The laugh makes her stomach clench, but Allison stays quiet, watching him. The way he looks, though, makes her blood run cold but for a moment she can’t bring herself to say anything.
“A trip?”
Her brow furrows deeper as he keeps laughing, reminded too much his laughs like that whenever he’d hit a low during his recovery.
“Klaus, what happened?” The question is softer, gentle, bypassing his question about the rest. Considering the twelve years of distance between them all, they haven’t been exactly bonding so the answer almost goes without saying. She’s more focused on him right now, anyway.
God if he could find a way to make the sounds of explosions and screaming and gunfire quiet down in his head, he might be able to pull himself together a little bit better. As it is, his head feels like it might split into halves and his whole body shivers, like a sudden chill or draft slipped in through an open window.
"Oh yeah, a trip. The bad kind, where it starts out so great, you're flying as high as a F-4 Phantom ready to unload, then everything goes to shit."
Ten months. Ten months and he's somehow back here, in the Academy, in his own bedroom with leftovers on the walls from childhood. He finishes with his shirt and sits heavily on his bed, bending to pull his boots onto bare feet. Dave hated it when he did shit like that.
"So while everyone else was busy playing house, those assholes that broke in here found me instead. It was really good stuff. Tied me to a chair, beat the shit out of me. But hey, I talked to an old, dead psycho Russian lady. Couldn't understand a word she said but hey, it passed the time."
Allison immediately tenses at the mention of the intruders that had gotten in and attacked them. She had figured that her brother's disappearance had something to do with them considering the timing of it all, and she knows Klaus better than to think that he could have possibly fallen back into old patterns like how Diego had teased.
Walking over to the bed, Allison sits next to him. "No one was playing house," she clarifies, although she knows that it won't undo anything of what happened. The last thing she wants, though, is for him to think that no one had been looking for him. "I've been looking for you everywhere, but I had shitty luck in even finding a hint of where you could be. I'm so sorry, Klaus."
God, she's so fucking sorry, but it feels so empty when he looks the way that he does. Although, if they beat the shit out of him...how is he not covered in bruises? He looks like he went through hell, but it somehow doesn't match with what he's saying.
"Are you hurt? Do I need to take you to the hospital?"
He doesn't know if he's trying to convince her or convince himself but he says it anyway, even if everything about the way he moves, the way he speaks, says differently. But the weight of her beside him is comforting in it's own right, familiar in a way that doesn't nod to the war, to Vietnam.
He fidgets with his hands in his lap, wringing fingers together, trying to work up some semblance of tired courage from deep within his chest. "No hospitals, please." Closing his eyes tightly, he tries to block out all the white noise, tries to bring his brain to a slow stop instead of letting it rapid misfire.
"Those assholes took me, thinking Five would come after me." He snorts at the idea and shakes his head. "I told them they were wrong, of course, but it wasn't like I was going to lead them right to you. But then this bad ass lady police officer rolled in, cut me loose, but things get a little hairy from there."
He scrubs his hands over his face, feeling his heart rate ratchet up in his chest. "They had this briefcase they kept talking about, so I stole it. Made out like a bandit with it through the air vent. Real tricky, but lucky me, I wasn't wearing any clothes." His voice trills up at the comment and he waves his hands in the air, as though it's all some big spectacle. "Thought there might be something good in it. Money, blackmail, who knows. But when I opened it... I— I went somewhere. Pulled a Five and just fucked off into another decade and have no idea how or why."
While Allison doesn't say anything, the look on her face makes it pretty damn obvious that she does not believe him. He is far from fine, but she's trying to not make him pull away from her.
As it is, she tries hard to not just pull him in for a hug or at least touch him as she watches the way he fidgets and moves. For now, she lets this proximity between them be enough, thankful for the fact that he's still here and that he's not pulling back altogether.
It's hard, though, when it's so obvious that it's as if he's pulled away from here altogether again, as if just reliving it all is making him disappear all over again. Klaus has been living with her and her family for seven years, but in so many ways it feels like that day that they had seen each other at the hospital after his overdose; as if she's re-learning how to navigate things around him all over again.
There's nothing she wouldn't do for Klaus, though, and she stays quiet, listening to him even if she feels a hot rage run through her veins at the idea of those bastards torturing her brother. The fact that he had been held there, tortured, and for a moment she can swear she sees red. Until he talks about disappearing into another decade, and her heart feels as if it plummets right to the floor.
Reaching for his hand, she tries to swallow the knot in her throat. "...how long were you gone for?" He looks like he has aged in the last couple of days, and now it all makes so much more sense. Why he's not bloody, why he isn't covered in wounds or bruises. He looks so haunted, and nothing like the man that had left Los Angeles with her less than a week ago. "Where did you go?"
It feels like a decade since he last saw Dave and that was only hours ago that he watched him die on that battlefield. It feels like eons since he was left in the motel room, beaten near to death, those two morons asking him questions he can’t answer.
He squeezes her hand, suddenly aware she’s holding his. “Ten months. Turned up in an army camp. Woke up in Vietnam, fought a good fight in the A Shau valley.”
His free hand runs through his hair and absently falls back to the dog tags at his chest, clutching them tightly. His eyes threaten to burn and with a deep, shaky breath, he wills them away. He squeezes Allison’s hand tightly, but doesn’t look at her, he can’t. A lump rises, heavy and thick, into his throat and he doesn’t know how to put to words the shards of his heart left floating in his chest, sharp, uneven.
