Klaus Hargreeves (12stepspirit) wrote in chances_rpg, @ 2022-07-06 09:27:00 |
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Entry tags: | umbrella academy: ben hargreeves, umbrella academy: klaus hargreeves, ~ex umbrella academy: five hargreeves |
Who: Klaus, Ben and Five Hargreeves
What: Klaus returns and has news
Where: Hargreeves Apartment
When: Wednesday, mid-morning
Klaus felt a brief moment of slipping, before the pain and what he assumed his death (or supposedly his erasure from existence) over came him and everything went black.
He wasn't exactly sure what was going on, when he felt breath enter his lungs again, he blinked his eyes open. Lights. A couch. And then instantly memories, two timelines merging and competing for dominance. The station. Clint. His cat. The end of the world. Luther. Hotel Oblivion.
"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck me." He spat out as he tried to climb off the couch ( and leaving a sizable amount of his own blood behind, even as his wound was actively healing), it didn't help that he had Luther's blood on his hands. He needed a drink, and he marched into Five's room, half-stumbled, to grab a bottle of alcohol he was sure to be there. It didn't even matter what it was. He popped it open and took a swing, as his brain began to make sense of everything.
"Anybody home?" He called out, rubbing his face.
—
After a sleepless night of crying jags and staring at the same paragraph for hours on end, Ben told Allison he wasn't up to going to camp that day and called in sick.
Klaus was gone.
Even thinking it was too hard.
He pulled a pillow over his face and screamed into it.
Didn't do much good, and now his throat hurt. Dammit.
Eventually, he would get up. Start living again, but he was overdue for a good wallow.
And then he heard it. Muffled, but there. A voice. Ben sat up and listened hard. It could have been the TV or the radio or someone's phone, but still he strained because—
Because—
"Klaus? Klaus!" He scrambled out of bed, but misjudged just how tangled his legs had gotten from a full night of tossing and turning. So of course he wound up on the floor with a loud thump.
—
Too much time alone in the apocalypse made it harder for Five to miss his brother as keenly as Ben clearly did after only one day. This wasn't to say he wasn't missing Klaus's random comments about nothing in particular, or random insults. But he was just not that worried about his brother. Yet. He might start serious worrying in another couple of days. But for now, he was just going with the flow and getting settled into his new home. It was much nicer than his old one.
It was morning and that meant coffee. The coffee available in the apartment was passable, and as much as he wanted to go out and get something better, he decided to settle for making some himself. He had just gotten his first cup poured when he heard the unmistakable sound of Klaus cursing and stalking through the house. He felt a little bit vindicated in his lack of worrying until he heard the next sound of a crash coming from Ben's room. "Can't a man just have a cup of coffee in peace?" He took a sip then walked down the hall to investigate the noise. He almost missed the trail of blood...almost.
"The fuck?" He followed it to his room and blinked at his brother drinking from his hidden stash. There was just too much blood for it to all be Klaus's and for him to still alive. "What the hell happened here?"
—
"You wouldn't know how to do anything in peace if it bit you in the ass, Five." Klaus muttered to him. Another swig of the bottle, and Klaus was already moving towards the sound of Ben.
"Benarino~" his voice wavered for a second, remembering that this was his Ben. The right Ben. "Bento Box, you okay in there?" Of course, Klaus, as blood soaked as he was, had no delusions of his brother's privacy and was already pushing the door open to investigate.
"We fucked up the future again, Five. All to hell."
—
By the time his door was opening, Ben had managed to extricate himself from his bedding and was on his feet. All he had was the impression of far too much red before he was on Klaus and holding him in a surprisingly sticky hug. He didn't even have space in his head to point out just how culturally inappropriate that nickname was—and had done so in the past. All that mattered was that Klaus was there, in his room, and cursing up a storm at Five.
That's when the all too familiar smell of copper caught up to him, and Ben leaned back to actually look at his brother. His eyes widened to the size of saucers. "Are you hurt? Do we need to take you to see Claire?"
—
Klaus was not wrong and Five just shrugged. "I can still want one you know." The closest he'd ever come was in the apocalypse, but that didn't really count now did it? He side stepped to let Ben into the room with them and surveyed the blood splatter. There wasn't nearly as much as there would be, if Klaus were still bleeding. He didn't think there was anyway.
In a series of spatial jumps he moved from room to room in the apartment depositing each bit as he found it and finally stayed put when he'd brought in what would pass for a first aid kit. He poured some water and antiseptic into it then dropped a cloth into the liquid. "That sounds like something we'd do..." He wrung the cloth out and stepped over to begin cleaning the blood up from his brother. "Where are you hurt and who did it?" In other words: Who was he going to have to kill this time?
—
Klaus leaned into his brother's hug, as Five bounced around the apartment, but he shook his head insistently at his brother. “Hey, I’m fine. I’m fine.” He promised. Then Five was back and cleaning off the blood.
“Uh. So, hey, weird new fact… I can heal myself?” Even as he said it, it was strange, “But uh… only if I die first.” He pulled away from both of his brothers, and he pulled his shirt off. The stab wound that had gone all the way through him had been starting to heal. It was bloody and gross, but even as Klaus looked at it, skin was knitting together. “And I did it… because the other option was to be erased from the timeline?”
Klaus wrinkled his eyebrows at Five, “Blitz krege? Kugelblitz…? That mean anything to you?”
