33 years later

Five contemplated the tattered and dirty cover of the copy of Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven that had been poking out of a pile of rumble. He had read it aeons ago - decades ago, Delores corrected and making him acquiesce to her tic for details, especially time-related ones. He still remembered the entire book. It had been his window to the future years of his own past he had missed, his only way of knowing some semblance of how his siblings had grown up to adults - or older teenagers, as it was, for Vanya had transcribed her memories only up to their eighteenth birthdays. The gap from there to most of their deaths at twenty-nine in 2019 was left to his imagination.

Today was his forty-sixth birthday. Of course, there was the possibility he had misscounted some days throughout the decades, but he was fairly aware of the small margin of error. Plus Delores kept the time tabs for him when he forgot. Regardless, he could technically decide it to be October 1st today if he so wished it and if he was prepared to hear Delores' complains. He decided that finding a second copy of the book today was a questionable coincidence, or some form of destiny. Either way, he sat down and flipped back and forth through the pages as if he was trying to find some part he particularly liked. It was hard to find any.

He had imagined his siblings reactions' at the respective times they all read it, and found himself reenacting the possible scenarios in his mind. Shock and embarrassment were likely to have been the main feelings for anyone whose major part of their life had been exposed to society. He stumbled across a passage about him and did feel a strange tingle in his chest for the bluntness and unflourish words, but he could only commend Vanya posthumously for staying true to her resolve to display the bare truth of facts and her perspective evenly throughout the whole book. Being described as 'an arrogant and self-centered prodigy, a stellar product of our Father's methods to create incredibly powerful weapons and proportionally deeply damaged children' wasn't exactly flattering, but it did make her following words on how his disappearance was the first tragic outcome of it all and a painful lesson on everyone feel more meaningful.

He got caught up on some moments of the reading, thinking back on the children he remembered his siblings as, taking his time on that particular passage on Klaus that he had committed to memory before and now found returned as words on paper: 'Klaus was so sweet and vulnerable as a boy, but Father experimented on him the most, and it changed him.'

The Klaus he remembered had indeed been sweet and vulnerable, until that time where Father trained his powers for real. Oh, he had remained sweet after it, but he had also become exponentially more vulnerable. Five remembered that one night where they woke up to the entire mansion shaking (to this day, Five was sure it really had, not that he had dreamed it) because of his screams, and he remembered how Dad's first reaction, rather than attend to Klaus, had been to order Vanya to take her pills to calm her nerves as she was visibly terrified by the startle. He didn't seem to think that maybe sparing some to calm down Klaus might be an option too, and instead, what he had done was place a harsh rebuke on his Number Four and lock him in his room without letting Mom in to soothe him. Five distinctively recalled the near hour of screams - and how, annoying as they were and kept them all up in their rooms, genuinely felt nothing like a tantrum but as terrified pleading - before Dad finally gave in for Mom to calm him down. The next day, Vanya had her pills stolen, and Dad punished Klaus severely for it in a way as horrid as locking him in a mausoleum had been.

All this was retold in the book. Vanya knew it, and so did Five now.

For all the psychology books he had been reading, the 'swim or drown' method seemed to be arguably more productive in its metaphorical practice than in its literal one, and for what he could assume, Klaus simply went down. Five had seen the first symptoms before getting stuck in the future, but it appeared Klaus had grown up to become a full time junkie, complete with turning his sweetness into a tool to lie and con everything and everyone to get the escapism he wanted, in hopes to drown both the ghosts and his trauma in equal measure, Five would assume. He could visualize his Dad's contempt so clearly in his mind, increased by a tenfold as his Number Four sunk deeper down from his esteem.

What a waste.

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Author's Note: The quote about Five is my own creation, but the one about Klaus is from the original comics, I believe. I've only seen it on a gifset edit
tuagifs (DOT tumblr (DOT com / post/184331388552/excerpts-from-extra-ordinary-my-life-as-number

Edit: I've indulged myself a little exploration of that nightmare incident Five recalls. It's called "When your way is the only way"