Chapter Text
Klaus Hargreeves killed himself on a Thursday morning.
Day dawned slowly, hindered by a persistent fog that settled like a white blanket over the city—a strange meteorological occurrence, considering that it was supposed to be summer. Instead of the bright sunshine commonly associated with late July, the wispy haze had rolled in off the seafront, bathing everything in the scent of salt and in secrecy.
Maybe that was why they'd missed it. The sound of someone scrambling around upstairs before the day had even begun, the noise of a bath running, hot water gurgling its way through the old pipes.
Unusually, the Hargreeves had been slow to wake up—yes, all of them. Five, of course, had been the first one in the kitchen, hunched over a pot of coffee like a dragon guarding its horde, only half the size and twice as ferocious, but even he had been late. By the time he'd taken his first sip of the black nectar, the clock had already been past eight, and the humid summer night had long since faded away.
And by the time the whole family had gathered (sans two, the dead—no, really dead now—one, and the ghost whisperer himself), it was already midday.
And by that point, it was already too late.
"Where's Klaus?"
"Probably sleeping off a hangover."
"Diego!"
"What? I'm not wrong. Has he had a day out of the bottle since we got back?"
"Well no, but-
"Face it, Allison, he probably got drunk as shit last nice and is face down in his own drool right now. Stop making excuses for him."
Allison scowled. "At least it's only drinking."
"Yeah, yeah, sure. And it started as only drinking when we were eleven, and he was picking at Dad's bar, and look at where it got him."
Above them, the lightbulb flickered, once, twice. "Can you idiots stop arguing and go and wake him up?" Five had muttered, dark circles present under his eyes and his mouth curled into a frown, looking not unlike a particularly annoyed raccoon.
"I'm making eggs," Luther chimed in, helpfully.
Five snorted. "Yeah. Luther's making eggs."
Diego leaned back in his chair, and it creaked at having to support the weight of a grown man on only two legs. "Why don't you go and get him, Blinky?"
The childhood nickname only served to infuriate Five further, a flush of red dancing across the tops of his ears. "Call me that again, and I'll cut your tongue out."
"So you keep threatening, Blinky, but you haven't done it yet."
Five's mouth opened in a snarl. Across from him, Allison drummed her fingers against the table; the wood is old and worn and smooth to the touch. She opened her mouth to offer before a proper argument can start, but it was Vanya who spoke first—beating her to the chance.
A shadow ghosted across her face as she spokes. "I'll go."
Allison has always been a worrier, trying to plan for any problem. "Vanya," she said, "you don't have to."
But Vanya just laughed.
"Allison, it's only Klaus," she said, rolling her eyes at her sister. "If he's not in his room, he'll just be smoking in the bathroom because he thinks Luther can smell it."
"Why does he think that?" Luther asked, flipping an egg absently; it sizzled when it landed in the pan. "I still have a nose."
"Does it matter?" Five shook his head. "Just go and get him, Vanya."
Since they'd gotten home, meals had become family time. It wasn't right for Klaus to miss them.
Vanya pushed herself up from her chair, eyes rolling so hard that she thought she might see the back of her own skull. As she passed, she patted her littlest-oldest brother on the head, just to see him growl again like a feral dog. "I'm going, I'm going," she said.
She had no idea what she was about to find.
Klaus Hargreeves killed himself on a Thursday morning.
Vanya Hargreeves found his body.
Five Hargreeves was the first person she screamed for; loud enough it almost broke the windows. It took him fifteen minutes to decipher what she was saying due to a combination of her hysteria and the whole house rocking on its foundations around them. By then, the rest of the family was upstairs too, crowding around with raised voices, questions that melted into the already cacophonous noise.
"Shut up!" Five yelled, but it didn't do much to calm anyone down; even as he shouted, his head was splitting open.
When Five finally managed to understand what she was saying, puddled in that hallway, his own heart stopped in his chest. Vanya stumbled and sunk to her knees in front of him, and the house had sunk too, an inch further into the soft earth of the city. Her face was hidden behind her hands as she sobbed, horrible ugly tears punctuated with sharp hiccuping sounds. Five crouched in front of her, and for once, had not a single idea of what to do.
