A/N: And now, everyone's favourite character!
Read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Blargh.
"I know… yep, I know exactly how you feel, Luther. My dreams have been astonishingly weird and fucked up as well, but let's not dwell on that, okay? That's for my customers to deal with. No, you didn't wake me up, you don't have to feel guilty about that. You just have a nice lie down and remember your mantra, big guy. Keep saying it to yourself and stay away from those bars. Just remember, we're all proud of you, and I'm proud of you. Now, keep those eyes on the sunny side of sunny d. No, I don't know what that means either, Luther, I'm running on about three hours of sleep. Look, we'll talk about it on Saturday, okay? I'll bring up some cashew butter, some focaccia, and some of the really good coffee, the stuff you can only find on the black market, and we'll make a day of it. No, sorry, no menudo. Yeah, I'm pretty bummed about it, too: five years and not a single bowl of menudo in sight. But hey, at least there's chocolate pudding, so my cheeks are nice and hairless. See, I knew I could get a laugh out of you sooner or later! You get some sleep, now, Luther. Okay? Okay. Nighty-night…"
Klaus hung up, blinking rapidly as he struggled to force the vision of the park out of his brain.
Not for the first time that evening, he wondered if he'd ended up in a timeline when he'd never gotten off the drugs, but he'd be damned if he knew what kind of drugs could make you see the kinds of things that lingered with him even now.
By now, he was no longer surprised that he'd managed to remain sober this long in the face of everything that had happened here. Drug prices were through the roof in this reality, but then again, even if he'd found a cheap source, Klaus still wouldn't have worked up the nerve to take another dose. Now that he was mortal again, he needed to be careful about his health unless he wanted to find himself back in the afterlife for good… and given that this was a world where you could be shot in the back for walking home at the wrong time of day, it paid to keep your wits about you.
No, what surprised him was his success: the fact that he'd been able to land on his feet and actually bring in a regular salary for the family finances was almost beyond belief.
After they'd realized they'd lost their powers, everyone had scattered in all directions in pursuit of God only knew what, and Klaus had been left chasing after Luther. After all, the big doofus had been so determined to find Sloane that he was already forgetting that he wasn't superstrong and supertough anymore, so it was his job to keep an eye on him – again. On the upside, at least he hadn't been going through withdrawal pains at the time. For the next three days, Luther had fought with all his might to get access to Reggie, hoping that the old bastard could give him an explanation for what happened to Sloane or at the very least an opportunity to take revenge, but without his powers, there was only so much the big guy could do against Reginald Hargreeves' security forces. The last attempt got him as far as the first elevator in the Hargreeves' tower and ended with him getting beaten to within an inch of his life, to the point he was lucky enough to stagger out of the lobby with a pair of broken arms; having managed to get away with just a black eye, Klaus was left hauling him home by himself.
"Home" turned out to be the pokey little apartment that Viktor had lived out of back in the original timeline, the one place that the family knew well enough to lodge in while they tried to work out what the hell to do next, and as luck would have it, the one place they knew they could afford the rent on. Ben had mugged some unlucky pedestrian for enough money to pay the landlord's advance, and all of them had set about struggling to find out the next course of action.
It had all gone wrong in short order. Luther and Diego realized they couldn't play hero in this reality, Five had gotten pinched, Lila needed a place of her own to stay now that she had a bun in the oven, Ben still hated everyone's guts, and Viktor was still depressed over everything that had happened in the last few days – and who could blame him? The guy hadn't even had time to mourn for the hausfrau he'd been banging back in the 60s before Allison had gone and murdered said hausfrau's grown-up son.
And while everyone had been hell-bent on going their separate ways all over again, Klaus had been cruising around the shadier parts of town in search of fuck only knew what, until he'd found himself blundering into the Red Level.
You didn't expect corporate police states to have a thriving red-light district, but it turned out that ol' Reggie had realized the basic fact that you couldn't completely squash vice without having it ooze up in weird places where you really didn't want to find it. So, the city was home to a well-established hub of gambling, prostitution, drug dealing, pornography, and all the underworld activity that went with them, just so Reggie could concentrate all the filth in one place; that way, he'd know where to look if anything went to shit on his watch. Of course, the curfews were still to be respected and anyone who was stuck in the Red Level when the patrols kicked off would have to stay there overnight if they didn't feel like risking a bullet to the kneecap on the way home, but other than that, nothing was forbidden; as long as the gangsters who ruled the district kicked a percentage of the profits upstairs to Reggie, everything ran like clockwork.
