Snippets of Memory - The Umbrella Academy

Voices in the void

"You..."
He coughed again, finally seeming to recover.
"You also blink through space... plus invisibility and intangibility..."
I nodded.
"I don't know the link between the three."

'Blinking through space'. I'd never heard the term, but it was graphic enough for me to understand why he was using it. I just sat back down next to him, who was now clutching his safe bottle to his heart. He looked at me with confused, wistful astonishment, and I know today that it was Five he was seeing again through me for a moment. This time, however, he said nothing about him, and merely whispered:

"It must be devilishly efficient for your odd jobs".

I looked down at the surface of our makeshift metal table, and soberly nodded. Because I saw at that moment that he had no recollection of me, whereas I did. When we'd last met, I too had been very disturbed to discover who he was. Because the truth is, police custody wasn't the first place we'd crossed paths. Stealing, spying, falsifying... I was nothing more than the archetypal rogue that the Umbrella Academy had spent years putting in jail. Yes, we had bumped into each other once. Me too, there were things I'd rather forget.

"Yes," I simply whispered. "I'm not very proud of using this power to earn a living."
We remained silent for a moment, and turning my head somewhat towards him, I asked, without any idea of what I would trigger:
"Haven't you ever done it?"

I was thinking that - last time - we didn't get into any details after all, that I was happy to be able to have this kind of conversation with him for the first time... But my train of thought had no time to go anywhere, as Klaus uttered, leaving me as frozen as he had been:

"I have no power. The ghosts are the ones having power over me."
I blinked a few times, my eyebrows pinched, and asked him with a caution that at the time I was far from mastering:
"You can't control it?"

I don't know if I could put into words the look he gave me. I realized that my words were an understatement. No, even worse: that I was four light years away from reality. He brought his overgrown teenage legs up against him on the mattress, grabbed his knees, and said, staring into the shadows of the old garden shed:

"I feel each one of them, and if I push one away, three come. What they felt when they died: their pain, their sorrow, their anger... they scream it to me, especially at night."
He swallowed, still not looking at me.
"Their fear, too, and I feel it tenfold."

Three sentences. He'd only said three sentences, but I think I understood, in that second, that - in our similarity - he and I were literally not born equals. And that this was probably what he'd meant too, last time, when he'd ironically remarked that my power was 'so much cooler than his'.

"Damn it, Klaus," I said, "that sounds like a curse."

It was another stupid thing to tell him, but he didn't hold it against me. And I think - to be honest - it was the first time he'd ever talked about it like that, too.

"It is," he said. "A curse that's been going on since I was six."
"For you, it started when you were six?"
I probably should have stopped there. The moment he started to tremble from it.
"I was mostly a kid with really bad sleep and supposed nightmares, at first."
"You were scared shitless."
He closed his eyes.
"I thought I was going mad."

He had just voiced this with a factual murmur heavier in texture than lead. No more jokes, no more offbeat comparisons or even ironic laughter. No more pretence. For once - even in the history of our relationship - he didn't put up any walls. I let him carry on, and still with his eyes on something I couldn't see - probably Ben, actually - he added:

"There's a void in the darkness, and voices in that void. When I called at night, my mother was programmed not to come. Nobody did. Except..."

I didn't ask about his 'mother' at the time. I thought for a moment that something in this conversation would bring some warmth to my heart, and I was sorely mistaken.

"Except?"
"Except when my father decided to make the most of it."

I didn't know the full extent of what this word implied until much later, but I guessed that what he was talking about had something to do with the missions for which I - like everyone else in The City and beyond - had known about the Umbrella Academy. Despite my youth, despite all the clumsiness I'd already demonstrated, I had the presence of mind not to push him further at that point. Perhaps because I felt I was on the verge of causing him an anxiety attack I couldn't have handled, or perhaps because he himself drowned it directly in a gin swig. I looked again at the stuff he'd sent under the shelf, at his bottle, and remembered the effect chemicals had on me too, including paracetamol, if I ever took too much.

"Hooch and drugs... You called them 'solutions' the night we met."
He sighed and swirled his bottle. I think he already knew I'd figured it out, but since we were putting our cards on the table, he replied:
"It silences them. I'd rather be numb than completely insane, Rin".
I frowned painfully as he looked at me, and he added with a dull form of terror in his voice:
"I've never been to rehab for so long and it scares the hell out of me."

You should know that this was the most serious conversation I've ever had with Klaus, and actually the last one for a long time. Maybe ever since. In that moment, as the swamp-green filled with goddamn tears, I promised myself that we'd forget the whole thing. That I'd go visit him in rehab if I could. That as soon as he'd be out, we'd go party wherever he wanted. Over and over. Every night if necessary. That we'd burst out laughing again, like we did in the cells of police custody. That I wouldn't care if he climbed the fire escape when Granny was asleep. And that I would never - ever - judge what he was doing to himself so he wouldn't have to endure all of this.

Hesitantly, I raised a hand and slowly patted his back. I was aware that I'd been physically rough with him last time, but now my demonstration of caring was sincere, so much so that I saw him hopeful again. I sighed. I told him:

"I won't make myself intangible this time".

And in a split second, he turned this miserable shed into a memory we'd remember for a lifetime.

---

Notes :

If you've read 'A Bend in Space-Time', you'll know that this location on the edge of the Argyle Park woods features in Klaus's peri-mortem space, along with the water tower at the Ap Bia camp and the barber store from his childhood. He once said that heaven looks like the idea you'd like to have of it. It seems that his smells a little like waffles.

Some conversations never took place between him and Rin again. She chose to bring him out of his darkness by partying him away, and respect his choices no matter how bad they were. If you read seasons 1 and 2, you'll understand that she will wonder someday if it was the right thing to do. But she did what she could, in the moment.

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