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He changes his mind about attending the funeral a half dozen times on the bus ride across town alone. He’s been going back and forth on whether or not to attend since he caught the breaking news broadcast in the back of the ambulance. He changes his mind twice more when he comes close enough to step into the shadow the Academy casts and then again for good measure. It’s not like he’ll be missed.The news of the old monocle’s death had reignited the public’s interest in their dysfunctional little family and invited speculation on their inevitable reunion. They haven’t all been in the same place at the same time since Allison’s wedding and surely they must come together to mourn their father’s passing. Allison and Luther’s homecomings had been plastered all over the local papers courtesy of the photographer camped out across the road from the front doors.‘You’ve come this far,’ Ben says as he wavers on the corner.Going it is. He avoids the front door, not because he thinks anyone will recognise him, but because walking through those doors feels too respectful of the old man’s memory. So he circles the block instead, fishes the baggie of pills from his underwear and pops two for luck before letting himself in through a back door.He says lets, but he means breaks in. He hasn’t been back since he was seventeen and if he ever had keys they weren’t to this particular door. And for the residence of a reclusive billionaire, the lock is astonishingly easy to pick. He eases the door closed behind him and takes a moment to orient himself. They hadn’t used this wing even when they all lived here.The house is exactly as he remembers it; high ceiling-ed, long hallway-ed and cavernously empty. The floorboards creak and his footsteps echo as he makes his way through the abandoned wing. He keeps to the old servants’ stairs and avoids the halls that might lead him to Pogo or Mom or his siblings. He’s not here for reunions; he’s here to get his money and make sure the old bastard’s really dead. Still, he knows he’s entered the occupied areas when he stops leaving a trail of footprints in the dust and he catches himself sneaking along on the balls of his feet, like he’s broken curfew again and trying not to get caught.His bedroom door opens at the touch of his palm. The bed is made, but otherwise his room is exactly the way he left it, down to the posters and adolescent scrawl on the walls. He’d left the closet wide open and accidentally pulled the string of fairy lights half-down in his haste to pack the shit seventeen-year-old him had deemed essential to running away. He finds the switch and turns the lights on. Mom’s been in recently, he can smell her floral perfume, and the sense memory hits him so strongly it’s like he’s eight years old again. He’s eight and it’s finally his turn to start specialised training. Luther, Diego and Allison had all gone before him and come back exhausted but proud, like they did something good. He’s excited. Maybe Dad is finally going to teach him how to stop seeing the ghosts all the time. His power isn’t like the others’, something he can choose to use; the ghosts never go away and all he wants is some control.He follows dutifully after Dad as he leads him to the far side of the mansion where no-one ever goes. They go down to a cellar and out into a tiny courtyard smaller than his bedroom. There’s nothing in the courtyard except for a door in the opposite wall that’s chained and padlocked shut. Dad opens the door and gestures him through it, into a small room with engraved stone plaques on the walls. He steps closer to read one and there’s a lady wringing her hands together in the corner, face twisted in a snarl. ‘He did this! He did this!’ she yells and blood spills endlessly from the gaping wound in her throat. He flinches away from her.‘For your first lesson, Number Four, you must learn to master this irrational fear of the dead,’ Dad says. ‘You control them, not the other way around and we cannot progress until you realise this.’And then Dad shuts the door in his face and he’s alone in the dark. Except he’s not alone and the lady with the slit throat isn’t the only one in here with him.He’s eight and he’s long since lost track of time. He’s screamed himself hoarse and his throat hurts. Even with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands pressed to his ears he can still see them, still hear them. He’s backed himself into a corner as far as he can go and still skeletal hands pluck at his uniform as they scream