Chapter Text
The whirling gale of Five’s teleportation vanishes suddenly, dropping Klaus to his knees amid fading wisps of electric blue, and he loses his grip on the brothers to either side of him to catch himself before he faceplants into the floor. The dull thuds and groans around him suggest he’s not the only one to land on the ground. His head swims and throbs and his stomach roils, and he forces down the sick sting of bile before it gets past his throat. Vaguely he can hear retching beside and across from him- his siblings don’t have his years of practice at keeping their stomachs under control by sheer willpower, and his legs throw him backwards away from the mess without any need for input from his brain.
His back thuds into something firm and warm, that emits a startled “Hey!” in a voice both familiar and not, and he turns, wide eyed, to see Ben wriggling out from under him. Klaus’s eyes go even wider and his jaw goes slack.
“Get! Off! Me. You di…..”
And Ben trails off, eyes widening to match Klaus’s as his brain catches up, just in time to brace himself as Klaus launches himself at Ben, gangly arms wrapping around his brother’s frame and clinging like his life depends on it. The lights in background waver as tears sting his eyes, and his throat, all unbidden, lets out a gurgle that is something between a sob and a laugh.
“Oh my god….” Ben’s voice is shaky, as full of tears as Klaus’s eyes, and Klaus feels his brother’s arms slowly reach around him, fingertips tentatively brushing at Klaus’s shoulders, cobweb light at first, then stronger, fingers pressing more firmly as Ben’s thumbs stroke up and down the fabric of Klaus’s top. “Oh my god!!” Ben’s fingers grip Klaus’s shoulders hard, and Klaus feels the warmth from his palms against his bare skin, pulling them closer together, feels Ben’s face buried against his neck just like his is against Ben’s, feels Ben’s wide grin, and tears, and warm, gasping breath- breath!- and they both choke out unintelligable rubbish around giggles and sobs and cling to each other in amazed wonder.
Ben’s here. Physically here, solid, warm, breathing and alive, not just solid but breathing, actually breathing, exhaling out warm air against Klaus’s skin when there’s been nothing warm about Ben for 13 fucking years, and Klaus never wants to let him go, no matter how much snot Ben is currently depositing on Klaus’s neck, and why the hell shouldn’t he when Klaus is certainly depositing just as much on Ben’s?
“I’m alive, Klaus,” Ben breathes delightedly, “I… I can feel.. feel... everything!” He squeezes Klaus harder as if to demonstrate. “Oh god, I... Klaus, I’m breathing, I can feel my heartbeat! I’m alive!”
Grinning stupidly Klaus pulls back just enough to bring his hand round to Ben’s chest, to press inside his hoodie, and even through Ben’s shirt he can feel that his skin is warm, and there, there it is, he feels the faint thud-thud of his heartbeat below his palm, and he laughs out loud, grin spreading impossibly even wider as he slings his arms back around his newly alive little brother.
Only Ben isn’t his little brother, hasn’t been for years- they’re practically the same size. But now that the initial shock of touching his living brother is easing there’s some room opening up in his brain to notice other things. Like how Klaus’s arms reach so much further round Ben than Ben’s do Klaus. Like how Klaus’s spine is curved over, bending him down to put his head on Ben’s shoulder. Like how the leather of Ben’s jacket is hanging so baggily on him.
Klaus loosens his hold on Ben again, forces himself to lean back and really look at him.
Ben’s grip on Klaus’s shoulders doesn’t waver, nor does his grin. But that grin is on a face Klaus hasn’t seen for a very long time, big eyes shining out in a face slightly too small for them, against cheeks that are round, not sharp. Klaus remembers Ben’s shout when he fell back against him, the voice that he knew, but not quite. Because Ben hadn’t sounded like that since they were… what? 12? 13?
“Oh...” he starts, his euphoria suddenly tempered by his racing thoughts, and… What the hell? Since when was his voice so high?
