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He doesn't remember dying, not to begin with. He's just alone, lost and disoriented in a dark building which looks…more familiar than it should? Or less familiar? Should he know where he is? There's something about his situation which isn’t right, at any rate. He just needs to work out what it is.
The creeping wrongness only grows as he remembers something of himself and where he actually is. He had a mission, didn't he? He was here with the others, all five—no, all four of them. Five together; Five gone forever. But where are they now?
Later, he will carefully edit out this part of his return to himself, along with the indeterminable but probably rather long period of time where he breaks down entirely: a sobbing mess of remembered agony and regret. Nothing more. He's nothing more now. No more Six. No more Ben Hargreeves. Ben’s gone. He’s dead.
Okay, so he’s dead. He remembers dying now, much as he rather wishes he didn’t. And he’s something of a mess to look at, which probably ought to have been a giveaway from the off. Does he have to be? Is this it, forever? Will he remain a walking horror show? God, he’s both a and The. That’s depressing. Isn’t there...aren’t there other ghosts somewhere? There ought to be a fair few kicking around, because he certainly didn’t go down alone.
But there aren’t. There isn’t anyone around, and there’s no sign of where he ought to go, either. Isn’t there meant to be a somewhere? Damn, he should have asked—
Oh. Oh! God, of course, he’s such an idiot. Apparently, dying has completely ruined his ability to think things through. Klaus. He’s got to find Klaus. He’ll know what to do. Well, he will as long as he’s not high again, or drunk, or both. Shit, he’s probably both, knowing him. No conjuring the dead for their team’s resident slacker.
Then again, will he even need to? Will it matter, if Ben finds him himself? Klaus has never particularly mentioned how the whole thing works—he’s always hated talking about it as much as he’s hated doing it, and Ben has—had, it’s ‘had’ now, he’s dead and that comes with a lot of past tensing—he had enough commonality with Klaus not to push him on the subject. It never prompted any actual answers, anyway. Just a wall of deflecting nonsense which invariably they did not need to know. Certainly they’d never wanted to.
But. This is getting besides the point, which he acknowledges even as he fails to come to a conclusion as to what the point actually is. He needs to find Klaus, but…why? Now that he stops and thinks about it, what good will that do? The others probably already know he’s dead—scratch that, they definitely already know he’s dead, there’s no coming back from something like that—so why does he need to check in. He’s free, isn’t he?
And that’s a thought. He’s free. No more missions, no more dad ruling his life. Admittedly there’s no more life either, but is that so bad?
(yes, yes it’s bad, he wanted out but not like this)
He can go anywhere, see anything. There’s nothing particularly holding him to the spot where he died other than not really remembering where he is, exactly. It had been dark out, as dark as it is inside the narrow corridors and smashed up rooms. He hadn’t paid attention to the where, only the who. He was the one expected to take most of them out, after all.
Ben’s lot in life had always kinda sucked in that regard. Luther and Diego and Allison don’t have it anywhere near as bad, and Klaus could probably manage things a lot better if he wasn’t so…so Klaus. But they haven’t got—hadn’t had?—literal monsters lurking under their skin, or the burden of letting them rip people apart in front of them from a young and impressionable age. They’d never witnessed what he has, never experienced it as viscerally. They’d just relied on it and taken him for granted, sure that he’d always be there to back them up.
He’s probably allowed to feel a little bitter about that now, given where it’s gotten him. They’d just wound him up and set him loose whenever the situation maybe called for it, without ever imagining how that felt. It felt awful, every time, and he just put up with it for years, no complaints until the day he died.
But the team’s another man down now; they’ve probably got enough shit on their plate without the ire of the dead. And it wasn’t even entirely his siblings’ fault, anyway. They were just doing what they were told. Good little soldiers all.
Around him, the world has been getting lighter and then darker by turns for a while. Is that days, passing without him? How long has he been here, anyway? There’s no reliable way to chart the passing of time inside windowless halls, and even the rooms with windows have been boarded up and smashed halfway to pieces. They’re only on the upper floors, anyway. Most of this place was underground.
Yeah. Yeah, now he’s remembering that it was half the problem. Cramped underground with the knowledge that if he let too far loose he’d be bringing a hell of a lot down on top of them all. Hamstrung, and expected to run the race as usual. He probably should have. Or shouldn’t have?
It’s definitely not something he needs to dwell on, not when there are less bleakly depressing things to think about. Things like how to find Klaus, and the likely protracted inconvenience of haunting his wayward brother until a window of sobriety crops up. Yeah. That’s definitely more manageable than stewing on his own death, even if it’s not something he’s really looking forward to. When is Klaus sober these days?
He guesses he can find that much out when he gets home again. It’s going to be a real drag walking there, but at least he’ll have a better view than some flickering emergency exit signs and the filtered down remains of whatever time of day shines into this dump. A memory teases at him: Klaus making some comment about ghosts haunting the place they died, or where they’re buried, but frankly that idea can go suck it. For the moment at least, he’s done following the damn rules.
