Chapter 10

Vanya squinted and blinked as dim lights slowly stopped swimming across her view and focused into a streetlight. She groaned and pressed a hand to her head, trying to keep her brain from sloshing out. She felt a full body jostle and then realized she was being placed on the cold pavement. Flashes of following her brother across town, getting lost in an abandoned asylum, seeing Ben through a crack in the door.

"It's okay, Vanya" she heard a familiar voice say and assumed she'd gasped or made some kind of distressed noise. "It's me; it's Ben. I've got you."

"Klaus," she finally managed to form a word. "He's…"

"I know."

She could hear the regret in Ben's voice and knew her fears had been confirmed. Something was seriously wrong with their brother, more so than usual. She wasn't quite sure what had initially tipped her off, just a feeling. Klaus could be unintentionally cruel with his humor and devil-may-care attitude, but he had never intentionally hurt them. Plus he'd been so reserved and dark following their encounter with the fire-starter, and maybe some of it was partially her power, but she could swear his vibe had changed, like she could sense it.

"Why?" she asked simply, feeling tears slipping free from the heat in her eyes; she wasn't entirely certain if they were from the pain in her head or pain in her heart. Ben shifted her more against his chest, brushing the hair that wasn't matted with blood from her face.

"It's complicated," he explained gently. "The short of it is that red-headed woman from the office explosion did something to him that split his spirit or personality, whatever you want to call it - he's walking around without his conscience so to speak."

Vanya sat up a bit on her own, picking at some of the dried blood on her cheek as Ben's explanation soaked in. "He's a walking Id?"

A small smirk pulled at Ben's lips followed by a nod. "I've been calling him Id-Klaus to help keep them separate."

Vanya frowned at that. "Them?"

Ben sighed, rubbing at his left shoulder. "So the ego part of his spirit is...still in spirit form."

Vanya blinked at him. "I don't understand, how would you know that?"

"Because I can see him?" he said with squinted eyes. Vanya continued to look at him dumbly. "When his power evolved in the future, apparently it also gave him the ability to possess other people by temporarily transferring his spirit into them."

"What?" Vanya's eyes widened. "That sounds incredibly dangerous! What if he gets stuck?"

"Well...that's actually a good point," Ben hesitated. "Either way, after the explosion, I was out of it. Klaus possessed my body and was able to get me out of the building before the ceiling collapsed."

Vanya rested a hand on her brother's arm. "That's how you got out?"

Ben gave a brief run-through of the entire encounter following the explosion. Vanya was quiet afterward, shifting so she was leaning against the wall of the building they sat next to.

"So...how do we fix this?"

Ben sighed as he regarded their surroundings once more. Once Peter had helped set his shoulder, he'd been able to carry his sister further from the abandoned asylum into an offset alley. Granted, it had still hurt like hell, which made him seriously question his brother's pain tolerance; he had no idea how Klaus had carried Vanya with the dislocated shoulder. Ben felt he'd barely been able to carry her with the shoulder set.

"I think the first step, would be finding a phone. We need to warn the others."

They helped each other get to their feet before Vanya let her fear form into words. "Do you think he'd hurt them?"

Ben met her sad eyes for a long moment. "I think he's hurting. And with his better half missing, I think his normally contained sociopath is willing to do anything to stop the hurt."

"He didn't kill us," Vanya stated, reminding herself more than anything that even though he was doing bad things, he still retained some level of attachment to them...he was still her brother, whether all there or not. "That's has to mean something, right?"

Ben wrapped his good arm around his sister and turned them toward the alley entrance. "I hope so."

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Klaus pressed further into the tiny alcove he had squeezed himself into, face turned away from the intense heat that rushed past his little hidey hole like an exploding sun. It was the seventh time he'd had to find shelter from the odd phenomenon.

Stepping out of Ben had been like stepping through a wall between worlds. He'd frozen, immediately fearful he'd wound up back on the space whale but quickly realized he was standing amidst a close knit city made of an obsidian-like mineral. All the buildings were connected and had dome shapes about them with columns and made him feel like he was walking through an ancient city.

