Snippets of Memory - The Umbrella Academy

Whispers of the Minerva

"Come on, I have something amazing to show you".

---

Sounds of steady snoring was rising from Luther's room as we left the bathroom. Hargreeves Mansion was sleeping like a huge, sprawling creature, or at least, what remained of it. Klaus had assured me that Pogo was in his quarters in the basement, that Grace was standing still on the gallery bench, recharging. The floorboards creaked, it was inevitable. And I fought the reflex to turn invisible and intangible because Klaus couldn't do the same.

The hallways stretched beneath the milky glow of the Art Deco wall sconces, casting delicate shadows along the walls. Every corner exuded a faded, oppressive grandeur, a splendor frozen in time. The entire mansion suffocated under the weight of its trophies, taxidermied specimens, and collections of exotic curiosities that seemed to have been brought back from past expeditions.

And in the midst of all that? Klaus zigzagged through it in his absurd unicorn onesie, nearly knocking over one trinket or another with his ridiculous rainbow pom-pommed tail.

When the grand staircase appeared before us in the darkness, I remember perceiving it as a threat, almost a precipice, as if it sank deep into the bowels of the house. But we didn't descend. We left the pseudo-Moorish arches behind us. We veered into a long gallery lined with glass display cases, once again filled with artifacts that were incomprehensible to me, almost eerie in the the faint glow of the night lamps.

"Once, Diego and I christened those Ming vases below with the finest vintage, by pissing off the balcony".

I chuckled softly, letting the thrill take hold of me as we continued walking. For a moment, he hesitated at the entrance of a narrower hallway, at the end of the gallery. We slipped into it like two shadows, arriving before a door that appeared ordinary, though thick. And yet, I quickly realized that wasn't the case.

"We only passed through here in cases of extreme urgency", he murmured. "Or when a mission took us far away".

I furrowed my brows and looked at him in the dim light, feeling a shiver run down my spine.

I couldn't - still can't - truly picture those mission departures, during the Umbrella Academy era. I had caught snippets of that time, overheard allusions buried between acidic jokes or drowned in alcohol, but Klaus never spoke about it outright. For me, it was a patchwork of disjointed, fractured memories: uniforms changed twice a year, forced tattoos, old newspapers recounting exploits that seemed more like PR stunts than acts of heroism. The most crucial pieces of information about that period came not from what he told me, but from what he didn't. From traumas I could only guess at, from the silences he could never fill.

I struggled to picture him in that role, and not just because he didn't have the makings of a fighter. Klaus already had that intelligent irreverence, that soft, honest sarcasm, that pacifism and that gaze devoid of hatred, always cast upon others. So no, I couldn't imagine him being sent out against criminals, the kind I had, more than once, been lumped in with myself. And in that moment, I felt his fear, the same one he had always felt when he zipped up his suit and stepped out of his room.

Suddenly, that hallway, that door before us, appeared to me like a tangible scar. A forced passage toward a destiny he had never chosen. I watched him in the dark, his hands brushing against the thick wood, his features frozen somewhere between nostalgia and apprehension. He didn't need to say a thing: his posture spoke for him. All at once, he was no longer flamboyant, no longer dramatic. He was his past self, carrying a silent fragility. I blinked in the shadows.

"It's locked", I said, and he lifted his gaze to me.
"Yeah. But Pogo keeps a spare key for maintenance. I've seen him come in here a hundred times, pretending to be curling on the waxed floor".