The grand and almost imposing sight of the Umbrella Academy has never been what Ben would call comforting. Reassuring perhaps, in an odd and probably Stockholm Syndrome sort of way, but not a comfort. That was the role of their mother; was Saturday afternoon’s half-hour of uninterrupted reading; was the journey home after a particularly successful mission, knowing their debrief wouldn’t drag on too long.
Comfort is…admittedly unlikely to mean the same thing for him that it does for the people he had passed by on his way home, to be fair, but it’s not as though he’s ever been unaware of that fact. Still, he gets an inkling of what so-called ‘normal people’ must feel when coming home as he finally rounds the corner and sees the gates. Against all his expectations it is a comfort to see it again. This is probably the longest he’s ever been away, and it feels good to be back, even if pedestrians do keep walking right through him as he stands there staring at his home.
There won’t be many pedestrians indoors at least. He’ll be able to find a peaceful spot and work on what exactly he’s going to ask Klaus in order to maximise the chances of getting a halfway useful answer. The fact that the one person (probably) able to see him is the one who spends the majority of his time slacking off and jerking around (in every godawful sense of the word, too) is annoying but unavoidable.
Still, surely Klaus will take a sabbatical from his constant search for the next high if it means helping his brother. His recently deceased brother who can’t work out what to do next. Even if it is probably only going to be because it’ll be the first (and who knows, possibly also the last) time he’ll ever be in the position of knowing more about something than someone else.
Ben stands in front of the door and steels himself a moment before walking through it. Only part of the reason is the fact he hasn’t quite come to terms with that facet of the whole ghost package deal. He’s yet to find any mention of the date, or whether anyone will even be home. There’s no routine, no plan, no set of instructions to follow as a dead man, and it’s starting to get more than a little unsettling. The sooner he can rectify this, the better.
Fuck it, he thinks, pushing through the tinted glass and into the hall.
No one seems to be home, at first. Ben makes a circuit of the ground floor peering into every room, but all is quiet. He’s not really sure exactly what time of day it is, but it has to be somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. There’s been more than enough day so far. It can’t be morning any longer.
“Hello?” he calls, despite knowing that no one can hear him even if they are there. It’s a comfort thing again, but to appease his irrational self-consciousness a little he tacks on a belated: “…Klaus?”
Predictably, there’s no answer. If he’s brutally honest with himself he hadn’t really expected Klaus to be in a listening-to-ghosts frame of mind even if he were around, and from the looks of things everyone is out.
They must be on a mission, he thinks, because at this time of day they would otherwise have training somewhere around the place. Instead the mansion is a veritable ghost town, pardoning the pun.
It’s fine, he can make jokes like that now. He’s the one who’s dead, isn’t he?
The sight of his bloody hands held out in front of him is a rather grim reminder. Why does he have to look like this, still? It’s pretty unpleasant, and it’s not as though he still has a body to be bloody and wrecked.
Oh, that’s a thought. Have they buried him yet? Did he get cremated?
…Is it going to be inappropriate to ask?
The thing he’s finding about being dead is that he has so many questions. There’s so much he didn’t realise—like being stuck here, for one. What happened to heaven, or even hell, come to that. Shouldn’t he be somewhere else? He’d rather figured reincarnation was out thanks to his brother’s ghost-summoning antics, but he hadn’t expected death to involve so much waiting around. It’s been several days since he left the facility where he died thanks to his long walk home, and in all that time he’s not only seen no other ghosts, but he hasn’t even felt any kind of…of pull elsewhere. He’s got no direction, no purpose.
Has he done something wrong? Is he that bad a person? Or what if it’s a side-effect of who he is: of the horror lurking deep inside him somehow, even now?
He wanders as he thinks—worries, really—and eventually finds himself overlooking the courtyard. Oh, so that’s where everyone is. They’re all gathered around something vaguely person-shaped, his siblings hanging their heads as their father drones on, with Pogo and Mom stood off to one side. The general shape of that lecture is audible even through the glass, although the words have been dulled rather.
Briefly, he contemplates staying put. It’s a little thrilling to watch from inside. To be apart, outside of the rules constraining his siblings. If he were alive he would be forced to stand among them, slotted in between Klaus and Vanya like the good little Number Six he’s always forced himself to be. Why shouldn’t he stay away now?
He’s halfway along the hall to the stairs before his subconscious answer sinks in. He misses it, misses it already. He doesn’t particularly want to be Number Six, but if it’s a choice between that and being dead then it’s no choice at all. Except, that’s the whole problem. He never had a chance to make that decision, and now he’s dead and he won’t be getting any more choices in future, either.
Ben almost runs down the stairs, drowning out his slightly panicked realisation with a litany of Klaus will fix it, Klaus has to know what’s going on.
Ah, sweet delusion.
