umbrellajackassery | Young!Klaus Shenanigans

She knows that tone, and her whole body goes tense when she hears it. The stack of books - small, really, given how big this fucking house is - gets dropped into their box with a little more force than Vanya intended. Her jaw clenches, and she glances over as he waltzes in, sits down on her bed.

For a second she just stares at him, then turns in a half circle to gesture at her room. It should be obvious, shouldn't it? But then, he's probably already messed up; she can't remember the last time she saw him really sober.

(Vanya bites the side of her tongue, thinking of Dad's harsh words for her yesterday, is it so hard for you to keep track of your possessions, Number Seven, must you be utterly useless, and tastes blood.)

"What's it look like?" She goes to her music stand, pulling various concert pieces off and stuffing them into a folder to be packed away.

If she's assuming he's already taken something, Vanya is exactly correctamundo, amiga. Klaus really stays some level of buzzed or fuzzy-headed any more. Ever since he'd realized that he could get away from the ghosts, it was like magic, only made better by how genuinely good that feeling became to him. Fuzzy and numb and like he couldn't be in a bad mood if he tried. It's perfect. Beautiful. It's--

He jumps at the sudden, sharp snap! of the books in Vanya's hand clapping down into the box she was standing in front of. Then she's flitting around the room, grabbing things and putting them into folders, snapping words at him.

He glances around and actually takes in the look of the room this time. "Oh-- Dad was serious about that?" As if Reginald Hargreeves had ever told a joke in his life. He'd heard Dad throw something about a musical prison-- sorry, boarding school at dinner one night a handful of weeks ago, but he thought it was more like the way parents in movies threatened bootcamp at their kids. Just an empty threat to set their kids on the path they wanted them to follow. But apparently this was nothing like that at all.

"When isn't he serious?" Especially about them, especially about her. Holding his notebook during training didn't mean shit because she - she was the runt of the family. She was nothing. She was nobody.

She didn't have powers, and so what reason did he have to pay any attention to her?

Folding up her music stand with some small struggles, she drops it into another box, and goes to her desk to rummage through. There's not much to pack: she doesn't own much, all things told. Most of it is music, or blank sheet paper for working out chords, or extra strings for her violin. She's pretty sure she won't even need all these boxes, because all her clothes - uniform on uniform on uniform, for an Academy she'll never really belong to - will fit in one suit case. Her whole life here, summed up in a handful of square feet.

"What do you want? I only have a couple days left." And she's not sure she wants to spend that time with her spine feeling like it's going to jump out of her skin, waiting for him to ask what she knows he came to ask.

He watches her momentarily struggle with the music stand with arched brows, but she gets it and she's moving to the next thing. Packing like her whole life depends on it or something. Then again, maybe she feels like it does. Dad is always so...intense.

"Whaaat, I can't just wanna hang out with my sister?" He sounds falsely affronted, hand on his chest as if that truly wounded him.

He's joking, but the words stick to her skin like burrs, and she's suddenly so angry. It sputters in her, though, twisting like a serpent looking for an exit big enough and finding nothing. She hardly ever fights, only rarely argues: it's just easier, always, to let that serpent settle and die so she can just move on.

But Vanya is being forcibly moved on, and if she's never going to see him again, then what does it matter if she yells, just once? It's a fight to hold onto that anger, but she spins around fast enough that her hair goes flying.

"No, because you never want to hang out with me. You only ever come to ask me for--" Okay, well, she'd rather not yell about that, but it's the entire source of her anger, so though she cuts herself off, she still glares at him.

"I hang out with you all the time." He counter-argues in a pathetic sort of turnabout. It's not exactly true, but the defensiveness is already strong in the air and Klaus has always been emotionally susceptible anyway.

Vanya drops - practically throws - another book into a box, and on the way she stops to shut her door: she has just the presence of mind for that, through the anger that leaves her feeling guilty and sick.

"You don't. You come and pretend to care about anything I'm doing for two minutes so you can ask for some of my meds."

She hasn't really looked at him, busying herself with things she doesn't care about, packing stuff she'd rather never see again. All those fucking uniforms, all of them with the academy logo - but no tattoo on her forearm, no training, never any welcome. "Well it's done. It's over."