One way or another, if you know which street to seek out, which alleyway to take a shortcut through, and which manhole cover to open, you'd find a colossal underground street stretching off into the perpetual midnight, a neon-lit kingdom of brothels, strip clubs, porn theatres, adult bookstores, casinos, bookies, opium dens, drug laboratories, speakeasies… and surprisingly enough, psychic parlours.
It had been that last one that had really gotten his attention on his first visit: he'd been feeling pretty glum about how badly things had gone since the Hotel Oblivion, knowing he had no skills that could allow him safety in this new reality, and no way of getting by except through his powers. But then he'd seen the glowing sign proclaiming YOUR FUTURE TOLD! TAROT AND PALMS READ, SEANCES PERFORMED! DON'T LET YOUR FUTURE PASS YOU BY!
Ben was right, Klaus had thought, even as the rest of his mind had lit up in excitement. People who use that many exclamation marks are nuttier than squirrel sandwiches.
Before the month was out, Klaus was a full-time resident of the Red Level and earning more than enough to keep himself afloat and contribute to the family emergency fund, and why not? He knew the spiritualist business well, having practiced it himself when he'd been low on cash and desperate enough to turn con artist for the pennies that'd make the difference between a warm bed and homelessness. Hell, in the 60s, he'd made an entire cult out of nothing more than pseudo-mystical confidence tricks, pop culture references, and the occasional real supernatural feat. Even now that he'd lost his powers, he still knew how to read palms, interpret Tarot cards, even do the odd bit of mystical nonsense over the crystal ball.
And in this new world, people needed mysticism. Uncertainty was everywhere, rents fluctuated wildly among the poor, corporations could randomly send the price of essentials through the roof on a whim, employment wasn't always a guarantee even if you had skill and talent, and if you left it too late for your evening journey home, you ran the risk of being assaulted, arrested, or even executed for breaching curfew. And in place of all the concrete certainty that the hellscape had refused to provide, people came flocking to the fortune tellers, not really caring if they were fellow believers or just con artists.
Klaus, though, was both.
He knew there was an afterlife – one so vast it could encompass multiple histories and allow his mother in one timeline to watch every death he'd suffered in all iterations of reality. He even knew there was a god – one that just so happened to be a pissy little girl who hated his guts and rode around on a piece-of-shit bicycle. It was impossible for him not to believe.
It was just that the truth wasn't something anyone in their right mind was going to pay top dollar for. Nobody really wanted to know that you could spend all eternity watching TV and eating pizza in the middle of a desert, running a barbershop in the middle of a forest, or wasting time on a bouncy castle or some such shit. People wanted something a bit more dramatic, a bit more sentimental, or at least a bit more in line with their religious beliefs, provided that said beliefs had survived impact with Reggie's idea of paradise. So, regardless of whether the suckers wanted to know their futures or to speak with their relatives, Klaus spent most of these visits talking out of his ass: your lifeline says this and the Tower says that and the crystal says you will meet a tall dark stranger… it was all nonsense.
But unlike running a cult, which had drawn people desperate for purpose and had required him to put in serious work before people had started handing over the contents of their bank accounts, this job drew people who wanted to be lied to and would be happy to believe anything you said to them, just as long as you gave them the same mystical line of comforting bullshit. And as sad as it was, he couldn't blame any of them for that, not after what he'd seen on the streets.
And with conning people out of money came additional opportunities. Every now and again, one of the crime lords who he paid rent to would ask him for a favour: all he'd have to do was get access to a particular mark with a weakness for the Red Level and steal something off him – a document, a key, an ID card, or something else that Klaus' landlords could make use of. Sometimes, all Klaus had to do was get the mark to visit his parlour and rob them blind while they were relaxing into his special "precognitive trance" service, but at other times, he'd have to go the extra mile, perhaps getting them drunk at a bar or even spiking their drinks. Once or twice, he'd even posed as a prostitute and waited until the mark was too caught up in the afterglow to notice Klaus rifling through his pockets.