Klaus doesn’t know shit. Ben can tell the moment their eyes meet. He can tell before their eyes meet given the fact he’s rolling up one of his afternoon specials even as they all stand around what turns out to be…
Oh god, it’s a statue of himself. But there isn’t time to really worry about that particular bit of trauma because Klaus has seen him—and oh thank god, Klaus can see him—and that’s about the moment things go to hell.
Klaus shrieks.
Okay, that’s being a little unfair, the sound isn’t quite a shriek, per se. It’s more like the wailing of a half strangled deer or something, and boy does Ben wish their fucked up childhood missions hadn’t given him enough material to make that sort of distinction so automatically.
It’s not a great sound is the chief point though, and the moment it emerges everyone turns to stare at Klaus, eyes narrowed in disapproval. Oh, right. Perhaps startling his brother in the middle of one of dad’s speeches wasn’t the most tactful of decisions. Still, in his own defence, Ben reasons that if anyone has a right to interrupt what seems to be some sort of creepy memorial service for himself, then it’s himself.
“Ben,” Klaus croaks, face contorting with visible distress. “Oh god, Ben—”
“Klaus,” he says, looking awkwardly between the brother in question and their assorted family members, all of whom appear distinctly unimpressed. “Look I know this is…uh…a bad time? But I need your help.”
Klaus cracks, snorting with what at first looks like amusement but which turns out to be a sort of halfway deranged fit of hysterics. Allison nudges him, muttering for him to “Shut up already,” and Klaus’s eyes snap to the front, meeting their father’s furious expression for just a second or so before they drop.
He looks spooked. Ben backs up a bit. Okay, possibly this was a bit much, particularly given his current and rather…gruesome state of being. And also given that their father is in full swing, eulogising him in a really rather dispassionate way which seems mostly to allow him to lecture the others. They let Ben down. They let one of their own fall. They need to work as a more cohesive unit, grow closer in the wake of their loss and emerge stronger on the far side.
Wow, what a load of…of…of horse shit.
There’s no possible way his siblings are going to come out of this the same or better than they were before. He knows this. Surely their father has to know it too. They were barely a team sometimes even with him there, distracting and dismembering their foes by turn. What exactly does dad plan for them to do without that support? Ben might have hated his role but he could and still can see how it was a cornerstone of their team. Is the plan really to keep going as if nothing happened? What, is he going to keep sending them out until they all die?
Ben stands frozen through the rest of the speech, only moving when the gathering breaks up and heads inside, unseeing eyes staring right through him to the door. They walk closer and closer, and he’s forced to spring out of the way before they pass right through him just like the pedestrians outside had. Even Klaus, who can see him—he can see him, Ben knows he can—is acting as though no one’s there, ducking his head down to avoid meeting his eyes.
“Klaus!” Ben calls, trailing after them as they head indoors and part ways, dad heading upstairs to his office as his siblings meander in the direction of their rooms. “Klaus, come on, quit messing around! You know I’m here.”
Klaus falters half a moment then ploughs on, head determinedly down, fists clenched, tension rolling off of him in waves. He shakes his head ever so slightly then barges past his siblings and races down the hall, slamming his bedroom door shut behind him. It’s an obvious enough dismissal that Ben hangs back despite his frustration. Maybe he should have waited a bit. Maybe gatecrashing your own memorial service is breaking ghost etiquette or something.
Besides, the others are still talking amongst themselves, and he can’t help but wonder how they’re coping, too.
“What the hell is his problem,” Luther mutters, glaring down the hall after Klaus and shaking his head. “We all lost Ben, but he’s acting like he’s somehow worse off.”
“He—” pipes up Vanya’s voice, making Ben jump. She falls silent as they all turn to stare at her. Apparently the others are equally surprised that she wants to contribute to the conversation.
Allison frowns. “He what?” she asks impatiently.
Vanya shrugs. “I’ve heard him through the wall a few times,” she says. “I think he’s been trying to…conjure him.”
There’s a short silence while everyone apparently processes this. Ben feels oddly touched, although a little unsettled as well. It’s obvious enough that it hasn’t worked. His decision to come home had a lot to do with Klaus, sure, but nothing to do with being conjured or summoned. It would almost have been a relief if he had been.
“He’d have to stop smoking if he wanted to be serious about it,” Diego says at last, once it’s obvious no one else is going to speak. “He’s too off on it all to focus properly.”
“Where’s he even getting it?” Luther asks, and oh, that childish naivete, obvious enough that none of the others bother to provide an answer. Only Vanya nods in agreement, looking equally lost.
“You two…should probably get out more,” Allison remarks, looking between them with almost as much concern as Diego is with transparent amusement. She sighs. “We all should. I don’t want to be…to be stuck here forever.”
“But you heard dad,” Luther says. “We have to stick together. Work harder, and smarter, and—”
Diego thumps the wall. “And end up like Ben?” he asks, voice cracking. “Ffff-ffuck that! Annd fuck you.”