Ben’s grin is wavering now, fading into something more akin to confusion as he looks at Klaus. He finally releases Klaus from their hug, though his hand catches Klaus’s and clutches tightly. Ben’s gaze runs over Klaus’s shoulders and down his arms to his hands, then back to Klaus’s face for a moment, before shifting focus on something behind Klaus. Ben’s eyes dart left and right, and his lips stretch into a grimace, a realisation dawning on him that he doesn’t look entirely happy with.
Oh, right, the others! “Shit!” Klaus blurts out, in his somehow wrong voice, as he turns to see the rest of his siblings strewn behind him, mostly doubled over clutching at their stomachs or splayed on the floor in varying states of awareness. “Shit, shit, shit...” He’d been so caught up in having Ben back everything else had just fallen away, but, yeah, apocalyptical Vanya and time-travelling assassins and time-travelling strike forces and giant bits of moon rock hurtling straight at them and mass family bonding time travel- these were all things that had actually happened, ‘cos that’s just what it’s like being part of his family.
Klaus still feels the nausea from time travelling, but after so many years of pumping his system full of every illegal (and a fair few legal, if not exactly for him) narcotic he could get his hands on, 10 months in a war zone with very variable availability and quality of supply, two previous time trips and a recent cold turkey experience he is an expert at just keeping on while his stomach cramps and contorts and his brain tries to dribble out of his ears. Not so his siblings.
Luther, Klaus thinks, should be best equipped to deal with physical inconveniences like this. Aside from his obvious strength he’s always been more or less immune to any of the illnesses that occasionally did the rounds through the rest of them as children, has soldiered on through injuries that would have floored anyone else countless times, and has healed from said injuries in hours as often as days.
“Luther?” Klaus seeks out Luther’s giant form and blond hair, and is momentarily confused when he sees that the blond head rising to meet his eyes is attached to a pretty normal looking, if obviously ripped, body. A body swamped in a massively oversized overcoat.
Luther looks like shit, but he’s alert and taking in the situation with wide but determined eyes. He pushes to his feet, scrubbing his mouth with the sleeve of his giant coat and nearly stumbling over the hem. “Klaus.” He nods. “Ben.” This is said with a warm smile that lights up his too young face, and he shrugs himself out of the coat to make the short walk to wrap Ben in a brief, but fierce, hug. There are definitely tears in his eyes.
“You guys are OK?” Luther asks, seeming more surprised than concerned by their apparent lack of time travel symptoms.
“Yeah,” says Ben, at the same time as Klaus replies, “Welllll…. No, actually, I feel like utter crap, but, hey, turns out all those years of getting high were perfect training for coping with the effects of teleporting through time and space! Dad would be so proud of me being so prepared, don’t you think?”
Ben snorts out a laugh and Luther sighs, rolls his eyes and shakes his head.
As they turn their attention to their other siblings Ben says, “I’m guessimg time travel doesn’t have any physical effects if you don’t physically have a body. Well, at the start at least.” Despite their less than ideal situation he’s still smiling, and still holding Klaus’s hand tight. Fair enough, Klaus thinks. He’s pretty sure he’d want to keep touching too if he’d spent 13 years unable to touch or be touched. And only able to talk to Klaus. Ben deserves a fucking medal for that- Klaus has seen the sort of behaviour it takes to earn a medal for real, and those guys have nothing on Ben.
“So,” Ben continues, “we’re all back in our… 13? year old bodies. 12? Thereabouts anyway.”
Klaus glances at his ink-free palms, looks over his brothers and sisters, and nods, then says, “Actually, I might be able to pin-point things a little more…. Gimme a minute.”
He’d been about 12 and a half when he’d taken that fateful tumble down the stairs, and he’d never really been fully sober since- the least influence he’d ever been under, since Grace had declared he didn’t need those wonderful pain killers any more, was the whisky his father hadn’t realised he probably ought to keep locked away. It had tasted awful at first, but Klaus had quickly discovered that if taken in suitable quantities it had the lovely dual effect of quieting the ghosts and making him not give a shit about how bad it tasted. Or about anything else, if he was honest. It didn’t take him long to teach himself to enjoy the drink as much as its effects on him, though, and by then he was already moving on to bigger and better things, things that expanded his mind and contracted his world and blocked out the ghosts completely. It had taken a couple of months, he thought, for that development.