“I lost someone.” It’s quiet, distant, his mind going back to the valley, where Dave’s chest heaved, bloody and desperate, under his palms as he died.
Ten months. In Vietnam. She hears the words, and she squeezes his hand in return, her free hand moving so she can be holding his with both. It breaks her heart, how he moves, the way he clutches to the dog tags, but she just stays silent, letting him process this as best as he can.
“I’m so sorry, Klaus.” The words are said quietly, pained for him. Never in a million years did she think that when he had disappeared, he had ended up in a war that happened decades ago. That he had been gone for ten months, that he had been put through so much and all because he didn’t want to lead the psychos back to Five or the family. It makes her stomach turn.
Keeping one hand in his, she wraps her other arm around his shoulders. She knows damn well she can’t spare him of this pain, she can’t take it away for him, but she wants him to know that she’s here. It’s too late, but she’s here, anyway. Whoever this was, it had been someone special based on how he’s acting, and Allison finds herself mourning someone she has never even met.
Can he even say his name out loud? Can he put voice to a name he hasn’t said since the man died on the battlefield? He leans into the arm, leans into Allison’s side as his eyes fall down to the dog tags. A wistful smile pulls across his lips, one that speaks to months of tangled limbs, stolen kisses, drinks in noisy bars, a dozen and one iloveyous crammed into hugs and handholds and looks across noisy battlefields.
“His name was Dave. He was beautiful and he was perfect.”
He closes his eyes against the burn, and for a moment he can all but see the man’s winning smile, the bashful way he’d turn his head when Klaus winked or blew a cheeky kiss in his direction. He can almost feel broad hands around his waist, or the pull of a hand in his own in a smoky bar. Tears slip slowly down his cheeks.
“And I loved him. Still love him, I guess. Hasn’t even been gone twenty-four hours and I’m already talking about him in the past tense. Guess I’m an asshole, after all.” He laughs mirthlessly.
“You’re not an asshole,” she says quickly, holding him tighter still. “You traveled from the present, to the past, to the present again. Give yourself a break.”
Allison holds him close before letting go of his hand so she can hold him better. God, she wishes she could protect him from this, take all this grief away, but she knows better than that.
Kissing the top of his head, she adds gently, “He sounds very special, for you to love him like this.”
If he didn’t care, she doubts he’d be this broken up about it. He wouldn’t look so lost, so grief stricken.
Klaus tries to keep his cool, tries to breathe through the knot in his chest, the lump in his throat. But when her other arm comes around him, his defenses shatter. He presses his face into her arm as a small sob wracks his body.
“I couldn’t save him,” Klaus mutters between a hiccup of tears. “I watched those bastards shoot him but there weren’t any medics. No one was there. He just bled out. God there was blood everywhere.”
Thus, the blood on the floor, in the bathtub. His shoulders shake in another quiet sob. “Fuck. He was kind. He was gentle. It should have been me.”
Allison shifts her position slightly, only so she can hold him closer this way. It doesn’t feel like enough, she doubts anything ever will, but she wants him to feel safe now even if it’s just for a moment.
At the sound of his sob, she finds herself herself rocking him a little as she holds him close, just how she would do for Claire whenever she was inconsolable over something. For a second she finds herself wondering how she’ll ever be able to explain this to Patrick - this is even beyond the usual chaos the Hargreeves find themselves in, but she pushes the thought away as soon as it comes. They’ll worry about that later. Right now her focus is Klaus.
As Klaus continues, it all finally clicks together. The blood, his mannerisms, the way his eyes looked like he was just hollow.
“It shouldn’t have been either of you,” she clarifies gently, her own eyes filling with tears for her brother. For years she had wondered if he’d ever find someone he loved, someone he could connect with and be happy with, but this is beyond whatever she could have imagined.
“You both should have had a chance to be happy. I’m so, so sorry.”
For the first time he feels like he wants to go home. Wants to throw himself onto a plane and return to California, a place that only represents utter safety. He could wrap himself up on the large couch with Claire, watching Tangled a dozen times back to back and call life good. But he can't. Not here, not now.
"We had ten months of happy."
And it will never be enough. Happiness made up of dreams of life outside of the army, dreams of a stupid apartment in the middle of nowhere with stupid 9-to-5 jobs and dinners shared over a program on the TV. Klaus should have known better back then, when the briefcase dropped him in the tent of the other recruits. He should have known that nothing good comes for any of the Hargreeves. It's just not their way.
"I couldn't save him," he whispers again, eyes shut tight against tears, his fingers trembling against her arms. "I just wanted to protect him. And I tried to protect Five, too. Did they find him? Did someone kill those assholes yet?"
Surely, it all had to be worth something. He wouldn't give up the year for anything, but he has to know.
It feels like her heart shatters again when Klaus whispers, and at the way his fingers tremble. Unconsciously she kisses the top of his head as she holds him a little tighter.
“They didn’t find Five, he’s okay. You did protect him.”
He protected them all, and she hates that he had to do that. Allison would have taken another break in any day, if that meant Klaus not having to deal with the hellish ordeal he had just gone through.
“I don’t know if anyone has been able to find those bastards, though,” she admits, a hint of guilt in her voice. “I had no luck even finding where you were. When I came back in Luther mentioned that Diego is trying to find them, too, though.”