Ben eases past them, the ghost—ha—of butterflies dancing in his non-existent stomach. He can’t feel his discomfort, not really, but he’s heard more than enough all the same. It turns out that being talked about as though you’re not there is exactly as fun as he’d always imagined it wasn’t. He’ll take his chances with Klaus over the escalating argument at his back. Apparently Vanya has the same thought because she’s shuffling away as well, except in the other direction because she’s still got a body. It seems like she doesn’t fancy pushing past her brothers, and frankly who can blame her.
He doesn’t have any idea where she’s planning to go. None of them have ever particularly thought about where it is she gets to when she’s off by herself. But that’s not important anymore, if it ever even was. It’s not his business. She’s her own person, and he’s…well, he’s just a ghost now. He’s got other things on his mind.
Like Klaus, for example, and whatever’s been going on with him. Ben feels a little guilty about it, come to that. What if the reason he hasn’t been able to conjure him is because he was already here? It seems a bit of a jerk move to let him think he failed when it wasn’t actually his fault.
There’s music playing when he walks through the door, and Klaus is lying face down on his bed with a pillow over his head, humming along rather tunelessly. He doesn’t respond when Ben calls his name, or tells him to turn it down and listen. He’s not even sure if Klaus can actually hear him over the racket. It’s probably just as well Vanya wandered off elsewhere, frankly. If she was able to hear Klaus attempting to conjure him, she’d definitely be able to hear this.
If he’s honest, Ben wants to wander off elsewhere as well. But the only place he can think to go is his own bedroom, and he’s not sure he’s ready to face that one just yet. What would be worse? Seeing all his things as he left them, or seeing evidence of how someone else left them? Neither option sounds good, but that’s okay because he’s steering well clear. It would make the ongoing nightmare too real.
The long and short of things though is that he has nothing better to do than sit around and wait. Very probably his other siblings would be more interesting to shadow, but Klaus is the only one who can see him, and Ben needs Klaus to see him so that he can ask where he’s meant to go. Klaus is their resident expert on dead people, isn’t he?
He parks himself on one of the few clear patches of floor with his legs crossed, and wishes he had a book. Waiting is boring. It’s infinitely more boring because Klaus’s taste in music has apparently taken a shift towards volume over quality, and there’s precious little to appreciate about it other than the length of time it takes each track to frenetically wind to a close and give Ben another window of calling his brother in vain.
It takes about three tracks for him to give up. All his shouting seems to be achieving is to drive Klaus ever further under his damn pillow, pressing it so tightly on either side of his head it’s a wonder he hasn’t had to come up for air. So Ben waits quietly instead, gritting his teeth through the thumping bass and tuneless screaming of the vocals. Klaus isn’t that stubborn. He can’t keep it up forever, not least of all because he smokes, and smokers get cravings. Sooner or later he’s got to crack.
After another couple of so-called songs without any sign of movement, Ben has to concede that Klaus has more staying power than he’s usually given credit. Also, while definitely not to his own taste, the thumping music does actually have a melody of a sort. Now and then. It’s not the worst thing he’s ever listened to, not that he’s planning to admit as much.
In a way, the long wait is rather relaxing, too. If he doesn’t look down at himself he can almost believe it’s just another afternoon, and for some reason he’s decided to loiter in Klaus’s room instead of his own. Who knows, perhaps he finished his book and doesn’t want to get another. Perhaps there’s a meeting on in the living room and he can’t. Perhaps, against all the odds, Klaus actually invited him in and they’re just passing the time until dinner, and Ben has taken it upon himself to listen to the screechings of this hitherto unknown band voluntarily.
Eventually the cassette runs out, plunging the room into silence with a last faint click. It drags on for one minute; two.
Finally the Klaus-heap moves, pillow shifting slowly as he peers out from underneath it. One green eye becomes visible for a moment, and is immediately smothered again by the pillow with a muffled accompanying curse.
“Go away!” Klaus hisses in a high whisper. “Just…just go, please go. I’m sorry, okay? We let you down, we weren’t good enough, all of that, whatever you want, just leave me alone. I can’t handle this from you as well, I swear to god.”
Ben stares, only resisting the temptation to knock some sense into his brother because he knows his hands will just pass through him instead.
There’s a short silence before Klaus groans deeply from beneath his pillow, and peers out once more. This time, instead of retreating again he scrambles upright and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.
“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, I need a smoke so bad,” he mutters to himself. He glances at Ben again and rocks back far enough that his head hits the wall. “God, why are you so quiet, the suspense is almost worse than the screaming.”
“What screaming?” Ben asks, rolling his eyes as Klaus ignores him to reach down the far side of his bed. “Klaus. What screaming. I don’t hear anything.”
“Oh, well lucky you,” Klaus says, leering at him as he fishes out a pouch stuffed with papers and weed, and starts rolling a joint. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m just gonna smoke this and get rid of you, okay? It’s great hanging out with my dead brother, really it is, but I’ve had a shitty enough day already and…and this?”—he waves his free hand around in Ben’s direction—“This is making it worse.”
