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The text comes so early that Vanya’s almost surprised that he’s awake - then she realizes, just a heartbeat late enough to make her feel guilty, that he hasn’t been to sleep yet. thanks for leaving some of it out, it says. The number isn’t saved in her contacts, but Klaus goes through phones about as fast as he goes through men - losing them, breaking them, getting them stolen or shattered against a wall by a jealous boyfriend - and there’s really only one person that has any reason to be thanking her right now. She doesn’t reply. She doubts he’ll text her again. --Klaus was sweet and squeamish as a child, she’d written. Our father realized what Klaus could do earlier than almost anyone else. Luther’s powers were obvious when he picked up the dining room table at age two, but Klaus’ first words were babbling at ghosts in Hungarian, grasping at them with his chubby baby fingers.That was all true. She suspects that their father knew early on that she was useless, but he’d always said that Klaus had developed early. He liked reminding the others of that: even Number Four has impressed me on occasion - unlike you, Two, or you, Number Six. He particularly enjoyed comparing Klaus to sensitive, stuttering Diego, as though he knew that they would never compare each other without prompting. (He’d been lying. Ben had impressed him and horrified him in equal measure. Ben had impressed them, too, but for different reasons; he was the only one brave enough to stand up to their father, in his quiet way. Diego didn’t have to feel his knife ripping through someone’s trachea, Luther could throw someone through a window and not have to see the aftermath; Ben felt everything, saw everything, all the wild parts of him smelling blood and hungry for more. Ben wanted to stop.)
I think that the ghosts must have left him alone when he was young. I can’t imagine that anyone could grow up tormented by the dead and keep their sanity intact. From what any of us could tell, our father included, Klaus’ visions and possessions got worse as he hit puberty. The drug use started just after we turned sixteen, three years after Five disappeared and just after Ben died.
He and Ben had been the closest of any of us. Our father put them through the most trials and experiments; they shared a bond that none of the rest of us understood. Looking back on their relationship as an adult, it’s impossible to miss the signs of complex post-traumatic stress disorder that they both exhibited; they each may have slept three hours a night before they woke up screaming, and they each struggled with cognitive skills - Ben was overly cautious and a perfectionist while Klaus had (and still has) an inability to focus and almost no judgment and planning skills. They helped each other more than anyone could have individually assisted them, and Ben’s death sent Klaus into a tailspin. Tailspin was such a gentle word for it. She’d written and written and written, unable to stop once she’d started - about Klaus’ breakdowns, the deep, bloody furrows he’d gouge into his forearms and thighs when he’d have an episode, the pills their mother would smilingly force into his mouth, cooing you’ll feel better, Klaus over his sobs and watching him with her dead eyes until he swallowed past them. That was where it started. He must have realized that when his father shoved risperidone down his throat, and haloperidol after the risperidone stopped working effectively; drugs made it stop, drugs made the ghosts go away. They made Ben go away. (Sometimes Vanya thought she was the only one that noticed. She was a ghost in their own home; she heard Klaus sobbing in his room when no one else did, heard him pleading for someone to go away, to please him alone, please please please just go. When he started sneaking out - it was before Christmas, only just - she was the only one that noticed until Pogo mentioned it to her in passing, asking if she knew whether Master Klaus had left through the window or the back door this evening. Their father had never brought it up, not once.)
After Ben died, Klaus alienated himself from the rest of the family. I was always the sibling that the others came to when they felt alone; I had been alone our entire lives, the sole outsider, and they came to me to bemoan our shared circumstances in fits of teenaged pique. It never lasted long, but I liked the company, even if it was short-lived.
Klaus was different. We would leave the Academy together because we knew no one would notice until morning. We wandered the city, and I would pretend not to understand what he was doing when he ducked down an alley and came back fifteen minutes later with glassy eyes and a sweet, vacant smile. Sometimes he would stay sober, though; during one of these occasions, we found our favorite street food cart - it had been Ben’s favorite, too - and he came out to me over bungeoppang while we sat on a park bench. She hadn’t written that she’d known. She’d left it at that, and had sat at her kitchen table and thought about the cigarette burns littering Klaus’ arms and ankles and thighs after Ben had died, about the way Diego had followed him around like a puppy with his dark, sad eyes, about the purple-red marks on Klaus’ neck underneath the collar of his shirt and the spaced-out giggle he’d offered when she’d furrowed her brow and run her fingertips over them. About the marks on Diego, too, the vicious hickeys sucked into his jaw, the scratches scored down the backs of his arms. She might not have put it together if she hadn’t known about Luther and Allison - if everyone hadn’t known about Luther and Allison, no matter how hard they tried to keep it a secret. There weren’t many secrets in the Academy. Their father never tried to stop it; raising seven teenagers with limited contact to the outside world meant that certain things were inevitable, she supposes, and Reginald was clever enough to expect that. But that wasn’t something for the public to know. Not something for anyone outside of the Academy. The abuse, the experiments, the torture - that was all expected, all palatable; one can’t make a superhero without breaking a few children, as the saying went. Adoptive siblings sleeping together took things to a distasteful level, especially when those siblings were boys. It would hurt sales. The final paragraph in Klaus’ chapter started, Klaus overdosed for the first time while he was still living in the Academy. It had been in the spring, the ground just beginning to thaw. Their mother had answered a phone call and approached their father, saying Sir, Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy is on the telephone, smiling her uncertain something-is-wrong smile and watching him with unblinking eyes.
I was the only one home, other than our father. The rest of the team was at a training exercise; Klaus had apparently slipped off halfway through and taken off downtown, checking himself into a motel room. The desk clerk found him overdosing an hour later and called an ambulance. The toxicology screen told our father that Klaus had heroin and alcohol in his system. We were eighteen years old.
Looking at Klaus in a hospital bed was so much different than seeing him in our everyday lives. There, it was impossible not to notice how thin he’d become. He had always been slender, but since Ben’s death he’d grown increasingly smaller, replacing meals with anything that he could pilfer from our father’s private bar - our father never drank and, in fact, abhorred alcohol, but he kept it for appearances’ sake. We all knew that he was drinking, and some of us suspected his drug use, but the jump was shocking. (It wasn’t. Not much in her book had been an outright falsehood, but that was one of them; they’d known that Klaus was using cocaine and amphetamines, and the heroin had been an unsavory surprise for their father and no one else.)She had stayed. He didn’t wake up while their father was there, like something in his subconscious was protecting him from the wrath he would face if he did. She had stayed, and when Klaus’ eyes opened, she had said hey, had said, do you know what happened? And Klaus had looked around for a moment, had looked down at the IV in his bony hand, had said, oh, no, no, no, and something had dropped from her throat to sink down into her stomach, watching while he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes like he’s trying to stop tears, no, no, because she hadn’t wanted her suspicion to be so right. --Some of it is still ours, she texts back the next morning. Klaus never replies, and when she finally dredges up the courage to hit call, the voice on the other end of the line informs her flatly that the number she’s dialed is no longer in service and suggests that she try again. It doesn’t matter. He knows.