Klaus leans into her and it’s reminiscent of all those years ago in the hospital room, when her presence and warmth was all he needed to keep himself grounded. He tries to remember that now, even though his head feels like it’s full to bursting with noise, his heart wrenched apart.
“Yeah, the officer who helped me mentioned his name. I didn’t stay long enough to see what happened.”
It was all he could do to try and escape, and he couldn’t look back. He feels guilty for that, really, because he could have utilized those ghosts more, could have defended himself better, but after hours of countless beatings, his mind felt like it was far overhead, detached from his body in a way that made it all but impossible to focus.
He sucks in a deep breath, burying his face into her shoulder. He can hear movement in the hallway, hears Ben comment on Five passing down the hall with curious eyes, but he ignores it.
“This place is fucked,” he says finally, laughing a little. “Nothing good ever happens here, does it? And now we’ve gotta stop the apocalypse, how grand.”
Allison had heard what happened in passing, but she doesn't want to add that guilt to what Klaus is already carrying in case he were to feel guilty for her going in when he managed to get out.
When he rests his head on her shoulder, Allison rests her chin on it. As if somehow holding him like this can help ease some of the pain that he is; as if somehow it can fix anything even if she knows better than that.
"No, nothing." We shouldn't have come, she wants to say, but the heaviness in her voice gives way to the regret that she's already feeling.
But then she remembers the creep that she had found at Vanya's when she had stopped there to see if she had heard from Klaus, and while she still hates the fact that they're here, she wants to see that through.
"The apocalypse, and I think Vanya is with someone that could be trouble." She hates to dump this on him right now, but she's saying it almost as a reason as to why she's not telling him to pack up so they could get the hell out of dodge.
Klaus snorts at the idea, but it isn't like he knows anything about his sister's life at this point. Other than the very true, scathing book she wrote, none of them really know her. Honestly, they don't know one another well at all. Klaus has had the benefit of living with Allison for the past seven years or so, but otherwise, the rest of them might as well be strangers.
He wants nothing more than to curl up in a ball and sleep for the remainder of the day, but the tone of Allison's voice tells him that's not in the scope of possibility right now. There's so much going on and they need to work together to solve it.
Pulling away from her, he scrubs his hands over his face a few times, as though trying to wake himself from whatever nightmare all of this culminates to. It doesn't work.
"Right, then. Where should we start. I think I need to powder my little nose before I do anything outlandish but otherwise, darling, I'm all yours."
It's easier this way. Easier to throw the walls up and put on a good face, make some flippant comment and wrap the sorrow up tight, lock it deep in his chest until he can shut the door and be alone. He needs to be alone, to see if maybe calling out into the ether, yelling Dave's name deep in the recesses of his mind might draw the man back, even if it's only for one last visit.
His stomach churns sickly in his stomach and he pushes away from Allison suddenly, stumbling to the trash can on the other side of the room so he can vomit. Nothing much comes from it, other than heaves that wrack his body to its core, leaving him shaking. "I'm good. I just... you know, need a second or two. Or a baseball bat to the skull. That'd do nicely."
Allison opens her mouth to protest as Klaus begins to pull away, already regretting mentioning anything because he should get some rest. At the same time, she knows time isn't a luxury that they really have, even if that overprotectiveness in her is kicking in wanting to just shut his door and keep everyone out so he can have some space.
Before she can say anything, though, Klaus is suddenly stumbling towards the trash can. Allison immediately stands up and goes to his side, and even if all he can do is heave, she holds his hair back with one hand while the other rubs his back gently.
"Lay down, Klaus. You need some rest more than anything right now."
She knows keeping the others off his back will be hard, but considering how she's feeling, she's ready to take them all on and chew them out as needed.
"Just stay here for a little while, I don't think anything is going to happen if you take a break. You've done your part already, let us do the rest."
Settling down in bed would only mean he'd have an overactive mind, and right now, in a place that calls to every demon he's ever harbored, he can't afford that. It would be so easy to dip out to the corner of Chestnut and 15th, meet the toothless man he knows will still be there, and demolish his memory with the crunch of a pill.
He leans his arms heavily over the can, head hanging between his shoulders as he sucks in deep breaths, holding them for a few seconds before letting them out. What he would give to have Dave here, smiling and touching his face, petting his hair and telling him it was all some wild dream. A bad dream.
Klaus sits back, legs tucked under him. He's slimmer now than he was when Allison last saw him, but his body seems more lean, muscled from hauling gear and bodies for the better part of a year. "I'm going to get a drink," he says finally, resolutely. "Just one. But I fucking need a drink right now."
Allison wants to argue with him, try to convince him to at least lay down, but considering what he lived through she reminds herself that he should choose what he wants to do. As long as he’s not barreling out the door, she supposes it’s not a bad thing if he wants to just go downstairs.
But then he says wanting to have a drink, and Allison’s hand freezes on his back. Considering she has only seen Klaus sober for the last seven years, this is definitely not something she had been expecting.
“A drink?”
She hates how stupid she sounds, but she’s trying to make sure she heard him right.
Now he'll have to explain himself. He can hear it in the tone of her voice ad he knows he's misstepped. He should have just crept off when everyone thought he was resting. But he knows better than that; he knows that he can't break Allison's trust, but he knows what he needs right now, above anything else.
"Yeah. A drink. An alcoholic beverage. An adult elixir, if you will."
