umbrellajackassery | 01: i spend too much time ghosting [ota]

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01: i spend too much time ghosting [ota]

In the name of avoiding everyone and everything until he had sorted out the chaos in his own head, Ben had gone into hiding.

He hadn't left or gone anywhere else, he could still feel that tether drawing him back here, but that was where it got messy. Ben had several truths in his world. Even death didn't stop the Horror. Being dead sucked. He knew where Klaus was.

He was sixteen when he died, just shy of seventeen. And ever since then, nearly half of his existence, he always knew where Klaus was. It was always just a thought and he was right near him, usually in the middle of whatever chaos Klaus had caused.

But there wasn't a Klaus.

He was sure he'd seen at least three by now. One of them was definitely not the Klaus he thought of as 'his', because he had a Ben with him, a living, smiling Ben. And he was fairly sure he'd seen another version of himself, silent and invisible and lurking in a corridor outside a door.

But he wasn't sure which one was his and it was overwhelming and frightening, in a way that the world hadn't been for him for a long time. Which was why he had decided to go to the place he hated most and he knew the others would mostly avoid.

He went to Sir's office and sat down in a corner on an antique chair that they never would have been allowed to touch. He sat and rubbed his stomach where the Horror roiled, unsettled by his own discomfort.

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She nodded, "The pointy one then. Haven't actually met any of them, obviously, but seen them around."

A small smile, "I went ass over teakettle the first time tried to walk in heels, too, so I'm not really that surprised he fell that hard if he was on stairs. I only sprained a wrist and that was on level ground, can't imagine what might've happened if I'd been going down stairs."

Pointy. Diego never seemed pointy to Ben, despite his predilection for knives. He was too protective and caring and with his childhood stutter and short, hot temper, he had always been more like a cherry bomb on a short fuse.

"Never worn them. Klaus tried to convince me to try Grace's but-" It had been complicated. Grace had so little of her own. And anyway, Ben's feet had been too little.

He shrugged slightly.

"Honestly I'm surprised I even tried them again after that, and I'm sure the only reason I did was because girls were supposed to and it was before I'd given up caring about that kind of thing."

A shrug, "And by the time I had given that habit up, I'd already learnt to walk in them. And you know I think 'pointy' might be the wrong word, he didn't really seem sharp like that, but more like one of those alley cats with a bad ear and one eye that might let you pet them and even purr about it especially if you've got food, but one wrong move and they'll take your hand clean off."

"... that's a big more Diego," Ben agreed quietly. "He can be really cruel and cutting, but if anyone so much as looks at one of us wrong, he'll be in their face, forcing them to back off."

Diego found his voice and promptly learned to throw words as accurately as he threw knives, cutting deep and true. They'd all learned how to best hurt each other with words as children. "He has really good intentions though. He really believes in trying to save people."

She smiled, nodding once, "Sounds like the best kind of sibling to have. Not that I'd really know." She added, giving a shrug, "Only child. Sounds a bit like my friend Cassie, though. Even when she was upset with me she was still in my corner, and when she wasn't it was because she was literally possessed and wasn't herself, which meant it was my turn to be in her corner instead."

"... not really." Diego could be hurtful. Really hurtful. Not so much to Ben, none of them were really mean to him because he was the smallest for a long time, and quiet. But Diego and Klaus had a bad track record and Ben had witnessed a lot more of that than Diego knew.

"I was always closest with Klaus and Five, I guess. Then Five went missing and four years later I died. Klaus and I had each other's backs against the others." Against One, Two and Three, mostly. When they stopped fighting each other. "Diego will protect any of us, but he can be a massive dickweed."

"Oh don't get me wrong, Cassie could be a right cow, and there's nothing worse than fighting with someone who knows all your insecurities, and who's been there for almost every weak moment you've had. But in the end, when it really mattered, she was there for me, every time."

She had a feeling it was the same for this entire family, not just Diego towards the rest of them. Granted, she didn't have a whole lot to go on to back that opinion up, but she liked to think she was a good judge of character.

Ben and Klaus had been at literally every worst moment either of them had. Mostly Klaus' low points and mostly, Ben didn't use them against him because he remembered how horrific life was.

Something suddenly occured to Ben. Thelma looked... whole. Like him. "You don't have a death mark."

Her brow creased, puzzled for a moment, but then they both lifted in surprise, hitching up the side of her shirt, "This?" It wasn't really a stab wound, but it wasn't really a scar, either, given as how the stabbing had been symbolic she wasn't sure why it was there anyway, just that it was, "Anyway, I drowned. This was... confusing."

She shook her head, smoothing her shirt back down again, "Happened in a dream, but a dream that was sort of a real thing. In limbo, I guess, maybe actually purgatory."

