Chapter Text
For the first few seconds after Five falls out of the glowing ball in the sky, Klaus is stuck in the same spot he’s standing. Burning blue light begins to compress into itself, growing brighter and brighter and blindingly white before disappearing with an anticlimactic pop. He can’t seem to get his thoughts to collect inside of his head, faced with hundreds of superimposed words jumbling through his mind until all the things he wants to say blur together vaguely leaving him with the thought of ‘what the everloving fuck is happening’. Five brushes his jacket off as he rises to his feet, eyeing the rest of his siblings with a harsh grimace on his face and Klaus manages to free his feet from the concrete they’d found themselves buried in and rushes over to his brother.
“Five! Five are you okay? The building was shaking like crazy and that thing fell through me all like blargh and then I woke up here. How did you-” The words fall out of his mouth at a mile a minute, as if a dam in his memory broke open to spill the events of the last 24 hours into the forefront of his mind. He runs his hands all over his brother, checking for injuries from the debris he can recall rocketing towards the both of them at unprecedented speeds, Five quickly locking his shoulders tightly to his ears and brushing him off. Klaus lets his arms fall to his side, still insisting on looking over his brother but understanding he might need some space. He’s unsure how little Five got here after Klaus died, or how he knew to find him here, but Klaus can’t seem to care enough to will himself to worry about that. They don’t have to deal with the post apocalypse anymore, they can fix everything here.
Five doesn’t say anything as he brushes past where Klaus stands in front of him and storms into the house. Klaus stumbles closely behind him, never falling outside of an arms length away from the boy as they navigate through twisting halls filled with pretentious knick knacks that their father forbade them from even touching. The walls seem to close in on them now, and he can hear the rest of their siblings whispering behind them about Five as they all march towards some unknown destination within the mansion, can see Ben out of the corner of his eye with what he swears is a look of realization crossing his face. Their young brother(so strange, to think of him as anything other than one of Them, one piece of a seven player game, tormented by the same things only the rest of them can understand) mutters rapidly under his breath, indecipherable from even the short distance between himself and the boy. His feet cross over the kitchen threshold for the second time that day, and it’s not until Five begins to tear through the cupboards does he acknowledge the rest of his family.
“What is the date? The exact date.” His back is turned to the rest of them as they settle around the table in the center of the room. Klaus hovers in the corner, facing the brother that won’t quite look him in the eyes as he fights with the suit jacket engulfing his small frame. He wonders how their brother got the clothes, and even though they are most definitely worse for wear, they don’t appear to have been collected anywhere near the ruins from the Academy.
“The twenty-fourth.” Vanya pipes up from her seat at the table, eyes big and round as she stares at the impossibility in front of them. Five turns to her, the first time since stumbling back that he addresses any of them head on. Even with his face screwed up in a perfect scowl, his eyes are soft and kind as he regards their small sister. He turns back around and plucks the peanut butter from its home as he speaks again.
“Of?”
“March.”
“Good.” The boy looks relieved, calm, even if the scowl doesn’t leave. Klaus moves to sit on the table, tangling his legs together and placing his hand right next to Vanya’s. He doesn’t reach for her hand, doesn’t take his eyes off their brother, but he does recognize the relaxing of her shoulders and the slightest registering of one hand sitting closer to his own, and relaxes himself just the slightest bit.
Five has gone quiet again, methodically placing each ingredient for his sandwich on the counter in front of him. From his position on the table Klaus has a decent view of the spread, two slices of bread equidistant from each other, a bag of marshmallows gingerly placed to the right of the plate he’d grabbed from the cupboard, and a jar of peanut butter with the knife balanced perfectly on top. It’s a familiar scene, achingly reminiscent of a time in their lives where sneaking out to the kitchen in the middle of the night in pairs was a common occurrence. Klaus can’t recall how many times they would all find themselves sleepless in the kitchen, circled wordlessly around this very table and staring at anything but each other. It was a comfort to be alone together, where the most important thing on their minds was just to be, free from the scrutiny of their father or the ever watchful eyes of prying journalists hungry for any scrap of drama they can exaggerate to the nth degree in their latest article about the siblings. No, their times in the kitchen with bare feet against the cold tile and never more than an arm's reach away from the others were some of the best times in their disastrous childhood.
