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The anomaly was back.
God (if that's what you want to call her) huffed out a sigh, and started pedaling her bicycle.
He was sitting on the dirt road (if that's how you want to conceive of it), arms wrapped around his tucked-up knees. Dressed all in black, up to and including an incongruous cowboy hat. When he saw her, his face lit up.
"Yay, you're here! I need to talk to you."
"You shouldn't be here," God said.
The anomaly fluttered a hand, dismissing her words. Goodbye, said the hand. "I need to ask you some questions."
His hair—thick, brown and curly—was much longer than it had been the last time he'd been here. God tilted her chin up and traced the threads of cause-and-effect in her (vast, unfathomable) mind's eye, frowning. She found his departure point from Earth. It was only five days later than the point he'd last come here from, but he'd lived three years in between. How incredibly irritating.
"I don't like you," God said.
"Yeah, yeah, you've mentioned that," the anomaly said. "But I need to know how alternate timelines work."
In her inner sight, God zoomed in on the anomaly's departure point. His body was lying on a motel bed. The pills he'd swallowed had depressed his breathing sufficiently to stop his heart. His brother, still awake on the room's other bed, hadn't noticed yet that he was dead.
"No you don't," God said.
"Yeah, I really do," the anomaly said.
God willed his return to Earth, and it was done.
"Klaus, wake up."
It was easy to ignore Diego.
"It's almost 9 AM. Five wants another family meeting."
The grayscale landscape hadn't been a dream, had it? He remembered it too vividly.
"I can see your eyes moving behind your eyelids, asshole. I know you're awake."
Anyway, there was no way he should feel this clean and sober eight hours after taking that many pills. It was just like the last time he'd come back from that place—the little girl must have put him through some kind of mystical detox on the way down.
She hadn't answered any of his questions. She'd barely even let him get a word in.
Rude.
His train of thought was interrupted by the plop of a cold, wet washcloth landing on his face.
Which gave him a panicky few seconds of flashback to getting waterboarded by Hazel and Cha Cha. Klaus sat bolt upright, clawing at the wet cloth and gasping.
Diego stood with his arms crossed and his mouth quirked, watching Klaus flail. "I told you to get up, bro," he said.
Klaus hissed, and threw the washcloth back at Diego. Who stepped sideways and evaded it neatly.
"I brought you a muffin," Diego said. "If you'd gotten up for breakfast, you maybe could've had a blueberry one. But you didn't, so you get bran. Sucks to be you."
"I'm sorry," Five said. "I spent three days with Herb, checking the infinite switchboard and running the probabilities on different scenarios. We can't get her back."
Klaus frowned. He didn't care about what happened now, exactly, but he thought he'd at least been keeping track of time okay. Had he spent three days in the afterlife? Surely Diego would have said something.
"Bullshit," Allison said. "You were only gone for nine hours."
Oh, okay. It wasn't just Klaus who was confused.
Luther gave Allison a sympathetic wince. "Time travel," he reminded her.
They were all in the girls' motel room. Five was prowling as he talked. Luther was hunched in the room's one armchair. Vanya and Allison were sitting together on one bed; Diego and Klaus were on the other. Klaus was flopped flat on his belly, knees bent and feet kicking slowly in the air. His chin rested on his crossed arms. Diego perched on the edge, leaning forward and fidgeting with a knife.
"I was only gone for ten minutes," Five said. "I thought I'd treat myself to a good night's sleep for once before trying to explain overlapping vector calculus timeline curves to my high school dropout siblings. Too bad this big lunk snores like a grizzly bear." He batted the side of Luther's head as he paced by him.
"Ever since my nose got broken—" Luther started.
"Not like you ever graduated from high school either," Diego shot at Five.
"Shut up," Allison snapped. "Let Five talk."
Klaus shifted his arms, and started pulling at a hangnail on his right index finger.
Five cleared his throat, and his voice was softer when he started again. "The timeline looks largely unchanged up until 1989," he said. "But our dinner with Dad must have been the catalyst for the change. To prevent that, we'd have to interfere in our own timelines, which is tricky at best and fatal at worst—and we'd risk re-triggering the 1963 apocalypse. Or the 2019 one, for that matter."
Allison gave Five a challenging look, jutting her chin out. "So take me to 2011. When I should have met Patrick, if Dad hadn't—"
She didn't finish the sentence. Everyone had been uneasily tiptoeing around mentioning the fates of their counterparts in this timeline.
The old bastard had had a point, technically; it was absurd to be mad at him for murdering them as babies when they were all standing in his vestibule alive and well in 2019.
And Klaus hadn't even seen any itty bitty baby ghosts. No harm, no foul.
His finger stung where he'd pulled the little strip of skin away, and a bit of blood welled up.
