backdated: Starrgreeves WHO: Ava Starr; Allison, Ben & Klaus Hargreeves WHAT: Becoming roommates WHEN: Day One WHERE: Room 28 and the hospital WARNINGS: Nah? STATUS: Done enough.
Ben stared at himself in the mirror. He saw himself in the mirror. He touched his face and watched himself do the same thing in the mirror. His eyes widened, and he looked around the room. There was no reason he should be seeing himself in the mirror. A dead person didn't have a reflection.
He blinked a few times and then turned when the door opened.
Klaus entered the room, wearing nothing but the swim trunks he'd found in his suitcase. Spotting Ben, he blinked, then realized he was sober and apparently the change of locale had brought his powers back.
In this particular instance, he didn't mind.
"Ben! I've missed you," he said genuinely. "You should have seen the last place we were at… it was full of demon goats." Flopping down on the bed, he laid there for a moment before lifting his head to look at his brother. "But look… No more complaining that I didn't bring you to the ocean, right? Much better than being locked in a closet."
Ben looked at Klaus then back at the mirror then over his shoulder and out the window at the beach. He crossed his arms and hugged himself a little, then nodded. "Why were there demon goats?" he asked quietly. "And where are we now?"
Klaus had absolutely no idea why there were demon goats and the helpless expression he tossed his brother said as much.
"No idea," he admitted, which was an answer to both questions, really. "But at least it's warm here." Really, Ben hadn't missed anything not being around for Soviet Christmas hell, so Klaus didn't try to explain.
It did feel warm here, which Ben thought might be all in his head. He didn't usually feel like he could tell what the temperature was, and he thought maybe the sunshine was playing tricks on him. "Is this the apocalypse?"
Klaus tried to remember what Luther had told him about the apocalypse, to see if this could be it, but he was fairly certain it wasn't. "I don't think so. Maybe if there's not a moon in the sky later?" The details were all a bit hazy to him, mostly he'd focused on what had happened to Allison.
Allison!
"Hey, I gotta go by the hospital and visit our sister… You coming?"
It was a little weird that Klaus didn't answer about the apocalypse, when he had been there with him, with all of them, when it happened. He wandered over to the window, squinting at the brightness of the sun. "Vanya? Is she all right?" He rubbed his neck, feeling stiff and, well, weird. Then he shook his head. "No, I think I just want to -" He gestured to the bed. He wanted to sleep, actually. He had no idea why.
"Alright," Klaus nodded. "And Vanya's fine. I think." He should probably ask Luther about that. With the way things had apparently turned out, his sister's wellbeing and emotional state seemed extremely important.
It was a good thing his life had no such demands on it or the world would have been fucked long ago.
Had he thought about it, it may have seemed strange that Ben wasn't coming with him, or that his brother apparently wanted a nap. But after the choice of doors and finding himself at the beach after the bitter cold, he was a bit more distracted than normal.
Even so, he did manage to find his way back to the hospital, stopping in to get a check up as Luther had requested, and exaggerating the circumstances as he'd suggested he'd do. Which found him ambling down the hall toward Allison's room on a pair of unnecessary crutches, the pill bottle in his pocket, already two pills less than when it had been handed to him.
He was almost to his destination when he spotted someone in the hallway, and he swore he saw her flicker in and out of sight for just a moment. Had that really happened? Or were these pills even better than he expected?
For a moment, he could do nothing more than continue to stare, eyes wide, waiting to see if it happened again.
Ava needed out of the hospital. She shouldn’t have been up at all, and her fresh stitches protested the movement as she used the support of the wall to walk. But she was still on enough painkillers that the extent of what a terrible idea hadn’t caught up with her yet. Her ability to gauge pain was mostly screwed up from the fresh wave of it from her far less easily healed condition, literally come back to haunt her as her hand slipped through the wall and she stumbled a bit with an annoyed grunt.
But as much as she hated doctors, Ava’s need to get out was focused solely on the lack of network access. Cut off from whatever aftermath of the battle, she had missed most of it after she’d... gotten thrown out a window? The last thing she remembered was the shatter of glass, and then darkness. Fuck. That explained why she now had more stitches than the corpse bride. She spotted somebody staring at her, stared back with a bit of a scowl. “What.” Yikes her mouth felt cottony.