“It’s been seventeen years,” Luther breaks the silence, an air of command and desperation for answers perfectly audible in each syllable. Five sighs and looks not to their biggest(literally) brother, but Klaus. He can’t quite figure out what emotion is present in the boy’s eyes, can’t quite figure out why he looks to Klaus as if the man was already dead. It unsettles something in his stomach, forming a pit right in the center that he has a feeling will only grow bigger the longer Five remains back with them. Klaus moves to question their now younger brother, only for Luther to step directly in front of him, tearing the boy’s attention away.
“It’s been a lot longer than that,” Five finally responds in a dry voice, jumping to move behind the large man in favor of rummaging through another cabinet for some unknown item. Klaus feels his brows bunch up against his forehead, hasn’t it only been a day at most? Maybe two?
“Where’d you go.” Diego frames his response more like a statement than a question, giving Five a run for his money for the most tense family member at the moment.
“The future. It’s shit by the way.”
“That’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one,” Klaus mutters under his breath. He pointedly doesn’t turn towards his little sister he knows had to have heard him, though he does feel her hand tense just the slightest bit. Five catches the comment too, locking his eyes once again with Klaus as if trying to telepathically tell him to shut the fuck up. Klaus, despite not understanding why, bites back a further response in favor of hopefully catching Five alone for answers, an explanation, anything really.
“I should have listened to the old asshole. Jumping through space is one thing, jumping through time is a toss of the dice.” Five speaks as he begins assembling his sandwich, words accented by the swipe of a butter knife against soft bread. He brings his eyes upwards again, focusing once more on Klaus. “Nice dress.”
Klaus preens a bit at the compliment, doing his best impression of a curtsy from his sitting position at the table. Ben shakes his head at him, though he does not do much else than hover so very close to the boy who should not be there, stopping just short of laying his hand on the kid’s shoulder. Klaus doesn’t know if Five would even feel the hand pass straight through him at all.
Klaus admittedly checks out of the conversation a bit. He gathers enough, the fact that Five has apparently been stuck in the apocalypse for nearly twenty years, and he does not miss the fact that he purposely looks to Klaus as he states that he had only one companion, some woman named Delores, during his time in that hellscape. The pit in his stomach grows just a bit more noticeable as he registers that look on Five’s face as resentment, despite the scowl that seems to have found permanent residence there. Klaus still wants answers, still burns to know what exactly the fuck happened to have himself wind up in said hellscape for even the slightest fraction of time, and more importantly he tries to ignore the guilt flowing through his veins at the thought of leaving baby Five all alone there.
Eventually, Five picks up a newspaper brandishing the proclamation of their fathers death. His comments on the death spark a small debate between Luther and Diego, leaving them lost in their own inconsequential battle as Five begins to exit the room. Klaus hauls himself to his feet to follow, cold floors a bit too similar to the hands of the dead clawing at his skin for his liking. Before he can make it out the door, however, Five turns back to him with a new expression communicating that there will be answers, eventually, if Klaus stays put.
The thing is, Klaus has never been good at doing what he was told. That much was evident extremely early on, with the exasperation of their father’s face at every single infraction he’d managed to commit just on the way to breakfast each day. A debate sparks in his mind, to follow the man stuck in the body of a thirteen year old version of their brother, or to stay put and just… wait. Like every other time he’s been faced with such a hard decision, Klaus looks to Ben for an answer. Ben, in turn, gives him a confused look that communicates that for once, he is at a loss for the right and wrong path to take, and Klaus somehow remains planted in the kitchen.
Five leaving the room seems to be enough invitation for the rest of their siblings to file out as well, the last of which to exit being Vanya. She spares a tight smile towards him, almost conspiratorial in its timidity, and Klaus recalls her absence at the end of the world through a fog of half assed lucidity. He finds himself longing to ask her to stay, to follow him and Five as he demands answers about what exactly is going on, before she continues out the door.
It isn’t Five that comes to gather him in the middle of a disjointed explanation to Ben about the past twenty four hours but Allison, summoning the brother(s) to the spreading of their father’s ashes. She gives him a look as he talks to seemingly thin air, but does move to wrap him in a warm hug before taking his hand to guide him out of the room. Klaus tries to remember the last time they had done something like this, just the two of them, and nearly comes up with nothing at all. Ben is the one to pipe up, unheard to the woman standing just a foot away from him, as he comments about the many makeovers the two had had way back when the world felt so small and secure to even them. Klaus looks down to the skirt Allison has to know he’d stolen from her wardrobe at some point, smiling as she pulls him softly along behind her.