"I could bring you there," Five said to Allison. "You could meet Patrick. You could marry him. You could do everything the same as before, as close as you can remember it. It wouldn't bring Claire back."
"It might," Allison said.
Luther looked sad. "No, Allison, Five's right." Under Allison's withering glare, he pressed on: "It's just biology. You're ten years older. The, um, egg. Would be a different one."
"The child would be Claire's sister," Five said. "Or brother."
"Or gender non-binary sibling," Klaus pointed out, just because apparently nobody else was going to. He put his finger in his mouth, and tasted the blood.
Five accepted Klaus's editorial comment with a little shrug, and finished gently, "It would never be Claire."
Later that day, Klaus was sneaking out to score some more pills when he saw Allison crying by the ice machine.
"Shhhh, Allie, shhhhh," he said, throwing his arms around her and squeezing her tight. "It's okay. I mean it's not even remotely okay. I don't know why I said that. Ignore me, keep crying."
She did. In fact, she curled up her hands like claws, clutching Klaus's vest, and smushed her face into his shoulder and sobbed.
Nobody else came out of any of the rooms. There was a steady roar of traffic going by, and the sun was bright. Klaus held Allison, and rocked a little.
Finally she quieted, and sniffled. When she lifted her head, there was a thin trail of snot connecting her cheek to Klaus's shoulder. She didn't even brush it away. "It's been two years since I saw her," she said. "But I didn't think she was lost. I thought eventually Five would show up and he'd bring me back to her. I'd be a little older, but no time would have passed for her. I'd still have to deal with Patrick's bullshit, but she'd be there."
Klaus didn't know what to say to her grief. He felt an almost unbearable urge to make a pornographic joke to cut the tension, but he didn't. "I didn't think I could lose Ben," he heard himself saying instead. "He was already dead."
And then Allison's arms were around him. "Oh, Klaus," she murmured. "What are we going to do?"
"Well," he said, "Just at this moment, I was thinking of doing a whole lot of drugs. Wanna come with?"
She drew back from him, and sighed. "Klaus, baby," she said, touching his cheek. Her tone had changed into something more distant. Tired. "That's not a good idea."
But she didn't stop him.
The anomaly was back again.
"Is Ben here?" he demanded as soon as God came within conversational range.
"The question doesn't make sense," God said. "The one you call Ben is on Earth. Alive."
"Awww, come on," the anomaly said. "Don't play dumb! What happened when he went into Vanya and got all confetti'd? He must have come here, right?"
God checked the anomaly's departure point. Just twenty hours past the previous one, and with the same cause of death. His body was in a bathtub. The hot water of the bath had steamed up the bathroom mirror. The bathroom door was closed; the brother, sitting cross-legged on an unmade motel bed and sharpening knives, had not yet noticed that anything was amiss.
She played the spool forward. Twenty minutes would pass before the brother would decide to pound on the bathroom door, asking what was taking so long.
"Ben can't be here," God said. "He's on Earth. In his bedroom. Reading The Iliad. He's wearing a white t-shirt, gray jogging pants, and burgundy socks. He's on page 73."
"Yeah but," the anomaly said. "I know it's possible to double back on your own timeline and meet yourself. Luther told me Five did it. So there can be more than one of you. Couldn't Ben be here and there?"
God wrinkled her nose at him. "He isn't." If she tried to put all this in terms that the anomaly's limited, human-ish brain could understand, would he stop pestering her? It was worth a try. Having him here was making her skin crawl. (Her skin was made from universes. No universe was meant to contain something like him.) "The one you call Five met himself in a temporary space-time fold. It could not be sustained. He would have been ripped apart."
The anomaly nodded sagely. "From the farting, right?"
God glared at him.
"So, ix-nay on the eaven-hay for Bennirino," the anomaly said. "But, really? Seventeen years of life and..." he paused, biting his lip and calculating under his breath, "Seventeen-ish as a ghost, and now it's all just, just, erased? Like it never was? That emo-hair fucker down there has nothing to do with him!"
This was getting wearying. "This isn't Heaven," God said, and sent the anomaly back.
Sent him back four and a half minutes after his brother found him, to be specific. That should keep him out of her hair.
"Klaus? Wake up, Klaus. Klaus?! Klaus! Oh fuck. ... Luther! Five! Vanya! Get in here, I need help!"
The anomaly's next intrusion came nearly a week later, from an Earth point of view.
"Hey, that was playing dirty," he said as soon as he saw God. "Diego thought I was dead and he freaked out."
"You were dead," God pointed out.
"He hasn't let me piss with the door closed in a week," the anomaly went on, ignoring her interjection. "You don't even know how hard it was for me to get back here again."
"I know everything I choose to know," God said.
