Work Text:
Although Klaus did somewhat enjoy his time in the 1960’s, there really was something to be said for the modern conveniences of the 21st century. In addition to the fact that he couldn’t really be open about his true self in the more oppressive past, he missed a lot of little luxuries of the modern day, such as microwavable burritos, the internet, and of course, vibrating sex toys for those nights when you still felt the urge but didn’t want to deal with the effort of finding another person who was down to fuck.
And of course, Klaus had friends in 2019 that certainly didn’t exist in the 1960’s. Hell, even their parents would have been just children back then, if they were alive at all. Of course, he wasn’t sure how many of them would have still been born in the new timeline that had been created, but there was no reason all of them would have disappeared. He knew a lot of people from his time being practically homeless after leaving the academy, many of which should still exist in this new 2019.
Due to his past of drug abuse and occasional prostitution, Klaus had befriended a number of unsavory people, people he knew he couldn’t try and reconnect with, no matter how much he missed them. Too many of them would try to drag him back into the life he had fought so hard to escape from, the life he promised himself that he would never return to after he watched Dave die. So many of his old friends didn’t want to try and overcome addiction, instead they’d rather drag him back down to there level so they could feel better about their own lives, and so they could continue to delude themselves into believing any effort to improve themselves was completely futile.
There was at least one person who he knew wouldn’t try to lead him back to the life that was physically and mentally killing him. An old friend with benefits that had been trying to get him to quit for years in her own twisted and violent way. He knew she had cared about him as more than just a sexual partner-although it was pretty obvious her feelings towards him had never been romantic-and didn’t want to watch him destroy himself with toxic substances.
Her name was Leonarda, but most people knew her only as Leo, and the name seemed to fit her all too well. She wasn’t elegant or dignified in any way, but she was rough and right to the point. She was also batshit insane. As Ben had so eloquently put it, she was ten pounds of crazy in a nine pound bag, but Klaus found that aspect of her personality endearing. He’d met plenty of people who acted that way when high out of their minds on drugs, but nobody who could do it completely sober like she did.
While Ben had tried to convince him time and time again that she was incredibly toxic and borderline dangerous, Klaus had his reasons to continue going back to her. For one, she happened to be one of the 43 children born on that day in 1989 to a mother who hadn’t been pregnant that morning, so that was something they had to bond over. Klaus didn’t know if ol’ Reggie had tried to purchase her or not, but either way she hadn’t found herself in his possession, instead staying in Italy for her early childhood before later coming to the United States.
While she’d never been too keen on letting other people know that she was in any way different, upon realizing that Klaus had been part of the Umbrella Academy, she had allowed him to see that side of her. Leo’s power was the ability to summon two clones of herself whenever she wished, although she had explained to him before that they were more like puppets than anything else. They didn’t think or feel, and they didn’t move unless she put in a conscious effort to will them to do so. She told him that the reason she didn’t summon them too often was because of the mental effort it took, but he could tell her façade of normalcy also played a big role in it.
The second reason was that she seemed to genuinely care about him, and want him to get better, even if her pursuit of doing so often bordered on abusive and had even crossed that line a few times. Before they were reunited, all of his siblings at some point had basically given up on him ever getting clean after all the overdoses and failed stays in rehab, and basically accepted that he couldn’t be fixed and would likely end up dead from an overdose at some point, but not Leo. Even if her violent temper would sometimes come out after he’d nearly killed himself once again, she made sure to keep tabs on him, and kept the drugs from killing him whenever they crossed paths in those circumstances, or he showed up on her doorstep completely FUBAR from whatever pills he’d gotten his hands on. She didn’t just see him as someone to fuck, she saw him as a friend.
Klaus could certainly understand why Leo was the way she was. None of the 43 children born on that day (at least the ones he knew of, anyway) had grown into sufficiently stable and well adjusted adults, and from what he knew about her upbringing, her life might have actually been improved had her mother given her up to Reginald Hargreeves.
They spent a lot of time just talking on the occasions when Klaus was sober or near sober, so it was no surprise that their pasts came up regularly. Like most people, Leo knew about the Umbrella Academy from TV and the newspaper, and had even read Viktor’s book at one point, but Klaus provided her with his prospective of the whole thing, and in return she shared with him the details of her own shitty childhood.
