Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Whose ghost are you talking to?" Five asks, slumping into the other side of the couch to scowl at the movie of choice for the night.

"Ah, I was telling Ben about how the broccoli there looks like a severed hand," Klaus waves a hand vaguely at him. "You're sitting on him, by the way."

Ben gives his youngest (no longer youngest, he supposed. Oldest?) brother a ghostly pat on the head. He doesn't mind if it's Five. He was a sight for sore eyes, after all, and he was the least annoying sibling.

(A rank that was subject to reassessment, given the amount of time he had been away, but he still held the top position, for now.)

Five snorts at Klaus's words, but he does shuffle toward the armrest, leaving an empty spot between them.

"Hi, Ben. Must be tough, being stuck with the most annoying sibling."

"You have no idea—" Ben stares, mouth slightly agape. It was perhaps the first time any of their siblings had acknowledged him since his death.

(The others tended to think that Klaus was lying. Or high.

Mostly the latter.)

"Well?" Five prompts, after a beat of silence, looking from Ben to Klaus and back again.

"Uh."

Five must've read the bafflement on Klaus's face, because he sighs, taking a swig from his bottle. "I know there's barely anything in there, but mind telling me what Ben said sometime before tomorrow?"

"Ben said you ought to treat your brother better." Klaus, to his credit, recovers in a second, feigning hurt with a put upon sniff.

"That is not what I said."

"That is not what Ben said."

"Five," Luther interrupts, posture rigid, defensive, as he clears his throat. "Can we speak in private?"

Ben snorts, sharing a look with Klaus. They both know where this is going.

The movie had been put on pause at some point, Luther and Allison mirroring each other's stricken expression as they looked at their little group huddled on the couch. Ben hadn't even realised, too swept up in the excitement of talking to Five again.

"Unless an apocalypse is happening, no."

"Five." Luther's expression had hardened, the mask of Number One that he had never really shed falling back into place now, ready to put his younger siblings back into line.

(Except that they had probably all forgotten that Five had lived on his own for decades, had been forced to grow up all on his own, navigated his way through a treacherous organization, now battle hardened and no longer the thirteen year old smartass that they lost all those years ago.)

"Luther, unless you've gone deaf, I believe I turned down your request for a conversation. Less than a minute ago." Five says lazily, tipping his head back against the couch.

"Five, you should probably hear Luther out—"

Ben snorts. Of course Allison would jump to Luther's defense, when had she not?

"I'll save you guys the time, hm?" Klaus interjects, waving his hands. "Numero Uno there is going to accuse me of being high again, which isn't wrong, technically, and Five—actually, I don't know, Five, would you believe what dear daddy's boy says?"

"I've interrogated enough people for the Commission to know when someone is lying. Klaus isn't." Five says instead, fixing Luther with that cold, empty gaze of his.

His answer is enough to stun them into silence, Luther and Five now stuck in a deadlock, the tension in the room mounting to a stifling pressure against his chest. This was probably the first argument that hadn't devolved into a fight, which meant unfamiliar grounds for Luther, who clearly knew it too.

"Right-o," Klaus says, clapping his palms together. The sound rang like a gunshot in the room, startling both men out of their standstill. "Guess we know where we stand."

"But—" Luther sputters, gaze slipping to Ben. (Well, not exactly. It was that same thing where people were looking towards his direction but not really at him.)

Five downs the rest of his wine, somehow managing to exude danger even as he slowly sets down the empty bottle onto the ground. "You forget, Number One. Ben was Klaus's best friend. He wouldn't lie about this, not about Ben."

He is angry, Ben realises. Not the waspish, annoyed kind that they'd grown used to in the past week, but a quiet, controlled sort of anger that spelt a slow, painful death for those who crossed him. The kind that would've given Ben goosebumps, if he still had a body.

"Right." Luther says, jaw tight. And for a brief moment, Ben thinks he might attack Five. But instead, he slumps back into his armchair, suddenly seeming all too tired as he says, "Tell Ben I said hi...?"

Ben scoffs, turning back to Klaus, who was looking at Five with a mixture of wonder and disbelief, and Ben feels a wave of gratitude wash over him, thankful that there was someone in Klaus's corner now, someone who could stand up to Luther for him, unlike Ben, whose yells went unheard by their siblings, who could pick up the pieces of Klaus that they had reduced him into.

They rehash the argument, of course they do, only this time with Diego and Vanya in the loop as well—to what, convince him and Five that Ben wasn't actually there? Luther should really pick a better hobby. Preferably one that wasn't sticking his fingers into Klaus's affairs.

"You guys forgot," Five says, with an edge of hysteria in his tone. "It's been what, a decade, and you guys forgot?"