This wasn't strictly true. She could see exteriors, she could see viscera, but she couldn't see minds. The choices made by thinking beings were an unending source of surprise for her.
She liked being surprised. That's why she made people.
But she didn't like the anomaly.
"So anyway," the anomaly said, like he was picking up a casual conversation, like he had a right to her time and attention, "what about Dave?"
"Dave who?" God asked.
In his various times on Earth, the anomaly had encountered 37 different humans going by the name 'Dave'. She couldn't be expected to automatically know which one he meant.
The anomaly rolled his eyes at her.
"All right," God conceded, putting on a cranky face to let him know how she felt. There was in fact a 99.997% chance she knew which Dave he meant. "He's dead."
The anomaly's face went through a series of annoyingly poignant emotions, and then settled on hope. "Can I see him?" the anomaly asked.
God considered it.
If she allowed this, would the anomaly go back to Earth and stay there?
Perhaps. It was worth a try.
She edited a 1963 diner into the anomaly's perception of this place, and then nodded in its direction.
The anomaly's face lit up; his whole body seemed drawn towards the diner, as though it were magnetic. He gave God one last suspicious look, said "This better not be a gotcha like the last time," and then took off jogging.
Klaus recognized Stadtler's Restaurant. Of course he did.
At first he thought the old man sitting in the booth was god-damned Uncle Brian. Which would be just typical of the bicycle girl. He strode up to the booth, drawing a breath to at least make the best of this situation and give Brian the verbal reaming-out of a lifetime (deathtime?), when the man looked up and Klaus saw his eyes.
Klaus's steps faltered. "Dave?"
The old man—Dave—put down the menu he'd been consulting. His brow furrowed in puzzlement. "Prophet?" He sounded uncertain.
"Ah, shit, yeah, I guess so." Klaus suddenly felt like he was all awkward elbows and he didn't know what to do with them. He tried to push his hair back and half-knocked his cowboy hat off. He grabbed the hat and tossed it on the floor, and collapsed on the bench opposite Dave. "Fancy meeting you here. Again. So to speak."
Dave did a glance around at their surroundings. "Well, now I guess I understand the location. Do you have another prophecy for me? Not sure what I could do about it at this point if you did, though."
"Oh. Uh." Klaus didn't know what to do with this. With this stranger.
It was a gotcha. Fuck that bicycle girl.
But also, it was Dave. And he was old! He'd lived to be old. Klaus had saved him.
So really it was okay.
Klaus's Ben was gone, Klaus's Dave was gone, but Ben was alive and Dave had lived to be—what, seventy? Nothing to cry or scream about here.
"I'm not really a prophet," Klaus said. Gently. He couldn't talk to Dave in a way other than gently. Not even to this elderly stranger. "That whole thing was a giant scam. I was just a time traveler."
Dave's hairy, old-man eyebrows went up. He looked amused. "A time traveler? Huh. That does explain a thing or two. But in that case, it wasn't a scam. You may have been the truest prophet that ever lived!" He laughed. "Do the other Destiny's Children know about this? Do you visit them all up here?"
Klaus swallowed. "Other? As in, besides you? As in, you yourself, David J. Katz, are one of Destiny's Children?" He thought he managed to keep his tone soft and light and curious. Keep all the horror on the inside.
Dave, though ... even if he didn't know Klaus anymore, he was still the same empathetic, perceptive man that Klaus had loved. He picked up on Klaus's vibe.
He showed his palms, but ruefully. Hello/Goodbye, blurry with age and faded to a light blue. "Yeah. For a while, I was."
"So." Klaus cleared his throat and tried his best to will away the prickling of tears in his eyes. "Last time we saw each other, you didn't seem like a big fan of mine. What brought you around to..." he bit his lip, and gestured towards Dave's hands, "this?"
"You were right," Dave said. "Everything you said. About me, about the war. Every day I was over there, it got harder to dismiss. And then one day on leave in Saigon, in '67, I found a copy of that book you told me about. Dune."
Klaus perked up a little. "Did you like it?"
"Sure, but that's not the point," Dave said. "It had a 1965 publication date. You'd told me about it in 1963."
Klaus shrugged and made feeble jazz hands. "Time traveler."
Dave shrugged. "Everything else you'd told me could have been good intuition, lucky guesses, or maybe you'd done background research on me before you came to see me. But that?" He shook his head. "Bugged me right out. Because at that point, the only thing left that you'd told me that hadn't come true yet was the date of my death." Dave sat back, with a distant look in his eyes. "I deserted that night. I found the Destiny's Children, and they smuggled me out of Vietnam and eventually into Canada."
"Wait, hold on," Klaus said. "I never told them about you!"
"But you told them about the war," Dave said. "By 1967 they had quite the operation going, helping deserters and draft dodgers get to places where Uncle Sam couldn't reach them."