and beg for his attention.The cold has seeped into his bones. He can’t stop shivering. He doesn’t react when the door creaks open. He doesn’t react to the sharp bark of his name. More hands grab for him and the world tilts wildly on its axis and keeps swaying.Warmth spills down his spine and his fingers and toes prickle and burn as the blood flow returns. The air smells sweetly floral, lavender and something else he can’t place. He tips his head back and the fingers in his hair go still. He’s only aware of the humming when the sound of it stops. ‘Klaus, honey?’Mom is an angel, he decides, with her blonde hair and blue eyes and red lips, humming softly to herself as she washes his hair. He’s in the bath, he realises. The room is brightly lit and full of steam and Mom must have added something to the bath water to make it smell so nice. He feels warm again.‘Mom?’ he whispers, more breath than voice.‘There you are,’ she smiles. She touches her fingers to the side of his neck. ‘We’ll get you all cleaned up and then we’ll get you something for that sore throat.’He nods and makes himself focus on the feel of her hands in his hair and the sound of her humming. He thinks he recognises the song.He doesn’t sleep for three days. Every time he tries he sees the ghosts, blue and grey and reaching for him. He gets up and turns his bedroom light back on as soon as Mom shuts the door behind her. He’s not scared of the dark, but he is scared of the ghosts. He plays his records over and over again, loud enough to distract him and wake Diego next door. He doesn’t turn the music down even when Diego bangs on their shared wall.He goes through lessons in a daze. Gives the wrong answers to easy questions, can’t free himself from simple restraining holds, loses every race up the stairs. He doesn’t tell the others when they ask him what’s wrong.Four days after his first visit to the mausoleum, he falls asleep at the breakfast table. Drops his fork and slips off his chair and wakes up screaming when Ben touches his arm. He can’t look Dad in the eye and see how disappointed he is. Five had his individual training yesterday and it’s clear that he’s the only one who failed on the first go. He keeps to himself for the rest of the day.That night, when they’re all getting ready for bed, Mom hands him a little plastic cup with a pill inside like the ones she gives to Vanya.‘To help you sleep,’ she says.He takes it, washes it down with water. He sleeps through the night and doesn’t dream at all. He’s ten and for their birthday Mom gives him a portable music player and a stack of cassette tapes with all his favourite songs. He hides it in his room where Dad won’t find it. On bad nights, after his latest visit to the mausoleum when the nightmares are stronger than the sleeping pills, he puts the headphones on and turns the volume up as loud as it will go until he can’t hear himself think. Pretends that he’s really, truly alone.He strings fairy lights up around his bed to keep the ghosts at bay after he’s burned through more light globes than all his siblings combined. In the dark, there’s nothing to distract him. There’s no argument with Allison about who actually owns the skirt he’s wearing, no book Ben wants him to read, no sound of Vanya playing the violin down the hall, no crash of something breaking as Five antagonises Luther and Diego into a fight.In the dark, there’s just the ghosts. They cast an eerie blue light on his bedroom walls and turn everything strange and unfamiliar. On really bad nights, they press in around him and shout over each other, louder than his music, demanding things he doesn’t know how to give. He’s at least learned enough that they can’t touch him anymore. The fairy lights counteract the ghostly blue and let him see the fragmented sentences he scribbles over his walls. If he writes down what they yell at him, shows he’s listening, they leave him alone for a while. He’s twelve and a group of bank robbers is targeting the city’s banks one after the other and the police haven’t been able to catch them. Dad decides it’s the perfect opportunity to reveal the Umbrella Academy to the world. It’s exciting right up until it isn’t. Luther throws a man out the window three stories high and slams another one’s head through a counter. Diego sends a pair of knives into the chests of two men. They shut Ben in a room with the remaining five and Ben is the only one who walks out. Seven men die at their hands. Not everyone who dies sticks around, but the ghosts of people who were killed tend to be the most