “But after what happened outside, don’t you think that’s all the more reason not to try this shit on your own? What if you had manifested them again, Klaus?”

Don’t think about it, Klaus orders himself sternly. Don’t think about it. Think of puppies and rainbows and cigarettes and Dave and don’t think about it.

“Then I guess I’d have to start charging for admission,” he says, waving his spoon. His hand definitively does not shake, not even a little.

“This isn’t a joke, man, this is serious. It’s dangerous. You gotta let us help, alright? Five’s been working on it—”

Oh, of course he has. Some real creative solutions, Klaus is sure.

“—we’ll figure it out, I promise.” Diego does actually look earnest, the sucker.

“Nothing to figure out,” Klaus says. “Didn’t I tell you? I solved it.”

“Solved it,” Diego says flatly.

Klaus bobs his head and immediately regrets it when one of the ghosts in the corner copies him, dropping its head right off its shoulders and into its waiting hands. No way even hotshot Diego is that exuberant with his kills, come on—who the hell fully decapitates a guy like that? Klaus wonders if Five’s nearby.

“The answer’s staring us in the face,” Klaus says, tearing his eyes away from the gatecrasher. “It worked well enough for twenty years already, for both me and Vanny. Why change it up now?”

As expected, Diego bristles right up. Sigh.

“What the fuck, Klaus, no,” he says, heated. “You’re not doing the drugs again. You’re clean!”

Klaus hums. “And what fun it’s been,” he says wistfully. “Truly, I’ll treasure this experience. Alas, it does seem to be the root of the problem, doesn’t it? I don’t recall summoning an army of undead any time I was taking a tour through the stars. Wait, is that offensive to Luther?”

“The root of the problem isn’t your sobriety,” Vanya says, making her grand entrance. “It’s your lack of experience in controlling your powers. Trust me.” She smiles a little wryly.

“Besides,” Diego blusters, still all worked up. “You have to be sober to see them again, right, the one you lost?”

Abruptly, this is no longer even slightly amusing.

Vanya blinks, eyebrows raising, and fuck, she isn’t supposed to know, no one’s supposed to know, Diego isn’t supposed to remember or think about it or drop it casually while Klaus is watching blood drip to the floor from a wound in a woman’s chest and it isn’t him, it isn’t, it isn’t, but the blood drips and the wound gapes and Klaus’s hands itch—

Diego is still going, god, why is he still talking. “Dave, I think,” he’s saying, over Klaus’s head, and the word sounds so mundane coming from his mouth, so ordinary, like it isn’t the most sacred sound Klaus has ever heard. How the hell does Diego know his name? Klaus never said, he never told him, how, how, how— “You really wanna get high and lose the chance to talk to him again?”

No, Klaus thinks, then yes.

And Klaus never thought he’d have to choose between Dave and the apocalypse, and he certainly never thought this would be the choice he would end up making. After all, he chose Dave over his siblings once before, chose Dave over the future and home and safety, stayed in hell just to be with him and then learned that hell is to be without him. But he’s choosing again, reluctantly and wretchedly, choosing to sacrifice his sobriety and his sanity to prevent the apocalypse, choosing his siblings and the world over Dave.

Screw the world, he thinks, but he can still see his siblings’ faces in the courtyard, never stopped seeing them. And he sees Dave, too, of course, never stopped seeing him, the blood and the mud and the look on his face, and even if he ever managed to bring Dave back, see him again, he’d be seeing that, the moment of his death, forever and forever.

“—know there was someone,” someone is saying, a million miles away.

Klaus claws his way back to the surface, waving away the sea of ghosts to the best of his abilities. Ah, Luther’s joined the party, wonderful, and he’s brought Allison along for the fun.

“I think, on balance, Dave—” fuck, he didn’t know it would be so hard to say it out loud, to anyone other than Ben, “—would probably understand.”

Allison looks at him, eyebrows drawn, and curves her finger at her chin. Who? she asks.

For a split second, Klaus can’t help but think he might even like to tell her, one day, on his own terms. Sit on her bed, close and secretive like when they were kids, and she’d be patient and willing to listen, would smile at all the right parts and sympathize for the others, all without pity or guilt or using any of it as a weapon, a tool to manipulate him into training. Klaus sees it and he wants it and he knows he’s not going to get it.

“Anywho,” he says, pointedly turning away from Allison and refusing to feel any particular way about it. “I think keeping the apocalypse from happening, again, is a smidge more important than my doomed sobriety.”

Diego frowns. “You’re not going to cause the apocalypse,” he says, and kudos to him, because he almost sounds convincing. “Where’d you get that dumb idea?”

Jeez, does no one in this house talk to each other? Wait, scratch that, stupid question. Still, Klaus thought Five would’ve been ranting and raving all over the place for the past few days, roping the rest of them into whatever containment scheme he’s planning. Maybe he has been, and Diego is just finally learning to be a good actor. Allison could be giving him lessons.

“Finally, someone else who sees reason,” Ben says. Christ, a full house, or near about. Klaus just wants to eat his dinner in peace, is that too much to ask? At least the (other) ghosts don’t typically try to stage interventions.

Klaus jabs a finger in Ben’s direction. “Quiet, you,” he hisses. Their collected siblings immediately swivel to follow his finger.

“Are they... bad, today?” Luther asks, looking a little uneasy.

“Ben’s just being a bitch,” Klaus says, matter-of-fact, because he’s definitely not going to say yes, One, they’re an absolute nightmare, actually, and earlier it was so bad I kind of, sort of forgot where I was or who was and wasn’t living. “But when isn’t he?”

“Oh,” Luther says. “It’s just Ben?”

“Can you manifest him?” Vanya asks. “We haven’t seen him in a while.”

Klaus feels a little bit like screaming.

“The last time I tried to bring Benny-boy forward,” he says, as calmly as he can. “Things got a little out of hand.”

“Well, yeah, but we’re here now,” Diego reasons, as if that makes any difference at all. “We’ll help.”

Help, Klaus thinks. That mythical word again.

And because the universe is specifically designed to chew him up and shit him out again, it’s at that moment that one of the missing Hargreeves, as if summoned by the very implication of Klaus exercising his powers, appears in the kitchen. Klaus doesn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed that it’s Dad instead of Five, something he’d never actually thought would be in question.

Klaus immediately tenses, keeping a weather eye on Reginald while his siblings stay blissfully unaware. Forget apocalypses, this is the real threat he’s trying to prevent. Someone give him a gold medal because he is one of the least equipped of them to handle Daddy Dearest on his own.

(Is he, though? Imagining Luther or Vanya in his place is enough to set off enough alarm bells to, well, wake the dead, and leaving Ben alone with the guy just seems cruel. Allison and Five might be better off in his place, because Allison can be relatively cool-headed and reasonable, and Five probably wouldn’t let the old man bother him just on principle, but it would probably still be a close call.)

“Klaus, please,” Ben says anxiously.

Klaus thinks he means ‘oh, Klaus, please send Dad to the great beyond so we no longer have to gaze upon his visage’, but when he turns to share a panicked, apologetic look with his brother, he sees Ben watching their siblings instead.

“You’ve made me visible plenty of times before without a problem,” Ben says, because apparently, he’s decided to completely ignore the old man’s presence. Admirable, but not particularly helpful. “The courtyard was—weird, but you’ve been practicing for days. I don’t think you could manifest more than one ghost right now anyway; you haven’t slept in so long. Even if you did, your banishing’s gotten better.”

What world is Ben living in, Klaus wonders, then realizes the inherent fallacy in that anyway.

Maybe, maybe, Klaus would be more willing to consider the idea if Dad hadn’t just made his daily appearance. Because Ben has a point: he’s tired, his powers strained, and there’s no real guarantee he’ll be able to make Ben visible, let alone anyone else. The thing in the courtyard was new, a fluke, even, and wiped him out so much he immediately dropped to the grass. And Klaus is familiar with manifesting Ben, could do it in his sleep, probably, which is definitely the problem.

Unfortunately, Dad, as always, ruins everything.

“I can’t,” Klaus says, a little helplessly.

“Why not?” Ben demands.

Klaus can’t believe this. He hisses under his breath and jerks his head pointedly towards the corner, where Dad’s watching them clinically. Ben follows his gaze, looking unconvinced.

“Because you-know-who’s just waiting for the chance to make a come-back,” Klaus says. He feels more than sees the living crowd look around as if they could possibly see what he’s desperately trying to keep them from seeing.

Ben blinks. “Dad?” he says. Klaus winces, darting a glance to Reginald, but thankfully the man does not respond. “Klaus,” Ben says in a different voice, turning from Dad to Klaus and back again. “You think you’ll… manifest Dad?”

“Well, hopefully not,” Klaus hisses. “But his looming isn’t helping.”

Ben frowns. “Klaus,” he says again and—

klausklausklaus

—Klaus hates it when they say his name like that—

“—Dad isn’t here.”

Chapter Text

Klaus stares at Ben.

Ben stares at Klaus.

Reginald Hargreeves definitely stares at both of them.

“Ex-squeeze me?” Klaus says faintly.

This can’t be happening. He doesn’t entirely know what is happening, but whatever it is, it can’t be. He has no idea what’s going on. His brain is fuzzy and blurry and inside out, and Ben is supposed to be the anchor, the one who keeps the world tethered in place, who makes sense when the rest of reality has gone to hell. Klaus turns to Ben to be the sane one, damn it.

Ben looks just as thrown as Klaus, if for completely different reasons, which does not make Klaus feel any better.

“I haven’t seen him since yesterday, or the day before, maybe,” Ben says, sounding a little uneasy. “He was, you know. In your room, while you were trying to banish the others. You asked him for help, which I still maintain is one of the dumbest things you’ve done since getting clean, and he started, uh, saying—stuff. You—Klaus, you banished him and, like, four other ghosts.”

Klaus blinks.

“No,” he says.

“You did, though,” Ben says.

“No,” Klaus repeats, firmer. “He’s right there, Ben, Christ. He’s just fucking standing there, look, just look at him—”

“Who?” Luther asks, bewildered, uneasy, and, fuck, their siblings are here, right here, they can hear everything Klaus says, they can see and hear and they’ll know, but they can’t know, they can’t, Klaus has been trying so hard—

Ben is searching the room, eyes darting around, but they slide right past Reginald’s corner, what the fuck? What the fuck?

“He isn’t, Klaus,” Ben insists urgently. “I promise, he isn’t.”

“I can see him,” Klaus says, eyes glued to that corner. “Ben, why can I see him?”

“I don’t—I don’t know, Klaus,” Ben says. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

Klaus’s brain is broken and slow and half-dead, but he struggles through theories in record time, needing some sort of explanation, some answer, some solution, desperately and immediately, because none of this is making sense and Dad is still watching him, Ben is looking more and more worried, and their siblings, their fucking siblings, stupid and oblivious and not seeing Dad, totally useless—

“Maybe I’m—hiding him,” he says. “Like half-banishing, I don’t know. He’s still here but other ghosts can’t see him.”

Ben frowns. “Maybe,” he says doubtfully. He sounds like he’s just agreeing so that Klaus will calm down, but the joke’s on him, because Klaus is never going to be calm again.

“Klaus, what’s going on?” Vanya asks, earnest and soft and concerned, and it’s all too much.

Klaus can’t handle this. He really can't. He’s going to disintegrate right here in front of them, going to spontaneously combust, cease to exist, anything, anything at all to get away from this. This isn’t happening. He’s still in his room, fucked up by the ghosts, head spinning, reality melting. He’s still in the courtyard, passed out and dead to the world, wiped out from making the ghosts real and enjoying a fun little nightmare. He’s lying on that dance floor, he’s in Vietnam, he’s fucked six ways to Sunday. Anything, anything at all.

Klaus can’t breathe. He can’t see. It’s everything all at once.

“Whoa, hey,” Diego says, spooked by something, but Klaus just stares at him, unfocused, distant, because Diego has absolutely no idea. None of them do.

“I have to,” Klaus tries, but the words turn to ash, and he has to pause, think about them. “I have to go,” he says. “I have to.”

Where, he thinks. Thinks: Upstairs. Outside. Banishing. Drugs. Dave. Anything, anything at all.

“Running away solves nothing,” Reginald says, but it’s not fucking him, has it ever been him? It looks like him, it sounds like him, it feels like him; and what’s that saying? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, Dad’s still screwing with him, real or not?

“No, hang on,” Diego says. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

Klaus can never tell him, never ever. It’s one thing to be haunted by your dead father, to keep his ghostly presence a secret against better judgment because you live in a house of volatile people a hair’s breadth away from supervillainy, but this—whatever this is, Klaus definitely can’t tell them. Ghost Reginald, sure, the stuff of nightmares but maybe not entirely surprising; seeing Reginald, hearing him, when he’s not really there? That’s something else.

Klaus is going to be sick.

“Wait,” Ben says, raising his hands as Klaus shoves away from the table. “Wait, don’t, Klaus—tell them, please, for God’s sake, just tell them something—”

(At this point, Klaus refuses to do anything for God’s sake just on principle. It’s Her fault he’s in this mess. None of this would be happening if She’d let him stay in Her exclusive little playground, black-and-white and happy with Dave, because clearly he isn’t here, down in the mud and the hurt and the ghosts. He’s up there somewhere, waiting, waiting.)

Luther snakes out a hand to block the door before Klaus can make his escape, massive and immovable. Klaus could try to duck underneath—he can be slippery, fast, years of practice dodging paramedics and police and brothers—but he’s in a house full of people that can stop him before he reaches the door.

“Tell us what’s going on,” Luther says. It could be an order. It could easily sound like an order, Number One putting his foot down, but it doesn’t. It isn’t. Luther’s really so much better now, but Klaus isn’t sure it matters.

Number One is getting lax in his duties, Klaus thinks, but it isn’t his. It’s Dad’s voice, right in his head, and Klaus can see him over Luther’s shoulder, watching the proceedings with thinly veiled disappointment, disgust, disinterest. Dad’s holy trinity.

“Please let me go,” Klaus says.

Luther immediately drops his arm.

(That means something, it does, it does, he knows it does. But he can’t think, he can’t form a thought, not here, not now, not with ghosts lining the walls and Dad nearby and Ben telling him it isn’t Dad, not really, but then what the fuck is it? Klaus can’t fucking breathe.)

Ben follows him, of course. So does Dad. Not Dad. The thing that looks like Dad.

Because, apparently, Dad isn’t actually here. Klaus only has Ben’s word to go on, but Ben’s word is law. Sure, Klaus has a history of breaking those, but Ben is the cornerstone of reality, Ben keeps track of it all when Klaus is too out of it to see anything, when he doesn’t remember what day it is or what his name is (four, it’s four, he’s four). So if Ben says Dad isn’t here—

—Oh, god, he isn’t here, he hasn’t always been here, it hasn’t always been him. But Klaus has seen him, heard him, spoken to and been tormented and tutored by him, so if he isn’t real, if it’s all Klaus’s unravelling psyche showing him waking nightmares for giggles, then he’s just been torturing himself. But for how long? When did it start, how did it start, why didn’t he notice? How often has Dad been Not Dad?

“Ben,” Klaus says. “Ben, when you were gone, when I banished you, Dad was still here. He followed me, nagged me. Ben, was that him? How much of that was real? Christ, how much of that was me?”

Ben’s hovering anxiously, looking rattled, looking stressed. Join the club. He looks sad. “I’m sorry, Klaus. I don’t know.”

Lies, Klaus thinks. But it’s Ben. Ben’s an asshole and he’s not above manipulating Klaus to get what he wants, but he doesn’t—he wouldn’t lie, not about this. He wouldn’t. Lies, Klaus thinks again, but he doesn’t even know who’s doing the lying anymore.

Klaus thinks about that night, the surge of his powers while he was asleep, completely oblivious and not in control. Ben told him that he heard Dad’s voice in his sleep—the real Dad, the ghost himself, not the twisted double Klaus has been conjuring like a puppet—and that’s what made him banish the others. Klaus remembers waking up surrounded by ghosts and missing Ben. He remembers Dad at the foot of his bed, cold and familiar and—the ghosts around him didn’t react, they gave him space, but what does that mean? If Klaus banished Ben and the others, did he banish Dad too?

He remembers being conscious, head pounding, Diego nagging him, ghosts screaming, Dad tut-tutting. He remembers waving his fingers, feeling them go tingly, and making the other ghosts transparent, all of them except Dad, entirely unaffected. Because he wasn’t—it wasn’t—

How is Klaus supposed to know what’s real and what’s not? Is Dad still here? When has it been him and when has it not? Has he ever been? How can Klaus know, how can he—is he imagining other things? Other ghosts, other people? No one else can see ghosts, no one else can confirm, his siblings can’t see Dad—and they can’t see Ben—oh, god, what if—how can he know—

—and Klaus used to wonder, sometimes, when he was high and wrecked and spiteful and lonely, whether Ben was really Ben.

“Please talk to the others,” Ben is saying, but it might not be Ben at all. The others can’t see him, haven’t seen him in ages because Klaus hasn’t manifested him, hasn’t dared to, and that means no one can confirm, there’s no one to say for sure. How long? How long has this been happening, all without him knowing?

Klaus has no idea what’s real anymore. He just knows he can’t tell them, he can’t say anything to the others, because—because he just—he just can’t.

Five is one wrong move away from lunging for the trigger, surely, he must be, and Klaus can’t even blame him. Bad enough when his powers were slipping out of his control, because at least that’s familiar, that’s expected, that’s something they’ve seen before. But now, now it’s not just his powers; he’s not in control of his own mind, and he’s certainly not in control of the ghosts. It’s a horrible, dangerous duo, a recipe for disaster, and Five may be the only one willing to admit it to Klaus’s face, the only one willing to do something about it.

So Klaus can’t tell him. He can’t tell anyone.

He’ll fix it, somehow. He doesn’t know how to gauge the progress with his powers anymore, now that he can’t trust his count of the ghosts, now that he can’t trust Ben, but he’ll do it. He will. He has to.

Chapter Text

It’s funny, but Klaus misses dreaming about Dave and his family dying.

Not the content of the dreams, obviously, that shit’s all kinds of horrifying and traumatizing and he’d rather never see that much blood coming out of any of his loved ones ever again, thank you. But at least those dreams are normal, relatively. He knows what to expect from them. At the time, he thought the stress of the dreams and the training was going to tie him into knots, was going to push him right off the edge, make him snap, make him shatter.

What a joke.

He misses those dreams, misses that time, because as awful as it all was, at least he had a better grasp on things. He didn’t know it at the time, obviously, but hindsight and all that. Now it’s like he’s standing in quicksand, being swallowed whole by it all, drowning and flailing and failing. He can’t stop thinking about the mausoleum ghosts, keeps seeing them out of the corner of his eye, keeps thinking about Dad, standing right there, but apparently not there at all.

At least he saw Dave in his dreams, even stuck in his worst memory. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever have that again.

Fuck, if his brain is finally going to shatter, quite justifiably, after a decade of abuse, couldn’t it have done him one last favour before it checked out? Given him his soldier love, hallucination or not, instead of Reginald Hargreeves, the top of Klaus’s “DNI” list?

Speaking of, the man-not-man-not-real is still watching him with a curled lip, disgusted by his weakness or whatever. Yeah, me too, buddy, he thinks. Klaus is just glad he isn’t saying anything anymore, because that’s a mindfuck, now. Every word out of his mouth is fresh from Klaus’s subconscious, apparently, and there’s a reason Klaus doesn’t like to be too acquainted with that side of himself. Bad enough that he’s thinking back and cringing at the stuff not-Dad-maybe-Dad said in the past, in those murky waters between Ben’s banishment and bombastic return.

Ben, unfortunately, has not taken the same hint, because he is still talking. Sounding earnest, a little annoyed, a lot frustrated, but Klaus is making a concentrated effort not to listen because he doesn’t know if it’s real. Dad’s not real, at least not if Klaus believes Ben, but who’s to say Ben is real? It’s a slippery slope and Klaus is barely treading water.

Klaus has decided that the only ghosts he can trust from this point on are Margaret and German dude. Sure, they’re a little grouchy, but he would be too, if he were the victim of a pipsqueak serial killer. Hey, if Hazel and Cha-Cha had gone too far, if they’d finished what they’d started, maybe Klaus could have made them a vengeful trio. He could have fit right in, between German dude’s furious mutterings and Margaret’s mournful laments. Klaus could have spiced things up, been the flirty one, maybe, because if he’d died in that motel room then he never would have gone to Vietnam, never would have met Dave, so he’d be dead and unattached, free to wink and make innuendos at all the other little ghosties.

That thought hurts, though, for several reasons, so he doesn’t linger on it.

Anyway, he knows that he’s been buddy-buddy with Margaret and German dude for a while now, longer than Dad-not-Dad has been around. He’s been seeing them since before that first day in the sitting room, so he thinks that means they’re probably safe and real.

(It’s depressing that he’s now finding comfort in the gory ghosts that he’d been so desperate to get rid of before, but karma’s a bitch and has he mentioned that the universe hates him?)

“Klaus,” someone says, and for a long, long moment, he genuinely doesn’t know who it is, if it’s ghost or living, imaginary or real, in his head or out. He’s exhausted.

Reluctantly, he blinks past the film of the mausoleum, past the frowning forms of Margaret and the gruesome twins, and sees Five.

“Oh,” he sighs. “Hey, Fivey.”

Five is eyeing him cautiously, critically. He’s staying firmly on the other side of the room, not making any effort to get closer. That’s nice of him. Klaus wonders how long it will last.

“Are you alright, Klaus?” Five says in a funny voice, and fuck, Klaus is really tired of hearing his name like that—

klausklausklaus

—he’s gotten twenty years of good enough use out of the name, including a lovely ten months he probably didn’t deserve hearing his name said like a prayer from the best man Klaus has ever known, but good things definitely don’t last forever, and he thinks he’s officially reached his limit. Klaus is his name and it’s completely worn out. Maybe he’ll go back to Four, for old time’s sake.

“Peachy keen,” Klaus (Four?) says. Judging from the look on his brother’s face, it doesn’t come out very convincing. Well, tough, because he’s officially out of energy to put on any more pretenses.

“I heard you in the kitchen,” Five says, still so strange, slow and careful, completely unlike himself.

Panic lances through Klaus’s chest, but it’s short and fades quickly because he just doesn’t have the energy. What the fuck could Five have possibly heard?

“Something’s going on,” Five continues. “Has been for a while. I want to know what it is. You’re keeping secrets, something about your powers and the ghosts.”

Un-fucking-believable. The little asshole has been out of the picture for days, ever since their lovely little heart-to-heart where he accused Klaus of ending the world (which is admittedly looking more and more likely these days) and now he’s cornered him at potentially the worst time to accuse him of more completely correct things. For a guy who can time travel, Five’s always had the worst timing.

The thing is, Klaus gets why Five is being so annoying about this. He’s terrified that Klaus is gonna kickstart another apocalypse, the thing that’s been haunting Five since he was tiny and familiar, and it’s gotta be killing him, watching it happen slowly and not being able to stop it before it gets too far.

Actually, that’s probably why he’s been avoiding Klaus, zapping out of whatever room he’s in and keeping his distance. Klaus hadn’t really consciously noticed it, but he had noticed the pleasantly fewer ghosts that have been hanging around, at least when he hasn’t been blearily seeing the mausoleum ghosts that may or may not have really been there. Five’s been dodging him because he knows that if he sees him, if he sees how fast and far Klaus has deteriorated, he’ll have to acknowledge how close they are to the newest end times, and he’ll have to do something about it.