He pushes himself to his feet, looking like his limbs are made from lead, like his body can't fathom the walk down to the sitting room.
"Just one. Something strong. Then I'll get up, go help everyone save Vanya from her bad decisions and stop the apocalypse."
Klaus moves toward the door, scrubbing his hands over his face as he pauses in the doorway. He knows he shouldn't go for a drink, he knows that this might be one step too far, but he drank back in Vietnam, when he missed his family and showed up in a camp battered and bruised.
She tries to not react - to not overreact, but it feels like her heart is suddenly stuck in her throat. Like somehow she doesn't know how to make her brain work again, because she's stuck on the fact that her sober and dry brother suddenly wants a drink again. His sobriety has been a part of her family's life for so long now, that she doesn't know what to do about this now.
At the same time, Allison knows he has his reasons, that he wouldn't be throwing this away after this long over nothing. She can see the signs of it all over his face.
Just when she opens her mouth to speak, though, she remembers what she had told him in her kitchen so many years ago. That she would never force him, that she couldn't want this more than he did. That it was all his decision, not hers. It physically hurts to swallow down the words that are in the tip of her tongue, and she feels like her lungs are suddenly too small in her chest, but she had promised him, hadn't she?
"It's your choice," she finally manages quietly, standing up and following him out the door as she tries to ignore the screaming voices in her head telling her how this is wrong. This is just all wrong.
The words feel heavy, condemning, even if he knows Allison doesn't mean them to be. But they sit heavy in his mind. Living in California seems like eons ago, even though for her it's only been, what? A few days? A week?
He wanders toward the door and out into the hall, his bare feet slapping against the damp tile. He doesn't want to feel the cold of it, doesn't want to feel the sinking in his chest, the static in his mind, the sharp, needle-like tines the grief has slowly begun pressing deep into his heart. They suffocate him, winding their way up along his throat, gripping at the back of his tongue, making speech and breathing feel nigh impossible.
But he moves with the ease of a man sleep walking, feet slowly moving one out in front of the other, passing corridors with chipped paint, old drawings, the ghosts of laughter and pain from children who wanted nothing more than to be loved by someone. Anyone.
When he makes it to the main sitting room, he runs fingertips along the dusty backs of couches, display cases, books. Years and years he spent here, poring over texts for assignments, reading between the lines to try and discover himself in their pages, to crack the code to mastering his ability. When he finally comes back from his memories, he's standing in front of the liquor cabinet, all but facing it down, man to man. He opens the delicate glass door and the assortment has thinned over the years, but still ample: ornate decanters and old, vintage bottles with wax seals intact. He plucks one decanter up, crystal shaped like a swan, and uncorks it to smell the amber liquid within.
Sherry, perhaps? Scotch. The smell is so acidic it burns his nose in a way that makes him cough. Plucking a glass from the shelf, he starts to pour. A finger, first, then another, and another. Until the glass itself is almost full to the brim. He stares down at it for a long time, the smell strong and familiar, like an old, dangerous friend.
"Shit."
He could drink it, feel numb again, let the alcohol wash away the deeply cut hurt. But for how long? How long until the alcohol isn't enough, until there's one thing after another and he's back to where he started?
He suddenly, violently, throws the decanter on the ground, the crystal shattering, the sharp, tangy alcohol splattering all over the floor. The glass is next, swiped clean off the cabinet before he goes reaching for another decanter to shatter.
"God damn it." There another goes before he finally sinks to the floor, his back against the cabinet, his head buried deep into his arms.
By the time they reach the bottom of the stairs, Allison lets him walk into the other room, not willing to follow him and watch him drink. She can't. She can feel her resolve dissolving with every step, and she doesn't know what will happen if she actually watches him drink. It feels like she's choking with all the things that she wants to say but can't bring herself to, not wanting to go back on a promise that she had made him when he had been so far gone that the end of the tunnel felt so distant. Now they are here, so far removed from those days, but it feels like Klaus is about to hurl himself back into that precipice. She should stop him, she needs to stop him, but will it matter? Will it work? Will he stop for today, only to be tempted to do it tomorrow? To fall back into old patterns, like how Diego had said? Would he not tell her next time, and just do it?
It has been seven years, and suddenly that fear that she used to live with regarding his addiction suddenly grips at her so tightly that it feels like she's drowning all over again.
As they part ways, for a moment Allison almost reaches out to him to stop him, to get him in the car so they could go home now, apocalypse be damned. She doesn't, though, and instead she steps into the hallway leading towards the kitchen, leaning against the wall as she tries to get herself to breathe again. For seven years they had lived a life that was almost normal, that was happy, and all it had taken was a trip back here to fuck it all up. It feels like Reginald's one last parting gift, one last landmine to destroy everything again, and she finds herself cursing their father mentally for it all.
Most of all, she hates herself for agreeing to come. For not finding him sooner. For not getting them both on a plane the moment the funeral was done so they could go back to their old life and ignore the Academy ever existed.
Just as she's about to finish the walk to the kitchen, the sound of crystal shattering catches her attention and she's moving without thinking twice about it. She half expects the bastards from the other night to be here again, attacking them, but as she rushes into the sitting room she just sees him, hurling the decanter down. From the corner of her eye she can see Pogo approaching, but she quietly tells him to just keep everyone out of the room for now, before walking over to Klaus and sitting next to him. She doesn't know what to say, what can she say, so instead she just tries to pull him into her arms again. If he pulls away, she'll just sit there, waiting for him to be ready.