—
Still feeling very shaken by this entire thing, Ben was slow to take in everything that was happening. His jaw was practically on the floor as he watched his brother's injury heal itself, even while Five was actually being useful. He glanced at Five and finally put out a shaking hand for some of the bandage squares and antiseptic, even though it was obvious they weren't needed beyond simply cleaning the blood off. "It's German, right?"
Why was he latching on to that of all things? Klaus had apparently died, and there wasn't a single world where that was okay. Yet, his brain persisted. "Isn't that some kind of physics thing? Like a blackhole? Or is that the anti-aircraft gun?"
—
That was a very interesting ability and Five just shook his head, but kept cleaning off the blood. "Dying and coming back...wonder if the old man knew about that one." He figured their father knew. He had to know, didn't he? The man had tested all of them and their powers for limits, then did his best to throttle the ones he couldn't control. It had been his worst trait.
Once the blood was mostly cleaned off Five sat back on his heels and furrowed his brows, trying to make sense of what Klaus had just said. "Both of them mean something." He glanced at Ben "and they are both German. One is a for lack of a better word a battle tactic, very fast, very destructive strike. The other one..." He reached up and rubbed at the back of his neck. "The other one, is probably not even real." Like most things in theoretical physics, it was all just an idea until someone actually was able to see one or create the conditions for one. He looked at Klaus again. "Are you saying we somehow created a kugelblitz and destroyed the world?" And by we he of course meant Viktor, because he was the only one with the kind of power that could create enough energy to cause a kugelblitz.
—
Klaus allowed his brothers to help him get rid of the blood. He didn’t know if it was time to tell them that some of it wasn’t his. He took another swig of the bottle and almost lost track of what they were talking about. “Yeah, dad did know.” He muttered, a low voice that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want to talk about it yet, not with Ben already looking at him with so much concern.
Once he was clean, he reached out again to Ben, pulling him close and taking a deep breath. He just… needed to hold onto something, just to remind him that he was home.
“Yeah. We did.” He said, and he remembered the scary orange destruction that was coming towards him. “Uh… you called it the Grandfather paradox? Our mothers–” he swallowed hard, remembering his conversation with his dead mom “they mysteriously died before we were born in this timeline… so when we showed up in a timeline we didn’t rightfully exist, uh. The scary black hole happened.”
—-
It wasn't like Ben resisted being hugged in the slightest. Ever since he'd popped up in this place, he'd fallen into an easy and demonstrative affection with Klaus and Allison, and there was no way he was going back to being cold and pretending he didn't crave his siblings' acceptance. Klaus still smelled like a mix of rubbing alcohol and blood, but he was warm and alive and his heart was a steady lub-dub under his ear.
He wished it was all he needed, and the rest could just fade into noise, but Five was talking about a reality-ending event that his family had somehow perpetrated again—this time through no fault of their own. Ben didn't let go, but he did lean back far enough to get both his brothers in his eye-line. Yes, the kugelblitz sounded nightmarish, and rightfully so, yet he couldn't let go of the other thing Klaus had said. "Our moms died? So we were never—we were never born?"
—
"Mysteriously died...." He even did the air quotes as he said it. But then he stood up and started to pace as he tried to work it out in his head. Five turned when Ben asked if they'd even been born and gave him a look. "Of course we were born. We're right here." He said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world that even a kid should be able to understand. Especially a kid who was smart like Ben was.
He scratched at his head then stepped aroud his brothers on the floor then dug in his night stand for the pen and notebook he kept in there for moments like this. He sat down, flipped it open and started to scribble. "But if our mother's died before our doppelgangers were born, we should not be able to exist. If they had given birth before dying, even if the kid died with her at the time, the grandfather paradox wouldn't have happened. Our very existence in that universe basically punched a hole in the space time continuum. THUS creating the event horizon of the Kugelblitz which was the universe's attempt to right itself again."
He started to talk mostly to himself as he scribbled in his notebook. "Now what I need to find out is if we exist somewhere in THIS universe. Do our mother's exist? Is Dad somewhere out there trying to save the universe from destruction?" He stopped and lifted his head but he wasn't looking at anything in particular. "Would the apocalypse have even happened if Dad hadn't tried to prepare us to stop it?"
—
“No, Five, no.” Klaus said, suddenly very firm and serious, “No. There is no apocalypse here. There is no dad and there is no point in trying to find him! That is where we fucked up in the sixties and we won't do that here— if he even is here.” He was glaring.
“Our moms died hours before we were spontaneously born. Something about— Harlan still having bits of Vikor’s power– and he got upset and it… was like a feedback that killed them. I don’t, I don’t know how it happened, not really.” He frowned, and uncomfortable, he found himself gripping to Ben a little tighter than he’d meant to and he drained the bottle he’d been holding.
“We aren’t digging too deep into this. We aren’t going to fucking poke the universe until it starts unraveling again. Just fucking retire, Five.” Klaus pouted.
—
Ben listened to this exchange with growing apprehension until Klaus, surprisingly, came in as the voice of reason. It saved Ben from having an exhausting meltdown in his refusal to leave this life, to even make the attempt to save a universe they were no longer in, a universe where he wasn't alive—not as himself, at any rate. He took a deep breath and then let it out quietly. "It's not our responsibility anymore. It's not. Klaus is right. We can't do anything about something that happened in another dimension, no matter how much we, or you, might want to."
He frowned, felt his eyes go hot, but he didn't want to cry anymore, he just wanted to be done with this and to let Klaus take a shower and get food and reconnect with Allison and Clint. Ben leaned away from his brother, just long enough to swipe at his eyes and shake his head. "Five, don't go chasing waterfalls, okay? Just stick to this dimension we're getting used to."