********
It's not until after the funeral that Klaus manages to corner his little brother. Granted he could have done it sooner, but something about the sad pile of ashes called to the man, summoning his hand to put out his cigarette within them. He didn’t look to the specter milling about the statue in the courtyard, cast aside in the rain and mud by two constantly fighting brothers. He didn’t have to to know that the boy who never got the chance to grow older alongside them felt a small bit of celebration when the pale imitation of the real thing was knocked off its pedestal.
Klaus finds his brother once again in the kitchen. He’s starting to believe it’s the only place in the house that Five can go, that perhaps he was actually a ghost left to haunt the pantry and fridge in a sisyphean search for some unknown object. Or, rather, a never ending quest for coffee it seems, as the boy is found tearing through every single cupboard and shelf whilst yelling about the outright horrendous lack of caffeine in the entirety of the house. Klaus finds it a bit funny, the sight before him as he stalks silent into the room, though the pangs of nostalgia run just the slightest bit stronger.
Five slams his hands down on the counter in front of him, leaning his weight into the marble. Klaus watches as he bends his head down in frustration and jumps just the slightest bit when Five throws everything off the countertop, spinning around to face him. There is a hint of surprise in the eyes staring back at him, though not nearly enough if Klaus had any say in the matter. In his own personal experience, finding himself decidedly not alone when he’d thought otherwise never ended well, both with the dead and the living.
“Klaus.” The name rang out around the room, echoing against the wainscoting and wallpaper before reaching his ears. There was just the slightest air of regret, of mourning in the voice that uttered the name, as if he’d been among the dead that tormented his every sober moment. He doesn’t quite understand why it unsettles him so.
“Finally going to explain everything, mein bruder?”
“Any chance you want to hijack one of the old man’s cars?” Five pointedly ignores Klaus’ question.
“Well, dear brother, I wouldn’t be opposed. Let me see if I can clear my schedule for ya.” Klaus brings his hand(Goodbye) close to his face, miming crossing out things as he mumbles through obviously fake events that need his utmost attention at the moment. A gala, a rave, a concert with a hundred thousand people in attendance to ogle at him as he performs. He hums resolutely, putting down his imaginary agenda to look at an increasingly impatient Five. “There we go, looks like I can spare just a little bit for you.”
Five rolls his eyes heavily at the antics, marching off towards the garage on the other side of the sprawling house. Klaus sighs, sending a shrug towards Ben before trailing after their brother.
Five does not give Klaus the chance to ask to drive, choosing instead to walk directly towards the keys meticulously lined up against the far wall. The medium and the dead watch as Five deliberates over which car would be the biggest dishonor to steal from their father, settling on a quite frankly beautiful Ford Mustang. Klaus is, admittedly, completely incompetent when it comes to cars, from driving them to anything to do with the actual working order of the things. Even in his uninformed car experience, he can recognize this monstrously beautiful thing for what it is, a relic from an age long since passed frozen in time as if it had been manufactured just the day before. Mint condition, with the shine on the tire rims and body itself immaculate. It had been their father’s favorite, he thinks, considering nearly all of the rest of the cars that sit discarded and untouched since their last few missions requiring transportation. Hargreeves, in all of his pursuit of the education tailor made for fighting crime as a collection of patchwork superhero children, did not teach them anything to do with driving or car maintenance until a few years after the disappearance of the boy currently climbing into the driver seat. Klaus can’t muster the energy to care about whether or not he could actually drive.
Klaus follows the queue of his brother however, and clamors into the passenger seat without much grace. Before Five adjusts the rearview mirror he sees Ben phase through the door into the back seat, settling down in the middle of the pair as they drive off into the night.
“So, Five, my precious baby brother,” Klaus begins, finally having the opportunities to gather some sort of answers regarding what is happening to him and how it relates to Five, “care to explain how I ended up here when I woke up rather than the apocalypse where you failed to mention my presence entirely to our lovely dysfunctional siblings?”
Five stays quiet behind the wheel, and Klaus learns very quickly that though he can drive in the most abstract definition of the word, he has absolutely no respect for the laws regarding the road. He flies past the rest of the residents on the road, bobbing and weaving between people with an insane sort of accuracy that Klaus vaguely wonders if the boy man had figured out how to jump with the car and an extra body attached to him.
“Come. On. You as much as promised me an explanation when you left us after dropping the bomb of a shitty future on the rest of our ragtag crew. Can’t you at least let me in on the gossip? I was there with you for a little bit and I still don’t understand why-”
“Klaus, please , not now. I promise I will explain everything in excruciating detail later, but I,” Five’s voice breaks in the middle of the sentence and Klaus is unsure if it’s due to emotion or being stuck in a body too young for the man residing inside. “Just give me a bit more time. Please.”