Five is paranoid as hell and the last thing he wants to do is lose any more of his family, Klaus knows that, but he’s also relentless and determined and willing to stop the apocalypse no matter the cost. The inevitable conclusion is that Five is going to have to deal with it, deal with Klaus, whether that be containment or elimination—and, fuck, at this point, maybe Klaus will let him.

Klaus doesn’t think the others will be best pleased by that plan of action, but who knows, maybe Five’s already convinced them. He can be very persuasive. Look at Vanya’s apocalypse attempt.

“Yeah,” Klaus says heavily. “I’m not doing so hot. I mean, metaphorically speaking. I’m still the hottest bitch in this house.”

The joke falls flat and is also a teensy bit untrue because Klaus has caught glimpses of himself in mirrors and reflective surfaces lately. He doesn’t look good, and he knows it.

Five looks surprised by his honesty, which is probably a terrible sign for their progress as a functional team, let alone family.

Klaus decides, quite suddenly, that he’s tired. He’s numb and he’s scared and he’s done with it all, actually. He doesn’t want to be the reason the world dies. He wishes he could see Dave one last time.

“So, this is it, buddy,” he says. Five scrunches his eyebrows. It’s almost cute. “Time’s up. Are you going to do it now? You should.”

Five blinks. “Do what?” he asks.

“Kill me,” Klaus says.

Five rears back.

“Klaus,” he says again, urgent, disgusted, dismayed. “I’m not going to kill you.”

Klaus hums. “I’d rather you did,” he confesses. “Rather than the mausoleum, you know. Save us both some trouble.”

Five shakes his head, forgetting his earlier determination to keep his distance and taking several steps closer. He’s frowning quite severely, now. If he isn’t careful, it’ll stick like that. That’s what Mom always said, anyway.

With Five’s increased proximity, the mutilated twins behind him start to get louder. Klaus watches them distantly, too far away to even be bothered by it. Abruptly, he notices that Reginald’s presence has faded into the background of his awareness, cowering away from Five. He doesn’t know what that means. Ben’s still a million miles away, finally quiet in the corner of the room.

“No killing, no mausoleum,” Five says firmly. Klaus almost believes him. “After everything I’ve done to keep you assholes alive, you really think I’d kill one of you? I’ve been tempted, of course, but I wouldn’t. I really wouldn’t.”

Klaus remembers Vanya and blinding white light and the gun trembling in Allison’s hand, Five’s regretful but determined face.

“You said it yourself, Five,” Klaus reasons. “I’m dangerous. I could lose control, like Vanya. You can’t let the apocalypse happen, Five, please. Don’t let me do that. I don’t want to do that.”

“I won’t,” Five says. “I won’t let you, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Exactly,” Klaus insists. It feels like they’re going round in circles. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand before. I get it now. I know you’ve been avoiding me, trying to give me time to control it myself, but I think we’ve reached the end of the line, Fivey. You have to stop me.”

Frustrated, Five huffs tellingly. From very far away, Klaus thinks, First warning sign. God, that feels like a hundred years ago. He wonders if the end result is murder now. Fitting.

“I haven’t been avoiding you to plan your murder, you idiot,” Five hisses. “I’ve been trying to keep my ghosts away from you.”

Klaus blinks. “Say again?”

Ooh, he’s clearly uncomfortable now.

“I saw what they looked like in the courtyard,” Five stays stiffly. “It occurred to me that I must… attract a lot of them. I know what my victims look like. How messy they are. I thought maybe if I stayed away, there’d be less of them around, so you’d—it’d be easier. For you. To train.”

That—kind of makes sense? He had seemed bothered by Margaret’s presence, now that Klaus thinks about it.

“I’ve been working on a way to help you,” Five continues. “To prevent things getting out of hand.”

“By… training me,” Klaus says slowly, just to make sure. “Not putting a bullet in my noggin and calling it a day.”

Minutely, Five flinches. Oops.

“I thought I finally stopped it. That we stopped it,” Five says lowly. He is looking anywhere but at Klaus. He has no way of knowing it, but in his attempts to avoid one brother, he’s aiming an unfocused gaze in maybe-Ben’s direction. “All my life, all these years, I’ve done everything to avert the apocalypse. After what happened with Vanya, I thought we—I—had finally done it. Then you start acting strangely. Twitchy, nervous. Secretive. You lost control in the courtyard, and for the first time, I saw the potential of your powers.”

Potential of your powers, Klaus thinks. Now that sounds like something out of Dad’s notebook.

“It terrified me, Klaus,” Five says fiercely. Klaus has never heard him be so open, so honest. He doesn’t like it. “I worked so hard, and now it’s like I can see it all falling apart again, right in front of me, and I can’t stop it because you won’t let me. And I can’t kill you, I can’t kill any of you, even if that means dooming the whole world, and that terrifies me, too.”

“Ah,” Klaus croaks.

Five takes a breath, straightens his shoulders. The familiar steely look in his eye is back, all vulnerability scrubbed away in an instant. He determinedly meets Klaus’s eyes.

“Let us help you,” he says evenly. “Please.”

Five does not say please. He’s an asshole through and through, always has been, and despite Mom’s best efforts, any manners he might have once had were lost somewhere in the wasteland he called home for forty years. Five is not nice, he does not say please, and he certainly does not ask for permission for anything.

It’s strange and it’s confusing and Klaus is oh-so-tired.

He can’t trust Ben. He can’t trust himself. He certainly can’t trust Dad.

But here’s Five. Maybe his timing isn’t quite so bad after all.

“Yeah,” Klaus says eventually. “Okay.”

Chapter Text

First order of business according to Five’s “Stop the Apocalypse (Again)” plan is, apparently, to herd Klaus upstairs and into bed.

Not that Klaus doubts his brother’s qualifications or expertise on the subject, but this does seem a little strange, as far as training regimens go. Bemused, he follows Five as steadily as he can, sharing a puzzled look with a newly appeared German dude, though, admittedly, he doesn’t seem as invested.

“You look like hell,” Five says, as blunt and charming as ever. “First tip in training your powers: you have to be conscious and mostly cognizant.”

“I’m awake,” Klaus protests. “Up and at ‘em.”

The look Five gives him is withering and unimpressed, familiar enough that Klaus’s jangled nerves start to settle, just slightly. It’s nice, having the reassurance that Five isn’t planning his immediate demise, and he’s sure it’ll be even nicer when he starts to believe it fully.

(It’s a lovely idea, Five’s plan to train him into competency, to wrestle control of his powers and make them his own. But Klaus has been down this road before, first with Dad, and now with himself and Ben, and look where it’s gotten him. Destined to failure, down to his core. Five will realize soon enough, and then they’ll have to turn to the foreboding Plan B that no one wants to admit ends with a bullet or with the mausoleum, and Klaus knows which he prefers.)

“Five,” Klaus says as they reach his bedroom door. He refuses to acknowledge how much his head is spinning, the tremor in his hands. “Fivey, you said you’d help me.”

Five shoves the door open with a jerky movement that belies his frustration, though he’s doing a remarkable job of not expressing it too harshly. Worried of startling Klaus, perhaps, which is super annoying, actually, because Klaus has been living with the stuff of nightmares for as long as he can remember, and a huffy teenager with anger management problems isn’t going to be the thing that breaks him, thank you. Slam all the doors you want, Kotzbrocken.

“I am going to help you,” Five says shortly. “I am helping you. See, this is me helping you.”

Klaus shakes his head. “No, no, my powers, Five. I need help getting them in hand, like, yesterday. I don’t need a nap.”

“I disagree,” Five says. “Klaus, you look like dea—” He stops, chagrined.

“Oh, are we doing puns again?” Klaus asks mildly. “I’ve stocked up, you know. I’m dying to use them.”

“You look terrible,” Five decides on, which, so rude. Really knows how to charm a gal, that one. How did Delores get so lucky? “You barely eat, you look like you haven’t slept in days. Trust me when I say those are bad conditions to exercise your powers.” He looks grim and stony like he sometimes does when Klaus can see the end of the world in the lines of his too-young face.

Reasonable advice, probably, or at least that’s what Klaus imagines Ben would say (is saying? He doesn’t know, he can’t tell). But that approach doesn’t work for Klaus, it can’t, there isn’t time.

“I’ll catch up on my beauty routine later,” he says. He can hear it in his voice, the thinness, the anxiety. Hopes Five can’t hear it, but of course he must. “I just—I need some control first, that’s all. Just enough that I won’t—that I can’t—Please. You said you’ve been working on a plan, right, so hit me with it, come on.”

Five looks unsettled. “Klaus,” he says in that stupid funny, too gentle voice again. Klaus flinches all the same. “We will get a handle on your powers. I figured out how to help Vanya, remember? We’ll figure out yours, too, all of us. I just want to make sure you’re not going to keel over—again, by the way—before we talk to the others and start training.”

“Not the others,” Klaus says quickly. “No, just you.”

Five frowns. “Why?” he asks. “They want to help. And loathe though I am to admit it, they probably can offer some valuable insight: they trained with you growing up, faced their own unique challenges, and frankly, they know how you respond to things better than I do.”

Klaus has to stifle a sharp laugh. “Please,” he scoffs. “They barely know me.”

(Between the drugs and the streets and the ghosts and davedavedave, Klaus barely knows himself.)

“Why don’t you want them involved?” Five presses.

“Because...”

(any luck conjuring what about making them real you should try don’t be such a baby have you even tried you have to be sober right can you manifest him we haven’t seen him in a while)

“Because they want me to manifest Ben, even though there is a not-insignificant risk that I’ll raze the world to the ground with my angry ghosties,” Klaus says a little desperately. “And I get it, of course I do, they miss the asshole, whatever, they want to see him again. But it’s like they don’t even care that the other wandering dead are just waiting for the chance to surge through whatever hole I punch through the veil.”

As if to agree with him, the twins and German dude press closer, muttering in his ear and smearing blood on the walls, on the floor, on his hands, blood on his hands and under his nails and everywhere, everywhere, not coming off.

“Our siblings are idiots,” Five says flatly. “And often selfish and oblivious. It’s the nature of being a Hargreeves. It’s not that they don’t care, Klaus. They just don’t know.”

Incredulous, Klaus throws his hands wide, goodbye swiping through twin one’s stomach, making her ripple and fade for a split second before coming back online in full force. “I thought it was pretty obvious by now!” he says. “They saw them, last time I tried to conjure Ben!”

“Like I said,” Five says impatiently. “Idiots. They know the ghosts are different than they expected, but that doesn’t mean they know how it works. You don’t, either; none of us do, it’s all a mystery until we train and try to learn the limits, the rules. Together.”

“So train me, then,” Klaus says mulishly.

He’s getting on Five’s nerves now, he can see. Good.

“We will,” Five says. “I told you. But first—”

“No,” Klaus says hastily. “Five, it has to be now. I can’t sleep. Not yet. When I sleep, my powers, they—sometimes I lose control when I’m not even conscious. I banished... I banished Ben.” It feels like he’s confessing a sin. Maybe he is. “I banished him in my sleep.”

Five pauses. “Is he here now?” he asks carefully.

Yes. No. Maybe. A version of him, but I don’t know if he’s real, Five, I can’t tell anymore, I don’t know how to tell.

“I don’t know,” Klaus says, too honest for his tastes. “It’s a little crowded.”

Five’s shoulders stiffen and Klaus wonders if he took it as an accusation. Hell, maybe it is. Most of the assembled crowd do resemble Five’s handiwork, after all. And the masses keep growing the longer Klaus enjoys Five’s presence, pressing against them, whispering and crying and yelling, and the room is muggy and cold and this is why Klaus needs to learn control. If he slips now, they’ll tear him apart, of course, but they’ll turn on Five, too, in a heartbeat, and Klaus can’tcan’tcan’t.

“Okay,” Five says. “Klaus—”

It’s one too many, apparently, because it’s officially worn out, exhausted and threadbare and tangled and caught in too many mouths.

klausklausklaus

“Don’t,” he snarls, vehemence taking even him by surprise. “Stop saying that!”

He’s talking to Five and he’s talking to the ghosts and he’s talking to Ben and he’s talking to himself. He’s so sick of it.

Five raises both eyebrows comically high, but Klaus shrinks back, overwhelmed and heavy. “Saying what?” Five asks in that fucking voice.

One of the twins has taken up a mournful little chant, now that she has the name in her grasp, bony fingers unwilling to let it go. klausklausklaus. Number Four had been so excited when Mom gave him his very own name, had loved the sound of it, the shape of its letters, had been giddy to even hear the ghosts slowly change from four to klaus, new and exciting enough to stave off the horror. Guess twenty years is the expiry date on a name.

“My name,” he says miserably. “Klaus. Just stop.”

The twin does not.

Five, however, nods slowly. He looks grim and pale and not at all pleased, eyeing him with calculation, with mounting concern, perhaps reassessing the timeframe they’re working with. Klaus wonders how many warnings signs have to go off before even Five, stubborn bastard that he is, admits defeat, and figures it has to be a lot, because he’s pretty sure he’s setting off every single one.

“Okay,” Five says again. “That doesn’t instill me with a lot of confidence in your ability to exercise your powers safely and successfully.” He’s speaking calmly and reasonably, laying it out in a way he doesn’t usually bother to when he’s frustrated and impatient and deeming them all idiots. It’s got a little bite, a little sardonic, but that’s just how Five talks. This is positively gentle, for him.

“Safe and successful,” Klaus repeats. “Christ, where’d you get that from? Certainly isn’t Dad’s motto. Didn’t think you’d get soft in your old age, but here we are. Why are you being so patient? I thought you’d be, like, rabid about this. You know, your whole end of the world thing. What gives?”

He’s leaning against the doorframe now, wilted and sucked dry. His head is throbbing, eyes swimming, and he can feel every ghost like a thrumming over his skin, prickly and cold and skittering up his arms and sinking into his chest.

Five pokes and prods him in the side, fingers sharp and mean, and Klaus lets him bully him towards the bed, feet stumbling. Five is absolutely not the type to tuck anyone in, but he does hover and watch critically as Klaus collapses onto his bed, not bothering to do, well, anything, really. He’s not wearing shoes, at least, but these pants are going to suck in the morning.

Hm, maybe Five had a point after all. (Which makes sense, since Five is smart, and his words had echoed Ben-not-Ben-maybe-Ben’s, who has also been known to give adequate advice, every now and then.) As soon as Klaus is horizontal and feels the softness of his blankets instead of the press of stone against his back, he feels his thoughts start to drain away, circling the drain quickly, pulling him under.

He blinks blearily at Five and the assorted ghosts.

“Go to sleep,” Five says. “I’ll be around in case you fuck up and try to end the world in your sleep. Try not to do that, though.”

Klaus hums noncommittally. He’s learned to stop making promises.

He sees, vaguely, Five move to leave, walking through the ghosts without a problem, without so much as a shudder, though he still looks tense and wary. Maybe he’s imagining it, but he fancies he sees Five cast a look around the room as if he could possibly see the assembly. Maybe he’s just imagining his audience.

Five stops by the door. Klaus is already 90% blissfully unconscious. “I’m not Dad,” Five says, then leaves.

Klaus wants to think on that, actually, but he’s out before it goes anywhere.

Chapter Text

Miracle of miracles, Klaus does not end the world in his sleep.

He does, however, open his eyes to see the swarth of ghosts crowding every inch of his room and immediately suffers some kind of cardiac event because what if—

But no, because the ghosts, ugly bastards that they are, are not glowing that lovely and horrible blue, and Klaus seems to be largely intact and unwounded, so they probably aren’t corporeal. Also, Klaus only has the chance to gape at the sheer multitude of ghosts for a few moments while he tries to coax his heart to stay in his chest before Five pops into the room, landing square in the middle of poor Margaret. Yikes. On the bright side, this does support the theory that the ghosts are no more tangible than usual.

“No apocalypse,” Five says as if awarding him a badge, job well done. Christ, this family.

Klaus groans.

“What about accidental conjuring or banishing?” Five grills, as if he truly thinks Klaus has any functioning cognitive abilities this early and this loud in the morning. Is it morning? Klaus feels like he slept two minutes and two days simultaneously, and no, he doesn’t know how that works, take it up with the Little Girl. He’s making a list of grievances of his own to hash out with her on his next day trip.

“Hey,” Five says sharply, and suddenly there is a bony finger stabbing his cheek. “Answer me. Accidental power slips?”

“Fuck off,” Klaus says, but sits up anyway. “I don’t know. Looks like the usual crowd, mostly. Bit busier than normal, maybe, but it’s hard to say.”

“And Ben?” Five asks intently. “Banished?”

Actually, Benny-boy’s staked out a spot at the end of the bed, squished between a few of the more palatable ghosties, and looks to have been settled there awhile. It’s his usual spot when he feels nice enough or pitying enough to supervise Klaus’s nightly visitors, which is a point in the ‘real Ben’ tally, he supposes, but who can say?

“Around, probably,” Klaus says airily. Hopes. “Hey, wait, have you just been waiting for me to wake up? What, you got cameras in here?”

Actually, the cameras from their childhood may still be installed, now that he thinks about it. Sometime in his teens he went on a bit of a rampage and tried to destroy as many of them as he could find, often aided by Diego, but Dad’s always been a sneaky, paranoid bastard, and there was never a guarantee that they found them all, or that he didn’t just put in more the moment their backs were turned.

Klaus can ask him if he wants, since the man is present and accounted for. Maybe. But since he isn’t actually sure if it’s really Reginald Hargreeves or just his own fucked imagination, whatever answer he may get probably isn’t very reliable anyway.

Five might know, if that’s how he’s been monitoring the situation. Maybe that’s what he’s been doing for the past few days, avoiding Klaus in person and watching him closely over the video feed, noting every fruitless training attempt, every siege of mausoleum ghosts that he wouldn’t be able to see.

“No,” Five says, disgusted. “I have no desire to see whatever depraved things you get up to in here.”

That’s smart, actually. Klaus has always regarded closed doors as more of a distant suggestion, and therefore spent most of their teens hearing outraged yells from all and sundry (alive, for a change) until Diego and Ben got into the habit of pointedly slamming his door closed every time they passed. If Five had ever actually considered cameras, the others would have warned him off.

“But you’ve been asleep for twelve hours and I was going to wake you up anyway,” Five continues as if that isn’t an utterly incomprehensible sentence. Twelve hours? Klaus hasn’t slept that long in—at least a year, maybe, if he counts that time he got blackout drunk and high on an inadvisable cocktail and woke up, like, eighteen hours later with an absolute monster of a hangover.

Well, at least Klaus got his recommended amount of beauty sleep before he throws himself back into the breach.

“Goodie,” he says. “So. What’s first, cap’n?”

“Waffles,” Five says.

-

They do not train. (Yet. Klaus is keeping his eyes peeled.)

Instead, Klaus eats. Five hovers. Ben keeps his distance. Dad tuts his disapproval with Five’s lenient and coddling approach, and reluctantly, Klaus has to agree. He’s tense and waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the moment Five’s usual irritating intensity switches back on, waiting to be dragged outside and ordered to plunder the depths of his powers as if he has any idea how to do that.

This patience isn’t at all like Five, especially when it comes to the apocalypse. Last time, his dedication to the cause at the expense of most everything else had been much more like—well, Dad.

Five’s not Dad, Klaus thinks idly.

Still, Dad’s displeasure is a little catching, a lot chafing, because Klaus can feel himself getting frustrated too. Five is supposed to help him gain dominion over the ghosties before he implodes, not life coach him into healthy habits. That’s what he has Ben for, largely to ignore.

It’s weird, because they don’t see hide nor hair of the others, either. Not that the house is very social at the best of times, but normally there is at least some sign of one of the other seven people living here. The waffles are fresh and perfect, so Mom’s been around, but fuck knows where she is now.

Five just sips at a coffee as he waits for Klaus to finish picking at his waffles, and though Klaus takes his time and barely puts any food in his mouth at all, no one shows up in the hour that passes.

“Quiet morning,” Klaus says. It’s suspicious and unsettling.

“I told the others to get lost,” Five says.

Fork pausing in midair, Klaus stares at him. “Um,” he says. “Why? Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but they live here too.”

Five rolls his eyes and finishes his coffee. He looks like he wants to refill it and have another cup—his would-be fourth, as he’s gone through the stuff like a fish as Klaus has been meandering his way through his own breakfast—but the new pot is empty and Klaus has never actually seen Five bother to make a new one. It’s usually Mom or Diego, maybe Allison, who starts the thing. At least, during reasonable human hours. Everyone knows that Five is a terrifying and nocturnal gremlin, so he probably has to scrounge up his own coffee when everyone else sleeps, but Klaus has never seen it, despite his own fucked up sleep schedule.

Probably because coffee has never been Klaus’s fuel of choice, though.

“I couldn’t trust them not to say something stupid,” Five says. Klaus scrunches his eyebrows, confused. “About Ben. Or you. Your powers. I had a talk with them last night, and we agreed they’d keep their distance until I say otherwise.” His smile is toothy and way too threatening for a thirteen-year-old face.

Klaus hopes all their siblings are in one piece. Or, well, five pieces. Not one big piece. That would be bad. And horrifying. And largely inconvenient.

“Otherwise being…” he prompts, jabbing his fork in Five’s face, which is absolutely a terrible idea, because Klaus can just tell that Five is calculating all the many ways he can use that fork to exact horrible retaliation. It’s all to do with the eyes, the evil glint in them that’s been there since they were small, even before time travel and creepy temporal assassin agencies.

It’s an evil glint that has never actually resulted in the death of a sibling, though, despite everything, so Klaus is still clinging to Five’s promises on that. If Five won’t kill him to save the world, he probably won’t kill him for being a little irritating over breakfast. If his tolerance was that low, everyone in the Academy would have been dead within seconds of Five popping out of that portal.

“I know you said you don’t want the others around when you train,” Five says, which is a terrible place to start. “But I stand by my original assessment that they could be helpful. I do agree, however, that they are terrible and largely useless by normal standards, so I think we should only invite Vanya, at least at first. Maybe Allison.”

“Why them?” Klaus asks, mostly to ignore the jolt of panic that he definitely does not feel. He isn’t scared of his siblings. That would be dumb.

(Well, no, it would be reasonable, kind of. They’re all unstable adults with wicked and unexplained powers, trained to maim and kill, living in a house with horrible memories surrounded by people who know how to push every nuclear button.)

(His siblings are six people all raised by the same man who orchestrated their childhood nightmares, who implemented every training practice and control measure. They all rebelled and careened away from the Hargreeves legacy in their own way—some later than others—but the basic foundations are the same, aren’t they? The mausoleum can always sound like a reasonable option under the right circumstances, with the right argument, and they’ve all heard Dad’s rationalizations for worse.)

Five is frowning at him, which probably means Klaus drifted. Oops. He jams a forkful of waffles in his mouth to compensate.

“Vanya is in the best position to relate with new, uncontrollable powers,” Five mercifully says. “I don’t know how transferable the control techniques are, since her powers are largely emotion-based and react to external stimuli, like sounds, while yours are…”

“Hell,” Klaus supplies.