"What the fuck, V?" He sweeps one hand out and pulls a face that's somewhere between offense and disbelief. Vanya was never confrontational, this was just twenty different kinds of bizarre. "That's not even true."

Maybe it was, but what he really means is that even if that is true, he does still care about her, and love her, because she's his sister. But unfortunately nothing remotely like that makes it out of his mouth at all.

A part of her wants to explode at him, shout, because maybe then he'd hear her. Instead, she reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out the little RX bottle, thumbing off the lid - what's the point of a child lock on something she's supposed to be responsible enough to look after - and pulling one out. It doesn't occur to her that maybe it's a bit of a fuck you to Klaus, taking one in front of him, until she's swallowed it. But then, the idea of it being taken as a fuck you doesn't particularly bother her.

It's so difficult to be angry in this house, with this family: it's so difficult to feel anything with them.

"Name one time." She wants to cry, now, and viciously beats the urge back. She's not going to give him the - what, ammunition, satisfaction? Would he even take it as either?

As much as she hates the uniforms, she folds them carefully. She knows that she'll be back, that there are summer and winter breaks, but this feels final - that whatever she leaves will be gone, and if these are going to be tossed out, then she'll be the one to toss them. Or hoard them forever. Whichever feels right.

"Just - just one time that you asked me to hang out, or play a game with you guys. One where you didn't ask me for anything after."

There is so much anger built up in her suddenly that it's kind of jarring with the mousy, quiet picture of Vanya that Klaus has always had in his mind.

And then she pops one of her pills. Right there in front of him. Like a giant finger in the air at him. And that just annoys him more.

"What, like-- recently? Or I mean-- you forgot about hanging out in the attic with me and Ben when we were kids?!" That. Probably doesn't count. At all. That was a good six or better years ago. Probably more, Klaus wasn't the best with attributing time to things, spending so much of his own in various states of haze.

Her hand clenches around the last uniform; she nearly throws it at him, but the inclination for violence fades almost as soon as it rises. Just her nerves, a side effect of wanting to argue with him. That's all it ever is.

Vanya closes her eyes instead. She doesn't need to count to ten or take a beat to breathe. But she never has the right words, is never fast enough to snap back at any of her siblings. It's hardest with Allison and Klaus: they're so quick witted, and she is...not.

"We were like - six," she says, and it's shaky and uncertain because she is forever doubting herself. Maybe she should just - no. She'll be gone soon. It won't matter. And besides, she won't be here to give him anything.

Something inside her wants to cry, but no tears sting her eyes: she thinks it must just be her anxiety, flickering away under the medicine. V takes a deep breath, lets it out shakily. "I can't help you anymore."

He's almost unphased, could have babbled and barreled directly into some other bullshit excuse or explanation, but he doesn't get the chance. Because before he can, she says she can't help him and for some reason that's what makes him mad. His face screws up with his annoyance at the denial of something that he'd come to take for granted. "Fine." he bites the word out, like it's left a bitter taste in his mouth. "Whatever. Have fun at music prison."

He spins hard on his heel to leave the room, almost leaves it at that, but pauses in the doorway to turn back to let her have one more spiteful thing thrown at her. "I hope you don't come back." And isn't it lucky he doesn't have Allison's power, or it might have gone so very differently.

She could have lived with it. Vanya knows this is a punishment, and even if it's learning something she cares about, it's still being sent away because she'll never be good enough for the Academy. It doesn't matter how hard she tries: she doesn't belong here.

But he has to get one more shot in, and for all that she started this so righteously angry, he might as well have stabbed her. She'd already started to deflate, medicine swallowed dry because her hands had started shaking over the confrontation, but now it's like she's popped. And she doesn't want him to see the way that hurts.

There are no more uniforms to pack, she has so few things period, but she wants to break something, to at least make this place look like she feels. She wants to throw something at him, so he knows. But there isn't anything. And she couldn't do it even if she had something ready to go in her hands.

Vanya just stands there, staring at him, hurt and doing a bad job of hiding it: she was never the strongest of them.

Young!Klaus Shenanigans

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