"They actually forgot, Ben." Five turns to Klaus's right, jerking a thumb towards their siblings that were staring at him, open mouthed.

"Five, I don't think—"

"What, don't enable Klaus? Or do you think that I'm high as well?"

And Klaus would normally make an exaggerated protest, pushing back with as much glitter and smoke as he could to ignore the hurt that their scorn caused, but Ben was looking at him with those beseeching eyes, practically begging Klaus to allow him one conversation with Five.

(Klaus remembers too.

While Ben had been his best friend, the one he sought out after a particularly bad trip to the mausoleum, Five had been his confidant, the one to ground Ben when the Horrors got too overwhelming, too loud for him to ignore.

Five's rationality and equations grounded hum, Ben had explained, somewhere during those decades they'd spent together drifting.

Or well, Klaus had drifted. Ben had been a sort of reluctant follower, as Klaus was his tether to the mortal realm.

He owed Ben this much, at least, for putting up with his antics for the better half of his life.)

"Fine, alright, just this once, Benerino." Klaus draws out a put upon sigh, holding a hand out to Ben.

(And oh, being possessed was not fun. Being forced further inwards, having his bodily control being taken from him was not fun. It wasn't anything like getting high or drunk and Klaus decides that they are never doing this again.

The numbed senses were nice, though. A welcome break from the tiresome wails of the dead that flocked to him like moths to a flame.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to just.

Rest

For

A

Bit.)

"Klaus?" Ben whispers, frantic. The pull of Klaus's soul was getting dimmer, further than it had ever been, and Ben is seized by the sudden fear that Klaus would never come back.

Don't fret, Benerino. I'm just resting. Hibernating, if you will.

"Okay, okay." Ben exhales, unable to shake off the unease, the emptiness from the absense of Klaus's powers anchoring him to the mortal realm that left him strangely wrong-footed.

Five is bristling when he tunes back into the conversation, somehow managing to command everyone's attention with that tiny body of his. "Oh, of course you didn't mean that. You think I've gone senile."

"Of course not," Ben says, squinting at how terribly bright everything was, shuffling on his—Klaus's—feet to shake off the vertigo that came from being bound to gravity's laws once again. "They just tend not to believe anything they can't see, and Klaus doesn't help by speaking in half-truths around them."

"Klaus?" Diego starts, disapproval etched in the furrow of his brow. Ben takes a step back, knowing that he wouldn't be able to hold off on ripping into the man if he started on another one of his self-righteous tirades about Klaus's life choices.

They both see the exact moment that Five realizes—he had always been the most perceptive, the most attuned to each of them—the scowl on his face melting into something softer before he grabs Ben by the arm and jumps.

"Ben?"

"You remembered," Ben says, unable to stop the smile spreading across his face.

Five had jumped them to his old room, perfectly preserved by Mom, who regularly dusted but otherwise left everything untouched as it was seventeen years ago.

"Of course," Five says darkly, scowling at the door. "I'm not like those numbskulls."

He thinks he hears a muffled sound of protest on the other side of the door, quickly stifled. (Or perhaps it was Mom, clattering around the other rooms, Ben couldn't really differentiate. Hearing—he didn't actually know how their senses worked, in the afterlife—but inhibiting a body again only heightened everything, and it was giving him a mild headache.)

"I said what I said," Five says, slightly louder this time. "But have those idiots been accusing Klaus of lying all these years? Not one of them considered that oh, for someone whose powers were to see the dead, that he may have seen—you?"

Ben shrugs. "They were grieving, mostly. And it was easier for them to run away instead of being reminded about me.

"Honestly, I'm surprised—we were both surprised that you believed Klaus at all."

"I remember what his powers are," Five says shortly, shoulders hunched as he fidgets with the chalks left scattered across his desk. "And I saw his flinch when I walked into the room. There must be hundreds of ghosts haunting me, right?"

Ben grimaces. Five had always been the most perceptive of them all.

"It was a bit of a shock, yeah. Just what did this Commission of yours have you do?"

There must be hundreds of ghosts haunting me, right? Klaus hears.

You don't know the half of it, Fivey. Klaus huffed. There had been a horde of ghosts haunting his brother, packing their parlor to the brim as they hurled insults at Five, demanding that Klaus take responsibility for his brother's actions.

It was too much—bearing witness to the multitude of ways in which Five had killed them, being forced, as the only audience, to listen to their twisted symphony of their howls and moans—even Ben, who usually kept the more aggressive ghosts at bay couldn't warn them all away.

Klaus had promptly left the room in search for another hit or two, anything to forget the sight.

(And he'd been hell bent on keeping out of Five's way, at least until he got his hands on another batch of drugs strong enough to keep his ghosts away.

