Snippets of Memory - The Umbrella Academy

Voices in the void

Honestly? I still think that 10 dollars for two waffles is overpriced, and given that the owner has three shops in the whole park, it's practically organized theft. But this time I thought Klaus would be glad he wasn't just breathing them in, and that finding breakfast when he woke up might be a better start to our free-people relationship than a kick in the butt from Granny. The kiosk employee looked at my crest sideways, as if afraid that what I might want to loot the content of her cash register, not just buy her pastries. I was used to that. I knew how to answer with a big smile, which most of the time left people very disconcerted. I paid my dues and headed back to the not-so-abandoned shed, taking care to wait until the woman was busy scraping her waffle iron.

Careful not to drop my precious golden gift, I crossed the few brambles crawling by the door again. This time, my foot cracked a bit of dead wood, and I nearly stumbled. At that sound - all of a sudden - the door, which had remained ajar, slammed shut. I think it was the tenant's habit to be alarmed if someone had the potential to come and evict him. I stepped over the brambles and almost came to rest against the door.

"Klaus?", I called, since I couldn't knock with my hands full.

I could have teleported in, since I'd seen the inside, but that would have been a bit too bold. There was a moment of latency, a few seconds when nothing seemed to move. And just as I was about to call out a second time, the door finally swung open. A tattooed hand drew aside the curtain... and Klaus's shaggy curly head suddenly emerged, his eyes twisted by the light outside as much as by his surprise at seeing me there.

"Room-service?", I said, lifting my waffles.
" Holy shit, Rin!"
He burst into a laugh he tried to keep quiet, then pulled me by the arm inside before closing the door.
"If I'd known, I'd have dusted that place..."

Suddenly, he seemed to be in a hurry - not to say a panic - and started tidying up what he could around him. Clearing his bed of the musty old bedcover he'd picked up somewhere. Straightening his pile of clothes, as if that would make them look neatly folded. Pushing empty bottles under the shelves of herbicide tanks, and a whole lot of other stuff I guessed was used for drugs. The place reeked extremely strongly of weed, mixed with other smells I couldn't identify.

"Hey, I don't care about your mess," I said. "My bed wasn't made either."
With a broad gesture, he grabbed a metal crate and flipped it over next to the mattress, as if it were a state-of-the-art Stark coffee table.
"It's crazy that you came today. Tomorrow at this time, I wouldn't have been there."

I stopped looking around so insistently, put down the waffles and sat down. The mattress was covered in stains and smelled - this time - of old, adulterated alcohol.

"Have you found... another place to crash?
He shook his head, in a way that could have said yes and no at the same time.
"I've been in custody too often, they've got social services on my ass."
He started rummaging through a shopping bag, not far from his crate of clothes.
"At nineteen, they can't send you home..."
"Hell, thank goodness they can't. But they're sending me to a thirty-day rehab."

He kept searching, and my silence probably spoke volumes about the strange sense of disappointment I'd just felt at the thought of not seeing him for a month.

"What would happen if you don't show up?"

It wasn't a suggestion, but he could have taken it that way: come to think of it, I shouldn't have asked him that. But he shrugged, and pulled a cold canned coffee out of his bag, one of those - terrible - ones you find in vending machines.

"I'd probably get into bigger jams. And anyway, there's going to be another cold snap."

At the time, I didn't know how to read the strange twinge that passed between his eyebrows as he said that. I nodded as he opened my hand to lay the coffee can on it. I looked at it, then at him, as he let himself flop gracelessly down next to me on the mattress. This time, his toenails were fushchia.