Five’s nostrils flare. “Different,” he counters. “The ghosts themselves are a passive form of your powers, since they’re present without any obvious effort on your part. Controlling when and how you make them real, however, could work similarly to Vanya, though we won’t know for sure until we start.”

“And Allison?” Klaus prods.

Okay, Vanya being around for training makes sense, he begrudgingly admits. Besides, worse comes to worst, Vanya’s powerful enough and just unstable enough that she could probably blow Klaus back and crack his skull like an egg to stop him before ghost Armageddon. Theoretically, Allison could maybe rumour him, but he knows from bitter experience that it doesn’t last when it comes to stopping his powers.

(He asked when they were eleven. He traded two bottles of nail polish and a week of desserts, which he still thinks is incredibly unfair, since it wasn’t like Allison hesitated to use her powers on them when it suited her as kids. Regardless, she rumoured him to stop seeing ghosts and it lasted for all of one day before the dead surged back, louder and angrier than ever, and he had to deal with Dad’s punishment and Allison’s subsequent frosty treatment on top of it all.)

Five shrugs. “Hers work differently, but I thought she might still be helpful. Granted, I’ve never asked how the rumours work until last night, but there has to be some level of conscious thought to it, to make sure not every word she says is a compulsion.”

“That’s what the magic phrase is for,” Klaus says.

“No,” Five says. “Dad came up with that phrase and made her use it as a kind of on and off switch. She’s conditioned to use it, but theoretically, she doesn’t have to.”

Well, that’s mildly horrifying. Klaus wonders if Allison ever worries about that, about her powers slipping through when she doesn’t even mean it, about not being able to trust her own voice, her own words. Wondering if the people around her are acting the way they want to or the way she made them.

Likely seeing the look on his face, Five nods. “Fuck Dad,” he says succinctly.

A laugh bubbles out of Klaus without his permission, just a smidge hysterical. He sees dear old Dad scowl across the table, looming and convincingly realistic as ever. The best part is that Klaus is pretty sure that if Five could see the man, dead or alive, right now, he’d say it again, straight to the bastard’s face.

“For obvious reasons, Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum won’t be involved,” Five continues. “Their powers work completely on deliberate choice, and I don’t think knowing how to throw things is going to help you.”

Dad’s voice in Klaus’s head says number two, mild telekinesis but Klaus determinedly shuts that down and turns away from the spectre ruining his waffles.

“Fine,” he says, dropping his fork with a clatter. He finds his appetite rather ruined. “When do we start?”

Five assesses him over the empty coffee mug. His eyes flit down to his plate, barely a dent made in breakfast, and then back up to Klaus’s face.

Good to know that even though Klaus can’t believe in the Ben next to him, he still has brothers around to play the part of overbearing judgement. Ben has been urging Klaus to eat more of his damn breakfast for the past twenty minutes. It’s his little voyeuristic pleasure, watching Klaus eat the things he can’t, and he so rarely gets to indulge because Klaus is stubborn by trade and doesn’t generally care what he puts in his mouth as long as it keeps him going, be it nutritional or chemical.

Or, of course, it’s not Ben, and Klaus is just orchestrating this whole thing in an elaborate one-man show.

Klaus’s head feels a little bit less like a beehive this morning, but that’s because the bees have left home to settle on his skin and in his bones, each ghost like an insect on the spiderweb. He’s overrun with them, more ghost than man, and he doesn’t know how Five can’t see it, can’t be repulsed by it, lack of deathly vision notwithstanding.

“Now, if you’re done,” Five says. “We’ll break for lunch and continue after, depending on progress.”

Three more hours, Number Four, Klaus thinks tiredly.

He wonders what kind of progress Five is hoping for. For himself, he’s just hoping for the humming under his skin to settle, for the ghosts to take even a half-step back and let him breathe, for the mausoleum to stop ringing in his ears. He wants to be able to close his eyes without worrying he’ll see blue flare behind his eyelids, wants to get a better grasp on reality and look at Ben, see Ben, again. The rest can come after, whether that be banishing all of them for good (not Ben, never Ben) or, somehow, miraculously, finetuning things enough to pick and choose who stays and who goes.

He’s tired and jittery and knows with utmost certainty that he cannot live like this, with ghosts crawling over his skin and Ben just as lost as Dave, with Dad still there through it all, weighty gaze pinning him to the ground.

He doesn’t know how to explain any of that to Five, doesn’t know how he’s supposed to measure his ‘progress’ when Five can’t see it himself. How can he convince Five he’s trying, really trying, when he can’t prove it? Number Four has always been the slacker.

“I’m done,” Klaus says, pushing his plate away. “We can go.”

Chapter Text

“Not the courtyard,” Klaus says.

Five pauses. “It has the most easily accessible space,” he says, but he’s only a little huffy about it.

“Right, yeah,” Klaus says. “But not there.”

He can practically see the gears turning in Five’s brain, written into the furrow of his brow and the unhappy set of his jaw. Clearly, Klaus is already screwing with Five’s plans. He fully expects to be shot down and led to the courtyard regardless, because this is Five’s past-future-present and they’re all just living in it.

“Fine,” Five says.

Klaus blinks. “Really?”

His brother scowls. “Yes,” he says. “I assume you have reasons for not liking the courtyard, and I’m smart enough to realize it probably has to do with the ghosts. As much as it pains me to admit, in this one instance, you happen to have more insight on the matter. Besides, it’s not like it really matters where we train your powers. Vanya needs space for safety reasons, Diego and Allison need targets, but you have ghosts to work with no matter where you go, so it doesn’t matter. Not like there’s a shortage of dead people.”

He looks grim again, which probably means he’s thinking about his own entourage that only Klaus is privy to. It’s kind of weird, having someone consider that without being prompted.

(Oh, crap, is that another reason why One and Two are off the audience list? Surely Five has realized that the two of them have high body counts, too, if not quite to his level, so maybe—)

“So, not the courtyard,” Five finishes. He hesitates, though, which Klaus immediately takes as a bad sign, because Five has that vaguely distasteful look on his face that means he’s trying to exercise some human empathy. “I know Dad took you places for training,” Five says carefully. Klaus’s heart freezes in his chest, and the ghosts crowd closer. There’s a ringing in his ears. “But this time, you get a say in where we work. We can try one of the empty rooms, maybe. Obviously, we can’t use the basement, not with Vanya—”

—oh, fuck, Klaus hadn’t even considered that, thank god that’s immediately off the table—

“—and I’d rather we didn’t leave the Academy, not until we know what we’re working with, but this place is huge, a mess of unused rooms.”

“There’s always the attic,” a voice says behind them. Klaus jerks back, way more skittish than he wants to be, and can’t see Vanya at first, not through the ghosts, not when her head doesn’t quite clear German dude’s shoulder. Allison’s a little easier to spot, though, so he focuses on her first and works his way back (and down).

Five makes a considering noise. “That could work,” he allows. “But we’ll have to keep the door open, for ease of escape, in case something goes wrong.”

Klaus’s stomach swoops nauseatingly, and one of the twins groans in sympathy. Or maybe his glamorous new nausea powers have evolved to share, infecting the ghosts around him with the same feeling, because why the fuck not, he guesses. Might as well happen. He almost wishes Dad would drift closer, if only to subject him to such a common weakness. He’d accept the prickly feeling of proximity with the man for that.

Vanya tries to give Klaus a comforting look while simultaneously frowning disapprovingly at Five, which is mildly amusing enough to distract him from the inevitable Dad Spiral.

“It’s going to be fine,” Vanya says, though she sounds less certain than Klaus would like.

He remembers early on in her training when everyone but Allison and Five had to stay well away, out of her sight and out of range, and Luther only agreed so long as Five kept within arm’s reach of Allison at all times and promised to teleport her out at the slightest hint of things going sideways. They had to carve out an entire ‘blast zone’ in the Academy around the courtyard so that if Vanya blew, the damage could be contained. The precautions have gotten much laxer lately, as Vanya’s proven her control and also seems less murderous towards them in general, but he thinks she probably still thinks about it a lot anyway.

“Sure,” Klaus says. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

No, really, what’s the worst possibility? He can’t decide. Dad showing up and being proven real, Dad showing up and being proven not real, ghosts becoming corporeal in overwhelming numbers and turning their hatred on Klaus, ghosts turning their hatred on his siblings and the world, getting stuck in the swarm of ghosts and finally losing touch with the living world once and for all, being thrown back in the mausoleum, forcing Vanya’s hand and making his own sister take him out to save everyone else—the options are endless and he doesn’t know how to rate them from horrible to excruciating to worst. What’s the worst outcome and what are the chances that that’s going to be what happens?

He wonders if the Little Girl Above likes to gamble.

-

Five makes quick adjustments to his plans and they settle in the attic.

Klaus looks around, sees the way Allison and Vanya station themselves close by but distant enough to avoid crowding him (a nice thought, but ultimately useless considering his typical company), sees Five commandeer a corner with a few boxes to set up a makeshift workstation, papers and markers laid out.

(No red notebook, no timer, no stone walls. It’s echoes of familiarity but it’s safe enough that he doesn’t feel like he’s drowning.)

“Luther and Diego are listening outside the door, aren’t they,” Klaus says.

There’s a long moment of silence. Klaus considers asking German dude to go check.

“Maybe,” Vanya allows. She has a tiny, sheepish smile, a little nervous, but it blooms properly when he just sighs theatrically and rolls his eyes. “They promised to keep away, though. Why? Can you… tell? Are their ghosts here?”

Klaus surveys the attic. There’s been a tight clutch of ghosts around him for days now, enough so that it’s hard to tell whether a room is more crowded than usual or not, and there is that not-so-quiet doubt in his mind wondering if he can tell if any of the ghosts are actually there or not, considering recent revelations, but, well. He doesn’t have any reason to hallucinate any of the run-of-the-mill ghosts, right? It’s just the big ones he has to worry about, Ben and Dad and the mausoleum residents. No biggie.

“A few,” he admits.

Allison signs to ask if he wants her to tell their two brothers to buzz off downstairs, and while he’s tempted—the look in Allison’s eye is very familiar, and he thinks it’d be fun to watch her scold One and Two into obeying completely without rumours—he waves away the offer.

“Let them have a heads up if the world is ending,” he says as cheerily as he can. His living audience of three does not look thrilled with his humour, but they rarely are.

“There are two dimensions of your powers I want to explore,” Five says, signalling them all to shut up and listen. “First, your ability to manifest the ghosts into something the rest of us can see and hear, like you’ve been doing with Ben. From what we’ve seen, you’ve made good progress on this on your own, consistently bringing Ben forth for longer and longer periods. This is also the most concerning part of your powers, however, as we saw the other day in the courtyard. We should focus on making sure you can focus on specific ghosts to bring forward without touching the others, and only when you want to, recognizing the signs so that it doesn’t slip out of your control.”

“When I use my powers,” Vanya says tentatively. “At least at first, it was hard to do little things. It took a lot of concentration just to shake the leaves or move small rocks. But then once I started, once I was already using them, it was too easy to do more, without even really realizing.”

Five nods thoughtfully and raises an expectant eyebrow at Klaus.

“Uh,” Klaus says. “Summoning Ben, in the courtyard, that was—it was hard. More than usual. So once I did, I really didn’t notice that—that others came along for the ride.”

“You need to learn to recognize when that’s happening,” Five says. “When you’ve reached the point where it becomes easier to do more with your powers.”

Sure, Klaus thinks, but how? That seems like the sort of thing that can only be learned by doing, and that would require Klaus to purposely manifest the ghosts, more than one, more than Ben, and that’s—

“The other side is banishing,” Five continues.

Klaus sticks his hand in the air. “I vote for that one,” he says.

“That’s the point,” Five says, but he’s restraining himself from tacking on the idiot at the end, so he really is trying. “I don’t think you can learn one without the other, not really. Even if you manage to banish the ghosts perfectly every time, we’ve already seen that manifesting them can get away from you. Maybe you can banish them when it happens, but it would be best to solve the problem at its root rather than try to keep up with the fallout every time you slip.”

“Easy,” Klaus says, deadpan. “One word for you: heroin. I’m not picky, though, whatever’s the most readily available will do. Benzos, coke, big bag of weed will do in a pinch. I know a guy, sets up shop a few blocks from here, problem solved. You’re welcome.”

Allison actually kicks him, right in the shin, and with her three-inch heels, too. Ouch.

“Suggest relapsing again and I’ll tie you to your bedframe,” Five says pleasantly.

Klaus winks at him. “Why, Five, you old devil.”

Allison kicks him again, harder this time.“Ow! Stop being mean to me, can’t you see I’m in a delicate state?”

“Okay,” Vanya says, admirably ignoring them. “I think it should be up to Klaus what we focus on first. The ghosts have been bad lately, right? So, maybe we should focus on banishing.”

“The risk lies in manifesting them,” Five argues. “We need to get a handle on that before the world is put at risk again. We don’t know banishing will be an effective enough tool once he’s already made them tangible—”

—banishing renders your powers useless. The point of training is to expand the limits of what you can accomplish, and that can only be done by exploring your control over the manifestation of the dead—

“—I just think it would be best if Klaus can learn how to push them aside long enough to function, to eat and sleep without seeing them—”

“—and he will, but we have to look at the bigger picture here—”

—listen to them, Klaus, don’t—

—klausklausklaus—

“Shut up,” he says.

“—what? Klaus—”

—er tötete mich—

—just applied yourself as a child, none of this would be necessary. I told you, Number—

“—Shit, okay, Four—”

“—Five, don’t call him—”

“Shut up,” he says again. Voices continue to swirl around him, deafening him, and he can’t blink past the film over his eyes. It’s all going to hell way too fast, tenuous grip on reality already starting to slip through his fingers. He doesn’t even know who he’s talking to. All of them, any of them. “I’ll train, I’ll do it, just—don’t take me to the mausoleum, please.”

You must overcome your fear of the dead if you hope to have any kind of control over them.

“I will, I will, I am, just not there, not them—”

—don’t listen to him, please, just—

“What mausoleum? What's—”

“Four, stop! Control them, don’t let them—”

Blue explodes behind his eyelids, searing them, and the insects are shredding the spiderweb. He’s blind and dizzy and confused, bodies pressing against him, alternately freezing and scorching, and there’s a thrumming his chest again, rattling his ribcage.

“What the hell is going on—oh, fuck, Klaus—”

“Get out, don’t crowd him—”

“—Four, listen to me, just listen—"

—it’s okay, it’s okay—

—Number Four, control yourself immediately—

—klausklausklaus—

“—Holy shit. Dad?”

The world shatters around him. The ghosts surge, blue travels like fire through his veins, and somehow, somehow, he peers through the dead to see his siblings—five of them, now—all packed in the attic alongside the ghosts, looking suitably frightened. Diego and Luther have muscled their way closest to Klaus, barricading him from the grabbier ghosts, and Five is somewhere in front, evidently trying to talk him down while keeping Vanya away from her own self-destruct button.

They are all staring at the very real Reginald Hargreeves, centre stage.

“Oh, good,” Klaus says, voice rough and strangled. “So you can see him too?”

Chapter Text

No matter how smart he is, how hard he works, how much he knows, Five’s siblings will always be the flaw in his plans. Unpredictable, uncontrollable, and dangerous, the lot of them, and Five has never been able to adequately incorporate that variable into his equations.

In hindsight, maybe he should have seen this from a mile away. Klaus’s increasingly twitchy behaviour, his uncharacteristic drive to develop his powers, the strange asides to Ben. Something’s been wrong, they’ve all seen that, but they thought it was just – Klaus. It wasn’t until that day in the courtyard, seeing that flare of blue, the faces Five recognized from the narrow scope of his gun, that Five registered that something was really wrong.

This was never a possibility he considered.

Hargreeves come back to haunt them, more literally than they ever expected, and Five missed it. It makes an awful, predictable kind of sense, because Hargreeves has always been a stubborn, controlling bastard, and why would a measly thing like death change that? Five even remembers, faintly, like warning bells, Klaus saying “I conjured Dad last night,” and Five ignored it because it was Klaus and it was the apocalypse and there wasn’t any time, particularly in the wake of Pogo’s secrets.

Now Five is staring at Reginald Hargreeves, whole and familiar and blue, and it’s happening again. He’s missed the obvious and a sibling is going apocalyptic.

Even from the grave, Dad keeps fucking them up.

-

Maybe it’s the decades of distance that his siblings don’t share, maybe it’s the years working as a hardened assassin under the orders of people arguably more morally corrupt than even Reginald Hargreeves, but Five is less affected by Hargreeves than the rest of his siblings.

(Later, when the fate of the world isn’t hanging over them again, when all siblings are accounted for and talked down from ledges and triggers of all kinds, Five will take stock. He’ll slow down for long enough to come to terms with the fact that he’s seeing his father for the first time since that day at the dinner table. He will have feelings. He will try to ignore them. Delores will not let him.)

(Until then, Five is much more concerned with the blue of Klaus’s hands and the white of Vanya’s eyes. Reginald Hargreeves has always come second to Five’s family.)

Luckily, Five knows how to operate in and through a crisis, and has never been one to let himself freeze and become useless. As soon as Hargreeves manifests, Five runs through the variables.

One through Three, while doubtlessly shaken by the old man’s appearance, pose no obvious threat. Their response will be largely emotional, and therefore, not Five’s forte and not his problem. Four and Seven are the real dangers here, put in the most vulnerable position by Hargreeves’ visit. So, step one in diverting the apocalypse (again): get them as far from Hargreeves as possible.

He doesn’t know what step two is, yet. He’ll worry about it as it happens. It’s not like forty years of pre-planning helped any the last time, so maybe the key is to improvise whenever one of his idiotic siblings detonates. It’ll certainly save him some time.

“Dad?” Luther says.

Five hopes this won’t lead to another Luther-sized bender once this is all over. Their alcohol supply won’t survive the both of them, and Five calls first dibs on any and all alcohol poisoning in the near future. Someone will need to keep the stuff from Klaus, after all. Who knows what this disaster will do for his already tenuous sobriety?

“Number One,” Hargreeves acknowledges. “You’ve failed to keep your siblings in line while I’ve been away.”

Like they’re still snot-nosed children, Luther shrinks back from the disapproval in the man’s tone.

“Away?” Diego repeats incredulously. “You’ve been dead. You killed yourself, asshole. You d-don’t get to order us around.”

While the others are suitably distracted by Hargreeves, Five takes note of the number of ghosts that keep bleeding into view the longer Klaus’s powers slip out of his control. There’s no sign the incoming flood will be stopping any time soon, and the attic is already getting uncomfortably full. Five recognizes a disturbing number of faces, but not all of them. He isn’t sure whether to be relieved or horrified that his victims don’t, apparently, make up the majority of Academy ghosts.

He wonders where Klaus is summoning them from, and if that makes any difference in banishing them. He doesn’t understand nearly enough about his brother’s powers and the ghosts he lives with; there’s too many variables, too much uncertainty.

Klaus’s hands are still glowing blue.

“I’d hoped that with you all living back at home, you’d come to your senses and return to your roles,” Hargreeves says irritably. “With the mess you made averting the apocalypse, it’s clear to me you all need to work on—”

“The mess we made?” Vanya says, voice hard.

Five tears his eyes away from the ghosts to find her stationed next to Klaus, shaking, though not from fear, as Klaus is, but rather from rage. It makes Five uneasy, and from the way Allison hesitates between stepping away in self-preservation and coming closer to offer comfort, he’s not the only one.

Hargreeves turns cool eyes on the last of his children. He looks unrepentant, even faced with the furious outcome of his actions.

“You’re the one who locked me up downstairs,” Vanya continues. Her voice is starting to carry an echo to it. “I remember. You lied to me, my whole life. You took away my powers, you told me I was ordinary—you’re the reason—”

She stops herself, stumbling away from a ghost that gets too close. It’s getting almost suffocating with the number of bodies in the attic, and Five is losing ground. He tries to shove past the dead, clearing a path to Vanya (and Klaus), needing to get to them before it’s too late. He feels sick with the adrenaline.

“I deemed the danger of your powers to be greater than any potential advantage,” Hargreeves says. “And considering the destruction you’ve almost wrought, Number Seven, I can’t say I’ve seen anything to suggest otherwise—”

“You don’t get to talk to her,” Luther says.

At the same time, Diego snarls an emphatic, “Shut up.”

Five staggers out from the thickening crowd of ghosts into a few feet of clear space, finding Vanya on her knees next to Klaus. She’s tense and glowing, holding back her powers as best she can while still channelling them into something useful: she’s keeping the ghosts away from her and Klaus, pushed back a few feet by a faint white barrier. Five shivers as he passes through it, feeling an electric charge over his skin.

So, Vanya’s a hairsbreadth away from imploding, but managing to cling on to her hard-earned self-control, though there’s no telling how long she’ll be able to hold out. Klaus is lost somewhere, despite being right in front of them, bringing more and more ghosts forth with no end in sight. Five is stuck watching both of them struggle under the weight of their powers, wondering which one of them is going to spin out first.

This is not how Five saw this training session going. He planned for numerous eventualities, tried to cover as many bases as he could, plan ways to patch cracks in Klaus’s control as they appeared, but it wasn’t enough.

Five is an idiot.

-

“Would you shut up?” Five snaps at the ghost wailing a little too close for comfort.

He’s managed to herd Vanya and Klaus into a corner, giving them a little cover from the still-growing crowd of ghosts overtaking the attic. He’s left the others to fend for themselves because his immediate concern is making sure the two super-charged ones are as far from Hargreeves and the rest of the risen dead as possible. Considering the confines of the attic, he doesn’t have much to work with. He’s hesitant to teleport anyone away, because taking eyes off either of them is asking for trouble, and he isn’t sure what moving Klaus might do for the rest of the ghosts lingering throughout the house (the street, the city, the world).

“Vanya,” he warns.

“Sorry,” she gasps, squeezing her eyes shut. The faintest glow still shines through. “I’m okay.”

He doesn’t know if he should believe her, but he doesn’t have much choice. It’s obvious who the more immediate concern is, anyway.

“Klaus, can you hear me?” he asks, leaning in as close as he dares. The closer he gets to Klaus, the more unsettled he feels, like there are hundreds of eyes on him. The hair on the back of his neck prickles like someone’s standing right behind him, but when he looks, the nearest ghost is a few feet away, held back by Vanya’s hastily established border.

Klaus doesn’t respond, doesn’t show any sign of being present at all. His hands are clamped over his ears, blue light obscuring his face, and whatever he’s mumbling is too low for Five to hear.

Five hopes that means he doesn’t hear Reginald spouting off behind them. Five is doing what he can to block the old man out and figures Vanya must be doing the same since the world hasn’t died in an eruption of white light yet.

“Klaus,” Five repeats, because more ghosts keep appearing and he doesn’t particularly want to find out if Hargreeves can trigger apocalyptic powers out of a third sibling. Luther, Diego, and Allison are all that’s keeping Reginald firmly on the far side of the attic, and Five knows better than to trust their competency for too long.

“Klaus,” a ghost parrots.

“Klausklausklaus,” a few more chime in.

It’s a mantra, now, spreading throughout the attic until all the ghosts are clamouring for his brother’s attention, and Five curses.

One ghost is not caught under the same spell.