"Where is he?" he asked instead, voice barely above a whisper.
Vanya had to swallow three times before she could reply; the words kept getting stuck in her throat like a piece of over chewed gum—tacky and tasting bitter. "The, the bathroom."
Five nodded slowly. He opened his mouth to say something, only to close it again when he realised that he was coming up short on words. Comforting had never been his strong suit. And anyway, what was there to say in response to your sister telling you that your brother was dead?
Likely dead, he told himself, but the odds weren't looking good. In such situations, hope was hard to summon.
It took him a minute to stand without his own knees wobbling their way out from beneath him. Diego stepped forwards, was shoved aside by Allison; everyone wanted to get closer. Five glared at them all until they shrunk back away from him. The world was imploding in on itself, narrowing to a single dot. He walked down the hallway, the four, five steps to the bathroom.
The bathroom, as it were. There were plenty in the Hargreeves manor, but most of them had fallen into a state of general disrepair because Reginald had never let his charges use them. Instead, they'd been relegated to a single family bathroom on the second floor and the locker room just past where they'd done their childhood training.
Five hadn't stepped in the latter since he was thirteen years old.
So, the bathroom. The door had always stayed open, ajar for anyone who needed to slip inside. That had been a rule even before Five had left, so you could do things like brush your teeth, use the toilet. None of them had ever been bothered by each other's barging in, the sight of their bodies.
He remembered that rule. He also remembered Vanya's book detailing how, at fifteen, it had become more heavily enforced for distinctly different reasons. It was in the bathroom that Klaus had had his first, second, third overdoses in rapid succession.
This time, the door was closed. Five pushed on it, but it didn't swing open the way he expected. He wondered if it had been like that when Vanya had found Klaus or if she'd slammed it shut in her panic.
Not that it mattered now.
Inside, it was almost entirely dark. Thick curtains had been drawn for the first time in years, blotting out the sun. It took a moment for Five's eyes to adjust, to spot the stubs of melted down candles as light filtered in from the open doorway. The dark made him pause, but worse than the dark was the silence—so absolute it was unsettling.
In all his life, Five had never known his brother to be quiet. When Klaus wasn't talking, he was a rustle of shifting fabric and moving feet; when he wasn't moving, he had music playing, so loud that you could hear it from a foot away. When there wasn't music or talking or moving, you might hear groaning that sent you skittering away from his door. Sometimes, it almost got too much, especially for Five, who'd lived alone in a wasteland for forty-five years, but he found he would have preferred it to the void he'd stepped into.
He found Klaus in the bathtub, slumped against the porcelain, leaning slightly to the left.
It almost looked like he was sleeping. At least until Five got closer and saw the dark bruising beneath his eyes, the dull, washed out colour of his skin. A sickly type of white that almost glowed in the dark.
Unsurprisingly, Klaus was naked. A glass tray full of cigarette butts was perched on the edge of the windowsill that overlooked the bath, and next to it—
Five's vision blotted out black at the sight of the needle.
He couldn't take another step. Beneath him, his knees buckled. Five reached out with one shaky hand and caught himself on the edge of the bathtub, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps.
Hyperventilating, his brain helpfully supplied.
For a moment, a fleeting and runaway second, he tried to convince himself that it had been an accident. He knew that Klaus had overdosed in the past, even if Five had never been around to witness it before. But, no matter how he tried, he couldn't hold onto that thought for very long. It slipped through his fingers.
A horrible sickness that he knew to be knowledge rose up in him.
The bathroom was dark, quiet. The windows had been blacked out. The door had been closed.
Klaus hadn't cried out.
Beneath Five's hand, the porcelain of the bath was cold already; there was no heat left in the room. All of it had been sapped away. He couldn't help but wonder how long Klaus had been left here alone.
Pieces start to come together. The night before, they'd been up late. Klaus had known that gone to be latest of them all; he'd chosen a time when he'd be alone for a while, and he'd known it.
On an average day, Luther was always the first to use the bathroom. Vanya had only come up to find him because Five had insisted on it, annoyed that he wasn't around for breakfast.
Who had kept them up?
Klaus. Insisting on board games, a movie, one more round of trivia.
