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“Well why don’t you ask him for yourself ?”
Diego looks up from the high shine polish of his blade, where he’s testing its balance on two fingers. Klaus is staring at the empty space on the couch, with a wry lilt in his smile, haphazard emphasis lilting every other word like a see-saw. He’s sprawled out, taking up more than his fair half, with his arms spread wide over the back. There’s hardly any space for someone else to sit, but they wouldn’t anyway, for fear of sitting on Ben. Ben who most certainly is crammed into the sliver of couch Klaus has allotted him.
Diego slides the blade -sufficiently well balanced- back into the case and frees another. “I thought you could make him like---real, now.” Diego has definitely seen him; that scene in the bathroom hadn’t been the first time, nor the last. But for all that he had , he hadn’t often. Klaus himself can be something like a ghost. He always had a limited capacity for interaction. He reminded Diego very much of a cat - he came and went as he pleased, as like to crave attention as he was to resent it. As like to bite the hand that pet him, within a breath of butting his head into it.
“He’s always real .” The way Klaus turns to look at him - body perfectly still except for the Linda Blair twist of his head - is unsettling. “Just because you can’t see him, doesn’t make him any less real . Like air, or the homoerotic subtext in classic literature.” He frowns, brow scrunching as he turns back to the not-empty space beside him. “I’m not being mean. I’m being somewhat spicy .”
Klaus is...Well. Klaus is always unsettling. It’s the nature of him, really. He’d been an odd child that had grown up into an odd man and it has nothing to do with the physical eccentricities about him - the clothes, or the make up, or the skeletal curl of his long, stretched body. People on the street found Klaus odd, but knowing him - well. Knowing him didn’t solve any mysteries. Diego thought he understood, the best anyone really could. Klaus had one foot in a world no one else could see. Klaus was unsettling because he wasn’t fully settled in any one reality.
“I thought you could---make him visible now.” Diego doesn’t actually think Ben isn’t real, just because he can’t see him. It’s still hard to wrap his mind around, given that Ben was dead for years - but...Ben’s there. Not always, but then, none of them are. Diego just has to keep that in mind. “Since...You know.”
Since the Almost-Apocalypse, when Klaus had gotten a power-up no one saw coming. In the long term, it was just as shocking as Vanya. At least - Diego thought so.
“I caaaaaan ,” Klaus drawls, vowels curling lazy from his mouth. “But he’s shy. You are too, don’t lie . You’re a big shy baby who likes to creep over my shoulder and accuse people you’re staring at of staring.” His grey eyes volley between where Ben must surely be, and where Diego is sitting awkward and adjacent. “You’re all very overwhelming for poor little ghost boys.” He winces, shifting slightly to the side. “Stop hitting me! Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should--- ow ! Dammit Ben, you know I bruise like a peach! This is abuse .”
He watches Klaus rub at his ribs, pulling up the fishnet crop top to reveal a faint red mark against anemic skin, just below a pale, pierced nipple. The couch doesn’t move at all, where Ben must be sitting. Diego will never understand how he can be tangible and intangible all at once but he knows it for truth all the same. “So he can uh...Interact, even if he isn’t visible?”
“Poor, precocious little ghost boys,” Klaus corrects himself. “Yeah, he can. But mostly only with me.” He unfolds himself up from the couch, and his body casts long, spider-leg shadows across the room at angles that don’t quite make sense. “He asked me why you stare at me.”
“I don’t stare at you.” He doesn’t. He doesn’t . He’s just watching. Watching is what he does.
“ One of you is lying,” Klaus sings, the disaffected essence of his voice making it very clear that he doesn’t give a single shit which one it is. Diego watches Klaus hold his Hello hand out, palm upward, long fingers stretched and expectant. “Come on, Casper. Brother dear here needs to see you.”
He doesn’t blink into existence the way he blinks out, Diego thinks. He bleeds into color from Klaus’ fingertips, a faintly washed version of the brother he remembers. Ben is sixteen-shaped, but Diego can’t ever recall his brother being sixteen. Ben had been born into this world a terrifyingly old soul. He doesn’t hold Klaus’ hand, but lets his own fall back into his lap. His hood is down, pooled over his shoulders. He’s little in a way that still takes up space,and Diego has always suspected that was the Horror inside him. Ben is sixteen-shaped, but he’s every bit as old as any of them, (but not older, not like Five). He’s sixteen, but old, little but vast.
“...hi.” It’s not said quietly, not exactly, but it’s said in small a way that still seems to catch echos over the high ceiling.
“Hey.”
“Riveting,” Klaus interjects, prowling the room. He touches everything as he goes, dragging fingertips over every glossy, wooden surface, every spine of every book. There’s something menacing about the way he moves, at times. Diego is no stranger to stalking through the shadows, prefers it even to other mean of travel. Klaus though....Klaus slinks with a grace that belies the spastic, screwy front he puts on. Diego suspects it’s the absence of drugs, the absence of clouds in his eyes. Klaus slinks, like a cat, and the shadows seem to reach for him, casting him in a haze of darkness that only makes him seem brighter.