It stings. It really stings. It’s bad enough being dead, without the immediate rejection of the one person who can help him. The one person who can help him who’s his own damn brother, too. He ought to say as much. Ought to shout and scream, but he can’t. He’s just too stunned.
“Wow, you really are a…an asshole,” he says at last, getting to his feet. He looks down at himself, at the blood staining his everything; at the floor beneath him, still pristine. At the evidence of his arguable non-existence.
It’s not pretty, no. It probably isn’t all that easy for his brother to look at. But he lived that, lived it and then died, and in exchange he gets a stone cold rejection from his brother who it turns out he absolutely should not have put any faith in, not even the tiny, watered-down faith he’d still held onto that despite how he’s been getting, despite all his annoying habits and irreverence about pretty much everything, deep down he would still have been a good enough person to help. Well, the joke’s on him, isn’t it, because he—
“Ben,” Klaus says, low and reverential, making him jump. “Ben, you…you swore.”
He’s leaning forward when Ben looks up at him, forearms resting on crossed legs and face twisted with wide-eyed awe and glee.
“Who even knew such a thing was possible,” he goes on, shaking his head slowly. The joint lies between his fingers, unlit and seemingly forgotten. He’s watching Ben intently now, pointedly making eye contact. It seems deliberate, and to be fair, Klaus probably doesn’t want to look down and see the rest of him. “Dying…dying really changed you, you know?”
He almost pulls it off. There’s a lot of devil-may-care in his tone of voice, but his bottom lip is wobbling and he’s blinking much too fast for it to be normal. The unlit joint flaps up and down a few times as he taps his hand on the bed, before falling onto the mattress. Half a second later Klaus’s empty fingers clench into a fist.
“Look, I’m really trying, you know?” he says then, screwing his eyes shut and dropping his head into his hands. “You—you’re dead, you died, and now you’re all…well, you know, and I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry about it, but I’m just not gonna hold up with you here, I won’t. I’m gonna need to get so much higher and then I’m gonna get in trouble, and then I’ll need to get wasted again, and really it’s just gonna be better for everyone if you just…just go, okay? It’s nothing personal. I mean, I can take a message, pass on whatever it is you need to say, but I just…I just can’t do this. Not with you. It’s too…it’s too much.”
It’s about halfway through Klaus’s speech that Ben has the uncomfortable realisation that he’s never stopped to think all that much about the deeper implications of his brother’s power before. It’s been all sunshine and roses when he’s used it on missions, summoning this or that ghost to provide information when they needed it, and filling in as lookout or decoy when the situation hasn’t required that sort of advantage.
But the thing is, summoning ghosts is a pretty niche power, all told, and more often than not it goes unused. He’d always assumed Klaus’s larger-than-life personality was a direct compensation for this lack of utility. A strange and pretty misguided attempt to seem as though he’s actually contributing, or worse, to stay popular with their fans.
Watching Klaus falter on the edge of tears is making that assumption look a little short-sighted.
“I’d look different if I knew how,” he says, frowning down at his hands. “There has to be a way, right?”
“Hell if I know,” Klaus mutters, looking down and snatching up his joint. He turns and reaches through the window net, twisting the latch and letting the frame drop in one swift movement, sash rattling as it goes.
“But…but this is what you do,” Ben says flatly.
Klaus droops. “No, it’s what ghosts do. I don’t know how it works, I just get to watch. In glorious Technicolor.”
No. No. No that can’t be right, it just can’t.
“But what about me?” he asks, leaning forward and wincing as Klaus fails to mask a flinch. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Why are you asking me?” Klaus snaps. “I’m not some grand conductor of the dead! I can call people up for a chat, sure, but I don’t know where they come from! I don’t know how dying works because, crazy as this sounds, I’m not the one who’s dead!”
He freezes almost immediately, cringing and backpedaling with a tumble of apologies and pleas for Ben to stop, just stop, he’s really sorry, he didn’t mean it that way it came out all wrong, no, no wait, Ben, just wait and let him explain, it’s just been such a long day, and there were so many lectures, and he’s been trying, doesn’t he get that he’s been trying for weeks now—
Ben doesn’t listen. He doesn’t want to listen anyway, although there’s not much he can do to halt Klaus’s frenzied rush of words except march out through the door again and storm off, heading at random down the hall without any real destination in mind. Klaus follows at first but quails almost immediately as Diego yells at him from his own room to pack it in already. Long before he’s done sorting that out Ben’s gone, running as fast as he can through the walls of the house. They prove to be little more tangible than clouds.
He sits on a nearby rooftop for almost a day. It’s a pain climbing up there, but he’s always wanted to sit on a roof with a good view and look out across the city, and why not, now? It isn’t as though he could hurt himself if he falls.
The view is good. It’s really good. People keep on walking down below, and the sun passes across the sky above, and then it sets into a puddle of amber and gold and crimson, and a wash of stars race to fill the darkness it leaves behind, and he can lie back and watch them all night long, never tiring, never cold, never in danger of oversleeping in the morning and being late for breakfast.