Klaus doesn't seem to notice her at first, his face buried into his arms, his knees pulled up. It's not unlike how he used to curl in on himself as a child, waiting for their father to open the door to the mausoleum and set him free. But he's not trapped inside an old, stone building in a far-off cemetery this time. It's his own body, his mind.
Trapped and cornered by the need to escape into something, to turn his mind into mush all over again and call it quits. But Allison's arms are strong and warm, they're very real and with her sitting beside him, he leans heavily into her, all but curling up on his side, his head resting on her shoulder.
"You can do a breathalyzer if you want," there's the mark of old bitterness in his voice, making the edges curl up and wither, but the heat of the words dies on his tongue, dissolving into a weak laugh.
Out in the corridor, there's the tell-tale thunder of Diego's boots, Pogo's weak insistence that things are just fine. There's an argument, a tension in the silence that follows before those boots clomp back up the stairs. If Diego could see through walls, he'd be burning a hole through the ceiling to see what unfolded in the sitting room.
Ben perches at his other side, not touching him, not talking, just sitting. Sitting in a position where, had he been corporeal, their legs might be touching, their shoulders. Small but present motions. You've got this, Klaus, he finally says and something about it makes Klaus' heart ache. He doesn't want to move forward, but he has to.
"Sorry," he says finally, weakly, his arms reaching to curl around Allison, hug her tightly as much as she is hugging him. "Dad always said I had a flair for the dramatic, right?"
As he leans against her, Allison just holds him close, not saying anything. Even when he mentions the breathalyzer, she doesn’t say anything but just tightens her hold on him. She has never used one on him, even during the worst of his withdrawals, and she isn’t planning on using one now, even if she knows her other brothers would probably take him up on his suggestion if they would have heard him. Especially if they would have seen him upstairs, telling her about needing a drink before they could continue their attempt to stop the apocalypse.
For a moment Allison half expects Diego or Luther to storm in, or even Five just to tell them that they don’t have time for this, but the room remains silent and she just lets her focus turn back to Klaus.
“It’s okay,” she reassures him, her head leaning against his when he hugs her back. “You know I’ve never minded.” She stays still for a moment, just holding him as her heart eases back to a relatively normal rhythm, before she speaks again.
“Did you get cut anywhere?” She didn’t see any blood, but at the same time she had been too busy just trying to get to his side to even properly assess for any injuries.
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no subject
“A trip?”
Her brow furrows deeper as he keeps laughing, reminded too much his laughs like that whenever he’d hit a low during his recovery.
“Klaus, what happened?” The question is softer, gentle, bypassing his question about the rest. Considering the twelve years of distance between them all, they haven’t been exactly bonding so the answer almost goes without saying. She’s more focused on him right now, anyway.
no subject
"Oh yeah, a trip. The bad kind, where it starts out so great, you're flying as high as a F-4 Phantom ready to unload, then everything goes to shit."
Ten months. Ten months and he's somehow back here, in the Academy, in his own bedroom with leftovers on the walls from childhood. He finishes with his shirt and sits heavily on his bed, bending to pull his boots onto bare feet. Dave hated it when he did shit like that.
"So while everyone else was busy playing house, those assholes that broke in here found me instead. It was really good stuff. Tied me to a chair, beat the shit out of me. But hey, I talked to an old, dead psycho Russian lady. Couldn't understand a word she said but hey, it passed the time."
no subject
Walking over to the bed, Allison sits next to him. "No one was playing house," she clarifies, although she knows that it won't undo anything of what happened. The last thing she wants, though, is for him to think that no one had been looking for him. "I've been looking for you everywhere, but I had shitty luck in even finding a hint of where you could be. I'm so sorry, Klaus."
God, she's so fucking sorry, but it feels so empty when he looks the way that he does. Although, if they beat the shit out of him...how is he not covered in bruises? He looks like he went through hell, but it somehow doesn't match with what he's saying.
"Are you hurt? Do I need to take you to the hospital?"
no subject
He doesn't know if he's trying to convince her or convince himself but he says it anyway, even if everything about the way he moves, the way he speaks, says differently. But the weight of her beside him is comforting in it's own right, familiar in a way that doesn't nod to the war, to Vietnam.
He fidgets with his hands in his lap, wringing fingers together, trying to work up some semblance of tired courage from deep within his chest. "No hospitals, please." Closing his eyes tightly, he tries to block out all the white noise, tries to bring his brain to a slow stop instead of letting it rapid misfire.
"Those assholes took me, thinking Five would come after me." He snorts at the idea and shakes his head. "I told them they were wrong, of course, but it wasn't like I was going to lead them right to you. But then this bad ass lady police officer rolled in, cut me loose, but things get a little hairy from there."
He scrubs his hands over his face, feeling his heart rate ratchet up in his chest. "They had this briefcase they kept talking about, so I stole it. Made out like a bandit with it through the air vent. Real tricky, but lucky me, I wasn't wearing any clothes." His voice trills up at the comment and he waves his hands in the air, as though it's all some big spectacle. "Thought there might be something good in it. Money, blackmail, who knows. But when I opened it... I— I went somewhere. Pulled a Five and just fucked off into another decade and have no idea how or why."
no subject
As it is, she tries hard to not just pull him in for a hug or at least touch him as she watches the way he fidgets and moves. For now, she lets this proximity between them be enough, thankful for the fact that he's still here and that he's not pulling back altogether.