Klaus doesn’t, in all honesty, know exactly what to say here. He is notoriously bad at sitting still, sitting quietly obedient with the promise of delayed gratification to come his way. Most of his life beyond(and partially during) the Academy was spent in constant pursuit of instant gratification and doing anything other than what seems inherently against his code. It reminds him of their mother, with programmed personality traits and perfectly crafted confusion at the instance of something going against her own code. Diego had always been insistent on her humanity underneath all the wires and synthetic skin and the port hidden behind her ear to recharge her for yet another day keeping a household of seven rambunctious children in order. Klaus was never as convinced on her humanity, on the idea that she may have some sort of bug in her code that allowed her to care more than the writing dictating her every move allowed, but there were occasions where he could almost count himself in the same camp as his hero complex brother. He does suppose that, if there's even a slim chance that Grace could manage to break free of the binds holding her to the person that she is, he could attempt it.
This doesn’t mean that he stays quiet for the rest of the drive, however, even with the lack of responses from either party. Five’s eyes never stray from the road in front of them, ever vigilant in the face of the absurd amount of traffic the late hour provided, and Ben just watches the pair in front of him with an odd look in his eyes. Confusion, maybe, or perhaps his best attempt at mimicking the face Five always made whenever he tried to figure out how to best solve a problem. No, Klaus chatters away about the most mundane things he can think of, movies that he’d had the rare opportunity to see or the strange interaction he’d once had in the alley behind a convenience store that surprisingly didn’t involve drugs or sex in any way. The drive ends not too long after it began, depositing them in front of a place that Klaus had thought about every birthday after running away from their house.
“Griddy’s? Really?”
“They always had great coffee.”
“If you say so.”
Klaus saunters inside the donut shop behind a steady-paced Five, depositing himself down on the left of his brother. Ben moves to sit on the other side of Klaus, though to the empty diner it appears to just be the two of them and a stranger on the other side of the bar from them. Five looks to the bell beside his brother, and Klaus takes it as a hint to ring it.
“Sorry, the sink was clogged. What can I get for you two?” The lady that rushed out from the back had to have been the same woman from all those years ago, when the worst of their problems appeared to be getting through the training the next day with less than the perfectly scheduled sleep they were supposed to get after sneaking out on such rare occasions. She doesn’t seem to recognize them, though, despite Five looking the exact same as he did the last time they’d all been there as a group. They never could work up the nerve to go out without the boy after he’d disappeared, the beginning of the end of their close knit trauma bonded family unit.
“Could I trouble you for a chocolate donut, madam?” A go to, a staple, a relic from a past life withered away to nothing but faint memory.
“Of course, and would the kid like a glass of milk?” The question was aimed at Klaus, who freezes just a tad bit. Thankfully, Five comes to his rescue.
“The ‘kid’ will take a coffee. Black.”
The woman– Agnes, if her name tag is to be believed– looks a bit shocked at the order, though to her credit she washes the look off with startling speed as Five does his best imitation at an innocent child's grin. It looks more like he’s baring his teeth to the woman, though she doesn’t show whether or not she notices the morbidity of the sight. Agnes turns to gather their order, running back behind the bar and through the kitchen doors.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“You’re stuck in some weird time paradox thing. I don’t really know exactly what caused it, though my current best hypothesis is that my being in close proximity to you so soon after jumping to the future while you were reviving caused something weird to happen whenever you die.”
Klaus stares quietly at the counter in front of him, trying his best to understand everything that Five deigns to tell him. The boy speaks in hushed tones while the man at the other side of the bar is inside the restaurant, pausing only to graciously thank the waitress as if she’d brought over the ambrosia of the gods rather than a stale donut and burnt coffee. He doesn’t really understand most, or any of it, but he nods along to everything that Five says and does manage to take away the fact that, no, he did not leave young Five alone in the apocalypse in actuality. Through the haze of confusion surrounding the baffling conversation, Klaus picks up on the fact that there’s something Five isn’t telling him.
His small hands remain wrapped around his mug, refilled on occasion by the woman otherwise hiding out in the back rooms of the building, but his entire body fidgets in the stool it’s occupying, and Klaus has always been the best at knowing whenever the rest of them were lying about something. He supposes having been the family pathological liar gave him the ability to see through their bullshit. Though he does not interject with his own questions, he does parrot the ones that Ben has throughout the entire conversation, since he seems to at least grasp the fundamentals of whatever the hell is going on. Klaus knows he’s in for quite the interrogation once he’s alone enough that his shadow deems he can talk uninterrupted with the man.