“Number Four,” Hargreeves says, disapproving and exasperated, attention thoroughly derailed from whatever crisis Luther and Diego are having. “While indicative of great potential, this childish display—”

“Vanya,” Five says loudly, “we need to snap him out of it. The sooner he wakes up, the sooner we can get rid of all unwanted visitors.”

Luminescent white eyes dart from Five’s face to over his shoulder, all colour slowly draining from Vanya’s face, but she manages to keep it together. She tears her eyes away from them both and turns instead to Klaus, pointedly putting her back to Five and everything beyond him. A stupid move, tactically speaking, but Five’s got them both covered.

The constant repetition of klausklausklaus is a dull roar in Five’s ears, and really it’s no wonder Klaus asked him not to use it anymore if this is what he hears all the time. It’s lost all meaning, all significance; it’s just a noise the dead make.

“Damn it,” Five hisses. Nothing so far has garnered a sign of life from his brother, and things are getting slightly direr as time passes. “Four!”

Five doesn’t know what he’ll do if they can’t get through to Klaus. He’s trying not to think about it. He already knows from Vanya’s go-around that when presented with the option of saving the world at the expense of his siblings, he struggles to make the right choice. His Commission training didn’t quite prepare him for holding a gun to his sibling’s head, and he doesn’t think he’ll have much more luck this time around.

If they can’t reach Klaus, if he can’t get a handle on his powers—

Five isn’t thinking about it.

Vanya reaches out a hand, tentative, to place on Klaus’s shoulder.

Chapter Text

He’s in the mausoleum, surrounded and consumed by the twisted, rotten dead, so angry and so broken, the decades-centuries-eternity locked away in their tombs having driven them mad, feral, hungry for the only living thing they’ve encountered in so long. He’s terrified and deafened and blinded by them, swallowed whole, and Dad is an impassive figure just outside of it all, safely beyond their reach.

The dead clamour in his ears, so loud he’s sure the whole world must hear them, but nobody ever does. Just him. Just him.

“Dad,” a voice chokes out, and the world spins.

He’s in the attic. Not the mausoleum. His siblings have never set foot in the mausoleum, have never touched it, never been stained by it. He’s never even told them. But the ghosts—

—there are so many of them. A sea of blue, drawn to the light in his palms like moths to a flame. His heart is trying to rattle straight out of his ribcage, the blue is consuming his hands, spreading through his veins, he can feel every ghost crowding into the attic like an electric charge across his skin, and he knows, he knows, that they will not stop until they reach him.

They’re screaming at him, calling for him, pleading and threatening and outright snarling, klausfourklaus, and he doesn’t even know what else they’re saying anymore, he just knows it’s him they want, and he’s trapped in a room of living victims that he never meant to sacrifice.

There’s so many of them, more than he generally ever sees in one place outside of special occasions, more and more until he’s spread so thin amongst them that maybe he’ll just disintegrate entirely.

And there’s Dad, in the midst of it all, as indifferent and untouchable as ever.

He’s eight and he’s thirty and he’s in the mausoleum and he’s in the attic and he’s alone—

“What is he doing here?”

The world spins again.

“Number Four’s powers—”

“No one’s talking to you, old man,” and, oh, Klaus hasn’t heard Diego snarl like that in a while. He can barely hear it now, pulled in so many directions by the other ghosts, but he knows, he knows, recognizes that tightness in his tone, the grit of his teeth to stop the words from getting tangled around his tongue.

And Klaus is doing that, he’s causing it, he’s the reason his siblings are likely teetering on the edge of a collective and destructive mental breakdown, all because Klaus is too stupid and too stubborn to follow Ben’s advice and talk to anyone, ever.

—klausklausklaus—

—klaus—

He can’t see them anymore, can’t spot any of the living ones through the heaving mass of the dead, even though he knows, vaguely, that they must still be there, because the ghosts haven’t reached him yet. His vision’s gone blue and fuzzy, and all he can focus on is the bared teeth, the snarling, the reaching, scrabbling hands. He’s on the floor and he doesn’t know how he got there. He knows the drill, though, knows how this goes, so he curls up tight and holds his glowing hands to his chest, trying desperately to put out the light.

He tries to remember how he did it in the courtyard, the way he found the buzzing and just shut it off. But his whole body is buzzing, his whole being, it’s everything he is, and if he shuts it off, he thinks it’ll be a fast-track ticket to that greyscale meadow. He’d do it, he’d do it in a heartbeat, anything to quiet the voices, to keep them away, but he doesn’t know what will happen to the living ones if he cuts that cord. Will the ghosts stay? Will they hurt them? Is it too late?

A sickeningly familiar face abruptly breaks free from the crowd and lunges towards him, ancient and out of place in the here and now, mouth open and gaping, an endless call of fourfourfour. It isn’t right, it can’t be real, can’t be them, not here, not now. He’s never seen one of them outside of the mausoleum before, not really, not outside of nightmares and the briefest flash out of the corner of his eye, an imprint that’s followed two steps behind him his whole life, real or not. Because he’s hallucinated ghosts before, been down this sorry little path, but he’s always known it wasn’t real because they can’t leave the mausoleum. They’re trapped there, that’s what makes them so feral and angry and hungry, what makes them so horrible, and he’s always been so, so grateful that at least they can’t haunt him anywhere outside of his memories.

But there’s one reaching for him, another in the crowd, and who knows how many there might be, crushed alongside the others? It can’t be real, but maybe it can, because he’s at the Academy and Dad is here and maybe nothing ever really changed.

Maybe he’s back there, maybe he never left. There’s a wall at his back and he plasters himself against it, wanting to cover his ears but not wanting to see that infernal blue still setting him ablaze. The mausoleum ghost is so close, almost close enough to touch, glowing, glowing, glowing, and he has nothing to stop them, nowhere to go—

A hand lands on his shoulder and he’s gone.

He’s being torn apart, burnt alive, frozen to his core. His eyes are closed and all he can see is the blue, burning him up, an endless haze, and nothing else is real anymore. He doesn’t remember dying, not really, not in that club, but maybe that’s what this is. Maybe he’s dying again, maybe he’s already dead, really dead, and the Little Girl finally took pity. Had enough of torturing her little pet and decided to draw the curtains, end the show.

Good, he thinks. No encore.

He’ll just stay right here, or there, or wherever that stupid little meadow is, grey and quiet and not a hint of blue. It’ll be peaceful and lonely and just him for the first time in such a long time, with all the benefits of being blissfully high without the drag of ghosts or withdrawal or disappointed siblings.

If he just stays right here and lets the ghosts rip him to pieces, maybe he’ll finally see Dave. A few moments of unpleasantness, of his worst fears come to life, and then it’ll be over.

He lets himself think of it, of seeing Dave, of getting to touch him again. It’s been months and decades and eternity, and he hopes Dave is still waiting. They have a lot to catch up on.

He can tell him about averting the apocalypse, and Vanya’s secret powers, and the absolute nightmare that has been sharing a house of horrors with his dysfunctional adult siblings—about the Little Girl, even, because Dave will probably get a kick out of that, and also perhaps a minor religious crisis—about finally getting clean after two decades, proving that he can follow through on things, thank you, Ben—oh, and seeing Ben again, and seeing Ben again, how he’s never been so happy to be punched in the face—Luther and Diego’s painful truce just to avoid brawls in the hallway every morning—Mom’s insistence on still giving them smiley pancakes for breakfast—Five’s bitchy attitude—

—Vanya’s growing confidence—bonding with Allison over ASL and raiding her closet—Diego’s begrudging attempts to be nicer—Luther finally being someone other than overbearing Number One—and most of all, the completely alien feeling when he manages to bring Ben forward and all seven of them sit down for dinner. Pride, maybe.

Oh, fuck.

He can’t wait to tell all of that to Dave, but he’s going to have to, isn’t he? He’s been doing all of this for Dave, in the hopes of finally reaching him, but while he’s been straining to reach the dead love of his life, his living family’s been here all along, just trying to help him achieve that goal. Dave wouldn’t want—no, scratch that, Klaus doesn’t want to just leave them behind, not now. Especially not with Dad hanging around once more, invisible or not. He knows what it’s like having eyes follow your every step through life, and he wouldn’t want to inflict that on his siblings.

Damn it, Klaus is supposed to be the selfish one. Two years ago, he would have chosen Dave and abandoned the others in a heartbeat.

Two years ago, he never would have had a reason to choose.

The blue is still burning beyond his eyelids, he can still feel it sneaking tendrils up his arms, hands almost entirely numb, but he is, to his shock, still in one piece. He isn’t shredded into confetti by eager, violent hands. He isn’t being gnawed on or dragged into the fray or being hurt at all. They’re still screaming at him, deafening and terrifying, but the only thing he feels is that hand on his shoulder, tight but not painful. It’s squeezing him but it’s not trying to do anything, not trying to hurt or draw blood or any of the things he’s been threatened with for the past thirty years.

He doesn’t realize he’d closed his eyes until he has to remember how to open them. They sting.

The first thing he sees is Vanya, face ghastly under the blue light emanating from the bodies all around them.

She’s crouched next to him, hand fused to his shoulder, and he doesn’t know if it’s meant to comfort him or her more, because she’s looking fairly shaky. This is entirely fair, Klaus thinks. Not only is the room flooded with dead people in various states of ‘gory-disgusting-gross’, but Vanya is seeing Dad for the first time since everything went down.

Klaus is still fuzzy and fractured into about a dozen pieces, but he notes Vanya’s tense expression, the brightness of her eyes, the way she’s angled carefully to avoid looking in the direction he remembers Reginald being without turning her back that way.

“Van—” Klaus says, or tries to, but between the stickiness of his own thoughts and the wailing of the dead, he doesn’t know if anything actually comes out.

Instead, he thinks long and hard and finally remembers how to uncurl one arm from his chest, covering the hand on his shoulder with his own. Vanya jumps a little at the contact, which can’t be a good sign. He doesn’t want to be the reason she tips over the edge and ends the world (again), and he’s a little panicked at the thought of Reginald instigating Apocalypse: Take-Two just because Klaus is too stupid and too stubborn, story of his life.

But, hell, maybe the past few months of training and help from the others have been beneficial for his sister, because while she looks spooked and more than a little freaked when she turns to him, she’s miraculously keeping a lid on her world-ending powers.

Seeing him awake and mostly cognizant, Vanya squeezes his shoulder again, presumably in relief. She doesn’t try to speak, but Klaus guesses she’s hoping he’ll get his act together and send all the ghosties packing. A nice idea.

He’s doing his best not to get sucked back under the yelling and the oppressive presence of the ghosts, still skittering up and down his skin, and he just tries to focus on Vanya’s hand on his shoulder, the feel of her hand under his. He curls his fingers a little tighter and feels her pulse, just barely.

There’s a little space carved around them that’s free of ghosts, and he doesn’t immediately know how that’s possible. It takes him a second to realize that Vanya, while not overly glowy and terrifying, must be doing something with all the free racket, using it to keep some of the closer ones at bay. He doesn’t know how long she can keep it up, but he’s grateful.

He can’t hear individual voices anymore, so he doesn’t know what the others are saying, nor the poison Dad’s doubtlessly spewing, but that’s probably for the best anyway. He can kind of see the width of Luther’s shoulders in the crowd, physically barricading the ghosts from getting closer, despite the way they’re almost definitely clawing at him and screaming in his face, nevermind Dad doing his best to distract them all. He assumes Diego is doing the same, though he can’t see him.

Five is in front of him, keeping a wary eye on, presumably, Dad, somewhere in the maelstrom, and also the two potential apocalypse detonators huddled in the corner. Klaus wonders if Five is the last line of defence, if he’s waiting for the signal to defuse either Vanya or Klaus, whichever one of them blows first.

Because Klaus knows what the likely outcome of this little shitshow will be. This is the final act in the Little Girl’s sadistic play, the last moments of a dying Earth.

Somehow, someway, one of them is going to crack, and it’ll be his fault. Unstable Vanya with the troubling track record, even more unstable Four with the batshit untrained powers, dooming the world to sonic evisceration or the raising of the undead. A flip of the coin to see which one takes. Or maybe She’ll spice it up a bit, give one of the others some untapped, devastating power that just needed the right trigger to unleash upon the world. Maybe it’ll be Five. She strikes Klaus as someone who would get a kick out of the irony.

Christ, it’s like dominoes. One world-ending sibling, two world-ending siblings…

But no, because even though Five looks as wound up and stressed as he ever was in those time-crunch days leading up to the first apocalypse, despite Klaus having his finger on the apocalypse trigger, despite the unexpected gut-punch of seeing Dad’s ghost… not a single one of them has laid a hand on him. No rumour in his ear, no wave of Vanya’s hand in his direction, no gun at his temple. His powers are clearly out of his control and yet no one’s snapped the order to stop him by any means necessary.

“Klaus.”

Insistent, pushy, indistinguishable from the chorus of other voices except for the fact that Klaus recognizes it, misses it, has relied on it for so many years and through so many drug-fueled freakouts that responding to it is practically ingrained in him. He knows that voice.

“Ben,” he says, punched out of him like a breath he’s been holding for far too long.

He’s spent the past however long outright ignoring Ben for fear that he’ll prove to be a hallucination, keeping him from contact with the others, refusing to acknowledge him, knowing full well that it’s the cruellest thing he could do to his brother—but seeing him now, blue and worried and within reach, he’s the only thing keeping him from the mausoleum.

“It’s okay,” Ben says, so firmly and so absurdly that Klaus almost laughs. “Listen to me,” Ben insists, drawing him back. “It’s okay. Just breathe, Klaus.”

Klaus.

The only ghost that has ever said his name without ringing all of his alarm bells. The only one that has never looked at him with that unfettered anger, that hatred, that desire to rip him to shreds, despite the bullshit Klaus has put him through, despite the drugs and the fights and the resentment that grew like a beast between them. The only ghost that has ever remained sane, even after so long.

Bem’s visible and blue and real, really real, because both Five and Vanya react to the sound of his voice. It’s a relief, that outside confirmation, because it means Klaus can trust Ben again like he always has before. Klaus’s chest kind of lurches at the sight of him.

Klaus is… really glad to see him.

“I don’t know how to stop,” Klaus admits. He focuses on Ben and doesn’t dare look away, not even when the ghosts surge closer. He doesn’t look away from Ben in case he can’t find his way back again.

“This is why I trained you children. You must become the masters of your own powers, and Number Four’s selfish refusal—”

Reginald’s words cut off, lost in the sea of noise, stopped before he finishes, but it hardly matters. He’s right.

Klaus feels sick.

“Ignore him,” Ben says, as if it’s really that easy. “Don’t listen to him. Asshole’s never had a helpful thing to say.”

That does wring a laugh out of him, somehow, even though he feels fractured into a million pieces.

“So it really is him,” Klaus says, resigned. Relieved. “This time.”

Ben pulls a face. “Yes,” he says. “And I think, once this is over, Luther and Five are probably going to drain the bar dry. But it’s him, really him, and he’s a ghost. Just a ghost.”

Ghosts are never just anything, in his not so humble opinion. Ghosts make up the fabric of his wretched existence, are the basis for most of his life decisions, as disagreeable as they may be. Ghosts are the foundation of his very being.

“You can banish ghosts, Klaus,” Ben says, a little impatient. “Even him. Especially him.”

Klaus shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says. “You know I can’t. I don’t know how. I’ve tried, I have, I swear, but I can’t. He’s right. I haven’t tried hard enough, haven’t had the right motivation, not like—”

God, he can’t even say it. But he should have. He should have suggested it immediately, should have divulged the ugly details to Five, should have sucked it up and marched to the mausoleum himself. It didn’t work when he was a kid, but maybe—

“You’re such an idiot,” Ben says. “I told you: you can banish them. You’ve done it before. Several times. You’ve even banished him, and that was in your sleep.”

The look on Five’s face—and the spasmodic squeeze of Klaus’s shoulder—tells him that there will be more questions on this later, both about Dad and about Klaus’s previous (supposed) success at banishing, but that all hinges on there being a later.

Klaus shakes his head again. “I don’t remember,” he says. “I don’t know how.”

The blue is blurring in front of his eyes, ghosts smearing together. Even the features of Ben’s face, so close to his own, are starting to get lost in the glare. He blinks, eyes burning, ears ringing, and finally looks away, his father’s voice a familiar hum in his ears.

His immediate response to seeing the faint glow around Vanya is a sickening flood of horror, though he’ll never tell her that. For an awful moment, he feels his chest lurch with guilt and fear, seeing the white of her eyes, convinced he’s about to see her go over the edge, go supernova. His loss of control is going to shatter all her progress, catapult them back to where they started those months ago, and he’ll get to watch it happen from only a few feet away—

Five catches his eye. His mouth is set in a grim line, but he makes no threatening move, not towards Vanya and not towards Klaus, no matter how dire things seem to be getting.

They’re leaving it to him. Leaving him to get a hold of it himself. Trusting him, even, just as they’re trusting Vanya, despite her track record. Or because of it?

For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t want to ruin that. Doesn’t want them to regret it.

Klaus wants to tell Five not to worry, because he can’t even distinguish Reggie’s voice from the general dull roar anymore, so whatever instigating bullshit is coming from his mouth isn’t landing, and he’ll get himself together and stop ending the world any minute now.

“I’m sorry,” he says instead.

Five looks far from appeased by this.

“You can control them, Klaus,” he says, and kudos to him, because there isn’t any doubt in his voice or on his face. “They’re your powers.”

“I don’t know how,” Klaus says again.

Five pulls a face. “That’s why I was trying to help you,” he says. “Clearly, that went well. Nothing like trial by fire to motivate you.”

Klaus surprises himself by laughing.

He doesn’t remember banishing Reginald before. Doesn’t remember successfully banishing any of the ghosts before, other than shoving them away in the courtyard, and that was… less than ideal. But Ben says he has, and he trusts Ben. Has to trust Ben.

“Okay,” he says, barely audible. He tries to look at Ben again, a smear of blue in front of him. “Okay, Benny. Showtime.”

A hand touches his shoulder. Ben’s touching him for the first time, grip firm and unyielding, and somehow, Klaus doesn’t freak out. It’s a ghost and he’s touching him and he should, by all rights, be very much not okay with it, but it’s Ben. It’s Ben and it’s familiar and Ben has never hurt him, not really. (Punch to the face deserved and notwithstanding.)

Klaus focuses on Vanya’s hand under his, the faint pulse he can feel; the sight of Ben, just as blue as the other ghosts, another vibration against his skin, but the only one not trying to sink his claws into Klaus, the one who never has, despite countless opportunities and motives; the presence of his living siblings stationed throughout the attic, hidden from his view but doing what they can to beat back the ghosts themselves; hell, he even focuses on Reginald, standing out in a sea of feral, mindless dead.

Just like in the courtyard, Klaus uses Ben’s hand as an anchor, keeping him in place, whole and separate from the horde of ghosts. He still feels them, connected to him, but they are flies caught in his web, struggling and fighting against it, against him. But he caught them. He has them.

Blue washes behind his eyelids, blinding.

He lets them go.

Chapter Text

The sudden quiet of the attic is almost as disorientating as the overwhelming noise had been.

Klaus’s head spins violently and he worries for a horrible moment if he’s going to be sick all over Five’s shiny shoes. It won’t be the first brother he’s expelled his guts over, but this time Klaus doesn’t have the cushion of being high to stave off embarrassment and/or prevent him from feeling the pain of being slowly eviscerated for his sins.

Luckily, some white-knuckling of Vanya’s hand and quick swallowing prevents disaster, and Five’s shoes stay shiny.

“Holy shit,” Diego says.

Klaus blinks, trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain and keep himself firmly in the attic. Diego’s voice is almost too loud in the sudden vacuum.

“Is…” Vanya slowly withdraws her hand from his shoulder, but he clings to it, refusing to let her go. She tolerates this. “Is Dad—Is he still here?”

Klaus makes himself drag his eyes up from the floor. Exhaustion is settling into his bones, and his hands are shaking. Vanya’s eyes are no longer white, but she’s almost sickeningly pale, coiled as tight as a spring next to him. Klaus licks his lips.

He doesn’t see Reginald Hargreeves in the room. He also doesn’t… not see Reginald. He can feel his presence still, a shadow at the edge of his vision, but he doesn’t think the man’s ghost is still around.  Klaus tried very hard to banish every single nuisance ghost, fathers included, and there’s no good reason Reginald should have slipped through the cracks of the mass exorcism unless he piggybacked along with Ben, who Klaus tried equally as hard not to banish. Admittedly, the fine motor control of his powers is underdeveloped, but he put a notable amount of effort into shutting Reginald up specifically.

Klaus slides his eyes to the side. Ben catches it and frowns, looking unhappy, but dutifully scans the room.

“Gone,” he says.

“I don’t think so?” Klaus tells Vanya. She doesn’t look particularly comforted, and Five moves restlessly. “I mean—the others are gone. All of them. It’s just Ben.”

All the tension evaporates from Vanya from one second to the next. She slumps against his side in a boneless, relieved heap, clinging to his arm. This is an uncharacteristic display from Vanya, but he can’t say he doesn’t welcome the (warm, alive) physical contact. If she feels half as wrecked from almost pulling the apocalypse trigger as he does, he’s not surprised she needs a little friendly reassurance herself.

She hasn’t slipped her hand out of his, either, which is nice of her, since he can’t seem to make himself loosen his grip just yet. Her own grip on his arm is pretty tight, though, so it’s probably fair play.

Klaus hopes his head will stop spinning soon. He isn’t sure if it’s from the relief, the adrenaline, the fear, or a fun mix of all the above, but it isn’t helping his nausea any.

“Is it going to happen again?” Five asks.

Klaus does not like this question. He especially doesn’t like that it’s a completely valid and necessary thing to ask.

“Um,” he says.

Five is in his face immediately, eyes a little wild around the edges. “Are you in danger of losing control like that again?”

“Like, in general, or right now?”

“Either,” Five says. “Both.”

Klaus thinks about it. Everything still feels a little too disjointed, too slow to piece together, but he thinks that’s probably just the vestiges of the panic rather than particular warning signs.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. His throat feels scraped raw and his voice sounds small to his own ears. “I didn’t—I’m—”

Vanya squeezes his arm. Surprisingly, it helps.

He takes a breath.

“I think I’m okay,” he says. “For now. My head’s clearer. I feel more. Me.”

And Christ on a cracker, Klaus hadn’t realized just how muddled he’d gotten, these last few days. Like he’s been present enough to function, just, but too scrambled to notice how close he was to tipping over. He’s been walking a tightrope for days, fraying at the edges, too numb to even realize. It reminds him of the trance he used to get into, sometimes, when he was taking drugs as they came, mixing and matching and overdoing it simply because he could.

Five studies him for a moment more. Whatever he sees satisfies his risk assessment, because he backs up and dares to take his eyes off of him.

“You’ll be fine,” Ben says. “You’ve got it under control.”

Maybe, if one of them repeats it enough times, it’ll make it true. Manifestation or whatever. Power of self-actualization. Now that’s an angle Dad left woefully underexplored.

Thinking too much about Dad feels like one of those really bad ideas, so Klaus tries to shut that down quickly. He closes his eyes and turns towards Vanya, resting his head against hers. She’s stopped shaking, which is nice, and she doesn’t seem to be in any rush to untangle herself, which is even nicer.

Idly, Klaus wonders if Allison will rumour him to sleep if he asks very nicely.