"Jesus," Klaus said, stunned. Keechie had sure grown some balls. Or maybe Jill?
"So yeah, I figured I owed them my life," Dave said. "Them, and you. But by then you'd turned into a bit of a mythical figure. Nobody had seen you since 1963." He cocked his head. "You don't look a day older than you did when I met you."
"Oh, well, actually it's been..." Klaus stopped and counted on his fingers. "Just over two weeks. For me."
"Huh." Dave furrowed his brow, taking in that information. The expression was so familiar, it nearly made Klaus cry. "Time travel?"
Klaus nodded. And gathered his courage and all the equanimity he could muster. He folded his hands on the formica tabletop, smiled at Dave without bursting into tears, and said, "So why don't you catch me up on what I missed?"
Klaus came to sprawled on the back bench of the minivan they'd rented. The vibrations and traffic noises told him they were on the highway.
He sat up.
In the front passenger seat, Allison startled and turned around. "Klaus?! Are you okay? You shouldn't be sitting up."
Diego was at the wheel. Klaus saw his frantic eyes in the rear-view mirror.
"Where are we going?" Klaus asked.
"To the fucking hospital," Diego said.
There was a blood-soaked bandage wrapped around Klaus's right forearm. But nothing hurt.
Klaus started unwrapping it.
"No no no Klaus baby don't do that," Allison said, straining around in her seat and reaching for him, but falling several feet short of contact. "You have to leave it on. Let the doctor take it off."
Klaus was a bit curious about what he'd find. Unmarred skin would be hard to explain; he didn't think the bicycle girl wanted to show her hand quite that plainly. But then who knew what she wanted, actually?
There was a wound, as it turned out, and it looked appropriately fresh. But it was just a shallow scratch. Nothing to write home about.
He held up his arm so Allison could see. "It stopped bleeding," he said. "I'm fine."
Allison let out a huff of annoyance and glared at Diego. "Diego, that doesn't even need stitches. What are we doing here?"
Diego wrenched himself around to see. "What the hell?"
"Eyes on the road, mi hermano," Klaus called out. He still had a to-be-continued conversation on the go with the bicycle girl, sure, but he didn't want to drag Diego and Allison along with him.
"Allison, you saw him, he was passed out cold," Diego said.
"Probably because he took something."
"There was a lot of blood."
"And you're squeamish." Allison rolled her eyes. "Ironic, for a guy who fights with knives."
"Hey, if we're headed uptown anyway," Klaus said, "Can we stop for waffles?"
The anomaly glared at God. "I'm calling bullshit."
God gave him a disdainful sneer. (It probably would have come across better if the anomaly hadn't insisted on conceptualizing her as an adorable preteen girl. Ugh.) "You shouldn't be here. Why do you keep coming back here? I let you talk to David J. Katz for as long as you wanted."
"Yes, great, okay," the anomaly said. He stood up—he'd been sitting cross-legged on the dirt road, waiting for her—and started pacing back and forth, waving his hands. "I talked to Dave. Thanks for that! I can't even describe how lovely it felt to have my heart ripped into little shreds of confetti."
"I thought you'd be happy to know that you saved him after all," God said, pointedly.
"I am!" the anomaly said. "Jesus!" And then he stopped, and looked thoughtful. "Hey, is Jesus here?"
God shrugged. "No comment."
"Oh, what about the other ones? Mohammad? Buddha? Vishnu? Coyote?"
"No comment," God repeated, glaring at him.
The anomaly seemed distracted for a moment, contemplating that. But then, irritatingly, he found his train of thought again. "So here's the thing. You told me that the Ben I knew is gone, kaput, more than dead, totally erased, because that fucking Sparrow shitheel replaced him. But! If the Dave here never met me in Vietnam, then there must be a me who never met Dave in Vietnam. And yet here I am! Explain that!" He flung out an accusing gesture, his pointed finger hovering just inches from God's (hypothetical) nose.
"You're the you that's here," God said. "There isn't another one, because there's you. There can't be two."
"But what happened to the other one?" the anomaly said.
"I chose you," God said. "Don't make me regret it."
(It was an empty threat. All versions of the anomaly were terrible, but this version fit best into the overall pattern. If she had chosen a different version, she would have had to pull too many other threads out of alignment.)
"Okay, okay," the anomaly said, holding up his hands in peace or maybe surrender. "So just let me see if I'm getting it. We're only allowed to have one version of each person? But you choose which version it is."
God lifted an eyebrow. "Are you going to beg me to bring back the ones you loved, at the cost of erasing the others?"
The anomaly looked momentarily stunned. Maybe that hadn't been where he was going with that. "Could you?"
"Of course I could," God said. "Do you want me to?"