It's hard, though, when it's so obvious that it's as if he's pulled away from here altogether again, as if just reliving it all is making him disappear all over again. Klaus has been living with her and her family for seven years, but in so many ways it feels like that day that they had seen each other at the hospital after his overdose; as if she's re-learning how to navigate things around him all over again.
There's nothing she wouldn't do for Klaus, though, and she stays quiet, listening to him even if she feels a hot rage run through her veins at the idea of those bastards torturing her brother. The fact that he had been held there, tortured, and for a moment she can swear she sees red. Until he talks about disappearing into another decade, and her heart feels as if it plummets right to the floor.
Reaching for his hand, she tries to swallow the knot in her throat. "...how long were you gone for?" He looks like he has aged in the last couple of days, and now it all makes so much more sense. Why he's not bloody, why he isn't covered in wounds or bruises. He looks so haunted, and nothing like the man that had left Los Angeles with her less than a week ago. "Where did you go?"
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It feels like a decade since he last saw Dave and that was only hours ago that he watched him die on that battlefield. It feels like eons since he was left in the motel room, beaten near to death, those two morons asking him questions he can’t answer.
He squeezes her hand, suddenly aware she’s holding his. “Ten months. Turned up in an army camp. Woke up in Vietnam, fought a good fight in the A Shau valley.”
His free hand runs through his hair and absently falls back to the dog tags at his chest, clutching them tightly. His eyes threaten to burn and with a deep, shaky breath, he wills them away. He squeezes Allison’s hand tightly, but doesn’t look at her, he can’t. A lump rises, heavy and thick, into his throat and he doesn’t know how to put to words the shards of his heart left floating in his chest, sharp, uneven.
“I lost someone.” It’s quiet, distant, his mind going back to the valley, where Dave’s chest heaved, bloody and desperate, under his palms as he died.
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“I’m so sorry, Klaus.” The words are said quietly, pained for him. Never in a million years did she think that when he had disappeared, he had ended up in a war that happened decades ago. That he had been gone for ten months, that he had been put through so much and all because he didn’t want to lead the psychos back to Five or the family. It makes her stomach turn.
Keeping one hand in his, she wraps her other arm around his shoulders. She knows damn well she can’t spare him of this pain, she can’t take it away for him, but she wants him to know that she’s here. It’s too late, but she’s here, anyway. Whoever this was, it had been someone special based on how he’s acting, and Allison finds herself mourning someone she has never even met.
“What was his name?”
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“His name was Dave. He was beautiful and he was perfect.”
He closes his eyes against the burn, and for a moment he can all but see the man’s winning smile, the bashful way he’d turn his head when Klaus winked or blew a cheeky kiss in his direction. He can almost feel broad hands around his waist, or the pull of a hand in his own in a smoky bar. Tears slip slowly down his cheeks.
“And I loved him. Still love him, I guess. Hasn’t even been gone twenty-four hours and I’m already talking about him in the past tense. Guess I’m an asshole, after all.” He laughs mirthlessly.
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Allison holds him close before letting go of his hand so she can hold him better. God, she wishes she could protect him from this, take all this grief away, but she knows better than that.
Kissing the top of his head, she adds gently, “He sounds very special, for you to love him like this.”
If he didn’t care, she doubts he’d be this broken up about it. He wouldn’t look so lost, so grief stricken.
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“I couldn’t save him,” Klaus mutters between a hiccup of tears. “I watched those bastards shoot him but there weren’t any medics. No one was there. He just bled out. God there was blood everywhere.”
Thus, the blood on the floor, in the bathtub. His shoulders shake in another quiet sob. “Fuck. He was kind. He was gentle. It should have been me.”
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At the sound of his sob, she finds herself herself rocking him a little as she holds him close, just how she would do for Claire whenever she was inconsolable over something. For a second she finds herself wondering how she’ll ever be able to explain this to Patrick - this is even beyond the usual chaos the Hargreeves find themselves in, but she pushes the thought away as soon as it comes. They’ll worry about that later. Right now her focus is Klaus.
As Klaus continues, it all finally clicks together. The blood, his mannerisms, the way his eyes looked like he was just hollow.
“It shouldn’t have been either of you,” she clarifies gently, her own eyes filling with tears for her brother. For years she had wondered if he’d ever find someone he loved, someone he could connect with and be happy with, but this is beyond whatever she could have imagined.
“You both should have had a chance to be happy. I’m so, so sorry.”
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"We had ten months of happy."
And it will never be enough. Happiness made up of dreams of life outside of the army, dreams of a stupid apartment in the middle of nowhere with stupid 9-to-5 jobs and dinners shared over a program on the TV. Klaus should have known better back then, when the briefcase dropped him in the tent of the other recruits. He should have known that nothing good comes for any of the Hargreeves. It's just not their way.
"I couldn't save him," he whispers again, eyes shut tight against tears, his fingers trembling against her arms. "I just wanted to protect him. And I tried to protect Five, too. Did they find him? Did someone kill those assholes yet?"
Surely, it all had to be worth something. He wouldn't give up the year for anything, but he has to know.
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“They didn’t find Five, he’s okay. You did protect him.”
He protected them all, and she hates that he had to do that. Allison would have taken another break in any day, if that meant Klaus not having to deal with the hellish ordeal he had just gone through.