“You,” Five says in a dangerous voice. “What the hell were you two thinking?”

Klaus wonders if he’s talking to him and Vanya, but that can’t be right—the old man never takes that tone with Vanya.

“What?” Diego says. “What did we do?”

“I specifically told you that neither of you were invited to join us for training! I told you to stay downstairs, out of the way.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“It wasn’t a suggestion.” Five’s voice is acidic. “You had no idea if your presence would make things worse. There was no way of telling what effect you may have had—”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Luther protests. “He was already… ah, upset, when we came in. It wasn’t us that made him—”

“He’s the one who requested you keep your noses out of it,” Five says furiously. “He didn’t want the two of you here while he trained, and why do you think that is? None of this is going to work if we can’t fucking trust each other, you idiots, and you completely ignored his wishes, despite my direct—”

“He can hear you,” Klaus says. “Please stop yelling.” He doesn’t bother opening his eyes.

His brothers immediately stop arguing, which is a power he’s never had before. He hasn’t decided if he likes it.

Klaus hears soft, familiar footsteps approaching his and Vanya’s huddle. Allison must settle on the other side of Vanya, close enough to touch them both while still leaving the space next to Klaus free for Ben, despite no longer being able to see him. Thoughtful.

Hesitantly, Allison brushes her fingers against the arm Klaus has surrendered to Vanya’s hold. He cracks open an eye to watch her wearily.

“Can we use your name again?” she asks.

Klaus flushes. They’re all looking at him. Somehow, it’s worse that they all look completely serious, not a hint of mockery on any of their faces. He’s really done a number on them this time.

“Yes,” he says hastily. “I mean—it’s quiet, now, so just—don’t wear it out. You know.”

It’ll probably be fine. His head is a bit more firmly screwed on now, and he doesn’t think he’s in immediate danger of spiraling at the sound of his name. He can’t guarantee it won’t happen again, but. It’s fine.

“I don’t want to call you Four,” Vanya says.

Klaus winces. Yeah, he’s not a huge fan of that either, it turns out.

“You don’t have to do that,” he assures. “I mean, it’s probably good that you did, before. It helped, kind of, just to tell you apart from the—from them.” His eyes skitter over Five nervously. “But my name is—fine. Usually. Sparingly.”

“Jesus Christ,” Diego says in disgust. Klaus is pretty sure it’s not actually directed at him, though. Like, mostly sure.

“How long has Hargreeves been around?” Five asks, changing tracks. Trust Five to focus on the important bits.

Klaus is not eager to have this discussion. He’s been working very hard to avoid it, and while he’s coming to accept that his judgment lately has been compromised, it doesn’t make it any easier.

“I don’t want to answer that,” he says.

“Tough shit,” Five bites back.

Vanya stirs. “Can we go downstairs? I don’t want to—stay up here.”

“It’s okay,” Klaus tries to assure. “There aren’t any ghosts here anymore. Well, except for Ben, but he’s the good one.”

“Will there be more ghosts downstairs?” Luther asks uneasily. He whispers the word ‘ghosts’ like he’s worried it’ll set him off again, like it’s a taboo.

Klaus thinks about it. “Maybe,” he says, ignoring the way his chest squeezes at the thought. He has to get a grip. “But I doubt it. Pretty sure most of them joined the party up here and got caught up in my eviction notice. Should be pretty quiet around here for a while, until they come back.”

He is not looking forward to when that happens. It’s another thing he’s trying not to think about.

The others still look undecided. They clearly don’t want to stay up here after Klaus rather spectacularly ruined the vibes of the place, but he can’t blame them for being hesitant, not wanting to risk his shaky control.

“I, for one, would also like to not be here anymore,” he offers.

(He can feel the walls looking at him. The room is empty, but he sees flickers out of the corner of his eyes, senses movement in the darkened corners. Vanya’s hand is getting sweaty in his. He’s very tired. Too tired to be properly scared anymore, which is good. Hopefully too tired to go nuclear again. Ha, there’s the cure to the apocalypse: sleep deprivation. He’ll have to remember to mention it to Five.)

That gets them moving, at least.

It’s a joint effort getting to the sitting room, Vanya stuck to his side like glue, keeping him on his feet even though she’s far from steady herself. She curls up on the couch next to him, looking pale and exhausted. Ben is equally as stubborn in staying nearby, perching on the arm of the couch, despite no longer being corporeal (and it being unlikely that he will be again any time soon. Klaus is putting the kibosh on that for the immediate future.)

 It’s a little suffocating, but he doesn’t mind; he can still feel Vanya’s pulse and the warmth of her skin, and having Ben continually in his line of sight is reassuring.

Five glares at the others until they step back several paces, giving them a wide berth.

“Ghosts?” he checks.

“Still gone,” Klaus mumbles into Vanya’s hair.

“Good. How long has Hargreeves been here?”

“Well,” he hedges. “Funny story. Remember the last time I manifested all the ghosties?”

There’s a beat of silence.

“Jesus Christ,” Diego says. Klaus wonders if he’s forgotten how to say anything else.

“So that was because of Dad?” Luther asks.

Klaus pulls a face. “No,” he says. “But also, yes. There were several contributing factors, okay, it’s been a stressful few weeks.” Months. Years?

Five sounds grim again. “How likely is this to keep happening, with him still around?”

Klaus has been thinking about this, actually, on the way down the stairs, in between trying to keep his footing and avoid another jaw-breaking tumble. That would really be the icing on the cake, the cherry on the shit ice cream.

“It might,” he admits. “But I’m… I can feel it, I think? My powers. The ghosts. It’s like a feeling in my chest, like I can feel them crawling, or existing, or—”

He can’t quite put it into words. He’s spent so long shoving his powers away, trying to ignore them entirely, but he doesn’t know how he can ignore the thrumming in his blood, the reverberation in his chest, anymore. He doesn’t like it, feeling connected to the ghosts, like they’re tied together, but it does give him more of a grip on things. He hopes. He isn’t eager to test it any time soon.

His siblings look disturbed.

(He’s a split second away from suggesting—asking—begging?—Allison rumours his powers away, tries to make them dormant, because, hey, it worked for Vanya. But then his brain, miraculously, kicks in just in time to remind him that no, actually, it didn’t work for Vanya, and also it’s a bit of a sore subject for present company, and he absolutely should not mention any such idea. Pity.)

(Also, he literally just came to the conclusion that he needs to face his powers instead of hiding from them if he wants any hope of managing them, so at this point, it’s just wishful thinking. Whatever, he’s recovering from almost ending the world not half an hour ago, he’s allowed to be a little unreasonable.)

“If it gets bad again, I’m pretty sure I’ll know how to stop it,” Klaus settles on, and can only hope he sounds more confident than he feels.

“If it gets bad again, you’ll tell us,” Five says. It is not a suggestion. “Preferably before the dead take over the Academy.”

Klaus nods gamely.

“And if and when the ghosts come back,” Five continues, “you’ll tell us that, too. The second you see Hargreeves again, I want to know.”

That’s a trickier request to agree to. The problem is that Klaus isn’t entirely sure when he’s really seeing Dad and when it’s just a trick of his overwrought imagination. Running to Five to tattle on a hallucination probably isn’t going to be very productive, but Five will doubtlessly get suspicious if Klaus doesn’t mention seeing him at all.

“Um,” he says.

“I mean it, Klaus,” Five presses.

Fuck it, Klaus knows that look on Ben’s face. That’s the you-know-I’m-right face, the exasperated don’t-be-stupid look that he’s seen so often. Goddamnit.

“Right,” he says. “Okay. Can I—I have a confession to make, actually.”

This is so not going to help his standing with the others. They haven’t considered him sound of mind for years, and he is not looking forward to proving them right.

Five glares at him, poised for another world-ending secret, but surprisingly, he bites back whatever his instinctual response is. He’s distracted by Vanya, who’s remained so quiet that Klaus sort of thought she’d fallen asleep next to him.

“Can it wait?” she asks Five. “Just for a little bit. I don’t think the world will end if we give him ten minutes to calm down.” Klaus thinks she would probably also appreciate a break to cool down, but he doesn’t mind playing scapegoat, since she’s right. Now that she mentions it, he can feel his heart still racing, galloping unevenly in his chest.

Five doesn’t look happy, but he also knows better than to provoke Vanya’s ire, particularly after such a close call. He steps back.

“Out,” he orders the others. “Staring at them like they’re going to explode isn’t going to help. Make yourselves useful and see if there’s any damage. I want to know what the range was for the ghosts.”

He glares until Luther and Allison reluctantly start to move, throwing concerned looks towards the couch. Klaus closes his eyes. He hears Five hiss something, presumably to Diego, who hesitates a moment longer before he gets moving, too.

“Ten minutes,” Five says ominously.

“Go, Five,” Vanya says. It sounds like she maybe rolls her eyes. This, more than anything, is what reassures Klaus that the world really isn’t ending.

As soon as Klaus hears Five’s little teleport-y noise, signifying they’re finally alone—barring Ben, obviously, who Klaus would rather never leave his side again, even with his snarky attitude—all the wind leaves his sails. He slumps back against Vanya and the couch, feeling sick and shaky, breath stuttering in his throat.

They probably make for a pathetic sight, a trembling heap on the couch, but fuck, at least he isn’t the only one with the potential of fucking everything up so cataclysmically. A horrible thing to be comforted by, maybe, but he’ll take it.

“I almost ended the world,” he says. “With my useless goddamn powers.” He’s known it was a possibility since the day in the courtyard, but this is the first time he’s really had to face it so openly. It feels like he’ll never catch his breath properly.

“Well, I almost ended the world with my nonexistent goddamn powers,” Vanya says. “Welcome to the Apocalypse Club. It’s a shitty gig, but you’ll get pretty good at ending arguments.”

He huffs a horrifyingly wet laugh above her head. Who would have guessed, little Vanya joking so cavalierly about the worst day of her life. Good for her.

“It’s okay,” Vanya says. “World’s still intact. Good job. Now you just have to keep it that way.”

“I don’t know if I can,” he admits.

“You can,” she says. “It gets easier. I promise.”

Well, he can’t very well argue with that. He figures that if anyone would know, it’s Vanya. He’s already decided to trust Five with the wrangling of his powers—he might as well trust Vanya, too.

Chapter Text

Ten minutes comes and goes, and Klaus manages to get his breathing under control. His heart feels less like it’s going to break out of his ribcage. Vanya is still close at his side, but they’re not clinging to each other quite as desperately, and she looks better, steadier. Ben is hovering protectively at the end of the couch, but he’s still the only ghost in attendance.

Overall, Klaus is feeling much better. Less unstable, though he supposes that’s relative and subject to change.

In any case, when Diego comes in, Klaus can meet his eyes and plaster on a grin, trying to emulate his usual energy. He can tell it’s a little lacklustre, but hey, he’s trying here.

Diego marches to the couch and shoves a mug into Klaus and Vanya’s hands each. They have no choice but to take them, lest they spill hot chocolate all over their laps and ruin what’s turning into a pleasant enough snuggle.

“Thank you?” Klaus says bemusedly. His mug has whipped cream and two peppermint sticks, and Vanya’s, he can see, has exactly five tiny marshmallows, which means Diego must have tracked down Mom and asked her to make it exactly as they like it.

Diego drops into one of the armchairs, crossing his arms and looking moody.

Vanya takes a sip.

“He’s being nice,” Ben stage-whispers, even though Klaus is the only one that can hear him.

“Aw, Di,” Klaus mumbles into his mug, licking the whipped cream. “You do care.”

“Fuck you.”

“Is this the new anti-apocalypse treatment?” Vanya wonders.

Klaus hopes so. Much more pleasant than anything he’s come up with himself, other than perhaps that which includes injecting or ingesting illicit substances. This probably comes with fewer adverse side effects, though.

“No,” Diego says. “This is the ‘my siblings almost exploded and look like they’re going to pass out’ treatment.”

Klaus shrugs. “Sounds like the same thing.”

Diego glares at him. Clearly, despite the hot chocolate, he’s not best pleased with him at the moment.

Klaus gets through half of his mug in the ensuing silence, wondering where Five’s gotten to. It’s not like the little rascal to give them a longer grace period than promised, and he doubts anything Diego could have said would delay him for long enough for Klaus and Vanya to enjoy something as frivolous as hot chocolate.

Points to Diego, though, because Klaus’s fraught nerves do feel much better, even with just the warm mug in his hands. He feels less clammy and light-headed, and Vanya’s stopped trembling next to him.

The passive-aggressive quiet from Diego is putting him on edge, though.

“Just say it, Diego,” Klaus says. “Whatever it is you’re thinking.”

Diego’s jaw clenches. Klaus braces himself.

“Why do you never tell us shit?” Diego asks. “You talk about dumb stuff all the time, but you never actually say anything important. You kept all of this about your powers to yourself for ages, and I don’t get it. Why?”

Klaus squeezes the mug in his hands, eyes fixed on the marshmallow he’d stolen from Vanya’s cup. “I thought I could handle it,” he says quietly. He knows as he says it that it’s a weak excuse, but it’s all he can offer.

“Yeah, great job. Handled it so well we can’t even say your name without it being a trigger. You see how messed up that is, right?”

Ben makes a noise of protest, but Vanya’s got it covered.

“Diego,” she reproofs. “I don’t think that’s helping.”

“Kind of hard to help when I don’t know anything,” he shoots back. “These aren’t little secrets. The ghosts, Dad hanging around, the Dave guy… Did it ever occur to you that we could help you with this shit?”

“Oh, like you’re an open book,” Klaus bites.

“I’m not the one raising zombies!”

“I’m going to start locking you and Luther out of the house,” Five says mildly from the doorway. “Either shut up or get out before you make things worse, Diego.”

Diego looks furious, but subsides, likely because everyone present knows very well that Five will follow through with his threats. As annoying as Diego’s being right now, Klaus doesn’t really want the guy stranded in Reno or wherever the fuck Five might dump him.

“Looks like the ghosts were mostly contained here,” Five tells them, turning his attention fully to Klaus. “Mom’s going to be patching some holes in the Academy walls for a while, but I don’t think any made it out onto the street, so no panic from the public, at least.”

Well, at least the Little Girl isn’t above small miracles.

“What about the ghosts now?” Vanya asks. “And—Dad?”

Klaus thinks he can make out Margaret in the hall somewhere, sticking to the far wall, and he can faintly hear familiar German grumbling from points unknown. Other than that, it’s still quiet, more so than it has been in weeks. Besides, hasn’t he already decided these two are essentially friends anyway? He doesn’t think he remembers seeing them in the attic after things went blue. Imagine that—maybe he’s found ghosts with boundaries.

“Still no sign,” Klaus assures. “Probably.”

“Probably?” Five asks.

Truth time. Diego might just burst a blood vessel with this one.

“So,” Klaus says. “That confession I mentioned. Things might be slightly more complicated than they appear.”

“More complicated than Reginald Hargreeves tormenting us beyond the grave and almost driving you into one,” Diego says flatly.

Klaus really wants to assure him that any grave he may or may not end up in will likely only be temporary, but, well. He has a sneaking suspicion his all-but-confirmed immortality will kind of end up being A Big Deal, particularly with his powers being such a touchy subject right now. One annoying revelation at a time, please.

“Bingo. Surprise! Never a dull moment in the Hargreeves house of horrors! So, uh—Ben’s great, we love Ben, and since he’s the only other one that’s been able to see Daddy Dearest, he’s kind of been the only thing keeping me—well, I don’t know if I’d say sane…” Far too many brothers are looking impatient, so Klaus tries to get a handle on his rambling. “The thing is, I’m not totally, completely, absolutely sure that Ben is real all the time. Or Dad, for that matter. Mostly Dad.”

A pause.

“Okay,” Vanya says carefully. “Why do you think they might not be real?”

“Because no one else sees them? I mean—I thought Dad was around this whole time, right, just kind of looming in the background, but then Ben said he didn’t see him even though he was right there, so—”

“But we’ve seen Ben,” Vanya says. “And Dad. We’ve known ghosts were real since we were little, and I’m sorry we didn’t always act like it, but we do believe you, especially now.”

“Yes, right, yes,” Klaus says. He’s spinning the mug in his hands and can’t seem to make himself stop. “I know they’re real, I know they’re ghosts, but I think sometimes they aren’t. I think I’m—seeing them when they really aren’t there. Maybe not Ben, since he’s usually always here anyway, but I’ve definitely seen Dad on occasions where Ben hasn’t, even when we’re in the same room.”

Five looks pensive when Klaus chances a glance at him.

“That’s why I got so twisted up with the banishing,” Klaus admits. “I kept trying to push him away, but it never worked, so I kept going and going until it felt like I’d banished more of myself than any ghosties, and I think it’s because even if I did manage to banish Dad, I saw him anyway.”

“If you made progress with your powers, you couldn’t tell,” Five says thoughtfully, eyes distant. “So, realistically, we have no idea what degree of control you have, or the baseline for your abilities.”

“Pretty sure my control is still as shit as ever,” Klaus mutters.

“Bullshit.”

Surprised, Klaus turns to Ben. His brother’s frowning at him like he’s the stupidest person alive or dead, and while it’s a familiar look, Klaus isn’t entirely sure what he’s done to warrant it this time. Even more surprisingly, Five and Vanya both look equally unimpressed.

“Klaus,” Ben groans. “Seriously? Remember what Five said? Two sides of your powers: summoning and banishing. We know you can summon because you pulled me back in the courtyard. We know you can banish because you’ve done it multiple times. You banished Dad and the others, including me, in your sleep, you’ve been banishing ghosts all week while dealing with Dad, and you just banished an attic full of ghosts—more than you’ve ever banished before—while they were corporeal and you were half out of your mind. Raw power and ability aren’t the problems, your finesse is—and even then, you banished an attic full of ghosts and still managed to purposely keep me around. If you had no control, it would be all or nothing, and I wouldn’t be here right now.”

Klaus opens his mouth to protest. Closes it. Has to take a minute to process.

“Holy shit,” he says. “Holy shit, you’re saying the training’s fucking working? I’m just too much of a mess to see it? What kind of bullshit—”

“That’s why it’s helpful to work with others,” Five butts in. There’s no way for him to have heard Ben’s goddamn bombshell revelation, but he’s a smart cookie and seems to have figured it out anyway, before even Klaus. Fucking typical. “An outside observer to keep track and stay on course.”

In Klaus’s defence, he’s always known that; he just intended for Ben to play that role, and never foresaw the possibility of losing faith in Ben’s actual existence. That’s the kind of existential crisis that’s only supposed to happen to their other siblings, not the Séance.

Try as he might, Klaus can’t find a good argument to rally against Five.

“Oops,” he says instead. He’s reframing the past few weeks in his head and, boy, he does not come out of it looking good. He’s such an idiot. He maintains it isn’t entirely his fault—extenuating circumstances, emotional instability, drug withdrawals, whatever—but he does have to concede that Ben (and Five, but mostly Ben) has been trying to tell him this the whole time.

“That being said,” Five continues stiffly. “I have to apologize.”

“For what?” Klaus and Vanya ask at the same time.

“I asked you to trust me to help train you and didn’t uphold my end of the deal. You told me you weren’t comfortable training around the others, and I didn’t do enough to ensure their distance. Maybe if I had, what happened in the attic wouldn’t have gone so far. So: I’m sorry.”

Five frowns like this is something really bothering the poor guy. Diego’s slumped down in his chair and glaring at the floor.

“Oh,” Klaus says awkwardly. “I guess that’s true. I really didn’t want anyone around, and it kind of… threw me off? But, ah, in retrospect, I don’t think I was entirely of sound mind. I thought they would—” Klaus thinks about Vanya’s comforting presence next to him and hastily changes tracks. “—I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Klaus still doesn’t love the thought of one of the others turning their powers on him, but he has to admit that now, with a sister on one side and a brother on the other, his thoughts more ordered and the strung-out thrumming in his chest at a manageable level, the threat doesn’t seem as imminent. Or even all that likely. He even has proof to back it up, which is comforting.

“I do trust you, Five,” Klaus says, because it seems like something he needs to hear. “With training, yeah, but also—I believe you really aren’t going to kill me. You had every opportunity in the attic, and you didn’t, so, you know, thanks for that. Real weight off my chest.”

(This does raise a minor concern, but Klaus isn’t going to mention it and ruin the mood. Besides, if what Ben and Five are saying about the development of his powers is true, then maybe Klaus really will be able to get a handle on things without resorting to drastic measures of his own.)

(It’s nice to have options again.)

“No one was going to kill you!” Diego protests immediately, shooting up straight. “What the hell? Why would you think that?”

Klaus definitely does not look at Vanya. He can practically sense her frown anyway, but that doesn’t mean he has to face it, or whatever is in her eyes.

“I’m not letting anyone kill any of you,” Five says firmly. “Although I reserve the right to maim anyone irritating enough.”

“I am known to be quite irritating,” Klaus observes, because someone has to.

“And he hasn’t maimed you yet,” Vanya says, leaning against his shoulder. “Maybe he has a soft spot for you.”

Chapter Text

The ghosts come back in trickles.

Klaus gets through most of the rest of the day in relative peace, though the longer the quiet stretches on, the more on edge he gets. By the time they’re all eating dinner and studiously not talking about it, Klaus is so jumpy he almost stabs himself with his fork when Mom ambles by to check on them.

Vanya pointedly asks him whether he would like to join her for violin practice. (She stresses that this is purely for recreational purposes—she hasn’t been able to practice as much as she’s used to, what with the whole powers thing, and she misses playing just for playing’s sake.) Klaus agrees and Allison invites herself along.

Margaret and a dark-eyed woman with a fascination with Vanya follow them up the stairs but keep their distance, for which Klaus is grateful.

(Ben makes noises about the strength of his banishing and the effects on lingering ghosts, talking about radius and duration and other stuff that Klaus isn’t listening to. That shit can wait for Five.)

Klaus spends a pleasant evening with his sisters (and Ben, who Klaus is refusing to let out of his sight. This would be a problem if Ben didn’t feel the exact same way, but luckily, their codependence is a two-way problem). Listening to Vanya play makes it easier to ignore the ghosts slowly bleeding back into view, and it doesn’t hurt that Allison takes his hand surreptitiously when he starts eyeing the shadows a little too closely.

Vanya plays and plays, even after Allison falls asleep next to him, until abruptly Klaus realizes that she’s waiting for him to tell her it’s okay for her to stop.

It’s embarrassing and it’s irritating and it’s—good.

Before Vanya turns in for the night, she asks him if there’s any sign of Dad yet. He hurries to tell her no, with no small amount of relief.

“Probably too much to hope the old fucker’s caught the hint,” he sighs.

With his sisters asleep and his brothers conspicuously scarce, Klaus finds himself reluctant to head to bed himself. He’s still leery about his powers slipping away from him in his sleep, and he’s worried about upsetting whatever tenuous handle he has on things now, like a storm waiting to break. One wrong move and it will all come crashing down like a house of cards.

He finds Five in the sitting room as he wanders the halls. There’s a glass of something tempting in his hand.

“Well,” Five says after Klaus admits he’s a teensy bit concerned to sleep. “How do you feel, powers-wise? On a scale of one to apocalyptic.”

“That’s a fucked-up scale,” Klaus tells him, then: “The same. I can feel the ghosts, more of them as they come back, more than I ever could before. It’s like they’re—a part of me. I could ignore it before, what with the drugs and the denial and all sorts of fun things. Not anymore.”