Not that she was saying that she would. But ... if it would stop the anomaly from coming back again? It might be worth it.
The anomaly had gone pale. He looked like he might faint, or vomit.
God didn't want to deal with that. She sent him back.
A hand grabbed the collar of Klaus's jacket and yanked him back from the curb.
"Fuck Klaus, be careful!" Diego snapped. "You want to get hit by a fucking truck?"
Klaus remembered getting hit by the truck. He remembered darting out in front of it, a moment of blinding shock that couldn't even be called pain, and then waking up on the black-and-white dirt road.
Diego had had his arms full of groceries, and hadn't been able to grab him in time.
The little girl had cheated somehow when she sent him back; the groceries were spilled on the sidewalk, Diego was furious, and Klaus hadn't managed to get more than one foot off the curb.
Klaus shrugged, and crouched down to start collecting the scattered items. A loaf of bread. A bag of oranges.
"I'm going to put you on a fucking leash," Diego muttered, bending to pick up a jar of peanut butter.
"Hey Diego," Klaus said, stuffing items into one of the cloth shopping bags, "if you had a way to get your Detective Patch back but it meant that the Detective Patch in this timeline would never have existed, would you?"
"In a heartbeat, fuck," Diego said. "Why the fuck would you ask me something like that?"
"Really?" Klaus asked. "You wouldn't worry about obliterating the version of her that's out there right now? What if she has, like, friends who care about her or whatever? Or she's just adopted a kitten?"
Diego smacked the back of Klaus's head—not hard enough to hurt very much, just expressing his feelings. "What the fuck does it matter? Five's not letting any of us near that briefcase. We're stuck with this timeline now."
"Hm," Klaus said, noncommittally, and handed him the grocery bag.
That night, he waited until Diego was asleep. He snuck out to the motel pool, and let himself sink to the bottom.
"So look," the anomaly said. "I know you don't like me."
"What was your first clue?" God asked him.
"You told me so. More than once. And you keep sneering at me," the anomaly said.
"True," God admitted.
"So why do you keep miracle-ing me back to life?" the anomaly asked. "Why me, and not, like, Ben when he died?"
"He's not dead," God reminded him.
"But he was," the anomaly insisted. "For seventeen years."
God patted the flowers in her bicycle basket. She'd chosen lilacs today. They would appear gray to the anomaly, but he'd be able to smell them. "I'm not doing you a favor. I just don't like it when you come here. Why do you keep killing yourself?"
"Uh, to talk to you," the anomaly said. "Obviously."
God tilted her head and looked up at him. His body was a lot taller than the one she was appearing to him in. He wasn't looming, though. His shoulders were hunched in and he seemed to be trying to make himself small. God sighed. "Didn't anybody ever teach you how to pray?"
"Actually, no," the anomaly said. "If I did, would you answer?"
"No," God said.
"Well, there you go then." The anomaly smiled at her and folded himself down to sit on the ground. He patted the dirt next to himself. "Sit with me. Let's chat."
God did not sit.
The anomaly squinted up at her for a few seconds, and then shrugged, and started talking anyway. Of course. "I miss them so much," he said. Obnoxiously assuming that God would know exactly who he meant.
(He meant the version of Ben Hargreeves who had been his brother, and the version of David Katz who had been his lover. Obviously. But it was pretty conceited of him to assume that God had been paying close enough attention to figure that out.)
"Linear time necessitates loss," God said. Since apparently they were making small talk now.
"I don't think the way we've been doing it has been very linear," the anomaly said, frowning.
"True," God conceded. If an ordinary finite being's timeline was like travel along a railway track, the anomaly's was more like a looping roller-coaster.
"You know, the one fucking upside of my power was supposed to be that I didn't have to lose people," the anomaly said. "And yet, here we are."
"Your power doesn't belong here," God said. "I don't like it."
"Oh my g— you," the anomaly said. "I don't like it either! Can you just take it away from me maybe? Win/win all around!"
God sighed. "No. It doesn't come from me."
"Wait wait what?"
"I only exist in relationship to Earth," God admitted. "Your power is Other. It makes me itch. It drains the color from this metaphor."
"Um, sorry?" the anomaly said. "Wait, hold on. You don't like me because of my power? I thought it was because of my personality!"
God tilted her head. "Your personality is extremely grating."
"Does that mean that I can't die?" There was a wild gleam in the anomaly's eye, but he seemed appalled more than excited. "Like, no matter what I do, you're always going to fix it so I survive?"
"You have died," God said.
"Yeah, like four times in the past two weeks," the anomaly said. "I think Diego's developing a twitch."
"In other timelines," God clarified. "When humans went extinct."
The anomaly's eyes widened. "You mean in the apocalypse? -es? That Five's always going on about?"