He'd thought the city to be abandoned but as he'd tiptoed his way through the narrows, he started to notice oddly shaped, dark faces disappearing from view whenever he'd catch them in his peripheral. He got the impression he was the predator here.

Then the fireballs came.

The first time they'd rushed through the city like meteors shooting through the atmosphere, he'd heard the distant rumbling of their approach first. Then a hot wind rustled against him. When he turned to look down a long walkway, he saw the quickly approaching wall of light and he almost too late ducked into an open entryway. The firewall had blasted through the streets giving off intense heat which didn't seem to bother the structures themselves and shielded those behind the walls.

Once the fire had passed, he hesitantly made his way through the streets once more, entering abodes and buildings to find them suspiciously empty. He thought he could hear foreign whispers but they stopped whenever he called out.

That was how Klaus spent the next three days; searching a city whose citizens refused to show themselves and had an incredible knack for hiding, and avoiding the horizontal firestorms as he'd taken to calling them.

On the third day he'd climbed to the top of a tower to get a better look at the surrounding landscape, what he saw shook him to his core. The black city was in the middle of what used to be a mountain. They, whoever they were, had built the city out of the mountain itself and all that remained was the surrounding wall of the crater. Beyond the rock wall a ginormous, spherical wall of flame burned orange, it filled a large portion of the sky and seemed to pierce through the very ground of what lie beyond the mountain.

Klaus blinked hard, slapped his cheek and spent several long minutes trying to comprehend what he was seeing. The sun that had somehow broken through this planets core didn't seem to have any effect on the city, other than the random fiery explosions that would erupt from the sun and burst through the city walls. He couldn't understand how they weren't all a melty mess or immediately disintegrated from the heat.

Klaus slid down the inner wall of the tower as another firestorm hit. He sat with his knees bent, elbows on his knees and his head buried between them. He'd tried more times than he could count times to get back to his world, to his family. Nothing seemed to be working though. He just couldn't seem to access his power, which made him wonder if this was how Five had felt, alone in an empty world, powers useless.

He'd taken Ben's body quite easily and then made quick work of popping his shoulder out of socket, just like he'd learned at the Kinky Kristmas Convention. Although, dislocating his shoulder then had been more of an honest mistake by a rough handler who didn't respect safe words, but it had worked in Klaus' favor as it had allowed him to wiggle out of the restraints and make a run for the opposite end of the convention hall where the happy pills were being handed out.

Klaus had wiggled Ben out of the straight jacket and had planned on self-setting it via the concrete wall, but then the door lock clicked and he didn't even hesitate; he grabbed the front of Id-Klaus' shirt and swung him around into the concrete wall. His Id didn't even have a chance to be surprised as his head smacked against concrete and he dropped.

Klaus didn't check to see if his body was still alive, he bolted out the door and made his way down the hallway to Vanya's room. He unlocked it and rushed through, making quick but painful work of dragging his sister with his one good arm under hers, backwards through the asylum. He crashed through the partially broken front door and didn't stop until he'd gone a couple blocks through back alleys. He finally stopped in one such backstreet, his lungs burning along with the fire in his left arm.

He almost felt bad for leaving Ben's body in such a state to come back to. But if his Id were to somehow find them, Ben was better suited for controlling the inner beast; Klaus feared if he unleashed it, it would hurt Vanya or go so out of control it ended up killing Ben. Already Klaus could feel the swirling darkness twisting in his gut - well, his brother's gut. The eldritch beast was not happy with his intrusion, it didn't understand and Klaus feared if he stayed much longer, the beast would emerge on it's own. With that thought, Klaus had taken a deep breath in and then exhaled, feeling himself step backward.

Backward into a confusing, foreign world where suns dissected partial planets without burning them and light shifted and moved like curtains of chiffon wavering in darkness. Klaus sniffed and pressed his palms into his eyes. That had been three days ago...well, days was purely theoretical of course; he had no way to keep time here other than the dull knocking sound that reminded him of a metronome. It seemed to come from somewhere within the tower and was steady; and after a lot of nothing, he couldn't stop his brain from counting along with the ticks.