Klaus had so many questions, but the one fresh on his mind when she spoke was, "Are you alright?" Whoever she was, she looked like she belonged in one of the beds, not stumbling down the hallway using the wall for support.
But in that way, she almost reminded him of himself, only he'd been in that sort of shape for completely different reasons.
“Fantastic,” Ava responded through gritted teeth, more in frustration and pain as she managed to straighten up to look less like a hobbling zombie, though she knew she came off quite pissy. Even on her best days.
Her body flickered, and Ava winced, kinda wishing she had stayed in that damn bed but too stubborn and too far now to return in defeat. “Where is... is everyone...?” Without knowing, it was difficult to even frame her questions. “What the hell happened? Where are we?”
"Right," Klaus said studying her, "You've been stuck here and don't know about the beach. As it turns out, we've gone from the freezing cold to paradise, and nothing's trying to kill us." He considered that for a moment. "Yet." After the Krampus demons, he expected that some sort of attack would just be par for the course.
"So everyone's at the resort and I imagine that's where you'll be when you're not about to fall over, drinking cocktails and enjoying the sunshine and this resort that's stocked up on booze and cigarettes. And food," he added dreamily. It really was paradise compared to the last scenario.
"And you tried to convince me you were a ghost," he said, everything finally clicking together in his head. Even though he hadn't even bothered with a shirt before leaving the room, and so was still only wearing swim trunks, he angled both crutches under one arm to get them out of the way and then offered, "Want a hand?"
Normally a resort would sound… not quite appealing, but certainly an improvement over the miserable weather they’d been experiencing over the past week. But the last thing Ava wanted was literal salt water in her wounds, and she huffed. Because that was just typical. Things to enjoy all around, and plenty of reason she couldn’t.
Or maybe that was just the overwhelming rush of negativity that came back with her reactivated powers. She squinted at him, vaguely remembered the conversation. The guy overly concerned about the dead. “Ah. Codename,” she waved vaguely, felt like it was fairly self-explanatory. She really didn’t care to explain.
Glancing over the crutches skeptically, Ava raised an eyebrow at Klaus. “You don’t seem in much condition yourself, to offer.”
"Nah, I'm fine," he assured her. Sure his ankle was sprained or strained, he could never remember which was which, but the double dose of painkillers would take care of that. Probably. He definitely didn't need the crutches right now, at least.
"So, the beach isn't your thing?" he asked, picking up on her lack of enthusiasm as he moved toward her side. She looked rather miserable and even more so, somehow, after he told her they'd left the cold far, far behind. "And I'm Klaus. Or Number Four, which sounds like it should be the code name but my dad couldn't be bothered with naming us."
“No, not really,” she sighed, running a hand through her messy hair and wondered if she could at least find some hair ties to pull it back. But that was a problem for another time. As Klaus stepped to her side, Ava instinctively took another step away, trying to read his intentions. Of course he was saying he wanted to help, but her suspicious nature never allowed her to simply take anyone at their word, and she didn’t know enough about this man to get a decent read on him yet. She had to be even more careful, when she clearly wasn’t in any shape for a fight. “Wasn’t really afforded a lot of vacation time,” and yeah she was a touch bitter.
“But it’s the stitches,” she finally admitted, holding her arm out and turning it over to show a few of the cuts. “They had a… difficult time putting them in.” Her physical state left the repair work rather messy, from the few she bothered to inspect, but Ava hadn’t quite gotten a full look at her body yet, wasn’t sure she was quite ready to see just how bad it was yet. “Went through a window.”
And fine, if she was sharing that much, she should at least give her proper name. “I’m Ava. What happened to the other three, then?”
Klaus raised a hand and took a step back, not all that bothered that she'd backed away from him. "Let's see, One, Three, Five, and Seven are here, Two isn't, and Six sort of is?" he offered, gesturing vaguely. "That's Ben, then One is Luther, Three is Allison who's in here, and Seven is Vanya. Five is Five." He offered her a shrug because he never really understood why Five didn't get a name like the rest of them but he never seemed too bothered by it.
But since she'd held out her arm, he took a look at the stitches. "That looks painful. Of course so does that thing where you… flicker."