God nodded. "In those timelines, I gave up and let you stay here." No need to clarify that with human civilization snuffed out, there'd been no chance of getting him off her planet, so there'd been no point in booting him back to Earth. He didn't know about the other worlds yet, and it wasn't her place to tell him. "Those timelines were quite irritating. I'm glad we've abandoned them now."
"Hey, about that," the anomaly said. "Last time I was here, you sort of made it sound like you could pick and choose people across timelines." He kept his voice light and casual, but his shoulders had gone tense.
God sighed. "If it will stop you from coming back here. All right. Which one do you want?"
The anomaly's eyes widened, and he paled. "Seriously? Just like that? I ask for a miracle and boom, Ben or Dave comes back to life?"
"I thought you wanted the dead ones," God said. "The ones who remember you?"
"You couldn't, um, bump them back to life the way you do me?"
"No," God said. Technically she could, but it would involve rewinding time all the way back to the moments of their deaths, and that was a can of worms she didn't want to open.
"And, just to be clear," the anomaly said, "what would happen to the asshole Sparrow version of Ben? Or Dave's old-man ghost that I met in the restaurant?"
"They would cease to have ever existed," God said, placidly. "In the same way that, currently, the versions you remember have never existed."
"And I get ... one? I can choose one person from another timeline to bring home with me? Not two? Or three?"
God nodded, and gave him a warning look. "The deal is more than generous."
The anomaly moaned, and covered his face with his hands.
God waited patiently for his decision.
"Allie," the anomaly said into his hands, "you better fucking declare me your favorite brother for all time after this one. Just saying."
God didn't understand.
Until the anomaly explained which individual he wanted to reclaim, and from which timeline.
Patrick was standing at the window, staring up at fire-streaked sky. Claire was with him, also looking out the window; she looked entranced, but Patrick looked terrified.
It was still daylight on the west coast. The moon wasn't visible. The meteor shower was hella impressive, though.
God hadn't exactly given Klaus a lot of spare time to work with.
"Ahem?" he cleared his throat.
Patrick and Claire both jumped and turned towards the noise. Patrick took a quick step toward Klaus, putting himself protectively in front of Claire. "Who the hell—" he started, his voice darkening in a performatively masculine threat. And then his expression changed. "Klaus?"
"Yep, in the flesh," Klaus confirmed, throwing his hands open. He'd only actually met Patrick once, at the wedding, but the tattoos were a good calling card.
"Uncle Klaus!" Claire exclaimed, with a gleeful bounce. "Have you seen the sky? I've made twenty-three wishes!"
"Where's Allison?" Patrick asked. "Do you know what's happening out there?" His gaze darted back to the window, where the fireworks show was already getting more intense.
Okay. Klaus had once explained to Dave that he was from the future and could see ghosts, and Dave had believed him. He could handle this. "Ah, short answer—the moon got blown up and the world's ending. Allie's safe in another timeline. I've been granted one, count'em one miracle, on account of being so annoying apparently." Klaus gave his most disarming smile. "I'm here for Claire."
Patrick stared at him. "What?"
Of course, Klaus had taken months to work up to that point with Dave. He'd dropped hints. He'd softened him up. He'd accidentally made several references to as-yet unreleased songs by the Beatles and the Stones.
"I can bring Claire to Allison. She'll be safe," Klaus said. "But God only gave me one get-out-of-hell-free ticket, I'm so sorry. Also, you're already in the other timeline."
Outside, there was a flash and a boom. The window rattled.
Klaus flinched. "That was a close one, huh? Uh, we don't have much time here."
He wondered if he'd have to fight Patrick. He wondered if he could fight Patrick.
But Patrick took one more look out the window, and then bent to hug Claire. "I love you, baby," he said, slightly choked. "I want you to go with your uncle Klaus now. Tell Mommy 'hi' for me, okay?" There was another flash, another boom. Patrick shoved Claire towards Klaus.
Claire was looking scared now. She took Klaus's hand, but looked back to Patrick. "Daddy?" she said in a wavering voice.
Klaus looked up at the sky. He wasn't sure if the direction was relevant, but 'up' seemed to be the cultural convention for this sort of thing. "Any time now, bicycle girl!" he called out.
Outside the window, a second sun bloomed in the sky.
It took some serious pounding on the motel room door to get a response, but eventually there was a shadow at the peep hole and then the door was yanked open and Klaus was confronted with Allison's annoyed frown and astounding bed head. "Klaus, it's the middle of the night. Why— why are you drenched? Did you fall in the pool?"
Claire had been hanging back behind Klaus. He hadn't been able to tell her whose room they were outside, since he was still coughing half the pool out of his lungs, so it was understandable that she'd been a little cautious. But now she shot out around him and barreled into Allison's midsection. "Moooommmmmmyyyy!!!"