“I don’t know if anyone has been able to find those bastards, though,” she admits, a hint of guilt in her voice. “I had no luck even finding where you were. When I came back in Luther mentioned that Diego is trying to find them, too, though.”
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“Yeah, the officer who helped me mentioned his name. I didn’t stay long enough to see what happened.”
It was all he could do to try and escape, and he couldn’t look back. He feels guilty for that, really, because he could have utilized those ghosts more, could have defended himself better, but after hours of countless beatings, his mind felt like it was far overhead, detached from his body in a way that made it all but impossible to focus.
He sucks in a deep breath, burying his face into her shoulder. He can hear movement in the hallway, hears Ben comment on Five passing down the hall with curious eyes, but he ignores it.
“This place is fucked,” he says finally, laughing a little. “Nothing good ever happens here, does it? And now we’ve gotta stop the apocalypse, how grand.”
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When he rests his head on her shoulder, Allison rests her chin on it. As if somehow holding him like this can help ease some of the pain that he is; as if somehow it can fix anything even if she knows better than that.
"No, nothing." We shouldn't have come, she wants to say, but the heaviness in her voice gives way to the regret that she's already feeling.
But then she remembers the creep that she had found at Vanya's when she had stopped there to see if she had heard from Klaus, and while she still hates the fact that they're here, she wants to see that through.
"The apocalypse, and I think Vanya is with someone that could be trouble." She hates to dump this on him right now, but she's saying it almost as a reason as to why she's not telling him to pack up so they could get the hell out of dodge.
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Klaus snorts at the idea, but it isn't like he knows anything about his sister's life at this point. Other than the very true, scathing book she wrote, none of them really know her. Honestly, they don't know one another well at all. Klaus has had the benefit of living with Allison for the past seven years or so, but otherwise, the rest of them might as well be strangers.
He wants nothing more than to curl up in a ball and sleep for the remainder of the day, but the tone of Allison's voice tells him that's not in the scope of possibility right now. There's so much going on and they need to work together to solve it.
Pulling away from her, he scrubs his hands over his face a few times, as though trying to wake himself from whatever nightmare all of this culminates to. It doesn't work.
"Right, then. Where should we start. I think I need to powder my little nose before I do anything outlandish but otherwise, darling, I'm all yours."
It's easier this way. Easier to throw the walls up and put on a good face, make some flippant comment and wrap the sorrow up tight, lock it deep in his chest until he can shut the door and be alone. He needs to be alone, to see if maybe calling out into the ether, yelling Dave's name deep in the recesses of his mind might draw the man back, even if it's only for one last visit.
His stomach churns sickly in his stomach and he pushes away from Allison suddenly, stumbling to the trash can on the other side of the room so he can vomit. Nothing much comes from it, other than heaves that wrack his body to its core, leaving him shaking. "I'm good. I just... you know, need a second or two. Or a baseball bat to the skull. That'd do nicely."
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Before she can say anything, though, Klaus is suddenly stumbling towards the trash can. Allison immediately stands up and goes to his side, and even if all he can do is heave, she holds his hair back with one hand while the other rubs his back gently.
"Lay down, Klaus. You need some rest more than anything right now."
She knows keeping the others off his back will be hard, but considering how she's feeling, she's ready to take them all on and chew them out as needed.
"Just stay here for a little while, I don't think anything is going to happen if you take a break. You've done your part already, let us do the rest."
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Settling down in bed would only mean he'd have an overactive mind, and right now, in a place that calls to every demon he's ever harbored, he can't afford that. It would be so easy to dip out to the corner of Chestnut and 15th, meet the toothless man he knows will still be there, and demolish his memory with the crunch of a pill.
He leans his arms heavily over the can, head hanging between his shoulders as he sucks in deep breaths, holding them for a few seconds before letting them out. What he would give to have Dave here, smiling and touching his face, petting his hair and telling him it was all some wild dream. A bad dream.
Klaus sits back, legs tucked under him. He's slimmer now than he was when Allison last saw him, but his body seems more lean, muscled from hauling gear and bodies for the better part of a year. "I'm going to get a drink," he says finally, resolutely. "Just one. But I fucking need a drink right now."
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But then he says wanting to have a drink, and Allison’s hand freezes on his back. Considering she has only seen Klaus sober for the last seven years, this is definitely not something she had been expecting.
“A drink?”
She hates how stupid she sounds, but she’s trying to make sure she heard him right.
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"Yeah. A drink. An alcoholic beverage. An adult elixir, if you will."
He pushes himself to his feet, looking like his limbs are made from lead, like his body can't fathom the walk down to the sitting room.
"Just one. Something strong. Then I'll get up, go help everyone save Vanya from her bad decisions and stop the apocalypse."
Klaus moves toward the door, scrubbing his hands over his face as he pauses in the doorway. He knows he shouldn't go for a drink, he knows that this might be one step too far, but he drank back in Vietnam, when he missed his family and showed up in a camp battered and bruised.
"Just one. Every time I close my eyes I see it."
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At the same time, Allison knows he has his reasons, that he wouldn't be throwing this away after this long over nothing. She can see the signs of it all over his face.
Just when she opens her mouth to speak, though, she remembers what she had told him in her kitchen so many years ago. That she would never force him, that she couldn't want this more than he did. That it was all his decision, not hers. It physically hurts to swallow down the words that are in the tip of her tongue, and she feels like her lungs are suddenly too small in her chest, but she had promised him, hadn't she?
