Various The Umbrella Academy One Shots

So much all the time

Everything was just so much all the time. Was it too much for a person to ask for just twenty minutes of peace for once? Of course it was, never once was The Sèance able to enjoy a single moment to himself before some foul spectre or wayward spirit came moaning and groaning and demanding his attention. They always did have a terrible habit of coming by whenever he really, really did not want them anywhere near him. 

The way it was looking, it seemed that the only real times he got any real peace was when he was momentarily deceased, and even that never lasted long. Rest In Peace indeed! If he was willing to take the time to find out who it was, he had a good few choice words to say to whoever first claimed that the dead rested.

Even on the rare occasion he was able to have some good time to himself, he was never even given a chance to enjoy it properly before he was needed - "Could you pick up an extra box of cookies while you're out?" "Could you ask my dead wife where she left the will?" "Could you just pop over to the other side of the City and see if I left my wallet?" "Could you get something off the top of the fridge for me?" - and his peace was once again broken. If it wasn't something it always was another, and they never seemed to stop. Of course, he'd do whatever it was he was asked when it was beneficial for him, and more often than not when it didn't, but that did not mean he would not complain about it for every metaphorical step of the way. 

No rest for the living, and he was close enough to living for that to include him. He never would get that eternal rest that they spoke of - whoever 'they' were, they certainly did have a habit of saying things that people liked to share around - and he didn't even seem to get the luxury of a good nap every now and again.
Oh, and how he wanted a good nap! Klaus rarely got the chance to sleep properly. Sleep, for him at least, meant he was seeing exclusively the suffering of the dead and damned without any of the wonderful distractions of the world of the living, but his body ached and yearned so desperately for something as simple as a nap. 

It was a lonely existence too, he hated to admit. All the lovely men and women he met were wonderful with their entertaining him in all manners of the term, but that was all they were really good for, brief distractions. They would eventually grow bored of him, become afraid of him, simply go their separate ways as they always did. Every single time he was then given no other option than to recall that death was his only real companion. Death and the dead. Even his own family was tragically transient despite how much he tried to forget this fact.
The damned Monocle never let him forget this for long, but the bloody bastard was dead and he was going to stay dead no matter what. 

He'd like to think that he couldn't feel anything at all. He'd done a wonderful job of repressing his emotions after all, both mentally and through wonderful artificially induced stupours but this was not always as efficient as it could be. 
If anything, this wonderful apathy made the moments of extremes all the worse. He'd gotten out of the habit of how to manage his emotions beyond stamping them down, so when they hit, they hit bad. But he wasn't allowed to die anyway so he could do whatever he wanted to in order to try and force himself back out of whatever had hit him with such a terrible force. 

The author Oscar Wilde had once written, "I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." but in the same text had stated "The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it." and from what Klaus knew about himself, it was always a great deal easier to yield to whatever temptations called so alluringly to him than it was to try and claim a dominion over himself. Perhaps this was just a coward's excuse, he'd claimed to Allison once chilly winter's morning when she dragged him inside and out of the snow, his very soul ruined by whatever temptations and delights he had been chasing that night, but it was easier to be the coward than to try and fight to claim the alternative. 

He never was the hero anyway. Never really wanted to be. That was more Spaceboy and The Kraken's gig, and he was more than content to let them take it in whole. But there wasn't any alternatives that he could try and claim for himself. He was just as poorly suited for the life of normalcy as he was that of a superhero. It was easier to settle for the devil that he knew than the devil he didn't, and so he played the part that he had never been given the choice in. 
None if them did, but the chance of an alternative had been stolen away from them when they were first taken in all those years ago. No matter how hard they struggled to escape, it was inevitable that they were to end up back within the same halls of The Umbrella Academy.

They never really were made for normalcy, but that didn't mean they could not wonder and dream about what the alternatives could have been. Even still, The Sèance had concluded on more than one occasion that things would have been significantly easier if things could just slow down a little bit. Not forever, that'd get boring eventually, but just on occasion so that it wasn't so much all the time.