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Klaus comes back, and everything is bright.
The briefcase smashes, but doesn’t shatter; explodes in a shade of red that haunts behind his eyelids, a cheap child’s imitation of the blood on his hands.
He doesn’t register falling to the ground, grabbing for something that doesn’t exists here, someone who doesn’t exist anywhere anymore. His face is stinging, grounding him like an anchor. The tears weigh him down with the pull of a thousand men, somewhere deep in the mud of Vietnam.
He’s back.
It’s too bright.
He can feel like phantom cling of dried blood on his face, lungs suffocating softly on the inhale. The sidewalk is sun-warm, scraping on the skin of his hands, breaking his nails as he claws. There’s nobody around, not a soul dead or alive, and instead of feeling peaceful it feels freezing cold, like the shivers that wrack his craving body in waves.
The ground is warm, but his bones are oh-so cold.
His brain feels fuzzy in the worst way, not anything like the way being high feels, but like someone’s shoved so much cotton up his nose it’s coming out his eyes, foaming out his mouth. His muscle ache and itch like they do during withdrawal, and he claws at his skin hard enough to break. It’s just more red to add to the canvas.
Klaus shakes, and feels like screaming.
He doesn’t know how long he sits, curled up on himself, basking in the late afternoon sun, trying to soak up all the heat he can, but it does nothing to clear the metallic chill of the dog tags, or the ice that’s crept into his veins.
Eventually there are hands on his shoulders, pushing his limbs out and pulling him up. It happens so fast Klaus isn’t sure what’s it is, but suddenly Ben’s there, screaming into his face, pushing at his shoulders with all the force of a hurricane. He doesn’t even flinch, doesn’t care because everything around him bleeds into red around the edges.
The sound of his brother’s voice is tinny, and the stuffed up feeling spreads from his brain to his throat, a reply lodged deep in the place where Dave’s name used to sit.
Ben screams, and it sounds like the whisper of a long dead ghost.
Klaus.
His head aches, and the hands on his shoulders are gone like they were never there, Ben phasing through with a tingling sensation as his desperation subsides. The emotion that had brought him forth all gone at once, like a flood. Klaus can almost feel it like it’s happening to him, except for the fact that all he feels is cold.
Klaus gets back up, he always does, and it hurts all the same.
Dave.
The helicopters whirl, gunshots sharper than knives, an orchestra for the insane.
Dave.
Klaus vomits into a flower box of purple and yellow peonies, and walks home.
The sun is bright, and his hands are red.
There’s a smudge on the edge of his vision, as he pushes open the doors of the academy, the gates of hell, he’d called them as kid, angry with the world and terrified of waking up every morning to screams and sobs. Ben is only a blur as he stumbles to the bathroom, uncaring of the bloody footprints his leaves on the floors. He runs the bath hot, scalding enough to turn his skin bright pink and raw. He savours it, and ignores the call of voices, listening to the symphony in his head.
Dave.
Klaus.
Sometimes he wishes Grace had never given him that name, hadn’t given the ghosts something to call out at him, to scream and beat and berate him with.
KlausKlausKlausKlausKlaus.
He remembers how his name had sounded in Dave’s mouth and banishes the thought, dunking his head under the water to watch it turn a muddy crimson.
He holds his breath, and hopes to drown.
When his hands go numb, pruned up and useless, he mindlessly claws at his arms, drinking in the feeling of something.
The breaking of skin is never cold, and that’s the best part.
It’s not the cold of the mausoleum, the sting of rejection, the cling of mud, the metallic clang of dog tags. No, the lines he carves up his chest, down his arms, are bright and warm and red.
The water washes the blood away like nothing happened, cleaning off Klaus shiny and new, moldable and adaptable like he needs to be.
He is molten metal, bright and glowing, ready to do whatever he’s told.
The voices in his head only scream for one thing.
Dave.
He needs a drink.
That’s the nice thing about alcohol, more so than drugs, it’s warm. There’s a special place reserved in his blackened, bleeding heart for the burn of bourbon, the sting of vodka. He never steals from his Dad’s liquor cabinet, hadn’t since he was a kid, because it’s too good, too smooth, so he resolves to find the nearest liquor store as soon as he can.
Klaus savours the smell of shitty tequila, and wears the need for it like a second skin.
He jackknifes up, his limbs unfolding out of the bath and splashing water everywhere, up along the walls and down to the floor. He gives his body a perfunctory once over with a towel and bypasses the mirror altogether, stumbling into his room, one shaky foot in front of the other.
Ben stares all the while, but he’s gotten good at ignoring the pull of his eyebrows and the frown lines that his brother never used to have.
The sound of footsteps creak past, and the full body itch settles onto his shoulders, heavy and weighted.
He listens as Five passes by him, and laughs.
He’s back, as real as the sun and the stars and the sky, and just as invisible as the ghosts that plague his every waking move. He laughs loud and cracked and broken, the sound tumbling out of him so fast he can’t stop.
He’s ten months older, wears that badge on his sleeve, feels it deep down in his soul.
He’s ten months older, and nobody sees it. His shoulders shake with laughter and unshed tears, and it feels like becoming a corpse, maggots rotting away at his insides and eating his lungs.
Dave.
Klaus comes back, and nobody cares enough to see.
He laughs, and goes to find a drink.