"Oh, drowning would explain it, I guess. The last drowning victim I saw was tortured as well, so he was always soaking wet." He sees other ghosts, but they generally aren't interested in him. Nor him in them, really.

Her brow furrowed, "Well that sounds horrible." She shook her head, "Is it rude of me to feel lucky I avoided that kind of thing, d'you think?" Because she definitely did, as horrible as the circumstances of her own death had been, at least it hadn't been something like that.

"No. If you have to die, finding a nicer way to do it is about the best we can hope for." Ben had seen a lot of dead people. He tried to keep them away from Klaus when he could.

"Suppose that's true. Still feels a bit selfish." She shook her head, "I mean, I know it's not like I can do anything to change someone else's circumstances, especially now, but I wouldn't want to upset someone by bragging, even by accident, you know?"

"Well... it's not bragging. We died how we died. We haunt for various reasons. Most ghosts I've encountered don't have much to them but the trauma of how they died. They're not really... whole beings anymore."

"I've seen that." She replied, "Or the ones that get stuck doing the same task over and over, or stuck in some other kind of loop." She'd known the little girl, Esther, was malevolent and not just stuck, but still a little stuck all the same.

She shook her head then, "Hope I just fade out again before that kind of thing happens. Seems like the worst sort of fate."

"Loopers." Stuck on a loop of the same thing, over and over. "I knew of one who walked the same spot every night. And when they redid the place and moved the ceilings, he kept walking in the same spot, because that's where his floor was."

Ben is scared to move on. He isn't really interested in doing it, not while Klaus is around, but he doesn't know what will happen to him or his guests. "I think it's like dementia. When you're that deep in it? You don't know. It's not awful for you, maybe even soothing. It's better than reliving your death over and over. Or just being caught in that trauma. I've been dead a while, you learn a lot about other ghosts when your brother is a medium."

"Suppose that makes sense." She agreed, really to all of it, the Loopers and knowing more than you should on account of your human anchor being more than just a normal human.

"Bit like how people say you can't really be crazy as long as you're still asking if you are, and if Cassie had found someone sensible to teach her about her heritage, I might have learned something useful like that as well. Witches and mediums and psychics kind of fall in the same boat when it comes to this sort of thing, I think."

"Insanity comes in a lot of forms. I don't think anything can unequivocally rule it in or out like that."

Ben has no idea about witches and psychics, not really. Just Klaus. "Maybe just anyone. Like, knowing about yourself and having someone help you with it is a pretty fundamentally human thing. It's just more difficult to find that help and information when you've got things very different about you. Like seeing ghosts. Or being host to eldritch horrors."

She just nodded at that, because it was true enough, and, having come to the realization that he'd been dead a good deal longer than she had, she finally asked: "Doesn't really get any easier, does it?"

She suspected it would be particularly difficult now, with Cassie out of the picture she didn't really have any kind of touchstone anymore.

He shakes his head. "You get... more resigned to not being able to do anything. Or I have. But I've been dead as long as I was alive, now. Basically."

He usually tries not to think about it like that.

"Klaus might make it easier for you. We've been working on him being able to make me tangible, or even just visible to others. He might be able to do it with you?"

She blinked then, brow furrowing, "More than I already am? I mean, really the only time I have trouble is if I'm trying to touch something living, that's when I pass right through, but I still have to go through doors the normal way, and I can still eat if I want to."

Her brow creased a little further, trying to think of other things, "Oh, and I can change clothes if I want to, though they do have to come from a dead person, otherwise it's the same problem as trying to touch something living, I just can't do it."

"You..."

Ben's face crumples a little before he gets control of himself. "I can't interact. Not unless Klaus puts effort in. Sometimes he randomly conjures things, mostly books. Once a pink ball gown, but I don't know if he knows he did that. I learned to sit on furniture, eventually."

Eating is out of scope. He wanders through doors if he needs to, but prefers to let Klaus open them.

"That sounds awful. I'm sorry." Perhaps surprisingly that sympathy was genuine, because that was something Thelma hadn't lost in death, if anything it had just gotten more intense, she'd always been a genuine sort of person, at least once she'd started to work out just what kind of person she actually was, instead of what kind of person she was expected to be.

A little flicker of a smile followed, "There's still the problem of not being seen, so even if I'm moving things around, I have to be careful not to get caught at it."

"It is what it is," Ben says softly. He rocks on his feet and shoves his hands in his pockets. "After thirteen years you get... resigned to it. And at least I can't hurt anyone by accident."

His anger didn't lead to rampaging monsters. "It's a problem I could live with, I think."

"I don't know if I could even hurt someone on purpose." A pause, head tilting as she thought about it, "Maybe if I threw something hard enough, don't know that i'd even manage it then, though."

She shook her head, "Probably wouldn't even try unless someone was being an unforgivable wanker."

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