“Mm, you do seem like a middle child,” she teased, was an only child herself and then nobody’s child, really. Bill had tried, but she hadn’t remained in his custody for long when SHIELD finally sunk their claws into her. “I might’ve seen your sorts about.” As if she hadn’t been keeping detailed notes on a variety of different groups since her arrival. “Adopted, then?” Because there definitely weren’t any genetic similarities between the lot of them. But it must have been nice actually having a group.
And of course it hurt, but Ava only scrunched her nose in response. She didn’t like to encourage much interest in her condition, in case anybody got bright ideas about what she could use it for. On their behalf. Not that this guy looked all that capable of putting some sort of agenda together. “Visiting then?” she asked, glancing down the hallway to the other occupied rooms.
Klaus gestured one door down. "In there. Have you met? She doesn't talk as much as I do," he promised. Or at all, but details. He very rarely bothered himself with details. "And yeah, we're all adopted. My father collected eccentric children like some people collect stamps or coins but those people don't try and turn their collections into super heroes destined to save the world. Or lock them in mausoleums," he added as an afterthought.
“No, we haven’t.” Ava gestured to herself vaguely, the fact she was barely managing to stand on her own. She hadn’t managed to do much chatting anybody up, even if she’d been inclined to. Which she usually wasn’t. If she were in better shape, she probably would have walked off by now, but she was weirdly glad she stayed, growing far more interested the more Klaus talked.
“Huh,” Ava looked mildly impressed and not at all surprised, it seemed like an inevitability really. Why should shady government organizations get all the fun? “I was collected too. Nothing makes people feel more powerful than exploiting powers that aren’t even theirs,” she sighed.
Ava felt slightly light headed, not sure if it was lack of food over the last week or the medication trying to knock her out again, but she went to grab for Klaus as one of her legs decided it suddenly didn’t know how to do its job anymore, but her hand passed right through him instead.
Instinctively, Klaus spun toward Ava, reaching out to catch her and dropping the crutches in the process. They clattered to the ground, where they remained.
"Are you alright?" he asked. Attracting attention in the hospital generally meant more doctors, and he had a hunch she wanted to avoid that. "Here," he said, slipping an arm around her to offer his support, bad ankle be damned. If they could make it to Allison's room, they'd be fine. As long as she was alright.
Ava blinked in a moment of stunned silence where she suppressed the urge to shove Klaus off her as soon as he grabbed hold, had to remind herself not everything was a fight. Of course she should have expected fast reflexes from a self-proclaimed super hero. She was embarrassed, but not as much as she would be if she had hit the floor. “Yeah. I don’t always do so well on… drugs,” she admitted, because she would certainly have been doing far more pain killers back home as her condition was deteriorating if they actually helped more. They threw her concentration off, and focus was the one thing that made her more capable of controlling her tangibility without the suit.
But it was somewhat nice to have somebody to lean against, since he was offering and she wasn’t really in the position to deny it. If it felt weird to go off visiting somebody else’s family member in the hospital after they just met, Ava wasn’t saying anything. Neither of them seemed normal sorts of people, anyway.
Allison heard the sound of someone coming through the door and gingerly sat up. Getting hoof-kicked by a band of angry goat demons hadn’t been her favorite adventure and she was covered in small nicks and cuts. Nothing that wouldn’t heal on its own in time. She looked at Klaus and the girl he seemed to be half carrying into the room and arched an eyebrow. It was a question without actual words because she still didn’t have a voice.
"Hey, Allison," Klaus greeted cheerfully. "This is our new friend Ava." He walked her over to a chair and then scanned the room for anything interesting, finding it rather bland. "We met in the hallway," he added, not at all concerned about whether or not that was a quick turnaround to declare someone his friend. Or Allison's for that matter. "When are you getting out of here?"
Turning to Ava, he asked her the same thing, before switching back to his sister. "Are you staying with me? I sort of assumed you would. This place is a vacation compared to the last. Complete with alcohol and cigarettes."
And still not having given anyone anytime to respond, he turned back to Ava. "Where are you staying, anyway?"
