Snippets of Memory - The Umbrella Academy

Whispers of the Minerva

"You wouldn't have called me if you could handle it".
He was quiet for a few seconds, just closing his eyes and taking a deep breath.
"I was hoping..."
He let out a soft, breathy chuckle that might as well have been a sob.
"That you'd tuck me in and chase the monsters under the bed".

I sighed, I think. I sighed every time. Both of us knew exactly what he meant by that.

I have never been comfortable with people's touch. Physical contact, I mean, because when it comes to empathy, there's nothing I like more than slipping into people's minds. But physical proximity always made me feel exposed, like people could see right through the leather, the piercings, the sarcasm. Maybe because I refuse to be vulnerable. Maybe because I need control over myself. I don't know. Or maybe because my role – in these situations – was too often at odds with what I felt about my identity.

And yet, that night, like so many others, I did it.

Klaus was an anomaly in my defense system, one I didn't try to explain. I always complied, inevitably, shoving it out of my mind the moment it was done. Oh, I never would've let him initiate contact - no - he had to keep his hands to himself, and he never tried. But to touch him for the sake of quieting the storm inside him - to silence the ghosts, even just for a few hours - that, I could do. To stop him from reaching for the heroin and knocking himself out for a day or two.

I knew all I was doing was swapping out a fuse in a short-circuited system. But if he wasn't okay, then I wasn't okay either.

I would have probably broken the jaw of anyone who suggested I did it because I wanted to be with him, in some way beyond the transactional, clinical nature of it. Attachment, to me, was a weakness. And I was powerfully blind to the fact that - after a year - we were already tangled in a near-symbiotic co-dependence that would never faded. For better, and sometimes for worse.

That night, once again, the energy in his room finally settled. His breathing did too. The writing on his walls, scrawled in layers over the years, became the only sighs left. Luther's record player, which had been faintly buzzing earlier, had gone silent through the door leading to the hallway, without me even noticing. Now, there was only the distant urban hum of The City.

The window had been left open, and I think I went to close it, even before turning invisible to slip into the hallway and into the bathroom to wash my hands. It wasn't insignificant, it wasn't meaningless, even if I couldn't put it into words. Yes, closing the window I had teleported through was a promise, one that - for a long time - would seem like a miracle to him.

The promise to stay. Of not leaving right after.

---

I stared at the running water for a long time that night, without giving a damn about the water bill his father would have to pay. This bathroom had always given me mixed feelings, and it still does, across all the versions of the Mansion, in every timeline. The light from the streetlamps outside filtered through the frosted glass windows, the sharp angles of a bathtub that, despite everything, remained a haven for Klaus, the gray-veined marble floor. The scent of marijuana mixed with lavender, the faucets with their fickle flow. If Hargreeves Mansion had ever been an Academy, it was now nothing more than half-abandoned corridors, even though none of the rooms were meant to be cleared out. Not even those of his dead or missing brothers.

I wasn't proud of these nights: they left me with the feeling that I was fueling another one of his addictions, making him, in some way, dependent on me, without realizing that I was just as dependent on him.

I straightened up, looking at my reflection, at my now jet-black hair. I looked more exhausted than I actually was, and yet, deep down, that strange sense of calm still lingered in me. Despite the way we shattered relationship conventions, despite the complete lack of definition for whatever this was, something in me knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.