Chapter Text
“So, she’s off her meds now - completely.”
Five’s voice rose above the incomprehensible muttering of everyone else, followed quickly by a short cough to clear his throat. It gathered everyone’s attention, turning all eyes onto him, and he continued to speak without missing a beat.
“Which, of course, helped her adapt to her powers a bit better than the whole mess that was previously.” He gave a pause, dull eyes turning to look at Vanya. She nodded her head, sitting a little upright what with attention now on her.
“Yeah,” she agreed. Ever uncomfortable with being the victim of attention, her eyes bounced down to stare at her hands, as if her knuckles and her nails had suddenly become a hundred times more interesting than anyone around her or the conversation at hand – not that Klaus could really blame her, what with the chipped nail polish on his own nails looking rather interesting as well. “I feel… much better. I’m not as overwhelmed like – like before.” Klaus watched as her lips twitched, curling upwards in the faintest of smiles. “It’s nice.”
Five’s head bobbed approvingly and he turned his gaze to sweep it over the rest of his siblings, spread out around the living room. Diego stood by the fireplace, his gaze flicking between the flames and his siblings, as if distracted or just simply not overly interested; meanwhile Luther seemed to contrast him, leaning forwards in his chair and looking too interested in it, his face serious and hands clasped together. Allison’s nails were tapping absentmindedly on the mug of coffee hugged between her hands and she wore an easy expression.
Ben – he sat next to Klaus, unseen by everyone else, and Dave sat on Klaus’ other side – also unseen by everyone else. Ben didn’t seem overly interested – his thoughts were elsewhere, as they seemed to have been since everything had calmed down the day Vanya had killed him, and almost everyone else – and sometimes he would fix Klaus with an odd expression, his eyes narrowed as if he might be able to peer through Klaus and see his soul.
Klaus understood what he was thinking – at least to some extent. That last resurrection from the dead had been an… odd one. Drastically different to every other revival and neither of them could quite place their finger upon what had changed, save for the obvious – Klaus seemed rather dead. All signals pointed to Klaus being a walking corpse. He had no heartbeat, no pulse, and his skin was paler than usual, somehow, and freezing to the touch. In the past week he had hardly slept more than a handful of hours altogether and he seemed to thrive despite it.
Nothing really seemed to be an issue, however, so Klaus wasn’t really concerned about this. He didn’t have a pulse, but nor did Ben or Dave. He wasn’t special.
“So,” said Five, snapping him from his thoughts. “Now that Vanya’s accumulated to them a bit, I believe we should start training. I managed to find some of Dad’s notes that he had tucked away in his office and I believe it’s best if we follow how he trained her.” His left hand rose in the air and, with a brief flash of blue, a book appeared in his hand. “None of her training was harmful or rigorous, but it did seem to work, so I don’t see why we should try to find a different way and risk doing something wrong.”
Vanya nodded her head when Five sent a glance her way. “We start slow,” he said, “and work our way up. Ease you into it. We’ll have at least two people around during your training on the off chance something might go wrong, and I’d probably be the best at doing something to avert or help in that kind of a situation.”
Klaus pursed his lips, drumming his fingers over his leather-clad thigh. “It’s as if he thinks he saved the world,” he muttered, glancing between both Ben and Dave. Ben scoffs, slumping into the couch and unwinding a little.
“Yeah, well, I’m not so sure about your ability to just jump out of your grave and hug the Apocalypse away again,” returned Ben, quirking an eyebrow at him. Klaus rolled his eyes.
“You don’t know that,” he said. “Maybe I unlocked a new power-“
“Klaus, are you even paying attention?”
Klaus lifted his head, fixing a glare on Luther. “Of course, this is just so thrilling to listen to,” he drawled sarcastically. He sighed, ran a hand through his hair and sat upright rather than the increasingly-slumped position he was in as he continued to slide further and further down the chair throughout the entire meeting. “Yes, I am.”
“Actually,” Five perked up. He leaned forwards, dropping the book of Vanya’s notes on the coffee table. He turned his attention to Klaus in the form of hawk-like eyes that never ceased to unnerve Klaus; they were like the eyes of someone way too old, stuck in that thirteen year-old body of his. If anyone had any doubts about Five or the things he said, all they had to do was look at those eyes.
Eyes of a time-travelling genius assassin, Klaus supposed, eying briefly the apparitions hovering constantly around Five’s shoulders.
“There’s something about you, too,” he stated. Klaus raised his eyebrows.
“Little ol’ moi? Pray tell, what are you so curious about?”
