Snippets of Memory - The Umbrella Academy

No tears left to cry

This story is a one-shot, part of the recollections of Rin and Klaus' younger years, both of whom appear in the story "A Bend in Space Time" (taking place over the seasons of The Umbrella Academy - links in my profile).
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Backstory: Rin is a 20-year-old punk girl born with a strange power that she uses for illegal work: she can teleport, make herself invisible or intangible. Over several nights in police custody, just over a year ago, she met a strange cellmate named Klaus... also endowed with an extremely invasive power: that of communicating with the dead.

TW: References to drug use - Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) - Sexuality (non-explicit) - Illness of a loved one.

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The sky was really blue on that day in 2009, I remember because I know that the brightness that had returned - after the winter months - had changed my mood all of a sudden. Dullness and rain can be extremely stubborn here in The City, perhaps because the ocean isn't far away. It was as if the high pressure system had coincided with Klaus's release from rehab. The second in just over a year. I stopped counting at around his sixth or seventh, I think.

I hadn't been told he'd been sent there this time. I realized this from his silence, and by the fact that he no longer knocked at my sticker-covered window. I didn't want to believe that anything worse could have happened to him. I'd already realized, I think, that no matter how risky his behavior, Klaus was always coming back from it, one way or another.

Once again, he had been sent there for thirty days, as every time after that. And just as many evenings - when night came - I shuddered at the thought, looking toward the fire escape through which he wouldn't appear. At least on his first rehab, last year, he hadn't really known what to expect. This time, on the other hand, he'd been forced to go in knowing exactly what was going to happen. That after twenty-four hours, he'd have to face the assaults of the beyond, managing the symptoms of withdrawal all at once. That the first week would be tough, despite the substitution medication, which would give him side effects he hated, as well as dooming him to sleepless nights.

The social services, the voluntary workers and even Dr. Milligan, who was and still is - I believe - an admirable woman, had no real awareness of what they were inflicting on him in the belief that they were saving him: the more they sobered him up, the more they exposed him to what was destroying him and which he could no longer keep at bay. The ghosts were constantly harassing him, in dormitories of four, moreover. A situation unbearable enough that isolation was often the chosen option. He was often sent to a 'room' all to himself, fortunately with a window and a door they all understood not to close. But solitude is not, and never has been, anything other than a trigger for what Milligan called - in Klaus's case - PTSD.

By the end of the first fortnight, this time, I'd learned that he'd designated me as his 'representative of relatives', at the Lakeshore Hills rehab facility. When Milligan called me in to attend, delivering the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder that he couldn't listen to. I was already his reference contact at the cops' - how ironic - which also meant I had to go and get him quite often, when they got fed up of feeding and housing him. For my part, and to tell you the whole truth, my mother was dying of cancer, and my grandmother couldn't handle the hospital paperwork. At barely twenty, I don't think I was able to handle all that. And I think deep down, even if he couldn't express it, Klaus felt terribly guilty about being an additional burden.

Nevertheless, that day, I was magnificently happy that his thirty days were over, and that I could go and get him out. Even though I knew what his first move would be, the moment he'd step out, even before eating. A blink of the eye, and he would have 'relapsed'. It wouldn't matter what would've happened there: to go out and be able to get chemicals flowing in his blood again would be an almost orgasmic relief for him, and I think that's all I wanted to see.