It isn't the first time. 'Course not. That would be too...easy. Too easy for him. Things can't be easy.
He's thirteen when it happens the first time. Thirteen and happy and not quite to damaged yet.
Klaus remembers Ben beating him at poker before Sir Stern-ass Hargreeves interrupts, "Number Four, come with me. It's time for training."
"What about me?" Ben was so hopeful sounding, Dad only said he wanted Klaus, not Ben.
"Number Four, hurry up," was the answer.
He's thirteen when it happens the first time. When he follows his father to the secluded mausoleum in the back of a cemetery. The ghosts are already watching him, watching him both, but they stay at bay. They don't know what he can do yet.
They are still dead, though, and he is still only thirteen, and he sees all these pale bodies staring at him and waiting.
"Dad, what are we doing here? What do you want me to do?"
He's thirteen the first time Hargreaves announces to the dead that his son can see them, hear them, help them and then locks him in the small zombie container of cement.
They all surround him. He tries to make himself invisible in the corner but he can't because that isn't how this works. And he plugs his ears so he can't hear them, but that isn't how this works. And he cries so his father will let him out, but that isn't how this works.
And they've heard his name now, so they know how to haunt him properly.
Klaus. Klaus, listen to me. Look at me. Klaus, help me! Klaus! Klaus! Klaus!
He's thirteen and it's an eternity the first time. His father leaves him there for a day while the spirits scream his name, their eyes are dead and their bodies are mangled as an echo of their bodies' decaying. They're old and young and unborn and the wailing deafens him.
He can't talk, he can barely move, he can't even cry anymore when Hargreaves opens the door.
"Three more hours," the man says and he does not return until morning.
He's thirteen the first time he returns home from the cemeteries. He goes to his room and sits on his bed.
They've followed him. He goes to his bed and pulls the covers tight over his head and he wails right back at them because he is terrified and there are dead men and women and criminals and children and hags in his room.
And then someone is shaking him and he's surprised to find that it's Diego forcibly yanking the blanket from his grasp and grabbing his shoulders.
"Klaus, what is it," he demanded. "Why w-w-won't you sh-s-shut up?"
As soon as he feels Diego's hands on his shoulders and they're solid, steady, living, he throws himself onto his brother and cries. Diego stays with him that night until they both fall asleep and then never talk about it again.
He's thirteen the first time he drinks himself into oblivion. It isn't that hard, he finds, to sneak into Dad's personal stock of relief-juice and drown the voices in wonderful hot alcohol. He's positively ecstatic when the ghosts go away. So much so, that he doesn't even care that his father finds out immediately and drags him back to the cemetery the same day.
He's drunk out of his mind and he can't see or hear the ghosts, so he can't even care when the condemning doors close and block out his light.
He's still thirteen when he meets his first hangover and the ghosts come screaming back.
He's fourteen when he learns the ins and outs of weed, cocaine, marijuana, and other blissful narcotics that fog over the voices even better than alcohol. Because after the first time, the alcohol only muted his tormentors for as long as he could stay hammered which became harder and harder to manage as his tolerance increased and his ability to hide it decreased.
So he's fourteen when Luthor finds them under his bed and he's too far gone to care when Number One plays at older brother and chews him out before going to Dad. He actually laughs as Luthor leaves because it's hilarious that Luthor thinks he is threatening. That he thinks Dad is good.
And then the police are called and he's sent to the hospital and they take all of his salvation and suddenly it isn't so funny anymore when he's handcuffed to the hospital bed and he goes through his first withdrawal and the ghosts return to his side.
He's sixteen when it happens for the last time because Hargreeves has learned that he's a lost cause. A disappointment. Luthor doesn't even bother ratting him out anymore. Missions? Nah, he was never very helpful in the first place, the only thing he could do was explain to the newly slaughtered bad guys that, yes, they were dead now. No, he couldn't do anything about it. And, sorry, it wasn't like he preferred talking to them dead rather than alive, so no, he wasn't really a part of it anyway.
The last time is the worst time because that time he has also just gotten out of actual police custody for the first time and they took his drugs for the millionth time.
So he isn't even high when the voices come back.
He's seventeen when he leaves and he leaves with Diego because Diego sometimes gave a crap about what happened to him, even if no one, not even Ben, actually listened to him anymore.
Ben didn't agree with his recreational activities at all. So Ben doesn't talk to him anymore. Not until...well.
So he's seventeen when he leaves with Diego, and then Diego goes to do something with his life. And he just lands himself in the alleyways and at rundown hotels and in the slums where he can drink and smoke and snort and party until he can't see straight, let alone see the ghosts at his back.