“You died,” he stated, blunt as ever, despite the way Vanya twitched at the words, her face crumpling in guilt and her gaze going back down to her hands. “You were dead. No pulse. And yet here you are, right as rain.”
Klaus hummed, tipping his head side to side. “Correct you are, how observant,” he commented. Five gave him an unamused look, deadpan.
“It wasn’t Diego that brought you back,” he continued on. “And your neck isn’t broken – it’s not even bruised.”
“Correct again.” Klaus stuck two fingers in the air as if keeping score before dropping his hand and shrugging. “So what about it?”
“What about it?” Luther echoed incredulously. “You were dead, Klaus.”
“I’m very aware of that, thank you, I am the one in question that died.”
“So how did you come back?” Five asked, eyes narrowed in scrutiny. Klaus hummed, his eyes flicking away. He eyed the spots on the walls where portraits of Reginald ought to hang, but since the Academy had been rebuilt following his and Vanya’s fight and since everyone had moved in in some kind of attempt to reform their family bonds, or whatever, they had kept all of the portraits of Reginald down. Klaus preferred the empty spaces.
Perhaps he could get back into art and hang his own paintings up in their stead. Yes, he thought that could be quite nice. A painting of some beautiful corpses that liked to follow him about, and maybe even one of the mausoleum if he felt like spicing it up. He could paint a portrait of God.
“Klaus, how?” Five reiterated, clicking his fingers as if he were a dog ignoring him petulantly. Klaus’ curled his lips up as if in some mock snarl.
“Christ, don’t get your panties in a twist, old man,” he muttered, holding his hands up in mock-surrender. “It’s a powers thing. You know, Number Four can conjure the dead – well, apparently little Number Four can also take little trips to the Other Side and get kicked back out by an ethnically-ambiguous little girl he believes may or may not be God or the closest thing to it.”
Five stared at him. In fact, everyone was staring at him. Klaus stared back.
“You’ve never been great with explaining things, to be fair. I don’t know what they expected,” said Ben. Klaus gave him a glare, tempted to manifest him simply so he could hit him, but he refrained on the simple fact that Ben’s presence was still unknown by the rest of their siblings. He hadn’t conjured him earlier, and the few seconds of which he had been manifested during his fight with Vanya had been swift and everyone had been a little distracted to identify the flying blue figure slamming into the wall as their beloved deceased brother.
“You can come back from the dead?” Said Diego. His eyebrows were raised in scepticism and Klaus gave him a deadpan look.
“Yes,” he said. “That is what I just said and what you saw for yourself first-hand.”
“How many times have you done that?” Five asked. Klaus shrugged.
“A few times,” he said. Ben snorted.
“You were nearing seventy, I think.”
Klaus gave him a look, nose twitching.
“You’ve – you’ve died multiple times?” Vanya asked, eyes widening. Klaus hummed.
“It’s no big deal, really. It’s like if Five came through and said there were alternate dimensions in which we were both five years old and fifty years old at the same time – a casual Five thing to say. This is a casual Klaus thing.” His shoulders bounced in a shrug once more.
“Is there a limit on how you can die and come back?” Five asked, curious.
“Not that I know of,” he answered. “Little Girl God said there’s a time for it, but if it’s not that time then I’m just bouncing between realms, really. It’s honestly not that big a deal.”
“It is,” said Diego. “You just – died and came back!”
“And? What do you want me to do about it?” Klaus snorted. “It’s a simple fact, like how you can throw a knife and have it hit the sign of the McDonald’s two streets down from here.” He held his hands up in innocence. “It’s just me, baby. Dead people things.”
Diego made a face at that before looking away, his lips pressed tightly together.
“At least that clears that up,” Five muttered, scrubbing a hand down his jaw. “Okay, and the last thing is the Commission. I’m not sure what their next move will be, but they are still out there and I’d expect that they’ll be after us. They’ve already given us a week; I don’t doubt they have hell to pay at the office. But I want everyone on alert for any signs of the Commission or of Hazel and Cha-Cha, the ones that shot us up looking for me.”
Klaus giggled quietly. Even Ben smirked, looking down.
“What? What is it, Klaus?”
“Hmm? Oh, nothing, nothing,” Klaus hummed, flapping one hand in a dismissive gesture. Five narrowed his eyes at him.
“Hazel and Cha-Cha,” he repeated, and Klaus’ hardly-restrained smirk stretched a little wider, like a child failing to contain their giggles in a classroom after being scolded. “You’ve met them.”
“We had a little discussion, you could say,” Klaus confirmed.
“What?” Luther asked, tone full of suspicion. Klaus rolled his eyes.