Against the fragile egg of his skull, Five felt the steady beat of his pulse; he tried to push the pain away.
In the end, he didn't remember leaving the bathroom. He remembered being torn between staring at Klaus's corpse and going out to confront—no, comfort his family. He'd only gone with the latter knowing that Klaus never would have wanted Vanya to find him.
And it was too late to do anything for Klaus now.
Later, Five would sit down and realise that Klaus had thought it all out, planned every step. It was unusually meticulous of his brother, who'd been impulsive his whole life, never stopped to look before he leapt off the edge of a cliff.
A veritable fool.
But it still hadn't gone as Klaus had intended.
Vanya was a wreck. Allison tried to coax her to eat, sleep, to talk, but she walked around in a daze, entirely guilt-ridden. More often than not, she spent days curled up in bed. When she did speak, she insisted that it was her fault but never got around to explaining why.
Then again, they all felt bad for not recognising how distressed Klaus had been. Luther felt guilty. As did Diego. And Allison.
And Five.
Klaus had always struggled; with his powers, his family, his own frenzied temperament. All of them had known that, seen the way he seesawed from manic energy to listless depression and back again. It had only gotten worse since they'd returned from their wayward trip into the sixties. Five had a feeling that something had changed irreversibly, but he couldn't figure out what.
Five ghost walked through the week following Klaus's death. Despite himself, he lingered on the outskirts of the family. It didn't feel like his place to get involved. As children, he'd been close to Klaus, more so than the rest of his family, but after years apart, he couldn't claim that same familiarity.
But, he did what he could to help. He tried to console Vanya, but it was an impossible task, made only harder when their siblings spoke over them in equally aching voices. Five attended the service that Allison arranged, stood beside his siblings in black blazer and black tie as they tried to make sense of what had happened.
There was no making sense of it, he realised. It was too painful, too awful to be rationalised.
Grief settled in his stomach, a heavy and burdensome stone. Five thought it would have been easier; he'd done this before after all—mourned the loss of his siblings—but the pain was fresh all over again. And now, everywhere he turned, he saw it reflected back into himself like staring into a mirror.
It was the fourth day after the funeral that Allison approached him as he paced his father's study. Outside it was raining; it had been since Klaus had died, the news claimed it was the wettest summer on record.
"There was nothing you could have done."
Allison had been saying it to everyone like a mantra. She thought if she said it enough, it might finally come true. Five kept his eyes trained on a droplet of rain as it slid dispirited down the glass.
"You know that's not true."
Allison sighed. "It's not your fault."
"I knew... I knew he was upset about something. I should have anticipated that something was going to happen, that being back in this house was going to have an effect! I should have..." he trailed off, throat thickening.
"Five," Allison breathed out. "He was in pain. He was suffering. Now he isn't."
He turned to face his sister. A strained expression was pulling her face down, hair limp where it tangled across her shoulders. "But everyone else is. You are."
"Of course I am; I lost my brother Five. It's only natural."
She'd lost another brother, Five thought, his stomach twisting itself into knots. He shook his head. "We shouldn't have to--he shouldn't have felt like that was his only option."
"But, he did."
Five was quiet for a long time. Allison stood by the doorway, waiting for her brother to speak again, but he didn't appear inclined to say anything. She couldn't quite tell how he felt because he looked utterly hollowed out.
Just as she was about to cut her losses and leave, a thought occurred to her. "Five... please don't do anything stupid."
Allison had lost two brothers, two husbands, and a daughter. Five had lost six siblings, two of them twice over. The thought of Ben was an old ache that felt dulled next to the fresh pain of losing Klaus.
Five might have laughed, had he the emotional ability to do anything. But he didn't, not anymore. For decades his only goal had been reuniting his family, seeing them grow old and healthy together, and now those dreams had slipped apart. He had no response for Allison; all he could do was listen to her footsteps as she left her post.
In the quiet of the study, his mind slowly began to patch together ideas. Five didn't consider his sister's words of advice, perching on the desk that had once been his father's. Klaus was dead, but he'd been dead before, and Five had fixed that. Not once, but twice.
He had the ability and the means to undo what had happened to his brother.
Maybe the world had lost him, but Five wasn't going to let it stay that way. Not any longer.