Allison's face went blank with shock. And then her breath hitched into a laugh and a cry, disbelieving and overwhelmed and ecstatic. She dropped to her knees in front of her daughter and squeezed her in a hug, shaking.
*phweppp* Five was suddenly in the room behind Allison. He was dressed in blue plaid flannel pajamas, and he was holding a plunger like he thought he might use it as a club. "What's going on?"
"I don't know," Vanya said. She was still sitting in her bed. Her pajamas matched Five's exactly; they'd been on sale two-for-one at the Walmart. "Klaus just came to our door a second ago with the little girl. Is that Claire?"
"It can't be," Five said. "She doesn't exist in this timeline."
"It's Claire," Allison choked out.
"Mommy, where are we?" Claire asked. "Where's Daddy?"
"Klaus," Five said, with a dangerous look, "what did you do?"
Klaus would've loved to answer, if he could've stopped coughing.
Vanya had gotten out of bed by then, and padded barefoot around Allison and Claire to reach Klaus. "Klaus, are you okay? Why don't you come in and sit down. Oh my god, your hands are freezing."
Klaus let Vanya tug him gently into the room. Five eyed him suspiciously as Vanya brought him over to the flimsy wooden desk chair. He collapsed onto it, still coughing. His chest hurt, and he was a little worried he might barf.
And that was when Diego and Luther finally made it to the party—arriving simultaneously from opposite directions and struggling to get through the door together.
"What happened to Klaus?" Diego asked.
"Claire?!" Luther said.
It took a while to get around to explanations.
Allison took Claire into the bathroom to get her out of her soaking wet clothes and dry her off. When they came out again, Claire was wearing one of Allison's shirts like a dress, and Allison's face was tear-streaked but she was beaming.
And then Diego brought Klaus into the bathroom to do basically the same thing with him.
"I cannot wait to hear how this all makes sense," Diego muttered, rubbing Klaus roughly with a towel while Klaus coughed and shivered.
Eventually Diego got Klaus settled on Vanya's bed, wrapped up in its comforter. Claire was already sitting on Allison's bed, drinking hot chocolate.
Five came across the room and loomed over Klaus, glaring. "Claire doesn't exist in this timeline. What did you do, Klaus?"
"I went and picked her up in our original timeline," Klaus said, around his chattering teeth. "Obviously." He was so fucking cold. The bicycle girl must have let his body sit in the water for a while before she sent him back. Probably because she liked making him uncomfortable. She was petty like that.
Five rolled his eyes, looking frustrated. "That's not a thing you can do."
Luther gestured in Claire's direction. "Well, apparently it is."
"Klaus, why were you and Claire all wet?" Vanya asked, in a conciliatory tone.
"Lack of foresight," Klaus admitted. "The little girl always sends me back to right where I left from."
"The little girl—Claire?" Five shook his head. "I don't understand. What did Claire do? How could she send you anywhere?"
"Not Claire. The little girl. You know. God, or whatever."
All of Klaus's siblings looked at him blankly. Except Allison, whose shining-wet eyes never strayed from Claire.
Klaus sighed. All he wanted to do was curl up in the blankets and disappear. But obviously his siblings weren't going to let this go without some kind of explanation. "I asked God to let me pick up Claire from right before the first apocalypse, and bring her here. The end. You're welcome, Allie!"
"What's an a-poc-a-lypse, Mommy?" Claire asked.
"Not now, baby," Allison said.
"Klaus, you ... you just asked God? You're saying you, what, you prayed? And all of a sudden Claire was there?" Five's skepticism was practically emanating from him in visible waves.
"Sure, yes. I mean, not exactly. I kind of asked her in person," Klaus said. And tugged the comforter a little tighter. "Hey, so anyway the important thing is, Claire's back! Who wants to go out for drinks to celebrate?"
"What does that mean?" Vanya asked. "Asked in person?"
"Oh, shit," Diego said.
Allison sniffled and shot him a quick frown, hugging her daughter. "Ahem. Diego. Language."
"Yeeeeaaaahhh," Diego drawled out. "Hey Allison. You want to take Claire over into my room, have some quiet time with her? While we get the rest of the story from Klaus? We can get you caught up later."
Allison obviously read something in Diego's tone, because she nodded immediately. "Come on, baby," she said to Claire, nudging her to get off the bed. And then, before she left the room, she came over to Klaus and wrapped him up in a bone-crunching hug. "However you did it," she murmured close by his ear, "thank you."
Diego waited until the door shut behind Allison and Claire before fixing Klaus with an intense look and saying, "So how do you get an in-person appointment with God, Klaus?"
"Are we actually taking this story seriously?" Five objected.
"Oh, you know," Klaus said, shrugging. "You gotta flee the mortal coil, is all. Gets easier with practice."