Leo had told him that her life was pretty normal for the most part up until the age of five, despite the unusual circumstances of her birth. She started showing signs of her power pretty early on, with her father (well, more realistically her stepfather, considering that like the rest of the 43 children, she didn’t technically have a biological father) claiming to sometimes see two of her when he peeked into her room to check in on her, only for the double to disappear when he turned away and looked back, but considering his history of mental illness, even he brushed it off as an occasional visual hallucination caused by stress. Overall, her parents we just happy to have a child-despite the peculiar circumstances-as they had been trying for a while with no luck and figured perhaps this was part of God’s plan after all.
When she was five was when things changed. Her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor and the treatments didn’t seem to be helping. As a last ditch effort, they immigrated to America where they had some family living in hopes that a specialist there would be able to do something, but unfortunately there was nothing anyone could have done, and Leo’s mother passed away on her daughter’s seventh birthday after a year and a half of suffering.
As Leo got older and her powers grew stronger, her relationship with her father only seemed to worsen. His mental health only deteriorated after the death of his wife, and he began taking all his issues out on his daughter, blaming her for the fact that her mother had died and the issues they had with regaining their Italian citizenship, and made it very clear that he found everything about her to be unnatural and didn’t want to be raising her. He turned to alcohol and later drugs.
In order to take her mind off of her homelife and keep herself out of the house at a young age, Leo took to learning auto mechanics from an older cousin of hers who had already found his place in America with his own auto shop (which she later learned was actually a chop shop). She would use the skills she learned from him later in life to open up a chop shop of her own, developing ties with the Italian mafia and carefully investing her profits in other criminal endeavors in order to make even more money.
Leo had told Klaus that the best day of her life was the day she returned home to find her father dead when she was just sixteen. She came back from working in her cousin’s garage to find her father hanging from the ceiling fan. She didn’t even bother looking for a suicide note, just packed up her things, called in an anonymous tip to the police so that the body wouldn’t stay there to rot, and left to go live with other family members until she found a place of her own. There was nothing left for her there, and she knew it.
“Some people are just too broken to be fixed.” She had told Klaus when discussing it. “Honestly, I’m surprised that bastard didn’t do it sooner.”
Much like everything about their relationship, the way they had met was also incredibly unusual. Leo had gone to a sketchy motel looking for someone who owed her money, and upon entering the room where they were allegedly staying, found Klaus passed out in the bathtub which had been filled with ice, presumably left there by someone who was planning on stealing his kidney. Whatever made her feel obligated to drag him out of there and bring him back to her place, Klaus was grateful for. Not just because he got to keep all his organs, but because it introduced him to Leo.
He awoke on her couch completely naked to her smacking him across the face and yelling that he needed to wake up because she wasn’t about to let him die on her couch, although it seemed more like she didn’t want to deal with the mess left behind from a dead body, rather than caring about if he made it or not. When he came to, she informed him that she saved his life, and that he was to be out of here by morning.
When she left the room, he asked Ben what the hell was going on, and his dead brother explained the whole incident to him, including the part where Leo had formed two doubles of herself out of thin air in order to help herself move Klaus’s unconscious body. As snarky as Ben was, he wasn’t known for making things up, so he trusted that his brother had seen what he claimed to have seen. He figured that, or this woman had two really sneaky identical sisters.
“Do you think she’s one of us?” He had asked Ben. “I mean, Reggie only got his hands on seven of us, so that means there’s like 50 others running around, right?”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Do you really not remember anything we were taught about our origin? There were 43 children born, which means there are only 36 others out there, assuming none of them have died.”
“Give me a break, Benny boy, you know math was never my best subject.”
Ben turned back to his book. “While that may be true, I still don’t know how you would manage to get 50 as your estimate.”
“Who the hell are you even talking to?” Leo had asked as she walked back into the room. “You’re completely alone, you stupid junkie.”
“Just my brother Ben.” He told her. “I’m never alone when I’ve got him with me.”
“Like I said before, there’s nobody in here. Are you high or just fucking nuts?”
