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It was late, Klaus didn’t really expect too many people to be up at the mansion. Diego had very generously given him a ride from the restaurant, which was nice, he’d wanted to see Diego again. But Diego had dropped him off and now he had to wander his way through his cult compound by himself. Keechie was up and offering things, asking things, but Klaus had learned how to handle him. He was like a puppy, you couldn’t tell him not to do something, but you could easily get him to do something else. “Can I get some tea?” he asked. “A pot of tea, for a bath?”
“Right away,” Keechie told him, bounding off toward the kitchen of the compound. Klaus was freezing still, he hadn’t warmed back up, he was freezing and felt like vomiting and his hands hadn’t stopped trembling, but a bath might fix it. Baths tended to fix a lot of things.
He was naked and sitting on the side of the bath, watching it fill with steaming hot water when Keechie joined him with a kettle of tea. “I want to be alone,” Klaus murmured, still staring at the water. Keechie made to go. “Not you, Keechie.”
“Then… who, Prophet?” Klaus looked up at Ben, standing in the doorway.
“Can you do me a favor, Keechie?’ Klaus asked, still staring down Ben. He didn’t think his brother would leave, but after a moment of tense staring the ghost did move on.
“Anything.”
“Call me Klaus. Not forever, if you don’t want to, but tonight?”
“Sure.” Keechie smiled at him, and Klaus knew that it wasn’t really at him, it was at his exoskeleton, it was at the him they’d made out in their minds to solve their problems and pasted over his body. But at least then it was nice, because unlike the hands grasping at him, always grasping, this he could back away from. “Klaus.”
“Keechie.” Klaus took the kettle from where Keechie had set it down on the tile floor of the bathroom and poured it into his bath. He recognized the blend, it was from India, fruity and heady, one of his favorites. When he reached over for the faucet he wondered if it was possible Keechie knew it was his favorite tea, or if they only kept teas he liked, if he’d ever told a living person what teas he liked. What would happen if he told Keechie he liked it? Would Keechie dedicate the rest of his life to making Klaus that particular tea every day? “Nice choice,” he finally said, looking around to grin at Keechie. “Stay here? I want to talk.”
“Of course pro-... Klaus.” Klaus slipped into the water, sighing heavily. This was just what he needed, something hot to chase the chill that had penetrated down to his bones. Keechie sat up with him, back to the wall, their shoulders in parallel.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course, you don’t have to even ask,” Keechie laughed.
“I’m a big proponent of consent,” Klaus giggled, because if he didn’t laugh he’d cry. “Keechie what the hell did I even say that made you quit your life?”
“In ‘61?”
“Yeah, Berkeley.”
“All of it,” Keechie told him breathlessly. “All of it, Klaus it was incredible!”
“But what, um, what specifically?” Klaus asked. “Humor me.”
“Well,” Keechie said, sounding thoughtful. “You said that we all do things that other people want, for other people’s reasons. And you said we should throw that off, figure out what we really want to do.”
“I said that?”
“You did!” Keechie laughed. “You said to hold things we had, and ask ourselves if they sparked joy. If they didn’t, we should thank them for their service and give them up. I’d never done that before, you know? I’d never asked if I was doing something that made me happy. I was always trying to make other people happy, like getting a law degree because it was what my family expected of me. I was just working to pay bills on things I thought made me an acceptable member of society. I didn’t want a picket fence, I didn’t want a 9-5. You freed me from having that.”
“So why pamphlets in Dallas?” Klaus asked. “That can’t possibly be what you want.”
“But it is!” Keechie insisted. “It is! I… I went out, in search of something that made me happy, that… that sparked joy. And you know what I found?”
“Mmm.”
“I convinced someone to look for happiness.” Klaus snorted. “I did! I did!” Keechie laughed, sounding breathless like he sounded when he was believing. “I had a friend for a long while, and she had always been unhappy with her life. She had kids, she’d gotten married right out of high school and never left her hometown. I went back to see her, and we talked about her life. I shared with her my story, how free I felt when I’d thrown off the shackles of people’s expectations. That night, that very night, she talked to her husband and they worked it out so she could take night classes during the week, he’d help out with the kids and chores so she could get a degree she’d always wanted. She was worried about him saying no, she was worried about being older than everyone else in class. But she did it, and she’s never been happier.”
“Oh, really?” Klaus asked, head lolling to the side so he could actually look at Keechie. Keechie smiled at him, a little eager but not something that made Klaus want to crawl out of his skin, leave behind the image of himself that they really wanted and sneak out the back door.
“So yeah, handing out pamphlets, talking to people, being here… it is what I want,” Keechie told him. “Don’t worry, Klaus. This is what sparks joy.” They shared a little giggle, and for some reason Klaus felt a little bit of a weight lift off his shoulders.
“I have another question,” Klaus continued, “but it’s… personal. Very personal.”
“We’ve shared plenty of intimacy.”
“Sex isn’t intimacy.”
“Isn’t it?” Keechie shrugged. “It’s intimate for me. It’s not for you?”
“It’s fun for me,” Klaus told him. “It’s all meaningless fun. Intimacy is something else.”
“So what’s intimacy?”