There is no breakfast, but there is a morning, and it finds him just as alone as the sunset left him: flat on his back on a pretty dingy roof in a shitty part of town, idly watching pigeons fight—no, no they’re not fighting. Ew.
It’s an awful morning to be dead on, all told. Not that Ben can really think of a good morning to be dead on—being dead immediately makes all days equally bad, equally pointless.
Why is he here?
Why can’t he just…go? If this is it, if this is really all there is, what’s the use?
Traffic picks up on the street down below him. Thousands of people starting their days, living and breathing and utterly unaware of his presence, even if he were to jump off the roof and land in front of them. He gets to his feet and stands on the edge, marvelling at the absence of vertigo.
There’s nothing. No shudder in his legs, no breeze to set him off-balance. He’s just…stood there. Perfectly steady, totally unafraid, and entirely insubstantial. With one glaring exception, as far as the world is concerned he doesn’t even exist anymore.
Ben doesn’t want to think about the exception, but Klaus has never been easy to put out of one’s mind. Growing up with him was a series of Klaus moments. Wake up: Klaus is awake already, playing music or wandering around. Eat breakfast: Klaus is at the table talking as he eats and taking twice as long because of it. Get to training: Klaus is messing around again, causing trouble. Sit down to dinner: Klaus is fidgeting beside him, rolling another joint under the table as though no one knows what he’s doing, or else fiddling with an already rolled one. Go on a mission: Klaus is slacking off, disrupting enemies, failing as a lookout, stirring up shit between his brothers, playing up for the cameras…the list is endless.
And now here he is dead and Klaus is still hogging his attention, because he’s the only person in the whole world who can see him. Great.
It’s unfair to take out his ire on his brother though. He’s not angry at him. He’s not even particularly annoyed, not if he stops and thinks about it. Klaus is just being Klaus, and there were more than a few clues during their exchange that not all is well in Number Four Hargreeves-land, and hasn’t been for a long time. Really, he should go back and apologise. He’s dead, yeah, and that’s…well honestly he can’t really think of anything which tops being dead, but being recently bereaved of a close family member is probably up there, just a few notches down.
He could probably stand to cut his brother a little slack.
Klaus is smoking when he returns, leaning half out of the window with the curtains drawn behind him as though it will do anything to curb the smell of weed. Not that Ben can actually smell it anymore, but he remembers well enough. And besides, from the alley where he’s standing it’s not unreasonable that he wouldn’t smell it, at least, which is a nice illusion until Klaus happens to look down, and startles so hard he almost falls out of the window entirely.
“Christ,” he squawks, grabbing at the wooden frame with his free hand and lurching forward when it’s not enough to haul himself back. He dangles there a moment, waving the joint back and forth as he struggles to regain his balance and stubbornly refuses to drop the damn thing even though it’s clearly making everything worse.
Ben’s halfway up the emergency ladder before Klaus has managed to get himself back inside again, stubbing the joint out on the windowsill and glaring at him, hand pressed dramatically to his chest.
“Are you trying to kill me?”
“That’s a pretty distasteful comment, under the circumstances,” Ben replies, as haughtily as he can. His intended goodwill is withering already.
“Sorry, I’m sorry, I just…I see a lot of dead people, you know?” Klaus says, pulling back from the window and waving Ben inside. “It’s weird that it’s you—it’s horrible that it’s you, by the way—but I’m…pretty high right now, so it’s this or you hang around until I come down and you get the hysterics, take your pick.”
Ben walks across the bed and hops down onto the floor, letting Klaus slump onto his mattress with his eyes closed and his arms splayed out on either side of himself.
“If you stopped getting high so often you could probably find a better management strategy than hysterics,” he points out, but Klaus isn’t listening, too busy nodding along with the notably less obnoxious music he has on. Ben glances at the stereo. “No crushing bassline this time?”
Klaus snorts. “I’m not drowning you out today,” he says lazily. “As long as I don’t actually look at you I can manage a conversation if you’d like.”
“Wow, how generous.”
There’s a pause. “You know, you’re pretty composed for a ghost,” Klaus remarks at last. “I freaked out the other day because I thought you’d just start screaming and all that, like the rest, but…you’re not, not really.”
Ben looks up from the desk where Klaus has a stack of cassette tapes piled so unsteadily they’ve got to be about to fall, and glances at his brother.
“Why would I start screaming?”
“Oh, right, yeah. You’re new at this. Well, most of the ghosts around these parts don’t so much talk to me as scream, pretty much non-stop unless I can get rid of them.”
Ben thinks about that a moment, watching Klaus as he shuffles around on the bed until his head is resting on the pillow. To look at him, he’s pretty carefree.
“I haven’t seen any other ghosts,” he says, watching his brother’s expression as he speaks.