It’s not until part way through an overly detailed explanation of whatever the commission is that the trio find themselves interrupted by something other than a coffee pot and a polite smile. At least twenty men in suits not all that dissimilar to Diego’s atrocious vigilante get up charge into the place, guns all aimed not at Five but at himself.
“Took you longer than I thought it would, honestly.” Five doesn’t turn around to acknowledge the room full of armed men aimed in their direction, merely continuing to sip on his drink as one of the men steps closer to him, barrel aimed directly at Five’s head.
“Let’s all be professional about this. On your feet and come with us. They want to talk.”
“I’ve got nothing to say.” Klaus does not like the lack of cooperation when faced with twenty odd gunbarrels pointed at them.
Five moves his hand to sit atop Klaus’ gingerly, and for a split second Klaus thinks his body is being torn into millions of tiny pieces before he’s spat back out unceremoniously on the floor behind the counter. His brother gives him a serious look, and Klaus takes the order to stay put as more of a suggestion while the world around them fades into uproarious gunfire.
For the first few moments of the fight, Klaus is locked in place. Everything around him erupts into a cacophony of bangs and clicks as he hears the commotion from his hidey hole. At some point he knows Ben rounded the counter as well, kneeling beside a balled up Klaus with his hands covering his ears and eyes widely looking into Ben’s dead ones. A small groan of pain wakes him from his stupor as he turns to see a gun aimed towards him from a downed man, leaping from being an open target directly into the battle.
Five jumps behind a man who seems to have glued his finger to the trigger, emptying an entire magazine into a sign on the wall, landing on the gunman’s back and jabbing a butter knife into his neck before moving onto another victim. Klaus turns to run from the active shooting, barreling into a man just a few feet away from him. They collapse on the floor in a tangle, with Klaus barely managing to sock him in the face before Five appears to snap the man’s neck with a worried glare shot at himself. The medium nods at the second pleading to find safety and turns in the other direction, scrambling towards the kitchen where the woman from earlier had to have been hiding.
As his hand reaches to push the door open, something hard collides with his head sending him crashing towards the floor again. He looks up to see another gunman, indistinguishable from the rest in any way, standing ominously above him. Klaus kicks his legs out as the man moves to aim better at him, grateful for the first time in his life that his training was distilled into instinct in the hell that was Reginald’s training. He grabs a coffee pot from the shelf beside him and slams it down on the man’s head before he can move to recover, scurrying away from him and further into the fight at hand. He sees half of the bodies splayed out across the floor, disturbed by Five’s handiwork in the fight. They were trained well, sure, but this appears to be years worth of training in specifically just killing people in the most efficient way possible.
“Klaus, behind you!” Ben yells out from his side, causing Klaus to spin on his heels. The man that had found him behind the counter earlier now has his gun trained on him once again, barely missing Klaus as he jumps out of the way and into a table, falling over and cracking his head hard against the metal rail of the chair. His eyes spin as his vision fills with static momentarily, only coming back to reality with enough time to see the last man standing pull the trigger as Five appears on his back. Instead of the bullet landing in the intended target of dead center between his eyes, it hits him square in the chest and searing pain blossoms throughout his entire body.
Once again Klaus finds himself struggling to breath through the pain in his chest and curses the little-girl-who-might-be-god for giving him the worst deaths imaginable. Blackness creeps around the edges of his vision as he tries to follow the mantra of in and out that Ben is repeating into his ear. The forever teen attempts to staunch the blood flow with no real reward, hands phasing through the second hole to have opened up in his chest and sending increasingly painful waves through his body. He seems to figure out that it's hurting Klaus more to try to help, drawing his hands to his own body and continuing to chant his instructions on how to breathe to the man who seems to think it impossible in the current situation. Five appears by his side as well, laying a comforting hand on his.
“Stay with us Klaus, please, we’ll get you back to the Academy and mom and get you perfectly better and it’ll be okay.” Ben is trying to comfort him, he thinks through the cloud of painpainpain coursing his head. Five stays silent beside him, unmoving with a look of terrible grief and regret in his eyes. Klaus thinks he tries to talk, garbled and incomprehensible to the two next to him. He sees Ben send an icy glare towards Five, who has done nothing to try and stop the pool of blood from growing underneath the trio before the world succumbs to the blackness encompassing his field of vision.