Let alone see the man who'd been watching him when
He's seventeen and he calls Diego to pick him up from an apartment in the higher-end part of town and he's covered in his own blood among other shameful things he doesn't want to name, and the problem is he doesn't know how he got to the apartment and he doesn't know what happened and he doesn't want to think about what he did. What someone else did to him.
Diego picks him up and they don't even talk. His brother just takes him to his place and he showers and Diego throws a crappy microwave dinner at him and then begins to yell at him delicately about how he's just hurting himself. And he avoids talking about the condition he found his brother in.
And then he finds that among the clothes he was left with, he has a box full of carefully rolled blunts that he's pretty certain weren't there the morning previously, and the second he pulls one out, Diego throws him out.
He is twenty when they all return to the mansion for the first time. Luthor is still there. Allison has just left.
They return because Ben is dead.
Dad won't tell them why. Luthor won't say a word.
He almost doesn't go because he doesn't want to see what his brother looked like when he died, but then it occurs to him that he has enough drugs to stone a whale, so what the hell, right?
He's really high, but he has been for years now, so he's surprisingly functional. Functional enough, apparently, that he can still see Ben when they can get to the courtyard where they bury him.
Dad leaves right away. Diego takes Mom inside. The girls go after that. And he tries to leave with them and then he sees his brother. But he isn't mangled. He doesn't look mutilated. Just like himself. Like Ben, only a little older than the last time he saw his brother.
"How th-" he looks around, waiting for the rest of the ghosts to appear too, but it's just Ben. Only Ben. He looks at the cigarette in his fingers and throws it down, reaching for a different one in his pocket. "Not you. Nope. Just some drug-induced...uh...siblings. Not you. Not you."
"Klaus," Ben says and he doesn't look, just lights up another blunt.
"Nope. Not you. Nope."
"Klaus, look at me. Klaus."
"You aren't real," he decides and begins to walk away. "That's not how it works. It isn't supposed to happen."
And then Ben is in front of him glaring. "You asshole, look at me."
And he looks.
"I'm here, okay? I don't know why, but I am."
He's twenty when Ben finds out about his panic attacks when he isn't under something. It isn't always about the physical fire that hurts him so bad, because he's twenty and it's been four years since he's been there, but he goes there again in his dreams.
And Ben just stares at him because he can see them too, now. And then his doesn't say anything when he lights up a blunt, gets himself a drink, and steals the phone and headphones from his current residence and turns up the noise so that he can't even hear Ben.
He's twenty when he is so drunk that he ends up telling Ben why it gets so bad sometimes. And Ben is tired of his junkie-crap that he yells at him that,
"Too bad, Klaus! You can overcome it. You can get better. You can make them go away, you just have to stop killing yourself."
He laughs because wouldn't it be so much more fun to die? But every time he's tried before, somehow, Diego has found him or Luthor has hounded him or Ben has screamed at him until he can't take the screaming and would rather be blissfully unaware than dying slowly and hearing his brother wailing like the ghosts.
He's thirty when Dad dies, and honestly, it's one of the best things that's happened to him in a while.
Ben doesn't share this sentiment. He doesn't see Ben until later when his brother is sulking and sad and really, he's just hungry and coming off a high.
But Dad is dead and Diego is letting him tag along and he has gotten to see all his siblings again, and he really does love them. And, long as Dad's not around, who cares if he crashes in his old room for a while - just out of rehab he doesn't have a place yet anyway - and he has stashes of drugs all over. So after he hangs with Diego, he can sleep like a baby.
"Saving lives, baby," Diego says.
"Toaster waffles," he tells Ben. Ben doesn't answer. He's still upset.
He's thirty and it is not the first time someone has beaten him so hard and screamed at him to say something they want to hear.
And of course, they ended up with him. Ben shakes his head and disappears for a time because even Ben can only handle so much of him being tortured, and then Ben comes back when the voices start again. Ben stays with him and doesn't leave anymore.
The mausoleum. The mausoleum is the closet and now he's thirteen and it's the first time and the voices are driving him insane.
But then he gives his captors pause. He's...sober. And he just...did something semi-important. The bodies are everywhere and he can only understand some of them, and Ben is with him, and for some reason, he's being tortured, but he's almost okay.
And then he escapes and finds the case.
He's thirty when the world is ending and the only thing stopping him from ending with it his Five's hand in his.
And he finds that for the first time in a long time, he's sober, there are no voices, he doesn't feel ill, he can feel Ben's hand on his shoulder, and he feels like he can take this. He can take what comes next. He can do it.
Klaus has Ben. He has his siblings. He does not have his father and the mausoleum is long gone. And he feels like he has a future. Under different more drug-induced circumstances, it would be funny. It takes the end of the world to make him feel ready for the future.
Klaus could do this. With his family.
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