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.
Klaus sighs and for the first time in all of this, he finally seems to settle down, body relaxing and going slack against her. He’s exhausted, and sleep sounds delightful, but he knows too well that he won’t be able to rest. That his family won’t allow him the time to rest, either, since the world is ending and what not.
“I’m fine. I am an expert at breaking valuable things. No personal injury necessary.”
He slowly sits up, pulling himself away from her shoulder. He runs his hands back through his hair, frowning when he realizes he’s definitely spilled some of the alcohol on his hands. He laughs at the thought, letting his head fall back against the cabinet.
“But now I smell like a drunk, so at least the family will have something to entertain them for a while. Who would we be without one of us playing the family fuck up, after all.”
“They don’t know you, they just think they do. They can just shove it, we have more important things to do.”
Although it’s said quietly, the fierceness for him behind it is still there. Although she and Luther haven’t discussed the phone call from seven years ago, when he called her as if to check if she had lost her mind for bringing Klaus to California with her, she can see in his eyes the same doubt she heard in his voice that day. Diego hasn’t made another quip since Allison had punched him on her way out to look for Klaus days ago, but she knows he might say something now and she can feel her defenses flare. They haven’t seen Klaus in years, haven’t seen how hard he worked at crawling out of that hole he had been in since he was a teenager. They hadn’t seen the way he lit up with happiness when he met Claire, how he’s her absolute best friend in the entire world. How he cares for her, for them, and as Allison leans in to kiss his forehead, she makes a silent promise to keep defending him and his name. She’s proud of him, so fucking proud of him, and this hasn’t changed anything.
She digs her keys out of her pocket and gives them to him. “Wait for me in the car, okay? We’ll go somewhere else for a few hours, take a break.” Maybe he can sleep in the car while she drives, she thinks but doesn’t say it. “I think we both need it. We’ll regroup after. I don’t think either of us should be here right now.”
Taking a break will give them both a chance to breathe. It’ll give her a chance to convince herself to not drive straight to the airport without even bothering to say goodbye.
"I'm going to need a burrito as big as my head, some aspirin, and maybe a couple of those weird chocolate, peanut butter wafer things with the hilariously inappropriate name. What, like, nuttybars? Who names a dessert nuttybar."
He takes her keys and looks at them, the suggestion that they are nothing if not a car ride away from being free of this place. A tiny part of him is tempted, really, to take the car and drive the whole route back to California, watching the apocalypse from the horizon.
He knows he can't, knows he won't. He loves his family, even for how fucked up they all are. But he pushes himself to his feet with a huff, not bothering with shoes as he steps over the puddle of alcohol, the shattered glass, and offers her a hand up.
"Or a puppy. Claire wants a puppy and I'll be just the best uncle in the world if I bring her back a puppy instead of handing her an apocalypse in a hand basket with a ribbon on top."
And once she's to her feet, he starts for the door of the sitting room, body sagging in a way that it usually doesn't, but he's trying. He slowly begins rebuilding the walls that crashed down in Vietnam, but for now, this will have to be enough.
Allison takes the act for what it is, but she plays her part, too. She smiles as he rambles about food, rolls her eyes when he brings up a puppy for Claire, and acts how they normally would if his world hadn’t been flipped upside down. She hates it, hates every second of it because she wishes it wasn’t needed. That Klaus hadn’t been taken, that he wouldn’t have been transported to Vietnam.
She wishes they wouldn’t have come here. Reginald didn’t deserve it, but they had come out of...what, duty? Duty is what almost drowned them as children, and now what fucked everything up.
As he leaves the room, Allison watches after him, listening for anyone that might intercept him or say anything. No one does, but it allows her to watch the way his shoulders sag, the weight of it all crashing on him.
One more day, she tells herself. They’ll stay one more day before they haul ass back to California. Hopefully by then this will at least seem somewhat worth it.
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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?”
no subject
“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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“I’m fine. I am an expert at breaking valuable things. No personal injury necessary.”
He slowly sits up, pulling himself away from her shoulder. He runs his hands back through his hair, frowning when he realizes he’s definitely spilled some of the alcohol on his hands. He laughs at the thought, letting his head fall back against the cabinet.
“But now I smell like a drunk, so at least the family will have something to entertain them for a while. Who would we be without one of us playing the family fuck up, after all.”
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Although it’s said quietly, the fierceness for him behind it is still there. Although she and Luther haven’t discussed the phone call from seven years ago, when he called her as if to check if she had lost her mind for bringing Klaus to California with her, she can see in his eyes the same doubt she heard in his voice that day. Diego hasn’t made another quip since Allison had punched him on her way out to look for Klaus days ago, but she knows he might say something now and she can feel her defenses flare. They haven’t seen Klaus in years, haven’t seen how hard he worked at crawling out of that hole he had been in since he was a teenager. They hadn’t seen the way he lit up with happiness when he met Claire, how he’s her absolute best friend in the entire world. How he cares for her, for them, and as Allison leans in to kiss his forehead, she makes a silent promise to keep defending him and his name. She’s proud of him, so fucking proud of him, and this hasn’t changed anything.
She digs her keys out of her pocket and gives them to him. “Wait for me in the car, okay? We’ll go somewhere else for a few hours, take a break.” Maybe he can sleep in the car while she drives, she thinks but doesn’t say it. “I think we both need it. We’ll regroup after. I don’t think either of us should be here right now.”
Taking a break will give them both a chance to breathe. It’ll give her a chance to convince herself to not drive straight to the airport without even bothering to say goodbye.
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He takes her keys and looks at them, the suggestion that they are nothing if not a car ride away from being free of this place. A tiny part of him is tempted, really, to take the car and drive the whole route back to California, watching the apocalypse from the horizon.
He knows he can't, knows he won't. He loves his family, even for how fucked up they all are. But he pushes himself to his feet with a huff, not bothering with shoes as he steps over the puddle of alcohol, the shattered glass, and offers her a hand up.
"Or a puppy. Claire wants a puppy and I'll be just the best uncle in the world if I bring her back a puppy instead of handing her an apocalypse in a hand basket with a ribbon on top."
And once she's to her feet, he starts for the door of the sitting room, body sagging in a way that it usually doesn't, but he's trying. He slowly begins rebuilding the walls that crashed down in Vietnam, but for now, this will have to be enough.
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She wishes they wouldn’t have come here. Reginald didn’t deserve it, but they had come out of...what, duty? Duty is what almost drowned them as children, and now what fucked everything up.
As he leaves the room, Allison watches after him, listening for anyone that might intercept him or say anything. No one does, but it allows her to watch the way his shoulders sag, the weight of it all crashing on him.
One more day, she tells herself. They’ll stay one more day before they haul ass back to California. Hopefully by then this will at least seem somewhat worth it.