He ponders things as Luther and Ben check the others. It’s a little difficult to tell, what with the lingering effects of travelling through time, but he is remarkably clear-headed. Experimentally he does a few sums in his head, quickly progressing from simple addition and subtraction to running through the 12 x table. He doesn’t do so well with the multiplication as he had at actual age 12, but he finds it’s not a lack of concentration or clarity and more a matter of just, well, not remembering it all. What he doesn’t remember he finds he can very quickly work out.
He looks around their surroundings, properly, for the first time since they landed here. They’re in the Icarus theatre. It’s quite dark, with only side lights on, and there’s no light at all coming in through the giant glass dome in the ceiling. He feels a twinge of panic at the lack of visible moon, but then again, he’s very pleased at the lack of visible moon rock and debris, and the moon isn’t always in the same place in the sky, or even always visible depending on phase and clouds, so no, he will not panic. He will be pragmatic and sensible and perform his final sobriety test.
How many people are likely to have died in a theatre, he wonders? There’s a distinct lack of ghosts around his siblings (of all of them only Vanya and Klaus hadn’t racked up at least a single figure kill total by this age) but does that mean anything when they’ve literally just teleported here? How quickly can ghosts travel spatially? He’s confident they can’t travel in time, otherwise surely Ben would have been with him in Vietnam. And that leads to thoughts that are absolutely not going to help right now, so lets just get back to the matter at hand…. He doesn’t hear anything other than his siblings’ murmering (Diego’s awake, and oddly non-aggressive by the sound of things, and he can hear Allison’s cultured tone, and that is very welcome) but there’s something in the darkness of the wings that he keeps catching in the corner of his eye. And maybe something in the stalls too.
He casually (he hopes to god this looks casual- he does not want to give any indication to any lingering ghosties that, hey, here’s someone who can see you, and hear you, and who you can pester and shout at and scream at relentlessly) looks out over the auditorium, letting his eyes drift over the barely lit seats, and then forces them to continue drifting rather than let them settle for even a second on the old white man with the pasty, sweaty face and the evening attire torn open, revealing a long vertical scar and carefully placed electrodes on his chest. There are worse ways to go than a heart attack at the theatre after a long life, and Klaus really doesn’t feel sorry at all for ignoring the man.
So. He’s sober. Absolutely and completely sober. Which, he suddenly realises, doesn’t mean a damn thing if these bodies they’re wearing are somehow their own bodies regressed. But he’d heard Allison. He walks over to his siblings to find all but Five and Vanya sitting in a cluster on the stage, talking quietly. Allison holds Vanya’s head in her lap, stroking her hair and whispering soothing words to her. Klaus doesn’t think Vanya can hear anything right now, but he can clearly hear Allison’s voice, and there’s neither wound nor dressing on her throat.
“So...” he speaks quietly, catching their attention, “we’re 12. It’s sometime before April 2001.”
There’s a flurry of “How can you tell”s and “What makes you think that”s so he lays out his logic. “We’re back in our old bodies- our actual 12 year old bodies, I mean.” He gestures to Allison’s smooth, unblemished throat. “We’ve not just been de-aged- that would just have made us younger, not healed Allison. Or you, Diego,” he adds, noticing there’s no scar at Diego’s temple.
“So? What the hell does that have to do with the date?” asks Diego. The others look just as puzzled.
Except for Ben, who has realisation dawning on his face. “You’re sober.”
“As a judge!” Klaus trills, flinging his arms out in true ‘tah-dah’ style, and following up with a deep and courtly curtsey, which he, rather gracefully, he thinks, turns into a smooth descent to sit cross-legged between Ben and Luther, who cradles an unconscious Five in his lap.