The entire place was maddening and made his insides want to claw their way free from his skin. His palms slid from his eyes to his ears as he rocked gently, trying to impede the building panic attack he felt coursing through his veins, building up pressure in his lungs. He felt his vocal chords grate as he let loose a frustrated scream, his voice lost amidst the firestorm rushing past.

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"And you can't remember anything from when he possessed you?"

"For the seventh time," Five turned annoyed eyes to Diego, "No. If you ask me again, I'm going to ram this pencil through your dickhole."

The siblings were pouring over their father's old journal notes and records in his old office; each of them sat in a circle on the floor around the stacks of papers and books. They'd been at it for an hour before they heard the tell-tale clicking of Pogo's cane.

"Can I be of any assistance?"

"Depends," Luther grumbled, raising tired eyes, "Can you think of an old abandoned building dad would've taken Klaus too?"

Pogo drew in a deep, contemplative breath, his eyes searching the decorated wall above the siblings heads. "You're father took Master Klaus to several places for special training," he announced, his voice carefully even, not necessarily offering any kind of approval toward Reginald's parenting but also not wanting to speak poorly toward the man who made him. "Only one of those buildings have since been abandoned, however, there was one location they visited that was already abandoned nearly thirty years ago."

Realizing he had captured all of their focus, Pogo continued. "It was the old Chaussey Asylum, shut down after years of reported abuse, neglect and gross mistreatment of it's patients." Pogo's eyes drooped behind his glasses, shame wrinkling his brow. "Your father believed the ghosts there would have a stronger connection to the living due to the violent nature of many of their deaths and therefore easily accessible for one such as Master Klaus."

Luther looked perplexed, his forehead wrinkled and mouth hanging partially opened. "Dad took Klaus to an insane asylum? As a kid?"

"I believe the training at the asylum was a one time occurrence. Suffice to say...it did not go well."

"What does that mean?" Allison spoke up.

"You know what it means," Five said pointedly, closing the journal he'd been scrolling through. "Unexplained injuries; random illnesses that kept us quarantined for several days." He let his gaze bounce between them. "We've all had special training. Some of ours was easier than others," he eyed Luther with pursed lips.

Diego's dark eyes found Pogo's. "He didn't fall down the stairs wearing heels, did he?"

Pogo's head dipped as he leaned further onto his cane. "No."

"Wait," Allison leaned in, "are you talking about when his jaw was wired shut and he broke his ribs?" Diego responded by tossing the stack of papers he'd been going over onto the pile. "Why didn't he say anything?" Allison went on. At Diego's frown, she held a hand up. "I mean after they unwired his jaw."

"What's he gonna say?" Diego snapped. "A bunch of insane ghosts beat the shit out of him? Who would believe him? Hell, he's been telling you for years he could see Ben and no one believed him." Diego turned his glare on Luther. "You were so wrapped up in being a dad's number one, you didn't give a shit about what he did to the rest of us."

"Don't start this again," Luther shook his head with warning.

"Did you know he used to lock me in a water tank with no air for hours on end just to see how long I could hold my breath?" Diego accused more than confessed. "Bastard would go get himself a cup of tea while I panicked underwater, wondering if I would make it out of the tank this time or not."

Luther became very quiet with wide eyes. They'd never been allowed to speak of their special training with anyone much less each other, Reginald's rules. Luther had no idea as to the trials his siblings had gone through, and by the look of Allison's shocked expression, neither had she.

"He used to lock me in the downstairs washroom for days without food or water." Five offered since they were in sharing mode. "Told me I could eat once I spatial-jumped to a certain location."

Allison turned a questioning look to Pogo who offered a small, sad smile, unable to meet her gaze. Luther, who had been sitting very still, finally pushed to his feet and squared his shoulders as he towered over the much shorter assistant.

"We need a tranquilizer and the address of this asylum," Luther demanded, his voice firm. Pogo nodded and turned to acquire the requested items. "And tell mom we'll be late for dinner.

...tbc