“Not as if I’m on their side, dumbass. After they shot up the house, they found me and we got into a little fight. The whole I can see all of your past victims and I can pop back up from the dead thing gave them a right scare. It was funny.”
He decided to leave the part about Ben’s Horrors beating the shit out of them out. He thought that he’d given them more than enough information about himself and his powers for one day.
Five pressed his lips together, curious, thoughtful, then turned his head slightly away and nodded. “Alright,” he said. “Now that’s out of the way, that’s all I have to say.”
Silence stretched as everyone eyed one another to see if there were any additions to this meeting, but everyone seemed perfectly satisfied. So, with that, they began to disperse. Klaus headed to his bedroom accompanied by Dave, Ben instead heading outside to sit in the courtyard and probably read.
Klaus was fine with that. He treasured the time alone he had with Dave; able to close the bedroom door and manifest him just in time to throw himself onto him, wrapping his cold body around him like a cobra. Dave, too, seemed to have little reservations about that; his nose nudged the top of Klaus’ head and then followed the touch with his lips.
“You’ve hardly slept, love,” he murmured. “You should try and get some rest.”
Klaus groaned. Sleep was coming less and less easier to him and he really could not be bothered with it; but, at least it gave him an excuse to lay his head upon Dave’s chest, entangle their legs together beneath the covers and at least rest while Dave ran his fingers through his hair.
He didn’t sleep, but it was comforting and he could almost convinced himself that he was back in ‘Nam, and they were both alive and everything was nearly picturesque.
###
One other thing to change following his resurrection was his relationship with food.
Usually, Klaus found himself starving like a madman after he died. He would scoff down whatever food he had in his kitchen that was remotely edible, and then he would storm across to John’s apartment and either knock until he let him in or he’d pick the lock himself if he was out, and he’d raid his kitchen and almost eat it empty, too.
Now, though, Klaus had eaten hardly two meals since his resurrection.
He didn’t know why it had changed so, but everything smelt and tasted and felt absolutely repulsive. He had thrown up both times he had eaten, as if one might if they had ingested rat poison and their body knew that it needed rid of that immediately. He could hardly bring food to his mouth, let alone get it down his throat.
The thing was; he did feel hungry. He got increasingly hungrier with each passing day that he didn’t eat, but he was beginning to doubt that forcing himself to keep down a meal would even help. If anything, he had the feeling it would only make him feel even worse, somehow.
The feeling left something strange in his guts. He knew that there was probably something deeper to this than some weird after-effects of coming back from the dead, but he couldn’t place it and so he could do nothing about it but craft up clever lies whenever his family settled down for dinner.
He could avoid lunch easily, since they never sat down to have it together. He could lie to everyone, say he had eaten at some point and they simply hadn’t seen him, and sometimes he could get out of dinner if he’d been out that day – typically at his old apartment, going through his belongings to bring some back to the Academy or visiting John – by saying he’d eaten then, but then there were the days that he couldn’t get out of it.
Diego’s hand clapped down upon Klaus’ shoulder like a vice. “Come on, bro,” he said, “Mom’s making lasagne.”
Klaus hummed. “Oh, sounds delicious, but I’m not hungry.” He tried, and failed, to wiggle free of Diego’s grip.
“Nonsense,” he said. “I’ve not seen you eat anything at all today, and you look like you’ve lost weight. Come on.”
Klaus narrowed his eyes at Diego, now succeeding in freeing himself from his grasp. “Fine,” he relented, and he followed him into the kitchen.
The smell – oh, it burned his nostrils like napalm. Grace set out a generous portion in front of him and he stared at it like maggots might burst forth from it and crawl about his plate. The sound of cutlery chinking against the dishes and against teeth seemed to roar in his ears, almost as loud as the sound of echoing, steady heartbeats that, as days passed, only seemed to get louder to Klaus.
He picked up his fork, twisting it between his fingers. The metal seemed like but a feather in his grasp. He stabbed it into the lasagne and steam puffed out.
Klaus almost gagged.
He’d never had such a strong reaction to food before, and he’d eaten some horrific things during his time on the streets. He’d eaten straight from dumpsters and swallowed it down with little more than a grimace. And yet, here he was, with a plate of freshly cooked lasagne – probably gourmet, what with Grace’s cooking, and feeling as if he was staring down at a plate of entrails, though even that seemed more pleasing than this.
When he did bring a piece of food to his lips and forced it onto his tongue, he did gag. He dropped the fork and let it clatter onto the wooden table, hurrying to spit out the lasagne and wash away the taste with the only thing that didn’t upset his stomach; water.