He taps his fingers against his chest, glancing off Dave’s dog tags. The thrumming hasn’t left him since the attic; it’s just below the surface, not quite demanding his attention, but twinging with every ghost. It isn’t roaring through his blood like it was before, but he can feel the potential of it like a lead weight.

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Five says. Klaus is obligated to shoot him a betrayed look. “Look, if you can feel your powers like that, then they can’t come as a surprise. You can keep a better grip on them, and on the ghosts. I don’t think you have to worry about sleeping.”

This is Five being kind.

“Okay,” Klaus agrees reluctantly. “But if you’re wrong and something does happen—”

Five rolls his eyes, which seems unfairly dismissive considering the near-miss they had this morning. “We’ll deal with it,” Five says, as if it’s as easy as that. As if Klaus isn’t going to go and have nightmares about the mausoleum tonight, as if Five isn’t going to dream about the apocalypse, as if Vanya and Allison aren’t currently dreaming about white light and supernova siblings. An open secret none of them are going to acknowledge.

“Night, Five,” Ben says and Klaus relays.

Klaus does dream about the mausoleum, and he does see Dad and the ghosts in his dreams, blue and destructive, with his siblings swallowed in the tide. But every time he wakes, he feels that thrumming in his chest, alive and constant and handled. The blue stays in his dreams.

-

Diego wakes him up promptly at 9 AM, which is entirely disgusting.

Klaus’s eyes are gummy from lack of sleep, he’s still wearing yesterday’s clothes, and he almost dies of a heart attack right then and there before his brain kicks online enough to recognize Diego’s hand shaking his shoulder.

“Christ on a cracker,” Klaus gasps. “Warn a guy, Diego! Actually, better yet, go away.”

“No,” Diego says, unsympathetic. “You’re going to get up and come down to breakfast. For once in your life, Klaus, I swear to God, you’re going to function like a passable human being even if I have to make you. This ‘going it alone’ bullshit stops now, and I’m here to make sure you don’t run yourself into the ground and kill us all.”

“Charming,” Klaus says. “Thanks for the pep talk.”

“I will drag you out of this bed.”

“Okay, okay! I’m up! If you don’t want a show, avert your gaze so I may peel off these leather pants—”

Diego stays stubbornly waiting just outside his door, looking, Ben cheerfully reports, like someone’s pissed in his cheerios. When Klaus dithers too long with the tie of his sweatpants—hands just too shaky to knot the string securely—Diego starts knocking on the cracked door, trying to force him out like an animal at the zoo.

“Considering I almost ended the world yesterday, you’d think he’d be more polite,” Klaus tells Ben. “Everyone was scared shitless of Vanya for at least three days after she went nuclear. No one pulled this shit with her.”

As soon as Klaus shuffles out of his room, Diego falls in at his side. Klaus clenches his teeth and does not skitter away from him, even though he immediately feels half a dozen invisible eyes fall on him as soon as Diego gets too close. He kneads his chest with the heel of his palm and scowls fiercely at every shadowed corner they pass.

Five’s already perched dourly at the kitchen table when they get downstairs, which makes Klaus wonder if the guy ever sleeps. Judging by the steaming cup of coffee clutched protectively in his goblin grip, the answer would appear to be no.

“Did Diego rope you into this, too?” Klaus asks, being forcibly directed into a seat—thankfully, one that’s decently far away from the dead cowboy in the corner. “Diego, you can’t do this. We have rights.”

“You have out of control powers and an inability to take care of yourself,” Diego says. “Maybe if you slept and ate like a normal person, we wouldn’t be worried about ghosts killing us in our sleep or Dad breathing down our necks.”

Five makes a warning noise but doesn’t look up from his coffee. Diego puts down a mug at Klaus’ elbow with a little more force than necessary. Klaus is stuck on the concept of whether ghosts can technically breathe down anyone’s neck, but he doesn’t think mentioning that to Diego would be productive.

“My point,” Diego says in a carefully and badly restrained voice, “is that we’re here to help you. Dumbass,” he can’t help but tack on at the end.

Klaus blinks. “Oh,” he says. “Well, if that’s all.”

“How are the ghosts today?” Five asks, as easy as if he’s inquiring about the weather.

Dutifully, Klaus swivels his head around, taking in the whole kitchen. Diego, a bristly sentinel at his side, check. Five hunched over his coffee across from him, double check. Ben sitting cross-legged on the counter nearby, triple check. Just to make sure, Klaus looks down and pats at his own chest—check.

“Not so bad,” he reports. “Only two in the kitchen, and one of them is Ben. I think there’s more in the hallway, but I can’t see them and they’re being respectful of quiet hours.”

Diego frowns but Five nods.

“Jesus, is that normal?” Diego asks. “They’re just… around all the time? Where’s the one in the kitchen?” He looks around suspiciously, which reminds Klaus endearingly of Luther.

“Up your ass,” he says sweetly.

Diego scowls.

“Still no Hargreeves?” Five checks.

“Nope. Haven’t seen his ugly face since—you know.”

Five hums contemplatively. Klaus wants to ask if he thinks Dad might be gone for good, since he’s not ashamed to admit that’s what he’s hoping for desperately. Hey, he managed to banish all those ghosts in the attic, and he hasn’t seen most of them in the hours since; maybe the universe will cut him a break and keep them gone. That takes care of the real Reginald—now he just has to deal with not-real Reginald. Uh, easy?

“Breakfast,” Diego says abruptly. “Mom’s busy cleaning up your mess this morning, so we have to cook for ourselves.”

“I’ll take pancakes,” Klaus says.

“I’m making eggs,” Diego says, already turning to the fridge. “Do you want scrambled or boiled?”

“I want pancakes.”

“Scrambled it is.”

Chapter Text

It turns out that all his siblings are in on the scheme.

Allison tells him that they just want to help him establish a schedule—eating three meals a day, sleeping at reasonable hours, the works. Supposedly, it’s meant to be healthy and isn’t at all a judgment on his ability to care for himself and his powers. If you listen to Allison, anyway. Diego is very much all about the judgment.

To be fair, no one actually forces him to do anything. A sibling usually ‘just happens’ to be around when Mom serves meals and reminds him to go, even if that sibling is typically Ben. One of them is within shouting distance at all times, though none of them have shared any contingency plans for if Klaus threatens to bring the end times again, so he’s not sure what good it’ll do.

He remembers those weeks immediately after little Vanya went nuclear. Everyone tiptoeing around the house, unwilling to acknowledge even to each other how relieved they were every time Vanya decided to crash at her apartment for the night. Constantly on edge, scared to ask her to so much as pass the potatoes, please, preferably without glowing white eyes. Only Five and Allison unwaveringly stuck to her side, staunchly refusing to be intimidated by rattling picture frames or unpleasant air pressure changes that made their ears pop at random intervals. Things improved, obviously, and now Klaus is reasonably certain Vanya isn’t going to blast him to smithereens if he bursts into her room unannounced or, apparently, shoves a pack of feral ghosties in her face in the ultimate stress test of her control, but still.

Anyway, the point is that after Vanny’s little meltdown, no one dared to risk overstepping their bounds. Except for Five, obviously, who wouldn’t know boundaries if you tattooed them on your face. Five was the only one who didn’t bat an eye at the idea of training Vanya’s powers despite the risk, laying down the cool logic that she’d either have to learn eventually or go back on Dad’s pills—which was an emphatic no, by the way. Everyone else was stuck walking on eggshells.

Not so with Klaus, apparently.

Diego shows no qualms in dragging him out of bed in the mornings. Mom makes him waffles whenever he asks, but admittedly, that might not have to do with his apocalyptic potential—that might just be Mom. Allison prods him downstairs for lunch, Vanya cajoles him with violin recitals, and even Luther pokes his head in his room every now and then to exchange a few awkward words. Five and Ben are always around when Klaus is too uneasy and panicked to sleep, the humming in his chest almost as deafening as the ghosts that still crowd him.

It's like they’ve all agreed not to make a big deal of the second almost-apocalypse. Which is infuriating, because it is a very big deal to Klaus.

The only thing that marks his siblings’ wariness is the fact that none of them seem eager for him to start training again. At least, none of them have mentioned it, and neither has he. He doesn’t plan to, either, not anytime soon. Sure, he needs to get his powers under control, get back to the grind—same ultimatum as Vanya. Either learn or go back to the drugs. But he can’t say he’s antsy to jump right back into it.

He does cautiously feel out the thrumming in his chest when the ghosts are particularly bad, taking note of how he can feel them even without seeing them. Sometimes, on nights where Five is closely watching and poised to sound the alarm if needed, he dares to stretch his powers a little bit, tapping into that tingly feeling that gave Margaret and German dude upset stomachs eons ago. It’s enough to make the ghosts flicker faintly and turn a little transparent with their dose of nausea, and Five thinks that’s the first step in proper banishing like he did in the attic. So, when things are particularly loud, Klaus can make them quiet down a bit, but he’s always too terrified of the blue slipping from his fingers to push any harder, so he doesn’t fully banish anyone, not daring to take the risk yet.

The others likely feel the same, so they’re leaving him be, for now—probably until he gets his act together a bit more and stops looking like he’s going to drop dead any minute (Diego’s words, repeated faithfully almost every morning as Klaus is wrangled from his room against his will). Or maybe they’re hoping he’ll get his head screwed on straight and stop hallucinating their asshole father before they expect him to wield power over the dead again. You know, like reasonable people.

In any case, Klaus, for the first time in a while, is eating, sleeping, and otherwise feeling less like a wrung-out, shredded sponge. Maybe—just maybe—his siblings have some kind of point with this ‘routine’ thing. He won’t tell them that, though. Ben’s smug enough as it is.

-

“No, you’ve dropped the stitches again,” Vanya says. “You have to count them.”

“I don’t do math,” Klaus says. “This is meant to be a hobby. Hobbies are supposed to be fun and math-free.”

She sighs. “It’s only twenty stitches. I’m pretty sure you can count that far.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Ben says from his lounging spot across the room, the little shit.

Klaus sticks his tongue out at him. He’d give him the finger, too, except both of his hands are hopelessly tangled in yarn and he thinks moving even an inch will seal his fate. He doesn’t know what happened. The ball of yarn clearly has a mind of its own. Maybe Vanya’s fucking with him, using her risky powers to sic his knitting supplies on him. Like hazing for the Apocalypse Club or something. It’s an exclusive group, after all.

Gently, Vanya takes the needles from his hands and starts the arduous process of freeing him. Knowing he’ll likely be more of a hindrance than a help, all he can do is stick out his arms and let her.

“Hard to keep count of anything with Tuberculosis Hans over here,” Klaus says, glaring at the unrepentant German dude. The ghost’s been creeping closer all morning, rambling mournfully and hacking up several lungs as Klaus has been trying to learn how to knit under Vanya’s generous—if clumsy—tutoring. “We’re workshopping his name,” Klaus adds as an aside to Vanya, her uneasy attention immediately caught at the hint of a haunting. “I promised Ben he could name this one, but all of his suggestions suck.”

“Hey,” Ben protests.

“Can you ask him his name?” Vanya asks tentatively.

She only dares ask because Klaus has mentioned German dude—Hans—several times, stressing that, although deeply annoying, he isn’t actually a real issue, as far as problematic ghosts go. He’s never taken advantage of Klaus’s out of control powers, never taken the opportunity to attack anyone with them. He just likes to chew Klaus’s (and Ben’s, adjacently) ear off, potentially due to boredom.

This is the only reason Klaus pauses for long enough to consider. “Maybe,” he says doubtfully. “I don’t think he’s really all here, though. He just rambles a lot about his tragic death and how he was murdered by his son, blah blah. Unresolved issues, unfinished business, whatever. Get in line, man, we’ve all got problems.”

Vanya purses her lips, faintly disturbed, as Klaus’s siblings usually are when they think too hard about their unwelcome, undead roommates.

“Back off, buddy,” Klaus shoots at Hans, who’s officially crossed the line into his personal bubble. Klaus’ hands only shake a little bit, he’s happy to note. That’s got to be progress of some kind. Hans, miraculously, stops whining, but he stares mournfully at Klaus. The discordant thrumming in his chest, what he’s taken to calling the ghost frequency, is getting distracting.

“Maybe he wants to learn how to knit, too,” Ben suggests. He’s turned back to his book, interest lost, which is more than a little insulting. Some concern and urgency would be nice—what if Hans is the thing that flips Klaus’s apocalypse switch? Come on, people.

“Should we change rooms?” Vanya asks, bless her cotton socks. “I think Five’s in the study. Or the library should be free.”

Klaus studies Hans. “No, this guy’s pretty fond of following me,” he says matter-of-factly. “Lonely bastard. It’s fine, he’s shut up now. We’re going to keep it that way, verstehe? And maybe give me some breathing room, jeez.”

When Hans hesitates for too long, Klaus waves an impatient—and only faintly shaking—hand at him. The ink of his goodbye tattoo flashes up from his palm and Hans dutifully cringes away. Klaus purposely makes himself turn back to his hopeless yarn tangle, putting his back to Hans and telling himself he isn’t at all nervous to do so.

Vanya is openly staring at him.

Klaus smiles at her. “So, Vanny,” he says. “When and why on earth did you ever learn to knit? Could have saved me a lot of hassle if I’d known earlier, you know, and a lot of wasted yarn.” He wiggles his fingers demonstrably, now even more tied in knots.

Vanya spares a nervous look to the empty air behind the couch before she shakes herself and turns back to the matter at hand. “Stop moving,” she reprimands, reaching for the worst of the tangle.

-

He's been locked in a staring contest with the ghost across the room for the past twenty minutes.

He’s like a live wire, the ghost frequency buzzing through his whole body, getting worse with every new arrival. This is probably the worst it’s been, crowd-wise, since his mass exorcism in the attic. He got a handy little break for a few days, but things are back in full swing now. His only saving grace is that there’s still been no sign of dickhead billionaires.

Klaus scratches anxiously at the hair on the back of his neck. He’s curled up as small as he can go in Luther’s preferred armchair, mostly because it was the only furniture free from ghosts and it affords him some shelter from the rest. There are at least half a dozen dead wandering around the room, crying and moaning and taking up space, and who knows how many more on the other side of the room behind him. He can hear some of them, but he doesn’t dare look. Most of his attention has been focused on this one ghost that’s been staring at him dead-on for—well, for as long as he’s noticed.

Meeting her eyes is somewhat difficult because her neck is so twisted and bent. Her head’s at entirely the wrong angle. Her eyes are clear, though, boring straight through him, unsettlingly present. She isn’t making a racket like the others—she’s just staring. Somehow, that’s worse.

Ben’s the only sibling around, standing sentinel at Klaus’ side and warding off other ghosties with a fierce glare. The noise has to be getting to him, too, but he hasn’t made an effort to leave the room, not outside of getting Klaus himself up and moving. Klaus can’t, though. He’s worried moving too much will attract their attention. Right now, a lot of the ghosts are just existing, moving about the room and stuck in their own worlds, but he knows from experience that as soon as they realize he’s here, all hell will break loose.

That’s why the girl with the broken neck is so terrifying. She’s clearly aware of him. She could blow his cover any minute, as soon as her sane ghost routine is up.

“I think we should find Five,” Ben murmurs, not for the first time.

Klaus’s eyes are starting to sting. His fingers feel cold on his neck.

A ghost somewhere behind him—way too close—starts sobbing.

“Klaus,” Ben says uneasily.

“Shut up,” he says. “Shut up, shut up, shut—”

He blinks.

When he opens his eyes, the girl is closer. In front of the opposing couch rather than behind it. He’s positive she had been behind it. She’s still fucking staring.

“Stay back,” he warns. He stretches out one hand to wave at her. The thrumming is so bad he’s surprised his arm isn’t vibrating, isn’t shaking apart. He shakes his hand and thinks of sending her away, of making her stop looking at him, of making them all quiet. She doesn’t waver.

He’s terrified that if he keeps trying, the humming will overtake him and turn his hands blue. He curls up again, fitting his hands over his ears like they belong there.

“Go away,” he says. “Go away, please.” His eyes are stinging and watering again, so he has no choice but to close them. This time he doesn’t open them, not wanting to see if she’s gotten any closer. Surely, if she gets too close, Ben will say something. Ben will keep her away.

He can still hear the ghosts, even muffled, even over his own voice, and he’s convinced he’s going to see the blue beyond his eyelids any second. Sorry, Five, he’s fucked up again—at least they’d gotten a few extra days after the attic.

“Hey,” a loud voice says beside him. A hand taps gently at his elbow, nothing at all like the violent gestures from most ghosts.

Klaus pries open his eyes. He doesn’t see the girl because, instead, Five is directly in front of him. He’s in his blue kid PJs and there’s a pillow mark on his cheek. It’s adorable.

“You okay?” Five asks.

Klaus blinks at him. “Yeah,” he croaks. “Peachy. Just a bit loud in here.”

Five pulls back, settling on his heels. He frowns, unconvinced. “Then maybe we should leave,” he says wryly. “Get up.”

“Bossy,” Klaus says, mostly to stall until he remembers how to move his limbs. He does manage to get to his feet under Five’s scrutiny.

“Oh, hello,” Klaus says, waving to his sisters. They’re keeping their distance, maybe on Five’s orders, but they’re huddled in the doorway all the same, peering over to watch him. There’s no sign of their brothers, either because they haven’t caught on to the potential crisis or because they’re purposely staying away.

Vanya is the only one to sheepishly wave back. They’re both grey in the face and jumpy, pressed close together in tense lines.

Five huffs impatiently until Klaus gets the hint and starts moving, painstakingly picking his way across the room. His siblings watch on without comment as he performs an intricate dance, sidestepping various ghosties. Ben trails next to him, still glaring at everyone.

To Ben and Five’s credit, the next room is somewhat quieter, at least for now. More ghosts will probably accumulate eventually, but for the moment, Klaus can take a free breath and shake out his arms, trying to dispel some of the buzzy feeling.

Allison signs anxiously to him. Klaus has to squint a little before his brain starts working properly.

“I’m okay,” he assures. “Really. Just a minor freakout. No army of the undead today.”

He doesn’t see the benefit in sharing how worried he’d been that that wouldn’t prove to be the case, since everyone’s looking on edge already. Taking in their downturned mouths and stiff shoulders, Klaus thinks—maybe his siblings haven’t been treating his apocalyptic potential as cavalierly as he thought. It’s possible he’s been reading them all wrong. He wonders if Diego and Luther really are somewhere nearby, as alert and worried as the others. Oops.

Come to think of it, maybe this has been the contingency plan all along—get Five to snap him out of it while the others stay on standby.

“Uh,” Klaus says. “Thanks, by the way. No Dad,” he adds hastily when Five opens his mouth. “Seriously. Just normal ghost bullshit. Got away from me a bit.”

Five closes his mouth and eyes him speculatively, maybe assessing how much he can trust his words. It would hurt more if Klaus didn’t fully deserve it. At least Vanya relaxes a little bit, though she’s still clearly uneasy.

“Fine,” Five says. “Well, I’m not getting any more sleep tonight, and I’m assuming you’re not either. Griddy’s, anyone? I could go for a coffee.”

Klaus stares at him. Allison frowns.

“Are we sure that’s… a good idea?” Vanya asks tentatively. “It’s just, there are probably more ghosts outside, right?”

Five rolls his eyes. “There are ghosts inside. At least outside, Klaus might lose some of them along the way, and won’t be cooped up in the house with them. It’s fine. He’s not going to lose control.” The look he shoots Klaus tells him he better not lose control, because Five hates to be wrong. For his part, Klaus is almost touched that Five trusts his abilities that much. Mostly he’s stressed, though. He’s known to disappoint people.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Ben says, then gestures pointedly until Klaus repeats this to the others. “Most of them in there are Academy ghosts—we’ve rarely seen them outside. Griddy’s might not be a great idea, though. Lots of ghosts after Five’s little adventure.”

Five scowls fiercely at this reminder, clearly kicking himself for forgetting. This time it’s Allison’s turn to roll her eyes. She reminds them that other coffee shops, cafes, and, yes, even doughnut places, exist. They even went to a few as kids, even if Griddy’s was their go-to.

“Let’s go, then,” Five says.

“But you’re in your jammies,” Klaus points out.

Five looks down as if genuinely surprised to find that he is, in fact, in his pajamas. He wrestles visibly with his pride for a moment. It’s fascinating to watch. Eventually, he comes to a decision and juts out his chin.

“Not like the stupid uniform is much better anyway,” he says. “Are you coming or not?”

Chapter Text

When Klaus does finally see Dad again, it’s in the sitting room. He appears almost in the exact same spot as he did those weeks and weeks ago and, like then, Klaus doesn’t spot him straight away.

There are three of them in the room, including Klaus and not including the various ghosts, of which there are a few. Klaus has staked a claim on the end of one of the couches, dutifully working away at the scarf Vanya’s been helping him salvage. He still has a bad habit of dropping stitches and has to keep asking Vanya for help on how to save them, but he’s blaming that not on lack of attention or inability to count, but on the distraction provided by two siblings and four ghosts hanging around like a bad smell.

Vanya patiently helps him every time either way, though she has picked up a tendency to sigh before doing so. Klaus is pretty sure it’s good-natured, though. Vanya has a pretty obvious tell when she’s really pissed. She’s at the other end of the couch, sheet music spread out haphazardly across the coffee table, chewing determinedly on a pen as she frowns at the papers.

Five’s camped out in an armchair, head buried in a horrible looking book that Klaus is pretty sure has even gotten Five beat, based on the scowl affixed to his face and the angry grumbling that occasionally arises from his corner. He must have scavenged it from Dad’s study, since it looks old and gross enough to be part of one of the man’s weird collections, but for the life of him, Klaus couldn’t even guess at what it’s about. How to traumatize children, maybe, or the lifecycle of some alien breed of moth. Klaus has glanced at the titles on those shelves—he wouldn’t be surprised by anything.

The accompanying ghosts aren’t too bad, relatively speaking. Three of them are some of Five’s usual crowd, but of the variety that prefers to keep their wary distance from him rather than scream obscenities in his face, so Klaus can live with them. The fourth ghost is an old woman who looks vaguely familiar, so he’s probably seen her around a few times, maybe with Diego or Luther. She’s pretty mopey and kind of brings down the mood, if he’s honest.

Klaus has already inventoried all of these ghosts for Five and Vanya’s benefit.

Ben would be here, too, since they’re still working through the codependence thing, but they’re trying to stretch the limits of how long they can go not glued to each other’s side before the panic sets in. So far, their record is two and a half hours, which is… not great. Ben’s currently on a stroll, mostly to restore some kind of normalcy and save his sanity, since he’s often complained that constant exposure to Klaus wears it thin. Klaus doesn’t begrudge him this, especially since the ghosts are manageable today. Based on experience, though, he expects him back sometime in the next hour.

It's a peaceful enough day, really. Which is, of course, why Reginald Hargreeves has to ruin it.

Klaus is concentrating fully on his knitting, only slightly tangled in the yarn this time. He’s making good headway into the scarf. It helps that his hands don’t shake quite as much as they did even just a few days ago. His attention is carefully not on the ghosts in the room, but he rubs irritably at his chest with the discordant humming.

