death is but the next great adventure

[terriblymisguided]

Klaus has a funny relationship with death. Mostly, he's a little surprised that after a childhood spent being a rather worthless superhero, followed by over a decade of addiction and one stupid decision after another, death hasn't come for him yet. It's sort of a miracle that he's even stayed alive this long, given the circumstances .

There have been close calls, of course. Perhaps none closer than that night with Luther where he struck his head against a cement floor and went to wherever that was where he spoke with that bitchy child and his bitchier father.

It had even gotten to the point where Klaus thought that maybe he'd end up cheating death entirely, but it seems that he was wrong about that. Death will come for him. He thinks maybe it's coming for him now.

Death is at the front of his mind, but that isn't surprising. What else is there to think about when you're bleeding out on the sidewalk?



It all happens very fast.

Klaus is walking along the street, sipping iced coffee and gesticulating wildly as he recounts an embellished story about a drag king he'd befriended in Amsterdam, when suddenly there's a wild cacophony of sound. A peaceful afternoon is disrupted when a car runs a red light and crashes into the side of another car, sending it spinning wildly into the front of a bakery just a few yards from where they're standing.

Glass and metal explode outward and litter the ground, which startles Klaus enough that he drops his iced coffee. The plastic breaks as it hits the pavement and the coffee spills, sending the liquid outward to follow the patterns of cracks and grooves in the sidewalk.

"That was a close one, huh?" Klaus says to the person next to him, but his voice sounds strange. His throat tickles and when he tries to clear it, the taste of copper fills his mouth and he coughs a little in surprise, blinking as blood trickles out from the corner of his mouth.

He hears a scream and coughs again, starting to shake as he tips his head down to look at his chest. There's so much blood there suddenly, pumping out of a hole in his chest and staining the thin pink tee that he's wearing. It spreads outwards like the coffee on the ground, growing and taking over whatever dry space it can reach.

Klaus reaches up to touch his trembling fingers to the edge of the jagged wound, coughing again as he slowly turns to look behind him. There's a piece of metal on the ground, rebar shrapnel, and it too is covered in crimson red. “Fuck.”

It's only once he realizes what's happened that it starts to hurt, and he feels like a child that's fallen down but doesn't start to cry until he spots the blood on his knee. It hurts so bad that Klaus can't breathe, or maybe that's because his lungs are filling up with blood.

He gives the person next to him a panicked look and then stumbles backwards, collapsing back onto the pavement and staring up at the sky. There's blood in his throat, pooling in his mouth until he chokes, and a part of him wants to laugh.

All those dangerous missions, all those years ruining himself with drugs. Multiple apocalypses. Frontline combat in Vietnam. All of that and this is how he's going to go-- random happenstance. A horrible accident. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so fucking depressing.

"I'm sorry," he chokes out to the person kneeling at his side, because he loves them and he doesn't want them to have to deal with this. He doesn't want to leave them, but everything is getting dark and cold and he's being called away to somewhere else.

Death is pulling him away, sick of being cheated out of the chance to reap Klaus Hargreeves, and this time, he can't seem to fight it.

This time, he has to go, even though it's the most that he's ever wanted to stay.

Comments

[terriblymisguided]

Viktor's transition had been such a sudden thing, but perhaps not an entirely surprising one. At least not to Klaus. It isn't as if he suspected anything, but when Viktor told him, it made sense. There was just something right about it, and Klaus made the switch in his head with little fanfare at all.

Now, as he bleeds out on the sidewalk, he's glad that he got the chance to know Viktor at all.

"Viktor," he chokes out, shaking as his smallest brother (a spot that Five was recently dethroned of) pulls Klaus into his lap. He hates to see his brother so upset, hates how familiar that look of anguish is. Viktor has suffered so much and Klaus doesn't want him to have to endure this, too.

His eyes are wide and wet as Viktor tries to save him, pushing energy into Klaus's body, but it's too late. The damage is too great, too sudden, and there isn't anything that he can do. But Klaus knows that he tried, that he would do anything, burn the whole world down. He doesn't want any of that. He just wants Viktor to be happy.

Klaus's final act is putting his hand over his brother's, squeezing with everything that he has left, before he goes limp, hands falling to his sides as his eyes go dull, staring lifelessly at the bright blue sky ahead.

He dies knowing with absolute certainty that he's deeply loved, and that alone feels like a gift.

[fifthbeatle]

The sky's brilliant blue is ushered away as Klaus' grip slackens. Viktor wails, a truly awful sound swallowed whole by a violent clap of thunder. It cracks the sky open. Rain is falling in thick sheets, washing away all of the light and warmth that danced through her brother's body. From New York to Amsterdam. From Peru to Vietnam. Viktor is sure all the places his bare feet have touched ground must be ripping open the way his heart is. What is the world without Klaus in it? The time for wanting space from him ended long ago. They were supposed to go shopping tomorrow.

How the hell is he supposed to tell Luther or Five? What will he tell Obi-Wan?

He's clutching his brother close, upside-down, crying into the blood-soaked shirt like it might repair the damage, his body shelter him from the rain. Out of all of the things that have happened, this hurts the most. It's worse than the world ending, worse than when he looked back and heard that Luther didn't make it through to Oblivion. At least Klaus had been there, to give them one more chance.

Viktor chokes when he connects the dots. The rain doesn't stop pouring -- the part of his power Viktor and the others understand the least -- but he does sit up, squinting in the torrential rain. All manner of blood and dirt and rain are a clinging film to his face and clothes. He has never given less of a shit.