Vanya frowned. "You mean you ... project yourself somehow?"
"He means he kills himself," Diego snapped.
Luther looked alarmed. "What?"
"I told you guys!" Diego said. "He fucking slit his wrist on Monday!"
Vanya tilted her head. "Allison said it was just a scratch."
"When he woke up it was."
"Klaus, is this true?" Five asked.
"Klaus, you sent yourself to the afterlife to get Claire back?" Luther was wide-eyed; awestruck, respectful, impressed. Klaus couldn't remember Luther ever looking at him like that before.
It was unbearable. Luther shouldn't ever have faith in him.
"I mean that was the end result, sure," Klaus hedged. "I'd love to say it was my cunning plan all along, but actually it was more of an 11th-hour swerve." Klaus sighed, and looked at Diego. "I was trying to find out what happened to the real Ben. And Dave."
"Who's Dave?" Luther asked.
"What did you find out?" Vanya asked.
Klaus felt himself starting to shiver harder again. "They're gone," he said to his knees. "I had to let them go. To get Claire back."
Five peered at him intently. "You made some kind of deal? With God?"
Klaus nodded, hugging his knees to hold himself together. "She doesn't want to see my face again. She kinda straight-up hates me."
Five let out a sharp, snorting laugh. "Only you, Klaus."
Klaus shrugged.
"Hey," Diego said. His arm was around Klaus's shoulders, though Klaus couldn't remember that happening. "This has been a big night. Lotta revelations. But it's fucking 3 AM and I think Klaus is wiped out. Van, how 'bout we swap rooms for the night? You go make sure Allison and Claire are okay, I'll stay here with Klaus."
Five and Luther both looked reluctant for a moment, but Klaus felt Diego shifting at his side, probably glaring at them, and then to Klaus's relief they left.
When it was just the two of them, Diego tightened his arm around Klaus and said, "You're the biggest fucking idiot, oh my g—." He cut himself off and shook his head. "So, the overdose?"
Klaus nodded.
"And you cut your wrist, and tonight ... what happened tonight?"
"Drowned," Klaus admitted quietly.
For a moment, Diego's arm around him got so tight that it hurt. Klaus grunted, and Diego softened his hold a little.
"Am I missing any? Oh shit, I stopped you from walking in front of a truck, didn't I? Today, when we were bringing the groceries back."
"Not exactly."
"Bullshit," Diego said. "You were heading straight out into traffic. Scared the bejeebus out of me, fuck."
Klaus shook his head. "No, you didn't stop me. Originally. But she sent me back a little earlier and gave you the do-over. Nice of her, really." Maybe he should revise his opinions about the girl, honestly. At least she hadn't sent him back in traction in the hospital.
Diego cleared his throat. "Klaus. Were you killing yourself to talk to God? Was it strategic?"
"Mmm," Klaus said, and rested his head against Diego's shoulder.
"Talk to me, buddy," Deigo said. "Now that you've got Claire back, is it going to stop?"
"I guess so," Klaus said. "God was pretty clear about not wanting to see my face again. If I don't hold up my part of the deal, I don't know what she might do about hers."
Diego swore softly.
Klaus wasn't sure why Diego was still hugging him, but he didn't want him to stop.
They all went out for breakfast in the morning.
Vanya played Tic Tac Toe with Claire on the back of the disposable paper place mat. Five drank three cups of black coffee and did not murder the waitress who offered him the kids' menu. Diego never let Klaus get out of arm's reach, and maneuvered him into sitting between himself and Allison.
And everyone kept smiling at Klaus.
Allison, beaming, every time she caught his eye. Luther, shyly, over his two plates of scrambled eggs. Five, with an ironic twist, but fondly. Vanya, after Claire beat her with three X's along a diagonal. Diego, making a blueberry and melon happy face on Klaus's waffle.
Klaus wasn't used to this. Wasn't used to feeling like anything other than a disaster.
The familiar black waves of grief and loss still washed over him every time he thought about Ben or Dave. So, every three or four breaths.
But. Then he looked up again, and saw another sibling's smile. Saw Claire, safe. Still with a lot of pain ahead of her, poor kid—Klaus didn't think anybody had explained to her yet about what had happened to her father or her world—but anyway, she was safe, thanks to Klaus and the choice he'd made.
And the fact that God didn't like him, which was fucking hilarious.
He still wanted to scream. He still wanted to cry. He still wanted to stuff himself full of booze and pills until it all went away.
But. He also wanted to stay at the table and keep catching his siblings' eyes and drinking in their smiles. He wanted to see Claire and Allison giggling together and know that he'd given them that.
Klaus was still pretty far from okay. But for the first time since Dave handed the dog tags back and told him he'd already enlisted, he thought maybe he could get there.