He's just finished a row without missing a single stitch—he counted carefully, just to make sure—and is about to triumphantly show Vanya when he sees him.

Reginald Hargreeves, for once in his life, is holding his tongue. He’s across the room and glowering at his wayward children, and the sight of him makes Klaus’ chest lurch unpleasantly. Klaus freezes, knitting needles held aloft. Reginald still doesn’t speak, even after locking eyes with him. He just scowls, that much more disapproving, and… fades, just a little. Maybe Klaus is imagining it. Maybe he’s imagining it all.

“Hey,” Vanya says from his left. Klaus doesn’t dare turn to look at her. He isn’t sure he could look away from Dad even if Vanya started to bring the roof down on them again. “Everything okay?”

Klaus swallows. “Um,” he says. “Hey, Five?”

“What?” Five says irritably.

“You know how you wanted me to tell you when a certain someone shows up again? Well.”

Silence for a moment. Then—

“Shit,” Five says, deadpan. “What’s he doing?”

“Nothing. I mean, he’s staring. Creepily.”

He senses more than sees Vanya shift uneasily. He feels bad for ruining her afternoon, especially over what might turn out to just be a figment of his masochistic imagination. Still, he’s just following the rules Five laid out for him, the ones that are specially designed to keep the attic calamity from happening again.

“Is he real?” Five asks shrewdly.

“How should I know? Ben isn’t here to confirm. Christ, just stop looking at us!”

Reginald flickers. He flickers.

Klaus blinks. “Oh, shit.”

“What? What’s happening?” Vanya asks.

Five’s abandoned his book to join them at the couch, though he stays standing just at the end near Klaus. He doesn’t bother looking around the empty (to him) room, which puts him steps ahead of most of their siblings, which shouldn’t be a surprise. He looks intently at Klaus, so much so that Klaus is tempted to turn away from Dad if only to stop Five burning a hole in his temple.

“Banish him,” he says. “Like you did before.”

Klaus squawks. “Thanks, hadn’t thought of that. If I could banish him, do you think we’d be in this situation? I’d wave my hand and say bye-bye before you even knew he was here.”

Five makes an impatient noise. “We’ve been over this. You’ve banished ghosts before. The only thing stopping you is your fear of your powers—”

“Pretty fucking justified, if you ask me—”

“—and you’ve been working on feeling out and controlling them. Use them, don’t let them use you.”

“Wise words from someone not looking at Dad’s ugly face,” Klaus mutters.

“Don’t look at him, then,” Vanya says.

At the same time, Dad finally goes to open his mouth, likely to spew his usual garbage. Klaus has zero interest in hearing any of it ever again, so he slams his eyes closed and yanks on the ghost frequency starting to thump in his chest, largely out of desperation. He flails out a hand (thankfully yarn free) and Vanya helpfully grabs it, wrapping it in her own.

“Number—” is all he hears before he throws his all into the humming.

Well, not his all. That would be bad. Potentially disastrous. But he tells himself he can’t hear Reginald anymore because he’s too busy successfully banishing a singular ghost, entirely consciously, for the first time.

His hand goes cold in Vanya’s, the humming rattles his teeth, and he thinks, forcefully, goodbye.

One heartbeat. Two. He peels open his eyes.

One of Five’s ghosts is weeping in the corner. The other two are safely out of reach, watching warily. The last ghost, the one that had been standing closest to Dad, is looking faintly green around the gills.

They are the only four ghosts in the room.

“Huh,” Klaus says. “Either he wasn’t real and I matter over minded that bitch, or I banished him.”

Vanya relaxes her tight grip on his hand. Five leans back with a self-satisfied and entirely infuriating look on his face.

“Good,” Five says. “I think we should start training again. Carefully, this time.”

Klaus groans. His fingers feel tingly and uncomfortable, almost as bad as the coil in his chest. He feels dizzy with relief and accomplishment.

“Hey, Van,” he says. “Look—I didn’t miss a loop this time.”

-

Now when Klaus stumbles across Five in the middle of the night, he’s made to feel out the thrumming and turn it against specific ghosts. Klaus relays how many ghosts are in a given room and where they are, and then Five goes around choosing one at random for him to try to banish.

There is varying success.

Sometimes Klaus is too tired and too jittery to trust himself—as soon as he tries to focus on his powers, he panics and lets it go. Sometimes the ghosts are too loud, and the room is too crowded, so he just shuts down and it takes Ben to talk him back. Five is always there to supervise, Ben is pretty much a fixture, and sometimes one of the others tag along so long as Klaus gives his permission. Mostly it’s Vanya or Diego.

They find that Klaus’ success at banishing relies heavily on having someone living he can anchor to, though Ben will do in a pinch. Five thinks it’s a mental block rather than a physical (metaphysical?) restriction, but tough cookies because it makes Klaus feel better. Once they realize this and start having someone around who’s willing to let Klaus cling to them like a limpet, the training actually starts progressing, albeit painfully slowly.

When Klaus can banish a ghost of Five’s choosing within a few minutes—using a great deal of concentration and throwing as much of his miraculous nausea powers at the ghosties as he dares—Five starts challenging him to banish quicker, banishing more than one at a time.

This takes significantly longer and is infinitely more frustrating. On the bright side, Klaus is often so exhausted by these sessions that his insomnia is all but cured—both he and Five start sleeping a bit more and look more alive during the day. Klaus is still hesitant to use his new and improved nausea-to-banishing powers outside of these training sessions, even when he finds the days overwhelming—maybe especially then—but he’s working on it.

-

The next time he sees Dad, he’s with Luther of all siblings. Well, and Ben, because they’ve had a bit of regression on the whole independence thing after Daddy Dearest showed his face again. It’s led to games of telephone with the others, since they still can’t see or hear Ben, but whatever, Klaus is going through something right now.

Anyway, it’s not that Klaus and Luther are hanging out. Despite the leaps and bounds Luther has made in the sibling department (seen plainly in the fact Klaus is still free to roam the house at all), they just don’t mesh personality-wise, particularly after Luther’s spectacularly awful attempt at cosplaying Klaus during the first apocalypse. Still, they live in the same building and eat semi-regular meals together. Their paths sometimes overlap.

Case in point: Klaus is going upstairs because it’s not his best day, and Luther happens to simultaneously be going downstairs because… that’s where Allison is, AKA the only one Luther knows how to be normal around? Klaus doesn’t know, that’s their business. Either way, they blink at each other on the stairs for a moment before Klaus decides he’s not equipped for this and would really just like a nap.

The problem arises when Klaus waves at Luther, snakes past him, and then comes face-to-face with Dad waiting at the top of the stairs.

“Oh, come on,” Klaus whines. “Ben?”

Ben grimaces. “I see him,” he says. “Unfortunately.”

At this point, Klaus doesn’t know whether or not to even feel relieved. He’s had some success with banishing lately, but he’s tired, he has a headache, and he’s so goddamn sick of Reginald Hargreeves.

“Luther,” he calls loudly. He hears his brother’s stomping footsteps pause. “Be a dear and come up here, please.”

“Uh,” Luther says. “Why?”

He sounds suspicious, which is fair. Diego used to play this game when they were kids: call a sibling back up to the top and then try to topple them over the railing. Luther usually ended up being the most common target, mostly because he was the least likely to be permanently damaged if Diego succeeded (other than Five), but also because it was Luther and it was Diego.

Now, though, Klaus doesn’t think he could budge Luther an inch, let alone throw the guy overboard. At some point, common sense has to win over childhood instinct.

“Because,” Klaus says, “you’re going to help me chase Dad away.”

“Uh,” Ben says. “Are you sure—”

Klaus sticks out an impatient hand behind him, wiggling his fingers and glaring resolutely at Dad’s knees. No poison from the viper yet, but it’s only a matter of time before he opens his stupid mouth, surely.

The stairs creak as Luther tentatively turns around.

“Dad?” he repeats in a funny voice and Klaus so doesn’t have time for this. He wiggles his fingers again.

“Yes,” he says impatiently. “He’s here and causing me emotional distress. Come help me.”

“Please,” Ben adds.

“Yeah, that.”

“Okay,” Luther says after a long pause. “Um. What do you want me to—”

“Oh, my god,” Klaus says, lunging his arm back blindly until Luther is forced to either grab hold or watch him tumble down. Thankfully, Luther goes with option one, yanking him out of his fall before he gets visions of wire clippers in Mom’s hands. “Danke. Now just give me a minute.”

Secure in the fact he can feel Luther’s arm against his, Ben nearby, Klaus closes his eyes. Five doesn’t think Klaus’s palm tattoos do shit, since they’re just a tacky accessory he got done when he was nineteen and high as a kite, but Klaus disagrees. He finds banishing comes much easier when he has the satisfaction of shoving goodbye in their ugly dead faces. He doesn’t open his eyes to see the look on Dad’s face when he uses this tactic, but it’s the thought that counts.

Luther shuffles. “Is… is he saying anything? Can you ask—”

“No. Shut up, I’m concentrating.”

Miracle of miracles, Luther doesn’t say another word. Klaus thinks about how much of a pain in the ass it is to have to tiptoe around his siblings when Reginald’s around, how it ruins the atmosphere immediately, brings everybody down. Thinks about how the last time Reginald was such a palpable presence between him and Luther, it ended with Luther throwing Klaus across the room and, inadvertently, Klaus running into a rave after Luther and, you know, dying.

Okay, maybe he and Luther have some unresolved issues. Doesn’t mean he likes the cagey look Luther gets when he knows Dad’s around, invisible and judging.

Goodbye, Klaus thinks. His whole hand starts feeling funny, all prickly and cool, and the ghost frequency squeals for a moment, grinding his teeth, and then falls flat.

“Klaus?” Luther says tentatively. “Or—Four?”

“No,” Ben says.

“No,” Klaus says. “Klaus is good. Is he gone?”

“I don’t know?”

“Not you. Ben?”

Silence for a beat. “I think so,” Ben says. He does not sound nearly as confident as Klaus would like.

Nothing else for it. Klaus peels open an eye to scan the top of the staircase warily. Nothing. He opens his other eye to get a better look. He does a slow spin in place, shrugging off Luther’s arm. He scratches idly at his chest.

“I don’t see him,” Ben offers.

“Me neither,” Klaus says. He scratches harder.

“Is he gone?” Luther asks. “Are you okay?”

“Yes to both. Fine and dandy. Just—feels like he’s still here somewhere. Whatever. Damn it, and I really wanted that nap, too. I’m not going to be able to sleep now. Fucking Dad.”

Luther frowns. “I was going to go to the library,” he says. “Do you want to come? It’ll be quiet.”

“Lu, almost nowhere is quiet for me,” Klaus can’t help but remind him. Luther’s face does some complicated gymnastics before landing on ‘ashamed’, and Klaus kind of feels bad. “I appreciate the thought, big guy. I’ll come anyway, see what the attendance is like. Maybe snag Ally to help do my nails.”

And Five to report on the success of (mostly) banishing Dad with only Luther (and Ben) as an anchor, he thinks and doesn’t say. This will probably count as progress the kid-not-kid will want to hear about.

-

Klaus banishes a room full of ghosts, fully and intentionally, without any catastrophic meltdowns, some weeks after Five starts insisting he can.

It’s 7 PM, they’ve just scraped the last of their dinner plates clean, and he hadn’t even been in the middle of training. He’d just been enjoying a mostly peaceful meal with the others—as peaceful as they ever get, anyway—and had been getting increasingly annoyed with the accumulated ghosts ruining his family time.

Ben’s sitting next to him, space left open for him despite his current invisibility to the others, and Klaus has been thinking guiltily of how he used to make Ben corporeal for these dinners before this whole shitshow. The ghosts around them have been getting on his nerves even more than usual because they’re the reason Ben has to play a game of telephone with Klaus just to communicate with the others. Frankly, Klaus is sick of it.

He doesn’t even think about it, not really. Or maybe he just doesn’t overthink it. He’s annoyed with the ghosts, distracted and uneasy, and he wants them to go away. After so many nights under Five’s irritating-but-effective tutelage, it’s almost instinct for him to tug on the powers settled in his chest, Ben comfortingly close by, and push.

All the ghosts in the kitchen stop, flicker, and vanish. Klaus can’t even be relieved because Ben is one of them.

“Whoa, Klaus—” Diego says, alarmed, when Klaus makes a panicked noise and vaults up from his chair.

Klaus ignores him. He slams his eyes closed and claps his hands over his ears—both to drown out his confused and rightfully concerned siblings, and to preemptively block out Reginald’s voice, should he appear. Which, considering Klaus’s luck, is entirely possible, maybe even likely. He doesn’t have time for any of that, though—he has to get Ben back.

(Don’t think about the last time he tried to forcibly yank Ben back, he tells himself. Don’t do that.)

His chest squeezes and aches. His powers feel off-kilter, forced from one extreme to the other, already stretched thin from a successful group banishing and now forced to fish back a specific ghost among dozens, all whilst Klaus has to try to keep his hands from turning blue.

He just keeps telling himself that he’s already done this before, he can do it again. Neater, this time, with less clingy ghosts.

Klaus pictures Ben and his insufferable face. Pictures how annoyed and surprised Ben will be once he realizes what Klaus has done. Most importantly, he’s careful to picture bringing only Ben back. Fine motor control has never been his friend, but damn it, he refuses to spoil dinner by overcrowding the place.

“Hey,” Ben says. “You did it.”

Klaus drops limply back into his chair. His head hits the table with a gentle thunk. He groans pitifully.

“What the hell was that?” Diego asks loudly. “What’s going on?”

“Five was right,” Klaus mumbles to the table. “Bastard.”

Chapter Text

Banishing is going well. Banishing is going better than Klaus could have dreamed, frankly, and he’s still in a little bit of awe sometimes. He never knew his quality of life could be improved this much without so much as a swig of vodka in the mornings. There are snags, sure, nothing’s perfect, but he can make the ghosts go away. Albeit with help and concentration, neither of which he’s the master of, but, hey, this is more than he’s ever had before.

The downside, of course, is that there is always a downside. When everyone is (mostly) confident that Klaus isn’t going to accidentally end the world when he shoves away the screaming, Five says the damning word: summoning.

It makes sense, which is probably the worst part. Five’s been harping on this since the beginning; can’t have one without the other, need to learn both sides, whatever. And, admittedly, summoning is the pressing problem, what with the ‘manifesting an undead army in his sleep’ risk, so, sure, it would be nice if that wasn’t a nightly concern. Still, no one seems to seriously consider Klaus’s stance of abstinence as the best form of prevention.

The assholes know his weak spot, too. Or, more accurately, Ben knows. Which he should, since the weak spot is Ben.

“You used to make me corporeal all the time,” Ben wheedles. “Nothing bad happened at family dinners. You’ve got things under control now. You haven’t hallucinated Dad in days, whenever he does decide to show his face you banish him within seconds, and you know how to turn everything off if things get out of hand. You can do this, Klaus. Please.”

Ben makes good points, which is infuriating. However, Ben is also deeply, deeply biased, and therefore Klaus can’t find it in himself to trust either of them with making this call. Most of their siblings are out, too, because they’re just as biased when it comes to seeing Ben. Luckily, Five tries to be less concerned with all the messy emotional bits when it comes to making the tough calls.

Unluckily, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Five is mostly on Ben’s side.

So, Klaus starts manifesting Ben again. Well, he tries. Under heavy supervision and under strict orders to stop immediately if he thinks the blue might get catching. Typically, this means having Five hovering close by, ready to talk him down at any point, and at least one other sibling waiting somewhere in case they have to keep the ghosts at bay. Usually, it’s Luther or Vanya, since they’re arguably the best equipped for the job.

The day Klaus manages it, Vanya’s conked out in an armchair, slacking in her lookout role, which fills Klaus with some regrettable vindication because ha, he isn’t the only one that sucks as lookout! To be fair to her—if he has to be—it is a little after 3 AM and Five has called dibs on every drop of coffee in the house.

So, it’s just Klaus and Five (and Ben) around and awake to see Klaus’s hands turn blue.

“Oh, shit,” Klaus says immediately. The blue flickers.

“No, no, keep going,” Five insists. “Just focus on Ben.”

Klaus anxiously turns to Ben, who's been practically vibrating all night. Ben gives him an encouraging thumbs-up.

The only ghosts in the room are Ben and Margaret, so, Klaus consoles himself, even if he does slip up, it’s not like things will be too dire. Unless, of course, his powers reach beyond this room and snag some souls throughout the rest of the Academy—but he’s not thinking about that.

He squeezes his hands into fists and tries not to freak out when the blue gets brighter, starting to crawl up his arms.

He knows that it’s worked when Five makes a noise and turns to Ben. Ben waves.

Seconds crawling by turn to minutes and nothing bad happens. Klaus’s hands stay blue, Ben stays tangible, and Margaret glowers from the corner. Slowly, Klaus’s hackles drop. Maybe he isn’t going to accidentally kill everybody tonight. Ben relaxes with him, which is somewhat gratifying.

Vanya snuffles in her sleep and wakes herself up with a start. She looks at them blearily. They look back.

“Oh,” she says. “Hi, Ben.”

-

Their first proper family dinner is met with some initial trepidation. Luther and Allison eye the blue of Klaus’s palms warily, while Diego sits stiffly at his side and glares at them, daring them to say anything. Klaus focuses on getting his fork to his mouth without stabbing himself.

Ben amuses himself with moving dishes and cups around simply because he can. He carries conversations with the others without Klaus’s input, which is amazing.

Five looks smug the entire time. Klaus flicks carrots in his direction and blames it on Ben.

-

“So,” Allison says, almost convincingly casual. Her voice is doing better today, and she is taking full advantage of it. Klaus overheard her on the phone with Claire for at least an hour this morning. Unfortunately, she seems to have decided to set her sights on him now. “Who’s Dave?”

Vanya, glancing through Allison’s stack of old magazines with morbid curiosity, pauses mid-page flip. Klaus stares determinedly at the ceiling from his position sprawled across Allison’s bed.

“Who?” he asks lightly as if it doesn’t kill him.

“The name’s come up a few times,” Vanya ventures. “Diego’s mentioned him, said…” She trails off, like maybe she isn’t entirely sure what Diego’s been saying about this mythical Dave. Klaus’s heart is beating so hard he’s almost surprised no one else can hear it.

“You wear his dog tags,” Allison says.

Klaus closes his eyes. “And?”

They don’t say anything, but he can practically sense his sisters having an intense conversation over his head. He lets one of his hands drift up from his side—hello instead of goodbye, not that it matters—to grip said dog tags in his palm.

“I don’t think I ever got the story on those tags,” Vanya eventually says. It sounds like she’s discarded the magazines. The bed rustles as she scoots closer.

“No story,” Klaus says. “Time travel, war, losing someone. Don’t worry about it.”

Maybe it’ll come up someday, but he’s certainly not eager to talk about it now. Five knows the bare-bone facts, and Diego knows more than he probably realizes, but like hell does Klaus want to lay out every last dirty detail to his mess of a family, regardless of how much better things have been lately. Vietnam is not something Klaus likes to dwell on.

“Dave is the someone you lost, right?” Allison says. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Klaus says. “Me too.”

“What was he like?” Vanya ventures. “You never—well, you never mentioned, ah, being with someone.”

Klaus hums. “Well, you see, we were all kind of going through something at the time. Didn’t seem to be an opportune moment for a family sit down to gossip about my soldier love.”

“Love, huh?” Allison prods. She raises one eyebrow, teasingly—and deservedly—skeptical. “Never thought I’d see the day you’d say that.”

“Oh, fair,” Klaus sighs. “But Dave… Felt like I was in love with him before I knew what was happening, the sneaky bastard. Tense times, you know, and lovely withdrawals on top of it all, I wasn’t exactly in a great frame of mind. He helped. He was… He was kind, and strong, and vulnerable, and… Beautiful. Best person I’ve ever known, and the only one I’ve ever loved more than… Well.” He clears his throat. “Anyway. Gone now. C’est la vie.”

Talking about Dave isn’t nearly as hard as he’d thought it would be. Or, it is, but it feels good, too. Only Ben has heard him really talk about Dave, and even then, it’s only been late at night when Klaus is too tired to keep his trap shut or too sad to care. Klaus has been keeping Dave a secret out of fear, afraid of the pain, afraid of his family’s dismissal, but all the while it’s just been festering inside him, grief eating away at him without anywhere to release it.

But he wants to tell them about Dave. Wants to tell them everything about him, from his freckles to the way he snored so loud Chaz threatened more than once to smother him in his sleep. Or maybe that was Klaus. Hard to remember, sometimes, with the way memories fade over a year or fifty.

Allison’s eyes have gone all soft. It makes Klaus wrinkle his nose.

“He sounds great, Klaus,” she says. “I wish we could have met him.”

“Have you,” Vanya starts, pauses. “Have you tried, you know, looking for him? Summoning him, I mean.”

Klaus almost laughs. “Hadn’t thought of it,” he says in a strangled voice.

“Right,” Vanya says awkwardly. “Sorry.”

Another pause, another silent conversation over him. He sighs and opens his eyes. There are damp spots on Allison’s ceiling.

“Haven’t had any luck,” he says. “I think maybe he doesn’t want to be found. Can’t really blame him. I’ve been trying to summon him since, well, since I lost him, and there’s no sign. Didn’t even get to see him in the freaking afterlife, what kind of bullshit is that? Sure, Dad gets to give me a nerve-racking shave, but I don’t even get to see my one love after I die? How is that fair?”

“Wait,” Vanya says.

“Afterlife?” Allison says. “Died?”

“Oh, fuck me,” Klaus says.

-

Vanya and Allison tattle on him to Five. He does not take it exceedingly well. Neither does the rest of the house when Five’s anger reaches the far corners.

Klaus ends up conjuring Ben to help field the questions and outrage, partly out of self-preservation and partly out of novelty that he can conjure Ben in high-stress environs without opening the doors to the rest of the ghostly flood. Ben doesn’t entirely help matters, though, because he quickly gets just as pissy.

Five is mad because this is yet another aspect of his powers that Klaus has failed to share, despite it being, apparently, quite a big deal. He spends some time calling Klaus an idiot for not mentioning literally being immortal and why that information might have prevented the close call the world had with oblivion. (Klaus is a bit lost on this one. It’s a neat party trick, sure, but how would it have changed anything if Five knew putting a bullet in Klaus’s brain wasn’t a reliable off-switch? Wait, maybe he does get it.)

Ben is mad because he thinks Five is getting worked up at entirely the wrong thing.

Diego ends up mad because he’s the one that eventually shuts up long enough to get the story from Ben and Klaus, at which point he stops steaming at Klaus and swings on Luther, which helps no one.

Klaus is mad because everyone yelling makes it a teensy bit difficult to tell dead from living and trying gives him a monster of a headache. When things reach critical levels, he has to drop the connection with Ben abruptly because he can no longer reliably distinguish good ghost from bad ghost. This, fortunately, shuts everyone up for a second.

“Luther,” he says, pointedly ignoring everyone else. Luther looks at him with wide eyes. “Look, was it your fault I went running into the rave? Maybe. Was it your furry friend that had the murderous boytoy? Yes.”

“Klaus,” Ben says.

“—But it’s all good, the past is the past, and you weren’t the one that cracked my head open like an egg. I forgive you. So you—” He points aggressively at Diego. “Can chill out. Luther was riding his first high, and I’m surprised he made it home at all.”