persistent. By the third mission, he’s just as reluctant to fight as Ben. By the fifth, he’s officially been designated lookout. It’s not like his powers are much help in a fight anyway.He’s twelve and Mom’s heels almost fit. They make him taller than Luther and Mom doesn’t mind him borrowing them as long as he gives them back. He’s practicing on the stairs when the Academy alarm goes off. He startles mid-step and his foot comes down on empty air. He cracks his chin on the banister as he falls and everything goes dark.He wakes up in the infirmary and he has to blink a few times to make the world stop spinning. His throat feels dry and he can’t feel his face. He tries to speak but he can’t open his mouth. He remembers the pain that lanced through his jaw when he fell, and he reaches up with one hand to touch his face. He must make some sort of noise because he blinks again and Mom and Pogo are standing over him.‘There you are,’ Mom says, smiling down at him. ‘You took quite the tumble.’Pogo tells him he broke his jaw and that he’ll be on a liquid diet while it heals. Tells him that while he’s on medication for the pain he won’t be able to take his sleeping pills. He panics. He needs his pills and his jaw is wired shut and he can’t breathe he can’t breathe he can’t breathe. Pogo sedates him.It’s not until Dad comes down to express his disappointment that something as trivial as a fall has taken him off missions that he realises the ghosts are gone. There’s always at least one hanging around and he’s on so much pain medication that the pattern on the walls is changing every time he looks away but he can’t see a single ghost.He draws it out for as long as he can, but as soon as he’s stepped down off the really strong stuff, the ghosts come back. Nothing else seems to work as well after that. The sleeping pills work as often as they don’t and he sometimes ends up trapped in nightmares he can’t wake up from. The ghosts are always louder than his music and he paints over his bedroom walls and starts again. He’s twelve the first time he sneaks out of the house and finds a dealer willing to sell to a kid in school uniform. (He’s thirteen and he’s spent five nights in the mausoleum in as many weeks as Dad steps up their personal training. Five’s been gone for months but as long as he’s high he’ll never see his ghost and he can pretend his brother isn’t dead. He tries to summon him anyway, and doesn’t know if he’s relieved or not when it doesn’t work.) He’s fourteen and Allison steals the fairy lights from his room for the cubby house she’s building in the greenhouse on the roof. As soon as he realises the lights are missing, he investigates and Allison is the only one who’s been acting strangely. It’s taken her weeks to build the cubby house, one piece at a time, sneaking around so no-one catches her. He could just get new ones, but they’re his, so he makes a plan instead.The night Allison finally takes Luther up to see it, he waits for them to creep past his room and gets to work. He sneaks into their rooms one after the other, dismantles their fake pillow-selves and leaves their doors wide open on his way out. He then lets himself get caught poking around Dad’s office. Dad drags him back to his bedroom but breaks off berating him at the sight of Luther and Allison’s empty rooms and just sends him back to bed. He stays awake until he hears their sheepish return.He knows Luther won’t go back to the greenhouse after being caught breaking the rules and Allison will be too annoyed and embarrassed that all her careful planning went to waste to try again anytime soon. So during their designated half hour of free time, he goes and takes his fairy lights back.He sleeps better knowing that when the nightmares drag him awake he won’t be opening his eyes to darkness. He’s maybe a little bit scared of the dark. He’s sixteen and on lookout, bored out of his mind while the rest of the Academy fight the bad guys. Jewel thieves or people smugglers or whatever they are, he wasn’t really paying attention. He leans against a wall, ostensibly watching the only exit, arms crossed and tapping his fingers restlessly against his biceps. He tracks the progress of the fight through the sounds he’s hearing.There’s a lot of screaming accompanied by a wet tearing and squelching that means the Horror is being horrifying and this whole thing should be over soon. The sooner it’s over, the sooner they can go home and the sooner he can do something about the elderly man still wearing the rope he used to hang himself that he’s resolutely ignoring.There’s one last gunshot as the screaming cuts off and everything goes quiet. He looks over at the door and finds Ben standing there, waiting. He’s covered in blood from head to toe, the way he always is after a mission, still in his domino mask and zipping his jumpsuit over his stomach.