But Five had caught onto his game, he figured. And while he expected the other to confront him, he hadn't quite forseen that it would turn out this way.)

It was a strange thing, being forced to watch as someone else piloted his body.

He could still feel with his senses, but it was like they had been numbed, dulled to a point where everything felt like a vague stream of consciousness that he drifted in and out of.

Would his soul be dispersed, if he let go of what remaining hold he had, Klaus wondered. Would it be so bad, to allow Ben another chance at life?

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad, if Ben were to inhibit his body instead.

(Because, clearly, Ben was the one who made the better decisions, the one who had his life put together before it was so abruptly snatched from him, the one who would actually make something of his life rather than waste it all away.)

"Our siblings are trying to run from our past. You're the only one who clung onto it," Ben says. "Okay, maybe you and Luther. But Luther doesn't count, because he thinks that the sun shines out of Dad's ass."

And—okay, maybe that wasn't the best thing to say, because Five's eyes had taken on that faraway, glassy look again, and Ben is once again left helpless to do anything but wait.

(He'd always been good at waiting. At being the one who watched from the outside in, hovering just at the periphery of whatever his siblings were getting up to, ready to catch them just in case.)

"I clung onto it because it was the only thing I had, in the apocalypse. Our siblings, coming back to stop the apocalypse, they were the only things that kept me going," Five says detachedly, too clinically, as if he were just an observer.

"I don't blame them for wanting to move on, it's just—"

"Frustrating doesn't even begin to cover it, I know," Ben says with a harsh exhale. Their childhood was all he had as well, most nights. He was stuck too, in his own way. Forced to live out the rest of his undead (spirit?) life through Klaus, who saw him more as a bother and a nuisance than anything else.

(That is not to say that he would ever understand what Five had gone through, to accumulate so many souls haunting him even decades after their death, to have the light he remembered—Five's eyes had always been the brightest of them all, with an impish gleam in them that Dad had never managed to snuff out—now replaced by flat, empty depths that gave Ben the chills when he looked too long.

Five had been through literal hell and came back to them still, only to find that they had all moved on from the point where he had left them.)

"It's just—" Five is saying, burning a hole through the ground as his hands curl into fists on his knees. "How could they forget everything so fucking thoroughly? Everything?"

And despite knowing that Five was at least twice his age now, it was hard not to see the thirteen year old he had been in that moment, looking so terribly lost and hurt.

"Yeah," Ben breathes out, unable to stop the hysterical laughter. "Sorry, I can't—see, that's the thing Klaus never understood either, when I tried to explain it to him.

"I knew why Klaus moved out, of course. I encouraged him to, even. But I never thought that they would all grow so distant. That moving out would only widen the cracks and chasms between them. Maybe it would've happened anyway. I don't know.

"And I can understand why they wanted to pretend it all never happened, but it also hurt a little, for them to never talk about us again—it was like we never existed at all—" Ben breaks off, unable to fight against the pressure in his throat that threatened to suffocate him.

"What really happened, Ben?" Five unfurls his hands, dropping two halves of his chalk onto the ground. Ben watches them roll across the wood, not quite knowing how to answer the question.

That part of their past was something everyone else seemed content to toe around, sealed up under the paints of Five's painting, buried with his body six feet under, never to be mentioned again.

But Five had barreled back into their lives, an old memory come back to haunt them, to remind them of what they once shared, demanding that they stop running and face their messy pasts for once in their damned lives.

"After you left," Ben falters, unsure how to phrase it. How was he supposed to say that Five had taken whatever semblance of warmth their family had with him, left them on turbulent waters, unsure of where to step?

No.

Ben shakes his head. "Thank you for coming back to us, Five."

"Ben," Five says, voice hard.

"What do you want me to say, Five?" Ben says, knowing full well how hypocritical he sounded, after his earlier speech. "You left. I died. Our siblings stopped trying to pretend that we were an actual family. I couldn't do anything but watch as Klaus started poisoning himself to drown out the ghosts. I couldn't bring myself to move on, not with things left as they were."

Five's expression shutters, lips thinning.

"Do you still want to?" The question, so wholly unexpected, throws Ben for a loop.

"Move on?" Ben asks, mainly to buy himself time, because he truly doesn't know. Doesn't know if he still wants to, if he even still has that option.

Because ever since that day, since the awkward, stilted thing that Dad called his funeral, after Klaus had confidently said that he could go whenever he felt like it, he'd never seen that warm, inviting light again.

See, that's the thing that Klaus had realised, two years after Ben's death.

That he had fucked up, majorly.

There was the fact that had always appeared different from the other ghosts that he saw, and then he'd realised that Ben was growing up alongside him, too.

And unlike the other ghosts that moved on after a month or so after realising that Klaus wasn't going to acknowledge them, Ben stayed.