Allison stared at Klaus for a moment before shrugging her shoulders. She didn’t know how much longer she was supposed to stay here or if she could leave soon. She glanced over at the girl - Ava - wondering if she was going to answer or who was supposed to answer first. The hospital had given her a personal white board, so she grabbed it and the marker that they gave her. It had a small eraser with it as well. She put that off to the side before writing. Hello, Ava.
After showing it, she erased it and wrote, Not sure about when. I don’t want to stay too much longer. Maybe I can just visit so they can monitor me?
She was at least relieved that there was a room to go to. She could handle a room. No smoking in the room, please.
Ava felt weirdly invasive just being here, but was happy enough to just collapse back into the chair and stare at the ceiling for a bit. Klaus’ questions were rapid, and seemed mostly meant for his sister, and it took a moment for her to register that he was asking her where she’d be staying as well. Because she hadn’t really gotten that far, didn’t know if there were options or if things were all assigned again and she shrugged in response. Probably on her own if she could manage it, but the time to strategically pick a location was probably passed.
She expected Allison to speak first until she realized the other woman couldn’t. And it seemed a recent or temporary enough condition if she was using a white board to communicate instead of something like sign language. Wasn’t really her place to ask, though she looked sympathetic.
She wiggled her ghostly fingers in a wave of greeting to Allison’s message, gave a small “hello” of her own. “I hadn’t even made it out of the hallway yet,” Ava reminded Klaus. “I don’t even know where there is to stay. Huts on the beach?”
"It's a resort," Klaus said. "Rooms with hot tubs, swim up bars… There's plenty of rooms to choose from, but you should stay with us," he offered, spinning back to Allison for confirmation that was alright. "Until you're healed up, at least."
He looked back and forth between Allison and Ava and then added, "Keep the collection together."
It would be a full house, with Ben in the room, but only Klaus could see Ben so that was fine.
Allison waved back, offering a small smile. She didn’t know why Klaus was inviting people he only just met to stay with them, but it was a fairly Klaus thing to do. He’d never been one to have trouble talking to anyone or picking up random strangers off the street. Though, in this case, it was inside of a hospital.
She made a vague gesture as if to say she didn’t have any complaints. But just to make sure everyone was clear, she wrote. You might as well. He’s going to annoy you into it eventually anyway. Because that was the Klaus way of things.
Ava wrinkled her nose at the suggestion, not sure why anyone, and especially not a stranger who clearly had more than enough family to go around, wanted to room with her. Not like she was all that great of company even when she was in a good mood, and she doubted this made for a great first impression. It felt a bit like a set up, even if she was too up on pain meds to figure out what the ploy might even be. She glanced between the two siblings a bit suspiciously, read the message, and yeah that seemed like that’d be the truth.
“Yeah. Sure,” she gave in, not wanting to admit how intrigued she was by whatever was going on with their family, and staying with them would be a good way to figure out more. Besides, she was also lonelier than she wanted to admit, and if she ended up regretting it at least her powers made getting away quite easy. “But I’m not taking a couch.”
“Perfect,” Klaus declared happily.
Ben had followed Klaus to the hospital, a little belatedly but there was just so much to look at. He was usually confined to wherever Klaus was, most of the time, but here -? It was too good to be true.
He wandered the floor, in and out of a few hallways, passing each room without talking to anyone. (Not like he could talk to anyone but Klaus, he supposed, so he certainly didn't bother trying. He passed one room, caught a glimpse of a familiar face - Allison - out of the corner of his eye and backtracked. He slipped into the room, trudging over to Klaus, hood up. "Hey."
“Hey,” Klaus said, smiling even as he kept the word quiet. He was rather accustomed to hiding his seemingly one-sided conversations with his brother.
Allison stared, perhaps more than she meant to. Ben. She covered her mouth, but she couldn’t even speak. She wanted to get up, started to get up, but she felt a surge of dizziness from sitting up so quickly. She closed her eyes and sat back, grabbing her whiteboard before writing, Ben.
"Wait you can see him too?!" Klaus asked, astounded. Then realized Ben had to be there, because he was still stoned.
Ben looked from Klaus to Allison and back again, brow furrowed. He looked down at his hands, at his feet, at the floor. He realized, with a start, that people had noticed him in the hospital, giving him a nod or a glance even without speaking to him. He looked at Allison again, then at the word she wrote on her blackboard. Then, he tried: "Hey, Allison."