Diego opens his mouth, anger written all over his eyebrows, but Five beats him to it.

“Forget Luther,” he says impatiently. “Has it occurred to you that your seeing Dad in the afterlife is what summoned him here in the first place?”

Klaus opens his mouth. Closes it. Contemplates.

“I did not consider that,” he admits. “But—no, hang on, Dad didn’t show up until ages after that.”

“After you started training more,” Five says slowly. “Like, I don’t know… summoning?”

“Huh,” Ben says.

Klaus stares at Five. “Are you kidding me,” he says flatly. “The one time I try to make use of my goddamn powers and instead of finding the one person I was looking for, I got Dad?”

Five shrugs.

“The next time I see that little girl, she and I will be having words,” Klaus says. “Is it morally wrong to throw down with a child if that child isn’t really a child, but rather an omnipotent entity resistant to labels who hates my guts?”

Allison makes a distressed noise. “Hopefully you won’t be seeing her for a long time,” she says pointedly.

Klaus waves a dismissive hand. “Yeah, sure. Hey, maybe none of it really happened. I have been seeing things lately. Maybe I just took a nap on the dance floor.”

“No,” Ben says. “You didn’t.”

“Okay, nevermind.”

“I can’t believe you never said anything,” Diego says, working himself up again. “What the hell? This is the kind of shit you tell me!”

Klaus pulls a face. “First, you wouldn’t have believed me. Second, what would you have done? Stabbed Luther? No, thanks.”

“Speaking of,” Five says, “Luther, meet me outside for a minute.”

“No! No one is meeting anyone anywhere, ever.”

“That seems reasonable,” Ben says unhelpfully.

Klaus sticks a finger in his face. “You are not helping.”

Ben sticks out his tongue. He does it only because the others can’t see, the ass.

So, now the others know about the immortal thing. It’s not like Klaus had been keeping it a secret on purpose, but he can’t say he’s thrilled that everyone knows about Dave and his afterlife trip. It’s just a lot of added hassle and scrutiny, really.

On the bright side, Five does not seem as eager to train this aspect of his powers. It’s the little things.

Chapter Text

“You know,” Klaus says to the room at large, “if you’d have told me two years ago that I’d be living sober and only somewhat haunted, I would have laughed all the way to the nearest dealer.”

“And to think, all it took was the end of the world and a Vietnam fling,” Ben says, bored. “I’ve been wasting my time all these years.”

Klaus pulls a face at him. Ben doesn’t even look up from his book, some new thing he picked off of Vanya’s bookshelf just this morning. Personally, books have never been Klaus’s thing, but he can imagine that being able to read something other than that one book Ben’s been stuck with since he kicked the bucket must be pretty nice. He wonders if the blue light is distracting. It takes studious effort to avoid staring at the blue from his palms, anyway.

“Oh, I’m sorry, are we joking about my deep trauma now? Is that open for audience participation?”

“This morning, you asked Five if he wanted to consider himself as part of the dead Hargreeves club.”

“Hargreeves that have died,” Klaus stresses. “Not currently dead. At least, not exclusively. And he should be honoured! Technically, we only thought he was dead for sixteen years. But he doesn’t have many friends, so I figured we could make an exception, make him feel included. Anyway, I’m allowed to joke about that, it’s funny. You can, too, if you ever take that stick out of your ass. Think of Luther’s horrified face!”

“I’ll never understand your sense of humour,” Diego says. “How is you dying in any way funny?”

Klaus heaves a put-upon sigh. “I think there’s some sense of irony,” he reasons. “For the first time in my life, I reject drugs freely offered to me—by my own overbearing, judgmental brother, mind—and, other than a teensy lapse, stick to my sober guns and try to help Luther. You know, it was very illuminating being on the other side of that coin. And I get killed for it! In the middle of a furry rave! A furry rave, Diego!”

Diego, regrettably, does not look all that amused.

“You’ll understand when you die yourself one day,” Klaus says sagely. “Not anytime soon, though, please. Afraid my dance card’s all filled by Benny for now, and I really can’t make time for another permanent ghostie.”

“Not even Dave?” Ben asks.

Klaus points at him accusingly. “You take his name out of your mouth, heathen. You’ve already called the love of my life and death a ‘fling’ in this conversation, so you’re on dangerously thin ice. Watch yourself or I’ll take a nap right before you get to a good part of that book. I’ll ask Vanya for page numbers.”

Ben glowers at him but, for now, keeps his mouth shut.

Alas, Klaus does not have a similarly suitable threat for Diego.

“What gives with that guy, anyway?” Diego asks. “You’re telling me that with all the progress you’ve made controlling your ghosts, you still can’t conjure one soldier?”

“Okay, see, what I don’t need is you making me feel insecure in my powers, so—”

“Fuck that, you’re doing great with your powers,” Diego declares. “Seriously, I mean that. You haven’t freaked out in ages, and it’s good to see Ben so often. That’s my point, though. Even Five’s said it—you’re making all this progress, putting in all this work, but it’s like… I don’t know, man. Your heart’s not in it.”

Klaus is no longer amused. He’s feeling a bit cagey, a bit cornered. “My heart’s not in it?” he repeats incredulously. “The hell does that mean? What goddamn heart needs to be involved? I’m not like Five, oh so passionate to learn my limits and surpass them, and I’m not you, taking great joy out of the mayhem I can cause with them. Training my powers is just… damage control. Precautions. Survival. Which, you’re welcome, by the way.”

Diego rolls his eyes. He actually rolls them, rude and dismissive, as if Klaus is the unreasonable one. Jesus Christ, he can’t be the only one that still has nightmares of that day in the attic. (Squished into his already full roster of nightmares, anyway.)

“No, Diego’s right,” Ben dares to say. He even tears his attention away from his stupid book. This is an even bigger betrayal, because it’s Ben—the one who lives with the ghosts as much as Klaus (relatively speaking), who knows the risks, who is intimately familiar with having powers that one can only contain, not control.

“I haven’t seen you even try to summon Dave in weeks,” Ben continues, as if it’s any of his or Diego’s or anyone’s business. “That used to be your biggest goal during training, it’s what started this whole thing in the first place, but now it’s like you’ve given up.”

That rankles, because the idea that Klaus would ever, in any way, shape, or form, give up on Dave is… is…

Well. Not quite as outlandish as Klaus wants to believe.

He makes a rude noise. “Excuse me for focusing on the bigger picture,” he says. “You’re right, I’ll just take a break from banishing Reggie all the time and conjuring your judgmental ass. Better use of resources to try and summon Dave into this shitshow—ta-da, sorry you died, here’s my mess of a life!”

“Pretty sure if Dave saw you in Vietnam, doubtlessly high as hell and probably just as incompetent, anything he’d see here would be an improvement,” Ben says. “You’re sober, you’ve got more control over your powers than you’ve ever had before, and, as much as I can’t believe I’m saying this, you’re a decently passing functional adult. Kind of.”

“Other than the fact you live at home with your family and don’t have a job,” Diego inputs helpfully.

“You’re here, too, asshole!”

“I have a job.”

“Stabbing purse-snatchers isn’t a career move, Diego.”

“Fuck off, I’m saving lives every night. And I meant my job at Al’s, dumbass. I have a room there, too.”

“A boiler room that doesn’t even have proper walls, and that you haven’t been back to in weeks. You’re thirty, Di, maybe it’s time to—”

“Anyway,” Ben interrupts patiently. “My point is, you’re doing pretty good these days. Just seems weird that you haven’t even tried to summon Dave. What’s the harm in trying? Don’t say the apocalypse. Even Five agrees that you’re significantly less likely to slip up like that these days, and that’s why we have backup plans.”

“Yeah, well, maybe Dave doesn’t want to be summoned, ever think of that?” Klaus bristles. “Maybe there’s a reason he hasn’t popped up yet. Can’t say I blame him. Imagine if I’d managed to drag him through at the beginning? Subjected him to Dad and all this hullaballoo? Probably much more peaceful wherever he is. I bet he’s having a grand all time. Wouldn’t be fair to yank him back to deal with all of our messy lives.”

Ben stares at him with a raised eyebrow. Diego’s making a face.

“How thoughtful of you,” Ben says dryly. “Selflessly letting Dave go so that he doesn’t have to deal with your bullshit. If only we were all so lucky.”

That stings. Klaus can’t help but draw back.

“But I don’t buy it,” Ben stubbornly continues. “I don’t think you’re being noble. When have you ever cared how your life choices might affect other people?”

“Uh,” Diego eloquently interjects, looking between them uneasily. The others still aren’t quite used to how much more ruthless Ben can be now that he’s dead as a doornail and altogether less afraid of speaking his mind. It’s almost funny. Ben’s been this way for so long that Klaus has almost forgotten what it was like when he wasn’t ready to rip Klaus a new one at the drop of a hat.

“You’re scared,” Ben says definitively, so calm, case fucking closed.

“Of what?” Klaus explodes incredulously, hackles raised. God, he hates when Ben gets like this.

Ben shrugs. “My guess? Being rejected. You’re worried that even if you manage to summon your dead boyfriend, he’ll take one look at you in the light of not wartime Vietnam and decide he wants out. I mean, who could blame him?”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Diego says, frowning. “Jesus, Ben. Lay off. The hell’s wrong with you?”

Ben rolls his eyes. “I don’t think that,” he says. “Well, not really. Not anymore. But that’s what Klaus thinks is going to happen. Right?”

Klaus refuses to speak, only glaring mulishly.

“I’ve never met Dave,” Ben continues, entirely unfazed. “I really couldn’t say one way or another how he’d actually react to seeing you in the modern world, or how he’d react to a version of you that isn’t a total walking dumpster fire. However, I know you, and I know how you talk about him. I’ve been with you for years and I’ve never heard you talk about anyone the way you do him. Seems a shame to just give up on that now, at the last hurdle. He deserves more than that. You deserve more than that.”

Ben being unkindly kind is making Klaus’s head spin a bit, and he can’t say he’s a fan. There’s a reason this family doesn’t do heart-to-hearts, and it’s because none of them are good at giving or receiving them. Ben never gave these kind of pep talks on the streets. He must be getting soft.

“You’re wrong,” Klaus manages. “I just don’t want to subject Dave to the ghosts that hang around here. Blue really isn’t his colour, anyway.” A more blatant lie has, perhaps, never been told, but his brothers don’t need to know that.

“Oh, come on,” Diego says irritably. “I think Ben’s being harsh—” que slightly reproving look “—but you’re being stubborn, man. Your powers have been a nightmare, I get that, but they’re not all bad. Good can come from them, right? Look at manifesting Ben! Klaus, that’s incredible. We’d never be together like this if you couldn’t do that. It comes with a lot of bad, sure, but you’re learning to manage that, and who knows what other good stuff you can do with practice?”

“Stop being optimistic,” Klaus says. “I don’t like it.”

“Too bad,” Diego says. “Your powers gave me Ben back, and they also stopped you from becoming a stain on the dance floor. Forgive me if I’m grateful.”

Klaus toys with the idea of retching. “Who are you and what have you done with Number Two?”

Diego shoves his shoulder, hard. “Shut up. If you two weren’t around, I’d just be stuck with Five and Luther for brothers. We’d kill each other in a week.”

“Generous,” Ben says. He picks up his discarded book, and Klaus breathes a sigh of relief.

“Please,” he says. “We all know Five would snap within two days and teleport Luther back to the moon and you, Diego, would get a lovely vacation somewhere far, far away. How does your leather get-up hold up in Antarctica?”

“I could take him,” Diego says confidently.

Ben laughs even harder than Klaus.

-

Klaus chases Ben away with some carefully curated words and hand gestures, delighting in the faces Ben pulls as he makes his hasty retreat.

A strange new party trick he’s developed is the ability to sense how near or far certain ghosts are, though so far this is limited only to the ghosts he’s familiar with—namely, Ben, his old friends Margaret and Hans, and, regrettably, Reginald. Klaus waits until he’s relatively sure Ben has fucked off downstairs (he’s learning to read the skips and feel of the reverberation in his chest, is learning to distinguish ben from the white noise of it all), and then, mostly alone, he opens the door to his bedroom.

As expected, Reginald Hargreeves glowers at him from across the room.

Klaus takes his time in kicking off his boots, picking a path through the detritus littering his room, and flopping down onto his bed. Reginald watches and doesn’t say a word.

“Cat got your tongue?” Klaus asks. He thinks he’s doing a pretty good job of acting like he isn’t tense enough to snap in half. He hates being alone with the man, even more so in light of recent events. That’s why Ben sticks to his side like glue on bad days and, conversely, is part of why Klaus shooed him away now.

Reginald glares.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Klaus says. “You’ve been awfully quiet lately. You know, in the time it takes me to kick your ass out.”

Still nothing.

“Why is that, anyway? You’ve never hesitated to give us—me, especially—shit before, so why the vow of silence? Don’t get me wrong, I’m over the moon about not hearing your voice, don’t feel the need to change.”

Klaus never noticed before, but now that Five’s words are rattling around in his head, he’s picking up on some things. Things like the fact that ever since Reginald first showed up, he’s been dressed in his usual suit and monocle, which he absolutely should not be if he behaved like any other ghost, ever, and manifested the same way as he died. Klaus has seen that surveillance tape of Mom poisoning him—go, Mom!—and this is definitely not the same wardrobe. Ben is the only other ghost that Klaus has seen change his appearance after death (thankfully), and that took years to happen gradually. Also, Ben insists it must have been Klaus’s doing subconsciously, but as far as Klaus is concerned, the jury’s still out on that one.

The Reginald that’s been oh-so-pleasantly stalking him these past few months looks more like the version that ended up crushing Klaus’s hopes for goodness in the world in that barbershop. So, points to Five, then.

Also, and more to the point, this Reginald hasn’t said anything other than ‘Number Four’ since that nightmare in the attic. It could be that Klaus has done his best to shove him firmly back into the void as soon as he can, not leaving much time for chitchat, but here he is now, center-stage and still suspiciously quiet.

“See, Dad, the problem I have,” Klaus says, propping his chin on his hand, “is you, obviously. And I’m getting pretty sick of worrying I’ll see your stupid face around every corner. Your silence has been a handy break, but it’s not doing it for me. Either you’re not talking because you’re not real or because I’ve got enough of a stranglehold on my powers to keep you just banished enough to shut the hell up. What’s your guess?”

Reginald has always had a knack for making the subject of his cool, dirty looks feel like a bug squashed under his shoe. Even without speaking, his angry, disappointed presence is filling the whole room. Klaus remembers it well from his childhood and here it is, in the flesh but not.

Despite the progress he’s made with banishing, Klaus still hasn’t yet managed to banish a ghost without a sibling at hand to remind him what it is to be alive and anchor him. He’s tried a few times under Five’s supervision, and it’s never worked out. He’s never really tried when it comes to Reginald, mainly because he appreciates their moral support in the face of their father anyway, so he might as well cling to them for the added banishing juice.

But he’s sent Ben away for a reason. It’s just him and Reginald—and Hans and Margaret, but they’re old hat at this point, they might as well be here—and Klaus is really, genuinely, tired of it.

He’s alone and he’s listening to Margaret and Hans and the other ghosts in the house he isn’t scared of them. For possibly the first time, he fully trusts the firm hold he has on them, the thrumming in his chest. He feels Ben downstairs, comfortingly close. He hears hints of his living siblings as they move about the house they’ve reclaimed as their own. He feels the dog tags against his palm, the groove of Dave’s name on his skin.

He hears Diego reassuring him that his powers can do good things, too.

When Klaus next dares to open his eyes, head aching, energy drained from him so suddenly he feels he could sleep for a week, Reginald is gone. Klaus can feel it in the same way he can feel Ben downstairs, the way he can feel the impressions of other ghosties in the house—he’s done it. He’s banished him.

The room is not empty. Hans has wandered off, Margaret is semi-transparent, and replacing Reginald in the corner is—

“Hey, sunshine,” Dave says.

Chapter Text

So. Klaus admits that there is some ugly crying involved. If his siblings ever ask, though, he will lie until he’s blue in the face, and Dave will back him up because he is sweet and wonderful and here, really, actually here.

Reginald has to ruin one last thing on his way out the door, though, because Klaus is too drained from banishing him to manifest Dave, which is maddening. Seeing him is one thing—one amazing, impossible thing—but seeing him and not being able to touch him, even though he knows it’s a possibility, is enough to drive him mad.

“It’s okay, love,” Dave soothes, despite looking just as frustrated as Klaus. He’s smiling his stupid soft smile and his eyes are all crinkly, face familiar and beautiful and almost wonderful enough to distract from the gaping, weeping wound in his chest that makes Klaus’s palms itch. “It’s so good to see you.”

Klaus makes a funny gasping laugh. His chest feels like it’s being compressed between two cinderblocks, he can barely get a breath in. All he can see is Dave, amazing, gorgeous, dead Dave, and he thinks maybe he’s died and been given a pity admission by the little girl.

But no, because if he were dead, he’d be able to touch.

“Dave, oh God, Dave,” he keeps babbling, and he can’t make himself stop. He’s on his knees on the floor and he doesn’t know how he got there. Dave is crouched with him, murmuring soft words that Klaus can’t focus on because davedavedave.

Forget the theatre, forget the attic, this is what it feels like when the world is ending.

There’s a spike in his chest, a discordant thrum, and it isn’t Dave because he still isn’t blue. This is potentially the only time Klaus desperately wishes to see that nightmarish blue, damn the consequences.

“Klaus?” Ben’s voice, tinny and far away as if from the end of a tunnel. He sounds loud and frantic. “Klaus, what’s going—” He bursts into the room and stops short, eyes big and worried. He stares at Dave.

“Hello,” Dave says awkwardly. God, Klaus loves him. He loves him.

“You’re…” Ben trails off, looking at Klaus. “Holy shit.”

Okay, so Ben knows about the ugly crying, and he’s much more likely to rat him out to the others. For the moment, though, he looks a bit too stressed to be thinking about any future humiliation, which Klaus would be grateful for if he weren’t too busy staring at Dave and thinking about Dave and wanting Dave.

“Hey, Klaus, it’s alright,” Dave says, unhappy with the continued hitching of Klaus’s breathing. “Please calm down. I’m here. I’m here.”

Klaus makes the mistake of reaching out a hand—it moves without his permission, on autopilot, instinct left over from those awful, wonderful months—and it passes through Dave’s shoulder. It isn’t possible, but Klaus feels the blood on his hands, caked into the grooves, under his nails, tacky and warm and so much, God, too much.

Ben curses. “You had to die gory,” he says grumpily. “Your chest, the blood—” He gestures pointedly until Dave gets the message.

Dave starts, then looks guilty. “Oh, Klaus, sunshine, I’m sorry,” he says. He shifts back, raising a hand to his chest self-consciously. “It don’t hurt or nothing, I swear. I’m okay. Please calm down. What can I do?” He turns beseeching eyes on Ben.

Klaus is curious what Ben will say, because frankly, he doesn’t know what could possibly help in this situation.

“Klaus, listen,” Ben says. “Hey. Listen.”

With great effort, Klaus tears his eyes away from the blood (so much blood, gushing over his hands, spilling from his lips) and turns to his brother. Ben looks sympathetic, a strange expression on his face.

“You have to calm down,” he says reasonably. “You can’t manifest either of us like this.”

Yes, Ben, that’s the problem, he wants to bite back, but the words get lost on the way to his mouth.

Slowly, Dave leans closer. “Can you look at me, please?” he says gently. “Up here, Klaus,” he encourages when Klaus’s eyes are immediately drawn back to his chest. Their eyes meet. “That’s it. Hey there.” Dave smiles.

Klaus’s brain kicks online enough to be mortified and pissed off that this is how Dave is seeing him after a year (fifty) apart—a puddle of tears and snot and pathetic on the floor of his childhood bedroom, in sweatpants and two-day old eyeliner. Sure, Klaus might not have been at the top of his game in Vietnam, but he always wanted Dave to see him in all his modern glam and glory, damn it. This is far from the fairytale reunion he wanted.

“Hi,” he croaks. Dave’s eyes have never looked so blue.

“There you are,” Dave says. “It’s really good to see you.”

“I missed you,” Klaus says desperately. “Dave, I missed you so much. I kept trying to summon you, but you never showed up, so I thought—I gave up, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Dave raises a tentative hand and holds it just next to Klaus’s cheek. He doesn’t touch, not wanting to disappoint either of them, but Klaus can’t help but sway closer to it anyway.

“I know,” Dave says. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

And that’s it, really. Lights out, show’s over. Klaus is gone. His chest is collapsing and the weight of the afterlife is sloughed off his shoulders from one heartbeat to the next. It’s dizzying.

“Where,” he says thickly, struggling, “the hell have you been?”

-

Ben gets chased out of the room again. Or, he chooses to be chased out after he takes one look at Klaus, curled up on his bed, and Dave, standing over him with hangdog eyes. He eyes them suspiciously, warningly, and then leaves, presumably to take up sentry not far outside the door, just in case things go catastrophically south.

Klaus ought to tell him not to worry. He’s so wrung out both physically and mentally that he’s more likely to pass out before his hands struggle to blue.

Dave settles at his side, shifting just enough so that the blood isn’t quite as visible from this angle.

“You look like shit, Hargreeves,” he says, ever the gentleman to sweep Klaus off his feet. “What have you been doing while I’ve been away?”

Klaus laughs sleepily. “Oh, baby, you have no idea. I’ll tell you all the dirty details later. Don’t go anywhere.”

He says it lightly, but he means it. He hasn’t been able to tear his eyes away from Dave and doesn’t want to. He’s terrified this is going to end up being a dream, or another hallucination, Ben’s corroboration or not. Maybe he’ll wake up and find Reginald back in Dave’s place. Klaus doesn’t know what he’d do then, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

“I won’t,” Dave says. “I waited fifty years to find you again, I don’t mean to leave now. Can’t get rid of me that easy. You can sleep. I’ll be here, promise.”

So, Klaus does. And Dave is.

-

Hours later, when Klaus wakes up feeling more human, he drags together every last hint of thrumming blue potential in his veins and ignores the spike in restless ghouls, attention narrowed in on one thing and one thing only. Dave makes an alarmed noise when Klaus throws himself forward, ghostly dissociation interrupted, but obediently doesn’t move out of the way.

Klaus’s palms shine a wonderful blue as he wraps them behind Dave’s neck and clumsily yanks him down. It doesn’t feel the same as when they were both alive—a bit too cool, a ticklish buzzing—but Klaus seals their lips together and feels home for the first time since he touched that briefcase with blood-slicked hands.

To his credit, Dave doesn’t waste time marveling at Klaus’s miracle powers—though, rest assured that Klaus will be after that praise later—because he quickly gets with the program. He wraps his arms around Klaus and it’s good, it’s familiar and it’s safe and it’s everything Klaus has been missing.

“Dave,” Klaus says in a spare moment, forced to separate for air (on his part, not Dave’s, the smug dead bastard). (Getting to say his name without the familiar lance of griefpainloss almost knocks him on his ass from the shock.) “Remind me not to tell Diego he was right. He’ll be insufferable.”

Dave blinks at him. “Diego’s your brother?”

Klaus stares. “Oh, my God,” he says. “Davey, have so much to learn.”

Dave smiles. “Can’t wait.”