Ben was always there, no matter how much he disapproved of Klaus's life choices, no matter how much he nagged him about his dealings with "shady people".

Ben was always there to catch him, whenever he hit rock bottom.

And Klaus was too chicken to ask him whether he had ever thought of moving on, because somewhere along the way, he'd started to take Ben's presence for granted.

That no matter what, his brother would always be there, hovering in his periphery. That Ben would always be there to pull him back from tipping over the precipice, would always be there to act as his moral compass and conscience, would always be there to annoy the shit out of him with his lectures and wistful, guilt tripping monologues.

And then Klaus had gotten a teaser into a life without Ben, abruptly thrown into another time before Ben ever noticed.

Vietnam had been a struggle.

He'd floundered without Ben, struggled to breathe without Ben to anchor him to reality—and there was some sick irony in that—a ghost anchoring him to reality. How Dad would disapprove.

Klaus had quickly figured out where he was, of course. He was nothing if not adaptable.

(And the army of ghosts were a dead giveaway, anyhow.

Their howls echoed throughout the night, creeping closer each hour until they had all crowded into the tent that Klaus shared with the others, their touch nauseating.

And Ben had been nowhere in sight, no matter how hard he tried to summon him.)

The only reason he'd survived at all was because he had Dave, falling faster and harder than he'd ever had, against everything that told him it was a bad idea, namely because he wasn't from that timeline at all, and allowed himself to love, for the first time in his thirty years of existence.

But that wasn't the point.

Point is—

Klaus had experienced it once, an existence without his brother haunting him. And it was one that he would rather (selfishly) not go through again.

It is Five's damned question, his asking Ben whether he still wanted to move on that has Klaus clawing his way out of the limbo that he'd been suspended in, pushing Ben out of his body before he could answer.

Klaus, Ben sighs. Klaus can’t beeing himself to look at his brother, afraid of what he might see in his face. He knows it was a bastard move, that he was being cowardly, but when had anyone expected anything less from him?

"Sorry, Fivey. Control slipped. It's exhausting to have two souls in one body, you know."

Klaus tries not to feel too hurt by the sight of Five’s eyes shuttering at his words—after all, Ben was also Five’s brother, and the others weren’t as fortunate as him to have Ben nagging them on the daily.

But in true Five fashion, the haunted expression was quickly tucked away, quickly replaced by something sharper, a curious set to his eyes as he probes, “does possession make use of your power too?”

“Of course,” Klaus stretches, cracking his neck. How long had they been sitting here? His legs had fallen asleep, and he winces, gingerly pulling them up to his chin. “It’s not easy, keeping this brilliant soul of mine from outshining Benny-boys.”

Does it really?

Oh. Klaus had nearly forgotten that Ben was still there, instead of haunting some other parts of the mansion that were previously closed-off to them.

“I can’t decide whether to use them or not,” Klaus shrugs, keeping it as vague as he could. He doesn’t know how to explain that even seeing Ben took a conscious effort, sometimes. That he had tried, tried to banish the unwanted ghosts to no avail. And this whole—possession thing—it was new, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to do it again.

(How does he tell Ben that he’d been tempted to let go of his grip on his consciousness? That it had been a fine line between keeping both their souls in his body and letting go to let Ben fully take over? That he wouldn’t be able to sleep properly now, without the fear of waking up trapped within his own body, forced to watch as someone else piloted it?

He trusted Ben, of course he did, but the lack of control, the alluring call of a permanent sleep had nearly taken him.)

Klaus, you should’ve said something! Ben says, stepping before him. Hibernation, my ass. Your soul was fading!

“But it got me a front row seat to this touching reunion,” Klaus waves a hand between Five and Ben. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world!”

Fine. Don’t tell me, Ben says, throwing up his hands in exasperation. But we are not doing that again.

“What did Ben say?”

Ben raises a brow, nodding towards Five, a silent go on, which Klaus makes a face at.

Leave it to him to relay the difficult message, of course. “Benji says he missed you. But the entire possession thing is a tricky process, so—”

“Of course,” Five’s face goes through a funny series of emotions at that, and eventually settles on constipated.

And well, that was a step up from the usual scowls and death threats that Five handed out on the daily, but still one that Klaus isn't familiar with, and one that he wasn't properly equipped to deal with now.

Klaus, a woman with a deep gash in her neck wails. Case in point. There were more ghosts materializing now, called forth by his powers, and Klaus seriously needed a smoke. Or alcohol.

Klaus staggers to his feet, wincing at the pins and needles that shot up his legs.

Then, said so softly that it might as well have been a whisper on the wind. “Thank you, Klaus.”

"Anytime, Fivey."