Title: Searching

Fandom: The Umbrella Academy

Pairing: none
Rating: PG-13

Summary: In 1963, Klaus is desperate for something to help relieve his cold symptoms.

Notes: Written for day 4 of my 23 Ficlets project to celebrate my 23^rd anniversary in the community

Searching

It isn’t easy to find in 1963. It’s just come on the market, so it isn’t widely distributed yet. But the tablets pharmacies have aren’t cutting it. He’s been awake for two days straight with this cough, and awake is not Klaus’ happy place even on the best of days. Awake and sober means seeing the ghosts of people everywhere, nagging and crying and screaming and suffering. Add a stinking head cold to the mix and he’s so fucking desperate for relief he takes a car and a tissue box and just starts driving. He stops at every pharmacy he passes.

He’s so tired of feeling sick and tired of feeling tired that he can’t even count the number of times he almost spins the car off the road or drives it into something that isn’t a street, though the worst he hits is a mailbox. There are no seatbelts or airbags, but Klaus has been to war, so the risks don’t even enter his mind. He’s too focused on his current mission.

The moon is full and bright as he stumbles from the car toward the door of another drug store. He laughs up at it, thinking about Luther and that mission and wondering where the others are right now. Did they memorialize him the way they did after Ben died? Do they think he’s lost forever the way they thought they’d lost Five? Did they even notice he was gone the way they hadn’t when Klaus found himself in Vietnam for years?

“hahh… Hahkxxshhh!” Klaus sneezes into his shoulder as he reaches for the door. Scanning the shelves is quick and easy. It’s not there. Then he’s back in the car, heading off to find a new place to check. He misses the internet. Google Maps. Cell phone GPS. Ordering off Amazon. It’s got to be somewhere, and even if it takes him weeks and he’s already over this cold by the time he finds it, he’s going to keep looking so he’ll have some on hand for the next time.

When there are more tissues outside the tissue box than in it, Klaus buys a new box at one of the stores. He buys some oranges as well, because he can’t find bottled juice, and he sits on the hood of the slightly dented car and unpeels the oranges, eating section after section and staring at the tattoos on his fingers, slick and sticky. He curls up in the back seat when it all gets too much and coughs and coughs, wishing he could feel Ben’s touch when his brother’s ghost tries to stroke his head.

“hahhKxxx! H’Kxxshhh!” The sneezes rock his whole body, making him flail then pull back in on himself. He curls into a fetal position and lets out a sob because he’s left the tissue box in the front seat and suddenly it’s all too much for him.

Ben tries to reason with him. Ben tells him to find a motel somewhere and bundle up in bed to wait this head cold out. Ben doesn’t want him driving halfway across the country in search of something that might not even exist. Maybe Klaus got the dates wrong in his head? Maybe Klaus is feverish, delirious? Maybe both. Probably both. But Klaus keeps driving. And searching.

And sniffling and sneezing and coughing and aching. He’s driven, and so he’s driving. And Ben has absolutely no way to stop him anyway. Those disapproving looks are fierce but his threats are empty. And Klaus is used to disapproval from his family, from everyone really.

“Klaus, promise me, if it’s not at this next place, you’ll try to rest,” Ben pleads with him, following him into another pharmacy. They’ve lost track of what state they’re in, what day it is. But Klaus looks and sounds ten times worse than when he started. His nose is red from sandpaper-grade tissues scratching at it constantly for days on end. His dark eyes are red and the bags under them almost have their own bags by now.

“S’not going to help!” He snorts with laughter. “Snot,” he murmurs to himself. The laughter scratches his throat and makes him cough again, but that is a fine price to pay for a moment of levity.  

He stumbles around the store until he finds the right section, then stops dead in his tracks. There it is. He rubs at his eyes, blinks, rubs, and blinks again. “Ben? Ben, are you seeing this?” he asks, reaching over to hit Ben and get his attention, except his hand touches nothing. He overbalances to the side and catches himself, knocking a few boxes of medicine off the shelf in the process.

“Yeah, I see it,” Ben says as Klaus grabs the bottle of bright green liquid and hugs it to his chest as if it is his now his most precious possession.

In a flash, Klaus twists off the cap and chugs two mouthfuls of the stuff. Ben yells at him to go easy on it. And some store clerk yells at him that he’ll have to pay for that. But the burn of pure Nyquil going down numbs him to everything for the moment. He closes his eyes and hums a few bars from a song that isn’t going to be written for another thirty years.

He buys two bottles of the medicine, just to be safe, and thinks he might go back for a third when he feels better and has the money to splurge. Ben helps him spot a motel nearby. It’s a shady, pay-by-the-hour joint, but Klaus has slept in worse places. He sprawls face-down on the bed like a starfish, tissues in one hand and the green bottle in the other. The medicine is kicking in, and he can barely keep his eyes open.

“hahhHmmphhh!” he sneezes into a pillow then turns his head the other direction so he’s not resting his face in a wet spot. The pillowcase feels cool and soft against his cheek, and it’s maybe the best thing he’s felt in months.

He looks around for Ben, wanting to ask him to stick around and watch over him while he sleeps, even though Ben’s not some angel sent to do that, and Klaus is agnostic anyway. But Ben isn’t anywhere. Maybe it’s the alcohol in the medicine that’s dimmed his séance powers again. He’s been sober for a relatively long time, at least for him, but he has no regrets about backsliding with Nyquil, apart from losing touch with his brother for a while. That’s nothing new to him either, though. It was amazing how he and his brothers and sisters all grew up together, lived together, fought crime together, and still all managed to feel alone. The silence in the room is easy to get used to. It’s pleasant. It’s familiar.

Klaus wonders, briefly, if he should take just one more swallow of the medicine, but before he can even raise his head to look over at the bottle, he’s out like a light.