"Klaus!" He yelps. Any onlookers must imagine this young boy has moved from acceptance to denial in a record-breaking leap. They don't know what he knows, what Klaus doesn't even know. Unless he somehow came into this power during Viktor's strange dream.

These warring sides rage on: will Klaus revive or not? The rain pours. Viktor sits on his knees, drenched through, his dead brother's head in his lap. He takes Klaus' hands back like Klaus had taken his. If Viktor needed reassurance on the way out, maybe Klaus will need it back in.

The wait is very still. Viktor is not blinking, barely breathing.

[terriblymisguided]

The rain beats down onto Klaus's dead body, mixing with his blood and sending it running into the gutter. Minutes pass as Klaus fights his way back, running through the afterlife, through a seemingly endless void until diving into the sea. As he swims, he can hear Viktor calling his name. He swims and swims, pulling himself through the dark water towards the sound.

Klaus tumbles back into his body like a freefall and he gasps suddenly, back arching as he opens his eyes. They're wide and panicked and his body shakes violently from the cold and the adrenaline of it all. For a moment, he's wildly confused, but Viktor's face is right there above his own, shielding him from the rain.

"Viktor," he chokes out, reaching one hand up to grab at the back of his brother's neck, anchoring himself to the moment. "Am I okay?"

[fifthbeatle]

"Klaus," Viktor laugh-cry-chokes as the last crack of thunder booms through the city. Klaus holds Viktor's neck and Viktor takes Klaus' face in his hands. Faintly, he's aware he's crying on his brother, but the salt mingles with the rain, indiscernible.

"I'm so sorry I didn't tell you." Viktor is angry at himself. It hasn't been very long since he found himself with a headful of new memories and a reshaped chest. What happened (holy shit, it actually happened, somehow) is still a jumble. The truth of it occurs to Viktor in waves. This is the newest one.

"Look." He releases Klaus' face so the man can look down at his rapidly-healing wound. The rain begins to relent, washing away the blood that is no longer pouring out of his brother. Viktor sweeps the hair from Klaus' face, lets him stay reclined on the wedge of Viktor's legs as long as he needs.

[terriblymisguided]

Klaus is soaking wet. Some of it is warm and some of it is cold and he wonders if maybe he pissed himself, but it's just blood. So much blood, soaking his clothes and being washed into the gutter by the rain that he's sure is Viktor's doing.

Viktor, who looks wrecked and is apologizing for something Klaus doesn't understand. He still feels out of it, like his spirit is settling back into its skin suit, and he blinks a few times as Viktor lets go of his face. He looks down as instructed and lets out a surprised huff as the gaping hole in his chest seems to be closing in on itself, turning pink and knitting together at the edges.

"Tell me what?" Klaus asks breathlessly, arms flung out to the side as he stares up at Viktor's face. "What did you do?"

It's a fair question, he thinks. Viktor has brought people back to life before, after all.

[fifthbeatle]

"Nothing!" Viktor yelps. He's an increasingly far cry away from the ball of stilted nerves he once was, but he's raw now, still vaguely stained from Klaus' blood. The rain decrescendos.

"You're immortal." It's no small wonder, and Viktor is appropriately in awe -- and drowning in a shallow pool of rain, blood and guilt. "I saw it in that dream or alternate timeline." Viktor has purposely not brought this up too much until now. Nearly all of it is terrible, and the parts that weren't -- Klaus' inability to stay dead, for example -- are couched in awfulness.

Viktor offers a hand to help Klaus sit up.

[terriblymisguided]

Immortal.

It makes sense, given what he just saw. All those times, he hadn't come close to death. He'd died and come back, over and over again. And Reginald knew about it. The entire time, Dad knew and--

"Wait." He reaches out to take Viktor's hand and lets himself be pulled into a sitting position, wincing at the grating shift of his wound. He pushes his wet hair out of his face and looks up at Viktor, visibly confused. "You found out that I was immortal and you didn't tell me?"

There's probably a reason. It hasn't been that long and Viktor has been dealing with some major stuff of his own, but it still throws him for a moment. "How did you find out? Did something happen?"

[fifthbeatle]

Viktor shifts now to put a gentle arm around his brother to steady him, to offer support. "I didn't mean to keep it from you," Viktor says gently. He sweeps a few wet curls from Klaus' face. It wasn't so long ago that he woke up from a dream that may be memories from another timeline, fully himself and confused. The latter overtook the former. Viktor wanted this change to be real so badly that he pulled the old Hargreeves trick and forgot.

What happened with Allison and the Sparrows doesn't matter, but this was something that was relevant, that could have saved heartache and pain. Will the truth cause Klaus more pain? Is that why Viktor never told him?

"Let's go home and get cleaned up. I'll tell you everything you want to know." That's a promise, and maybe Klaus will detect that, maybe there are things he won't want to know.

[terriblymisguided]

For a moment, Klaus feels a brief but very strong surge of anger because he's always the last to know something, even about himself. But then he looks at Viktor, his shorter hair and sharpened jaw, and deflates. Viktor was dealing with his own complications and, understandably, maybe didn't consider Klaus's newfound abilities to be at the top of the priority pile. It isn't as if he expected that something like this to happen.

"Yeah, okay," he says quietly, letting Viktor help him to his feet. "We can go home and talk all about how dad murdered me for silence." He lets out a dark, humorless laugh and wobbles forward on shaky Bambi legs, leaving a trail of blood as he goes. How absurdly macabre. "Does it still make you a serial killer if you're just killing the same person over and over again?"