Who: Klaus Hargreeves and Open.
What: Having a mental crisis.
Where: A random bar in town, but away from the apartments.
When: Tuesday Night.
Warnings: mentions of depression, PTSD, War and substance addiction
Spoilers: probably for Season two of TUA.



Klaus didn’t even know why he bothered. He always crashed. He was always a disappointment. Sure, he could keep it up for a while… months, even a year or two. But he always fell back down. Everyone knew that. He was sure that his siblings did. He was sure that everyone in the town… the people who had known some previous version--- a version that had had a healthy relationship with Dave and even had a few children-- and the ones that knew him… they could probably sense the failure that emanated from him. He could feel it.

The forest had been hard, but not for the reasons that it might have been traditionally hard for people. Klaus… didn’t mind killing the scarecrows. He had been a fighter his whole life, raised in the academy… on the streets… in the military. Despite the ineptitude that most assumed of him, he knew how to keep himself and others alive in a battle. He had learned the hard way over and over it seemed.

But the noise… the noise that had permeated the air in the woods, it rattled around in his brain and it almost felt like he was back in the war zone. He could hear the rattling of rapid shots, and the consistent chopping sound of helicopters, the din of war, the low chatter of soldiers praying for something. The longer he was there, the longer he was without sleep and water, the more the hallucinations happened. He could almost see enemy fighters behind trees, smell the marshy air contaminated with the tang of blood. We woke up after a nap and instinctively looked for Dave, having forgotten temporarily where he was.

It all hurt. He was still so tired. Still so mentally and physically damaged. He’d tried to take his mind off of it. He tried to knit. He took a long, warm bath. He tried to sleep. But nothing numbed him the way that getting high and plastered would. Nothing soothed him as well as the burn of liquor.

He’d wandered into the bar, after having walked a random path. He hadn’t lied when he said he had no idea where he was going. He moved just to move, as if he were running away from something he couldn’t place. In his spiral, just like he always did, he pushed his siblings away. He lashed out and he stomped his feet and had considered just sleeping on a park bench that night (it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d slept outside after all), but he knew somewhere deep down in the barely touchable traces of his mind that he was over reacting and that he would feel bad. Eventually. He always felt bad, and then started over, and then fucked up. He didn’t know how to stop the cycle.

He sat at the bar, and he ordered. Four fingers of Whiskey. Neat. He knew that eventually the drinks would get too expensive, and he’d have to find a cheap liquor store on the way home if he wanted to get truly numb. But this would do for now.

Except that he just kept staring at it. He couldn’t bring himself yet to throw everything away, but the thought of forgetting, putting blank spaces in his brain and drowning out all the loudness and all the thoughts. It was tempting. He pulled the glass forward, idly running his finger around the rim, lost in thought, and internal struggle about what he was, or should be, or would never be. He just wanted things to be quiet.