Ben’s eyes roll and he shakes his head fondly, but Luther and Diego still look a little confused. Allison’s face has frozen, and her fingers have stilled Vanya’s hair.
“Klaus.” She sounds absolutely horrified. “Are you seriously trying to tell us you were constantly high since we were 12 and a half?”
Luther, mouth agape, says, “What the fuck?!” his arms tightening protectively around Five, seemingly without him even realising.
Diego’s eyes widen, then narrow in anger, as the penny drops, and his hand automatically finds the hilt of a knife, gripping tightly.
“No! No, no, not high! Well, not always, at least not to begin with...” Klaus sighs. Shit. He hadn’t thought about this part. Ben reaches over and pats Klaus’s knee, then takes his hand and squeezes encouragingly.
“You were in the shit that young?!” Diego growls. He looks around the circle of siblings, eyes gleaming with…. something. “And none of us noticed it? Dad didn’t notice it? Or Pogo?”
On that point Klaus really isn’t at all sure. Well, hey, how could he be? He was as out of it as he’d been able to manage with such meagre resources. And how exactly was he expected to tell the difference between Dad being disappointed and disgusted with him for getting trashed and Dad just being generally disappointed and disgusted with him?
“Well, you were all busy with training and your own shit.” Klaus flaps a hand airily, dismissing the comment. “And it was just booze at first, after my jaw healed enough that I didn’t need the painkillers any more.” He can’t quite look up as he talks, his fingers, of the hand not being squeezed bloodless by Ben, playing with the hem of the military vest that’s now really much baggier on him than he’d like.
“So, what, the painkillers made you high? And you decided, 12 year old you decided, that that was what you wanted for the rest of your life?” Luther’s voice is angry, and he shakes his head in disbelief. “Klaus, what the hell happened to make you think that that was a valid life choice? I get that Dad wasn’t the best father, but for fuck’s sake, you had everything in front of you and you just threw it away to chase a constant high?”
This is going to shit. Fuck. He was trying to help, he was trying to be useful and somehow he’d managed to make a shitty situation even shittier, to actually lessen his siblings’ opinion of him. They think it’s all about the high. And ok, yes, the high is nice, and after a while maybe it was about the high as much as anything, ‘cos god knows by then he had nothing else positive in his life, no other reason to haul his ass out of the gutter each day. He fucking knows he’s made shitty decisions all his life, but is it his fault that all the options were just different shades of shit?
What happened? What happened was the ghosts went away. What happened was, all of a sudden, he could look down a corridor and see Luther walking alone, not trailing a disfigured and bloody entourage. He could sit in class and not have to filter out the angry mutterings of the man shot in the head by his own partner because of Allison’s rumour. He could sit at dinner and not be distracted by the guy with a knife in his eye dripping blood and vitreous fluid on to the table while screaming in Klaus’s face. He could sleep (kind of- unconsciousness counts dammit) without the constant wailing in the house’s halls at night.
He could even face the fucking mausoleum without screaming and tearing his fingers to shreds on the walls. Funny that- Dad stopped taking any interest in him when he emerged, face blank and emotions blessedly numb after that last night.
He sits there, jaw clenched and lips tight because he doesn’t know how to deal with this. He wants to yell. He wants to scream in their faces, just like their ghosts have done to him a thousand times, just so they know, so they can understand just a tiny little bit. He wants to shrivel up and disappear and vanish from existence completely, so he can’t disappoint anyone again, and they can’t disappoint him, can’t hurt him any more. He wants to slump to the floor and wrap his arms around himself and cry ‘till there’s nothing left of him, and he wants to punch Luther’s stupid face, and to rip that stupid harness from Diego’s shoulders and to push away Allison with her stupid sad, caring eyes, and he wants to jump up and just run, run and run until the soles of his shoes are worn to nothing and his legs won’t hold him up any more and his chest bursts from the exertion, and he wants to fall into Dave’s arms and tuck his head against his chest and listen to his heartbeat with Dave’s strong arms wrapped around him….