“It makes sense,” Diego says suddenly, eyes skittering from Ben’s face where it’s turned to his lap, back to his knives. “That you might be shy.”
The wrinkle in Ben’s brow is very familiar and Diego’s heart hurts at the sight of it. Quiet, but stubborn - Number Six. “I’m not shy. I’ve just been dead for years.”
“No one ever talks to you .” Sometimes Five talks to himself. Product of post-apocalyptic living. Some habits are hard to break. “We all talk to you through Klaus.” He doesn’t tell Ben he’s sorry. He doesn’t think Ben wants to hear it. He is sorry though.
Klaus’s head jerks to look at Diego, sharp as the cut of his jaw.
“It’s fine,” Ben says eventually. He’s not looking at Klaus, but...Klaus still nods. There’s a synergy between them that maybe only several years dead company creates. “It’s fine. It would probably be easier to talk to me if you could see me. I just---”
“No,” Diego interrupts as gently as he can. “No, you don’t need to do that. We know you’re there. That’s enough.”
“Do you want to go on the roof with us?” Klaus asks, apropos of nothing at all. Diego would think it a casual question if it wasn’t for the thunderstorm intensity in his grey eyes.”
“Isn’t it raining?”
“What are you? The Wicked Witch?” Klaus doesn’t wait for the room, just glides his merry way out toward the stairs. Ben wavers a little, the farther Klaus goes. Diego doesn’t think it has anything to do with distance between them, but rather Ben’s disinclination to be visible on his own.
“Are you going to the roof?” Diego asks, setting his knives aside. Ben nods, looking shifty and hunched. “Then, I guess I’ll meet you there?”
He gets a nod out of Ben, and only half his attention and Diego thinks that’s it but then Ben just looks at him. “You do stare,” he says, before flickering right out.
He climbs out the attic window, stretching his legs to meet where the roof is flat and even. Klaus is on the second peak, straddling the spine of the roof. He doesn’t look at Diego, but holds a hand out all the same. Diego takes it, not necessarily because he needs it but because Klaus is never one to offer help readily.
He doesn’t mean to let himself be pulled up, but Klaus is deceptively strong. Technically, Diego knows this. He’s seen the vicious, scrappy way Klaus can fight, but there’s nothing to his body that says he should be able to haul 200lbs of man up an incline while also holding himself balanced. He pulls Diego so fast, he almost loses his footing, feet slipping slightly against the old slick roof tiles. Another hand, that he couldn’t see if he looked, presses against his back and he suddenly he’s fine. Stable with his back pressed against the chimney stack.
With reckless grace, Klaus spins himself, nearly kicking Diego in the head so they can face each other. He’s smoking, joint held between his thumb and forefinger, cupped protectively beneath the rest of his hand. After seeing Ben - a glimpse into the reality of what being a Necromancer really meant- Diego sort of understood the drugs. Seeing Klaus pull at the things inside of Ben had been terrifying and..well. He’s was a cop - almost a cop - and in the grand scheme of things, marijuana is harmless. If Klaus can sustain some semblance of sanity off a little weed, Diego’s not going to say shit.
“Hold this,” Klaus says suddenly, handing the joint over to Diego. Diego does, more on reflex than anything, throwing himself back against the chimney stack just in time for Klaus to push himself up on the roofs spine, and step right over him. Klaus is all legs, and so when a foot plants itself against the brick, Diego is startled but not surprised. Klaus stretches up, hooking his fingers over the stacks top. He launches himself up, nearly kneeing Diego in the mouth, but then he’s found his perch, legs dangling on either side of Diego’s head.
Diego tilts his head back to look up at him and finds Klaus peering down with a Cheshire cat smile and an open, expectant hand. Just to be a shit, Diego doesn’t give him the joint back. He brings it to his lips and takes a hit, holding in the desperate, childish urge to cough or sputter. It’s not exactly his first, but it’s been a damn while.
Klaus---Klaus looks surprised. He folds himself forward, practically in half, with his arms hanging down like a rag doll. “I shouldn’t be surprised. Bad boy is your aesthetic.”
“It’s not my---this is protective gear.” They all give him a hard time about his suit, even Five who still wears the Umbrella Academy sports coat. Diego takes another hit and thinks about passing it to Klaus. Instead, he looks...sort of everywhere. “Ben?”
Ben bleeds back into color beside him, leaning around the stack. He has a hand curled under Klaus’s leg and he is very, very close to Diego. He takes the joint with the other, wordless for all that he’s staring right at Diego with a furrowed brow. When he’s done, he passes it up to Klaus without looking.
“This is nice,” Klaus says, kicking his foot - the one Ben isn’t holding steady - a little. On instinct, Diego grab sit, pulling it over his shoulder and pinning it to his chest at the ankle. Klaus doesn’t comment. Or wear shoes, apparently.
He’s right though. It is nice.