“Klaus? Are you okay?” Vanya asked, and he was suddenly very aware of everyone’s eyes on him. He stood, his chair scraping the floor behind him while he swallowed continuously against the urge to gag.
“Sick,” he grit out, and then he turned around and fled for the bathroom.
He didn’t throw up, though he did spend a ridiculously long amount of time gagging and retching over the toilet bowl, Dave’s hand rubbing his back gently.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered, slapping a hand above him to flush the toilet.
“Maybe you’re still adjusting,” Dave offered, moving his hair from his forehead. Klaus leaned into the touch with a sigh, his eyes slipping closed.
“It’s been a while,” he grumbled. “I need to hurry the fuck up and adjust already.” Dave nudged his side gently.
“Just take a breather,” he murmured. Klaus let himself relax against Dave, letting Dave trace patterns on his skin with his fingertips.
Eventually, though, he stirred. “’m gonna brush my teeth,” he mumbled. Dave helped him onto his feet and Klaus fumbled to pull a toothbrush out from the cupboard beneath the sink, applying a generous drop of toothpaste onto it before raising it to his mouth and scrubbing at the poor taste lingering there.
Spitting it out and washing his mouth out, he lifted his head to the mirror and spread his lips in a grin. Then, eyebrows furrowing, he leaned closer to the mirror and hooked his fingers past his lips, tugging them slightly to eye his teeth closer. And then, sharing a look with Dave, he raced to his bedroom.
“I think I’m a vampire.”
Ben looked up from his book with a thoroughly confused expression; his entire face scrunched up and he looked, honestly, just entirely fed up with what was coming out of Klaus’ mouth.
Klaus closed the door behind him and Dave, coming to sit beside Ben. “No, seriously!”
“Klaus,” said Ben slowly. “What the fuck?”
“I’m being serious! Look, it explains it, right?” He tapped his finger to the palm of the opposite hand. “The lack of sleep – vampires don’t need sleep, they’re fucking vampires. The paleness – they’re pale as shit. I can’t eat food because it’s all infused with garlic, or something. And look!” He hooked his fingers in the corner of his lips and pulled them once more, leaning close to Ben.
Ben’s eyes narrowed and he eyed Klaus’ teeth.
“I wouldn’t put it past you to have done that with a nail file,” he replied after a moment. Klaus dropped his hands from his mouth and huffed.
“I did not, I’ll have you know. That was only one time and it didn’t work. But Ben!” He ran his fingertips over his teeth, over each sharp point. “They’re sharp!”
And indeed they were. Whether or not they had been sharpening slowly since his resurrection or something, Klaus hadn’t noticed it until now. His canines in particular, though every tooth seemed to just be… sharp, even if not necessarily looking like some cat’s fang. Pressing the pad of his fingertips to the tip of the point and pushing down; it hurt. He had the faint impression that if he were to bite someone now, his teeth would meet little resistance.
“I can see that,” said Ben. His eyebrows furrowed in genuine thought, then, but all he could come up with was a shrug. “I don’t know. It’s weird, Klaus. This whole situation is weird, but it’s hardly like you having some sharp teeth or a shit sleeping schedule is hurting anyone. Just don’t go about trying to drink people’s blood, or something.”
Klaus folded his arms over his chest. “Well, there go all my plans for tonight, then, bummer.”
Ben gave him a look. Klaus huffed a sigh and fell back into his bed. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Here, I have something for you.”
His hand stretched to the side, digging into the first drawer of his bedside table. He pulled out a book and launched it at Ben’s chest with a force that made his brother jump.
“I might be dead, but that doesn’t give you the right to throw shit at me,” Ben growled.
“It’s a present; I can take it back.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Why?”
“Because, I’m sick of seeing that same book every day.” His foot lifted to nudge Ben’s knee. “Plus, I might just die of boredom and sleep evades me like I evade the law. If you’d be such a dear as to read to me and my ghostly lover, I’d be forever in your debt.”
“You already are,” Ben stated. Nonetheless, Klaus heard him turn the book in his hands to eye both the cover and the back, before finally opening it to its front page. With a victorious grin, his hands found Dave’s wrists and tugged the veteran onto the bed in such a way that Klaus could quite easily manoeuvre himself so he was virtually on top of Dave.
And with the faint warmth of Dave’s body, mingling both with the way he ran his hand through his hair and down his cheek and Ben’s steady voice, the way the pages turned rhythmically, Klaus found it easily to let his body melt and relax; problems about dinner forgotten, and he felt oddly at peace in this situation despite everything.