Klaus pouts. “Well they’re around,” he says. “Dunno why you can’t see them, being dead yourself and all. You sure there haven’t been any?”
Ben shakes his head automatically before he remembers that Klaus has yet to open his eyes again. “I’m sure,” he says. “I walked here all the way from the facility, and I haven’t seen anyone who’s not alive.”
“Huh. Weird.”
Klaus doesn’t say anything else for a long time, apparently content to tap his feet along with the beat of the latest song. Ben sits down on the floor, legs crossed beneath himself and tattered suit drawn as closed as possible.
“So…I don’t suppose you know how I can…I don’t know. Move on, or whatever I’m meant to do?” he manages at last, sighing when Klaus just shakes his head.
“Sorry Ben, I don’t think it works that way. If you’re gonna go, you’d have already gone, you know?” He snorts. “Why d’you think the ones who are left are so pissed off all the time?”
“They are?”
“Oh, for sure. I mean, it’s not been so bad lately, but that’s because Johnny stepped up, if you know what I mean.”
Ben doesn’t know what he means, and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t really want to know either, but unfortunately for him Klaus is in a sharing mood.
“Johnny’s my dealer,” he adds, waving the offending article a few times for emphasis. “I mean I seriously doubt his name is actually ‘Johnny’—can you imagine?—but that’s what he goes by. A code name, if you will. Anyway, he’s finally come through with the good shit and let me tell you, I am flying. If it weren’t for you I’d have been—ha!—a week clean. No ghosts at all.”
Ben looks around the room, empty aside from the two of them. As one song winds down into another, he can just about hear Vanya practising scales on the far side of the wall.
“So it seems,” he says. “But isn’t that going to cause problems? You know I was there the other day. I heard dad’s big speech out in the courtyard. He wants you to keep going without me. And I know you’re not stupid, so you have to know you can’t fight like this.”
Klaus snorts into his hand, choking down obvious laughter. “You think I want to? God, if this really gets me out of it then so much the better. If not…” He shrugs. “Well, let’s be honest here, it’s not like I’m all that important to the team anyway. They can take me or leave me, I don’t particularly care anymore.”
“That’s really stupid,” Ben says. Surely Klaus has to see it as well. “Dad won’t let you just slack off like that. He’s going to make you go along, and if you’re as doped up then as you are now, you’re just going to get hurt. Or someone else is going to get hurt.”
The last sentence is enough to finally make Klaus look at him. He seems uncomfortable, but to be fair Ben isn’t sure if that’s because of what they’re talking about or because his innards have less in about them these days. He stares his brother down nonetheless.
“Think about it Klaus. It’s not going to work.”
“Oh fuck off,” Klaus replies casually, no malice in his voice. He pushes himself upright and jams the roll up between his teeth as he fishes in his pocket with the other hand. “I don’t see why it matters to you. You don’t have to do it anymore.”
“Yeah, because I’m dead, Klaus!” Ben cries, loudly enough that his brother flinches and drops his lighter into his lap. “And you’re going to end up dead as well if you’re not careful!”
Klaus’s bottom lip wobbles. Shit. He’s always been soft this way, absurdly vulnerable despite everything they’ve collectedly hardened themselves against. The others have mostly grown out of this childishness but Klaus has…Klaus has weaponised it, turning to tears whenever stubborn refusal fails him.
“Come on Klaus, don’t just cry,” Ben says, folding his arms and hardening himself against his brother’s reddening eyes. The trick might be a good one, but it’s not going to work this time. “You seriously think you’re the one struggling here? At least you’re still alive!”
It’s tough love, sure. But Klaus is a weird contradiction of vulnerabilities, and sometimes the best way to help him is to make him help himself. Plus, it’s not like Ben has a choice. He’s…he’s intangible, incorporeal, and completely invisible to everyone else. If he can’t persuade Klaus to do the sensible thing he’s not going to get anywhere.
…He’s not going to get anywhere. Klaus hunches forward again rather than answer, hanging his head and clutching at his hair. A dangerous act with a lit joint in his hand. Ben isn’t sure if he can’t smell burning hair because it’s somehow not burning, or simply because he doesn’t have a nose anymore.
“Klaus…”
Klaus looks up, eyes narrowed. “How are you even here?” he complains, his voice trailing into a thin whine which Ben has always hated. “I shouldn’t be able to see any ghosts right now. I can’t summon them for shit, and the regular ones sorta…fade off, but you’re here. And you’re here now, which is just plain rude because I was calling you for weeks.”
Ben falters. “I don’t know,” he says. Weeks is an ominous sounding amount of time to have lost. “I just…I was at the facility, I guess. I don’t really remember much between the last mission and a few days ago. I came because I figured you might know what I should do next, to be honest.”
“Well you’re shit outta luck there, mon frère,” Klaus says, doing an about face and giggling like a complete idiot. He takes a long drag, blowing what is probably meant to be a smoke ring out of the window. “I just talk to the assholes you all beg me to summon, I don’t go and get existential about it.”