‘Klaus?’He bounds over, eager to be done. ‘Is it over? Can we go? There’s this old guy I’d love to—’‘Klaus,’ Ben says again.He goes to clap Ben on the shoulder and meets no resistance. At first he thinks he just misjudged the distance, but when he looks down his hand is somewhere in Ben’s ribcage. Ben’s form flickers and reshapes around his hand as he trails his fingers through Ben’s chest.‘No,’ he whispers. He tries to grab Ben’s arms but his fingers close on empty air and Ben looks up at him, sad and scared all at once, like he’s just realised the truth of it himself. As he watches, the lucky shot that killed him makes itself known, a small dark hole at his temple.‘No.’ He throws open the door he was meant to guard and sprints through the building until he’s in the big main room and Ben is lying still and small—so unbelievably small—in the centre of the room, surrounded by dismembered body parts as the last of the tentacles disappear back into his abdomen. ‘Ben!’ he yells, voice cracking and breaking on the vowel.He darts around Luther, who doesn’t seem to realise what’s happened yet. But a knife glints at Diego’s feet where he’s dropped it and Diego never drops his knives. Allison is half turned towards them, hands clasped over her mouth. He falls to his knees at Ben’s side, graceless, heedless of the blood all around him, lifts Ben’s head into his lap and touches his fingers to that awful, fatal bullet wound.‘I’m sorry,’ Ben’s ghost says gently.He screams.He doesn’t recall the trip back to the Academy. Doesn’t remember how Luther cradled Ben’s body in his arms and Diego had to wrestle him into the car. He doesn’t recall how they broke the news to Vanya, but he’ll always remember the callous indifference in the way their father looked at his son’s body and sniffed, ‘Pity.’And then there’s Mom, smelling faintly of lavender and that other flower he’s never identified, her hand on his back. She’s still an angel, he thinks, and realises she’s leading him towards the bathroom. He’s still in his jumpsuit, Ben’s blood on his hands.‘Mom?’ he asks.‘There you are,’ she says. ‘I’ve drawn you a bath, take all the time you need.’When he sinks under the water and shuts his eyes, he can pretend it was just another nightmare.He’s sixteen and the night after his brother’s funeral he breaks into the medical cabinet and takes the strongest pills he can find. He washes them down with whisky stolen from their father’s liquor cabinet and drinks until he can’t see Ben anymore. It takes most of the bottle. (He’s seventeen and he hasn’t been sober since Ben died. Diego’s fighting with Dad and Luther every day and Allison’s not hiding that she’s been going to auditions. It won’t be long until they’re both gone and he spends more and more time away from the mansion. With all their drama filling the spaces he used to, no-one notices when he just stops coming home.) ‘Oh, Klaus, there you are!’He startles out of his recollections to see Mom standing in the open doorway, which really doesn’t help the feeling of never having left because she’s never aged a day in his life, but she looks pleased to see him and he can’t help but smile back at her. ‘Hi, Mom.’‘I thought I heard you come in,’ she says. She tilts her head and looks him over, lips pressed together in concern. ‘You’re all skin and bones, would you like something to eat?’He stands, looks around his bedroom one last time and joins her in the hall. He leaves the lights on. ‘No thanks, I think I’ll just—’ He reaches out and trails his fingers over the closest self-defence poster on the wall— ‘re-familiarise myself with the house.’‘Raid it for things you can sell, you mean,’ Ben says from behind him.He swats at Ben, gives Mom a quick hug and kisses her cheek, because she’s his mom and he hasn’t seen her in thirteen years and heads off towards the old man’s office to look for things he can sell. He settles his headphones over his ears and presses play through the pocket of his coat. (He’s twenty-nine and he doesn’t remember the last time he was sober on purpose and the last thing he wants is to deal with his father in the afterlife. He’s twenty-nine and he’s spent too long in the dark to be scared of it but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be used to the ghosts.)