In return, Klaus got a very generous cash bonus and an attaboy from the kingpins who ran the district. He wasn't proud of what he'd had to do in order to get that far, not that he'd had much in the way of pride to begin with… but the money he earned on these extra jobs had helped pay Viktor's rent, smooth over any disagreements between Ben and Mr Singh, put meat on the table for Diego and Lila, keep their daughter in daycare, and pay for Luther's rehab. So, as ugly as it was, Klaus could live with it.
More than once, Klaus had wondered what Ben would think of this. Time and again, he'd imagined the reproachful looks and stern reprimands he'd get for once again finding himself in a career where he fucked people out of their money, even Ben's increasingly desperate attempts to get him out of the business and into something more honest. And as embarrassing as it was, Klaus never seemed to find a way of defending his choices in his own imagination, no matter how many times he'd told himself that a non-criminal career had been out of the question in the world as Reginald Hargreeves had designed it. But in reality, of course, Ben wasn't here – not the Ben he'd known the best, anyway, and certainly not the Ben he missed the most.
But then, it wasn't as if his Ben was the only person from his old timeline that he dearly missed.
Once he'd realized he was in a completely different reality to the one he'd left, Klaus had rapidly succumbed to temptation and decided to look up Dave, just to see what had become of him in this universe. He hadn't intended to pay him a visit or anything like that, for that would have been weird even by his lofty standards… but in the end, he'd never gotten the chance to even consider it.
The private detective he'd hired had turned up a very sad story of a Vietnam veteran who'd returned home with a missing leg and permanent loss of hearing in one ear, an embittered firebrand who'd spent the remainder of his life struggling with alcoholism, suicidal depression, and an increasingly corporate-run government that didn't much like veterans who couldn't be of use to their public image. About the best thing that had happened to him since he'd returned home, as far as Klaus could see, was the opportunity to take a shit on his homophobic uncle's grave (though that had gotten Dave arrested, of course).
Dave had ultimately been murdered by Hargreeves Security while "resisting arrest" at a protest march in 2021 and his efforts to rally the people against the mass-defunding of veteran care programs had died with him. The private detective had even given Klaus an address for the cemetery where Dave had been buried, but Klaus had hastily burned that little note before he could make the mistake of committing it to memory; he didn't need any more guilt or grief.
Maybe that was the reason why Klaus was having these weird dreams lately, the ones that ended with him and the rest of the family killing themselves to make a perfect world of sunlit parks. After all, there'd been occasions where he'd been tempted to end it all, especially in the months before he'd found Red Level, especially when he took the current state of his family into account.
Viktor was still grappling with misplaced guilt over Sissy and Harlan.
Ben was still an asshole and taking scores that would almost certainly bring the secret police down on his head.
Five had graduated from the orphanage to prison.
Allison was… no longer a part of the family.
Diego and Lila were constantly worrying about their daughter, the former barely keeping his hero complex under wraps, the latter a neat blend of optimism and crippling depression.
Luther was always in and out of rehab, a fact that never ceased to bemuse Klaus.
And Klaus… well, other than being sober and a wee bit more confident around dead things, he hadn't changed all that much. He was still an eccentric, still a criminal, still living alone, still mourning for Dave, still going nowhere.
The only thing that had really changed about him was that he didn't have his powers anymore, and that felt more and more insulting as the months dragged on: he'd only just realized his full potential, only just learned to banish ghosts at will and realized he was immortal, and then the powers had been snatched away from him. And in hindsight, he couldn't help but feel regret at not reaching that point sooner, at not learning to appreciate his powers earlier in life. After all, he'd never be able to speak to any of his old friends ever again now, not until the day he finally passed on.
But then, it wasn't as if Klaus hadn't brought that on himself, was it?
He'd made the mistake of trusting Reginald, even after all the abuse he'd heaped on him in his original timeline, and all but given him the keys to the Hotel Oblivion. Allison had helped him the rest of the way, as many other members of the family had told her (had Klaus been too harsh with her?), but it had been Klaus' fuckup to begin with.