“You barely even do that,” Ben mutters, but his heart isn’t in it. What’s the point, when it won’t change anything? He can’t stop his brother smoking, can’t force him to sober up and think things through. He can’t even tell any of the others he’s here, stuck as a ghost instead of moving on to whatever kind of afterlife they think all dead people naturally wind up in.
Klaus says nothing, eyes toward the ceiling as he keeps smoking. After a minute or so he looks over and jumps in place, as though he’d forgotten Ben was even there. Which, you know, isn’t offensive and infuriating or anything, not at all. Ben scowls at him.
“Don’t tell me you’re so wasted you—”
Klaus jumps again, and fumbles to extinguish his joint for a second time before scrambling onto his knees and staring at Ben.
“Why are you still here?” he asks, sounding vaguely desperate.
“Well where else am I supposed to go?”
“I don’t know!” Klaus exclaims, rocking back onto his heels and throwing his hands up into the air. “I never cared where they go before, just that they do! And now I’ve smoked almost this whole thing and you’re still…you’re still sat there, all gross and dripping and totally killing my buzz.”
“Well maybe if you stopped getting high and focused you could help me go somewhere less frustrating for both of us.” Ben says, getting to his feet and not even caring that Klaus recoils. Why did he ever think this was going to be of any use? “I…don’t want to be here like this Klaus. I need your help.”
“Yeah, but I can’t help.” Klaus replies.
He looks away, rocking back and forth on the bed, and wipes under his eyes with one hand. God, is…is he crying?
There’s definitely a wobble in Klaus’s voice as he carries on: “You…you think you’re the first one to ask me this? Because you’re not. I get it every day, Ben, it was non-stop, just random corpses wandering up to me and wailing in my ear about all their problems. And then dad—and then… Well anyway the point is, I can’t handle it anymore. I’m not going back to that. And if dear old dad doesn’t like it then…then… I dunno, I’ll think of something I guess. I mean what’s he gonna do, ground me? ‘No more Umbrella Academy outings for you, Number Four’. Oh, well boo hoo.”
Ben’s pretty sure Klaus doesn’t mean at least half of what he’s saying. Judging by the way he’s rambling he’s not sure Klaus is even aware of some of it, at least not in a way that counts. He’s rocking back and forth again, face drawn, and while Ben has absolutely seen Klaus get high before, he’s never seen him like this.
“Klaus, maybe you shouldn’t smoke any more of that stuff,” he says after a minute, when the rocking hasn’t stopped and Klaus is gazing through him with something of a thousand yard stare. “I don’t think it’s doing you any good.”
Klaus snorts, but there’s no other sign he’s paying attention. After a moment he closes his eyes, still rocking slowly back and forth in the middle of his bed.
“I mean it Klaus,” Ben says. “Just…just get rid of the rest, okay? If you flush it no one’s gonna notice, but you really can’t smoke it. This looks…it looks bad.”
“Oh, I look bad?”
Ben clenches his jaw hard enough to grind his teeth together. He can’t feel the expected discomfort, even though he can hear the sound of enamel on enamel. It’s an unpleasant realisation.
“Yes,” he says, pushing his discomfort-but-not to one side. “You look awful. You’ve never been this bad after smoking before. I don’t know what’s in that aside from pot, but it can’t be right. I don’t think it’s safe.”
Klaus is still rocking slightly as he smirks at Ben and reaches for his lighter. He sticks out his jaw stubbornly and tucks the remains of the joint between his lips, fingers shaking.
“Klaus, don’t,” Ben says, for all the good his protests are doing.
“You just want me sober so you can use my powers,” Klaus snaps, fumbling as his precious weed almost falls out of his mouth.
It takes him three tries to make the lighter work, but work it does, because despite Ben’s repeated protests that he doesn’t, he didn’t mean it that way...he’s just a ghost. He’s powerless to actually do anything anymore.
Klaus takes a long, sharp drag and shudders, coughing like he hasn’t done since he was twelve and smoking his first few plain cigarettes. Ben’s heart sinks. All he’s done is make things worse.
“Look, you don’t have to be sober, Klaus, just…not that stuff, okay? I…I dunno, find another dealer or something!”
It’s the first and last time he’ll ever encourage his brother to take drugs, but he can’t bring himself to regret it because it works. Klaus actually drops the joint in surprise.
In the short term the move is less of a success—it almost leads to another instance of his brother setting his bedroom on fire, in fact. But somewhere in his uncoordinated haste to extinguish everything and then cover up the scorch marks, Klaus stops looking at Ben as though he’s just the personification of the horrors which have always lurked inside him. He stops looking as though he’s scared of him.
As far as victories go, it’s not one of his greats. But he’s dead. He’s dead now. So even if Klaus is absolutely going to go out and buy more drugs the first chance he gets, Ben takes a great deal of satisfaction in watching the stumpy remains of one joint get flushed away.
Who knows. If he sticks around he might do better next time.