“What I’m gonna ask,” Klaus replied, licking his lips. He wouldn’t be able to ask when he warmed back up, he wouldn’t be able to form the words if his lips weren’t trembling. “Keechie, have you ever… given your body, to someone?”
“That’s a good question. I think in some ways, probably. How I lived my life to please other people, maybe?”
“Mmm. Maybe.”
“Sometimes during sex, I feel as if I’m giving my body to someone. Making myself an offering, I suppose.”
“Have you felt that way with me?”
“Sometimes.”
“Oh Keechie,” Klaus told him, frowning slightly. “I- I’m sorry.”
“No!” Keechie gasped. “No, no, don’t be sorry. You didn’t mistreat me. I’d do it again, given the option.” They were quiet for a while, which was not something Klaus usually enjoyed, but it was also not something he got a lot so he decided if he couldn’t savor the experience he could savor the novelty. “Have you?”
“Hmm?”
“Have you ever given your body to someone?” Klaus laughed.
“Someone,” he echoed. “There was someone, it felt… intimate, I guess, for the first time.”
“Who was it?”
“It doesn’t matter, it was a lifetime ago,” Klaus told him. “A lot of times, though, it didn’t feel like… giving. It felt like taking.”
“Taking from someone?”
“Someone taking from me.” Klaus didn’t know if he was making sense, or if Keechie was going to get it, the guy wasn’t all there. But some part of it must’ve landed, the look Keechie gave him was pained. “Keechie I want to be you,” Klaus told him, words coming out like an avalanche. “I want to be you, I want to know there’s someone out there who’ll have answers, who knows what’s going on.”
“Well,” Keechie said, and it was gentle. Oh, it had been so long since anyone had been gentle. “Someone once gave me some advice, and it might have something to do with all this.”
“Please don’t tell me that someone was me.”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t Klaus,” Keechie told him. “It was this Prophet I know.”
“Mmm. Well I don’t believe in prophets, but go on.”
“Well, he said,” Keechie continued, smiling, “he said a lot of things. But he told us, and this was something that might have been new to a lot of people, about having consent. You couldn’t do anything to anyone without their consent.”
“Yeah, but this is about my body, not about sex,” Klaus whined.
“Don’t see how it wouldn’t apply,” Keechie told him. “No one can do anything to you without your consent.” Klaus wasn’t convinced, it didn’t feel like he’d consented to anything that happened to him, to the hands constantly grabbing at him, to the people following him, to the things people expected of him. At least he’d tried his best to teach his cult about consent for sex, tried his best to make sure everyone who offered to have sex with him really just wanted to have sex with him. Made sure they weren’t looking for favors or clout or not thinking clearly because of his status. Klaus didn’t mind sex. Klaus accepted whatever was offered him, he didn’t turn down any meal that made its way to his plate.
But this was all so different than that, either so different or so deeply intertwined the two were indistinguishable.
“It’s my body,” he found himself insisting. “It’s- it’s mine.” Even as he said it he felt the surety of the statement slipping away from him.
“It is,” Keechie assured him.
Klaus eventually limped out of the bath, he still wasn’t feeling great but he was definitely feeling better. Ben was waiting for him in his room, he was sitting up and excited and all Klaus could do was sit and stare at him. Maybe before Dallas, before 1960, before sobriety he could have said something. But he didn’t even know where to begin, he didn’t know where he’d gone so off the rails and wrong. He’d thought for years all Ben had wanted was sobriety, and he’d done it, he’d given it to him even though he didn’t really need it, Dave wasn’t a ghost but Ben had pleaded for so long so he could give him that.
Only, Ben wasn’t happy.
Ben had always asked to go do things, always wanting to go to museums and movies and the beach. So they did, he was sober and they did they traveled the world and met new people and yeah he maybe started a cult, but. But still.
He wasn’t sure what he’d done to move the goalposts so far. He didn’t know how he’d sunk so low so as to lose Ben like this. He didn’t know how much more he had to give, if maybe this was punishment for not listening, for tuning out the nagging that threatened to turn into Reginald if he wasn’t paying attention.
It was just Ben asked for these impossible things, like being in control of his health and making decisions and being a good person.
Klaus stared at the ghost of his brother and wondered how to explain he didn’t want to share his body. He shared his life, he’d given Ben so much, but maybe, because of the way Ben had been acting, he’d given him nothing at all.
It was his body, though. In Vietnam he’d had nothing, nothing at all to his name it had been all he had and it was all he could offer to Dave. There’d been plenty of times when his body hadn’t been his, he hadn’t been offering, but that time he had and it wasn’t something he’d done since.
He wanted to pretend it wasn’t about Dave, it wasn’t about sex, it wasn’t about the hands that were always clawing at his skin. Maybe it was. But he wasn’t sure and he didn’t know if he could share that, if he could say no and explain how he was feeling, or if it mattered. There had been a time, before Dallas, when maybe he would have known if how he felt mattered.
“You are not getting in this body,” he told Ben. Or rather, he told Ben’s ghost. That was supposed to be enough, it was his body. He’d given Ben company, he’d given him entertainment, he’d given him a body, not a great one but a body, he’d given him sobriety.
Take take take, Ben, he thought, and we’ll just have to see how much of me is left by the time you’re done.