The dystopia in which so many people had been made to suffer, repressed, oppressed, arrested, tortured, imprisoned for life, exiled, brainwashed, or executed, was his doing. There was no denying that, not when so many of his own repeat customers had ended up on the business end of Reginald's secret police.
A couple of months ago, he'd been repeatedly visited by the Thibedeaus, a lovely older couple who'd stopped by every Friday to hear their fortune. They'd always told him stories of their beliefs, utterly bonkers stories of how the world as they knew it was a poorly made canvas that pieces of the real world kept falling through, and once they'd even claimed that they'd found a few pieces of them, even promising to show him some on their next visit. Klaus had thought they were out of their minds, but he told their future at half-price and encouraged them to come back anytime if they wanted "updates" on their destiny.
And then, just ten days ago, Jean and Gene Thibedeau had vanished. A quick visit to their apartment revealed that the place had been ransacked, with any trace of their identities destroyed and no hint of any strange objects left. All that remained were a few tiny bloodstains on the bedsheets, a broken tooth left where it had fallen, and two sets of furrows in the carpet – courtesy of two unconscious bodies being dragged out of the apartment. Even Klaus could tell what was going on: by the time their terrified neighbours had started wisely pretending that they'd never known the Thibedeaus, the interrogation of Jean and Gene was presumably already over, and their corpses had long since been shovelled into a cremation oven and transformed into yet another plume of smog being belched into the filthy sky.
Yes, all this and more was his fault.
Yes, he probably deserved to die.
Yes, suicide would be reasonable in the face of all the miseries that he and the others had suffered.
Yes, it wasn't as if Klaus didn't know where he'd end up.
And yes, he'd never have to worry about outliving the rest of the family ever again.
And yet…
Somehow, even in the face of all that, the urge to end it all refused to descend upon him. Every time he considered suicide, he always seemed to find something to distract himself with, something to draw his attention away from the gas, the gun, the overdose, or the razor. Looked at one way, he was just too scatterbrained for suicide. But to look at it a different way, he still had so much left to do.
He needed to be there for Luther, to make sure that he was staying strong, to see that the rehab was taking hold.
He needed to be there for Gracie's next birthday, to see that Diego and Lila were being the good parents they so desperately wanted to be.
He needed to be there in case Five was ever allowed visitors, to let him know that the family hadn't forgotten about him.
He needed to be there for Viktor's concerts, to hear the music soaring and see the smile return to his little brother's face as the melody carried him away, to see him forget himself and be happy as the applause rang out across the hall.
And yes, he needed to see if Ben might ever find it in his heart to be a better person.
And besides, it was Friday tomorrow.
Friday was payday. Friday was when the music of the Red Level was the loudest and most joyous. Friday was when there were toasts to the fallen and parties for the living, the kind that even a recovering addict could enjoy. Friday was when there was dancing in the streets and revelry on every corner of the Red Level. Friday was the one day of the week that felt as joyous as the day when they'd saved the world back in Dallas and beaten the Commission - the one day in the Umbrella Academy's strange history where they'd all felt hope.
How could he miss out on that?
Reginald leaned forward and gently banged his head on the console.
What the hell was wrong with Klaus? How could he see the entire point of the dreams that Reginald had been sending them and not commit suicide? How was it possible that this tiny-minded addict had somehow mustered up the willpower to resist the therapy?
Groaning, he massaged his temples and forced himself to think of the next objective.
There was a viable prospect up next; he knew this one hadn't been doing so well in the last few years, so perhaps she would be the one to tip the dominos in the correct direction.
He began initiating the next command sequence, ready to begin the therapy for the next target in line…
A/N: Yeah, I wasn't too happy about what season 4 did with Klaus. I mean, I can theoretically understand the logic, but did they have to make it so mind numbingly boring? I mean, bad enough that they smother the most interesting aspects of Klaus' behaviour and never give him a chance to make him as useful, entertaining, or inspiring as he was in season 1 or 3, but then they decide that the only thing they can do with him is to make him a neurotic, then a prostitute, and then fuck-all.
So, I decided to keep Klaus sober but still have his hands in the odd criminal pie.
Care to guess what's on next and what life will be like for them?