"It's your choice," she finally manages quietly, standing up and following him out the door as she tries to ignore the screaming voices in her head telling her how this is wrong. This is just all wrong.
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The words feel heavy, condemning, even if he knows Allison doesn't mean them to be. But they sit heavy in his mind. Living in California seems like eons ago, even though for her it's only been, what? A few days? A week?
He wanders toward the door and out into the hall, his bare feet slapping against the damp tile. He doesn't want to feel the cold of it, doesn't want to feel the sinking in his chest, the static in his mind, the sharp, needle-like tines the grief has slowly begun pressing deep into his heart. They suffocate him, winding their way up along his throat, gripping at the back of his tongue, making speech and breathing feel nigh impossible.
But he moves with the ease of a man sleep walking, feet slowly moving one out in front of the other, passing corridors with chipped paint, old drawings, the ghosts of laughter and pain from children who wanted nothing more than to be loved by someone. Anyone.
When he makes it to the main sitting room, he runs fingertips along the dusty backs of couches, display cases, books. Years and years he spent here, poring over texts for assignments, reading between the lines to try and discover himself in their pages, to crack the code to mastering his ability. When he finally comes back from his memories, he's standing in front of the liquor cabinet, all but facing it down, man to man. He opens the delicate glass door and the assortment has thinned over the years, but still ample: ornate decanters and old, vintage bottles with wax seals intact. He plucks one decanter up, crystal shaped like a swan, and uncorks it to smell the amber liquid within.
Sherry, perhaps? Scotch. The smell is so acidic it burns his nose in a way that makes him cough. Plucking a glass from the shelf, he starts to pour. A finger, first, then another, and another. Until the glass itself is almost full to the brim. He stares down at it for a long time, the smell strong and familiar, like an old, dangerous friend.
"Shit."
He could drink it, feel numb again, let the alcohol wash away the deeply cut hurt. But for how long? How long until the alcohol isn't enough, until there's one thing after another and he's back to where he started?
He suddenly, violently, throws the decanter on the ground, the crystal shattering, the sharp, tangy alcohol splattering all over the floor. The glass is next, swiped clean off the cabinet before he goes reaching for another decanter to shatter.
"God damn it." There another goes before he finally sinks to the floor, his back against the cabinet, his head buried deep into his arms.
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It has been seven years, and suddenly that fear that she used to live with regarding his addiction suddenly grips at her so tightly that it feels like she's drowning all over again.
As they part ways, for a moment Allison almost reaches out to him to stop him, to get him in the car so they could go home now, apocalypse be damned. She doesn't, though, and instead she steps into the hallway leading towards the kitchen, leaning against the wall as she tries to get herself to breathe again. For seven years they had lived a life that was almost normal, that was happy, and all it had taken was a trip back here to fuck it all up. It feels like Reginald's one last parting gift, one last landmine to destroy everything again, and she finds herself cursing their father mentally for it all.
Most of all, she hates herself for agreeing to come. For not finding him sooner. For not getting them both on a plane the moment the funeral was done so they could go back to their old life and ignore the Academy ever existed.
Just as she's about to finish the walk to the kitchen, the sound of crystal shattering catches her attention and she's moving without thinking twice about it. She half expects the bastards from the other night to be here again, attacking them, but as she rushes into the sitting room she just sees him, hurling the decanter down. From the corner of her eye she can see Pogo approaching, but she quietly tells him to just keep everyone out of the room for now, before walking over to Klaus and sitting next to him. She doesn't know what to say, what can she say, so instead she just tries to pull him into her arms again. If he pulls away, she'll just sit there, waiting for him to be ready.
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Trapped and cornered by the need to escape into something, to turn his mind into mush all over again and call it quits. But Allison's arms are strong and warm, they're very real and with her sitting beside him, he leans heavily into her, all but curling up on his side, his head resting on her shoulder.
"You can do a breathalyzer if you want," there's the mark of old bitterness in his voice, making the edges curl up and wither, but the heat of the words dies on his tongue, dissolving into a weak laugh.
Out in the corridor, there's the tell-tale thunder of Diego's boots, Pogo's weak insistence that things are just fine. There's an argument, a tension in the silence that follows before those boots clomp back up the stairs. If Diego could see through walls, he'd be burning a hole through the ceiling to see what unfolded in the sitting room.
Ben perches at his other side, not touching him, not talking, just sitting. Sitting in a position where, had he been corporeal, their legs might be touching, their shoulders. Small but present motions. You've got this, Klaus, he finally says and something about it makes Klaus' heart ache. He doesn't want to move forward, but he has to.
"Sorry," he says finally, weakly, his arms reaching to curl around Allison, hug her tightly as much as she is hugging him. "Dad always said I had a flair for the dramatic, right?"
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For a moment Allison half expects Diego or Luther to storm in, or even Five just to tell them that they don’t have time for this, but the room remains silent and she just lets her focus turn back to Klaus.
“It’s okay,” she reassures him, her head leaning against his when he hugs her back. “You know I’ve never minded.” She stays still for a moment, just holding him as her heart eases back to a relatively normal rhythm, before she speaks again.
“Did you get cut anywhere?” She didn’t see any blood, but at the same time she had been too busy just trying to get to his side to even properly assess for any injuries.
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