There are arms around him, he realises. Not Dave’s, much too thin and short to be him. But there are arms around him, determined and gentle and holding him tightly, despite an awkward size difference. Ben. Klaus sobs and buries his face in his brother’s shoulder, clinging to him and trembling. He can hear Ben’s voice, but the words don’t register, just the angry tone. He hears Allison’s voice too, closer, soothing, and feels a warm hand on his arm, stroking softly, another arm around his shoulders, another hand- this one bigger, rougher, but still gentle- squeezing his shoulder. He’s surrounded by warmth, by gentle touches and gentler voices and he recognises Luther’s murmering apologies and Diego’s offering reassurances, “It’s OK bro, we got you, we got you.”
They huddle together, Klaus and his (awake) siblings as Klaus cries himself out- he doesn’t know how long it’s been when he finally lifts his tear-stained face from Ben’s shoulder, fully aware now of Allison sitting at Ben’s side in front of him, her arms wrapped snuggly around him, of Diego pressed at his back, hands on Klaus’s shoulders, alternatively rubbing and squeezing, of Luther at his side, tentatively stroking his arm and peering at him with guilt-laden eyes. Five and Vanya are still unconscious, laid carefully on Luther’s and Allison’s coats.
“I’m sorry.” Luther speaks first, his voice shaky and hesitant. Klaus manages a nod, and Luther responds with a simple squeeze of his arm, before standing and pulling back a little, eyes darting over to Five and Vanya before returning to the huddle around Klaus.
Ben catches Klaus’s eyes, silently checking that he’s doing OK now. He is, he’s just tired, and he tries to put that into the look he shares with Ben. Ben gives him one last squeeze before nodding and letting him go. That prompts Allison to pull back too, but Diego stays behind him, slings an arm across his shoulders and pulls Klaus to rest his head against his shoulder. Klaus finds he’s quite happy with this new arrangement and lets his weight slump against Diego’s sturdier frame.
No-one seems quite sure what to say now, glances darting awkwardly among them, until Luther takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders determinedly.
“OK. We’re 12. We’re in 2001, sometime in the Spring, and these bodies are our original 12 year old bodies.” This summary receives weary nods from his siblings. “We now have 18 years to help Vanya learn to control her powers, and for us to actually learn how to function as a family and support each other. And no,” he says, raising a hand as if warding something off, “the irony of me being the one to say that isn’t lost on me.” His gaze only settles on Klaus for a moment, apology still plain in his eyes.
“18 years, man….” Diego does not sound enthusiastic about this, and Klaus doesn’t blame him. That’s a lot of life to re-live….
“Unless,” says Ben, “maybe Five can take us a bit further forward?” He shrugs and continues, “Y’know, after we do the important things like keeping Klaus from breaking his jaw and spiralling into drug dependency, and stopping me from dying….”
Luther nods slowly, gathering Five back up into his arms.
“Uhm, is he…. OK?” Klaus asks. “And Vanya?”
“Yes, we think so,” says Allison. She gestures to Five, “I mean, bringing all of us so far back, that must have exhausted him, it’s really no wonder he’s out cold. And Vanya….” Allison’s face falls as she looks over at her sister’s ashen face.
“And Vanya will be fine,” Luther says firmly, brooking neither argument nor self recrimination from any of them.
Allison’s nod isn’t nearly as firm as Luther’s voice, but she sets her jaw and stands. “Yes,” she says, determination strong in her tone, “she will be. We all will be.”
She holds out a hand to Klaus, and he lets her help him to his feet. Klaus in turn reaches for Ben’s hand, and helps him stand. Diego crouches by Vanya, wrapping her in Allison’s coat before picking her up.
Klaus looks around at his siblings and nods to himself. They’re the most dysfunctional family he can possibly imagine, all of them now adults (emotionally stunted at the best, unredeemably fucked up at the far more likely worst) in the bodies of children. They’ve been through hell, both together and apart, and here they are about to embark on that journey all over again.
But this time they’ll be there for each other. This time, they’ll do better.