“Well, I won’t deny that I’m still a little high, but the reason you can’t see Ben is because he’s dead. He’s been here the whole time, and told me about everything, even those weird clones you used to bring me here.”
She looked incredibly confused for a moment before making a realization. “Wait a minute, I know who you are. You’re one of those Umbrella kids. Ghost boy, right? I remember seeing you on TV when I was younger, you could talk to spirits and stuff.”
He chuckled. “In the flesh and blood. Not a huge fan of ghost boy, though, so I’d prefer it if you just called me Klaus. Ben’s here too, he’s just dead so you can’t see him. He was the one with the freaky squid powers if you remember. And what shall I call you?”
“Its Leonarda, but everyone just calls me Leo.” She told him. “I read your sister’s book, and I’ve seen plenty of those ‘where are they now’ articles about your family, and I’ve always wanted to ask, what the fuck happened to you? I know being able to talk to ghosts isn’t as useful as being able to throw knives at people with perfect accuracy, or rumor someone into killing themselves, but you think someone like you would be able to do more with your life than get addicted to drugs and almost end up with your kidney stolen.”
He shrugged. “The hero lifestyle isn’t for everyone, so I decided to quit. Besides, having to listen to ghosts’ sucks. They all want you to tell their family that they love them or take care of some unfinished business for them.”
“But that still doesn’t mean you have to be killing yourself with drugs.”
“I chose my path and I’m fine with it. But enough about me, how about you tell me what was up with you and those clones of yourself?”
She sighed. “Fine, I don’t usually tell people about this, and I thought you would have no way of knowing since you were unconscious, but I have powers. Like you, I was born to a mother who wasn’t pregnant on the morning of that day, and because of that I have abnormal abilities. I can create two versions of myself that I can control like puppets, but I don’t do it a lot because it takes a lot of physical and mental energy. Despite my circumstances, I’ve built a good and normal life for myself, and I doubt people would be able to see me for my achievements anyone if they learned what I am truly capable of.”
“I always wondered what happened to the rest of you.” Said Klaus. “I mean, I always figured at least some of the other kids born the way me and Ben were had to have powers as well, and yet I never really heard about anyone else like us.”
“I think we all just basically faded out of the limelight a year or two after we were born.” Said Leo. “After the seven of you were bought by that billionaire, the focus was mainly just on you, and people forgot about the 36 other kids, and we just went on to live more typical lives, powers, or no powers. I’ve made a few attempts to find people like me over the years, but I’ve never had any luck. I just wanted to feel like I wasn’t alone in all this, ya know?”
“I completely understand that, but hey, now you’ve found me, and by extension, Ben. Now, what do you have around here in terms of breakfast foods? Ben says I haven’t eaten in three days, and I’m starving.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know, if you were anyone else, I would have already thrown your ass out, but since I’m pretty happy to have finally met someone who’s like me, I guess I’ll let you stay a bit longer. Hell, I’ll even make you some fucking pancakes.”
“Waffles would be better.”
“Tough shit, I don’t have a waffle maker.”
They ended up hooking up later that night after a few hours of just talking, and the rest was history. While he and Leo were never really romantically involved, or even exclusive to each other (they both had multiple other partners), they remained friends and continued to have sex from time to time. They even experimented with using Leo’s clones in the bedroom, something Klaus had become quite fond of.
Despite the fact that he had stolen from multiple family members-and quite a few former lovers and friends-to fuel his drug habit, Klaus never stole from Leo. Not just because of how he felt about her, but because she had threatening to chop off his thieving hand if he ever caught him stealing from her, and he didn’t doubt she’d do it. He was pretty sure she’d murdered at least one person at that point, so mutilation wasn’t out of the question. Of course, she’d probably take care to make sure he didn’t bleed out, or catch an infection and die, but he wasn’t too keen on having only one hand, although it would be pretty cool if he got a hook out of the deal.
Klaus generally enjoyed Leo’s company. Sure, she had her share of toxic behaviors, but she skill managed to be a lot better than most of the people he had formed relationships with, and she did seem like a genuinely nice person deep down, even with all her issues.
Despite her hatred of drugs and anyone that used them, she still took care of him. If he showed up mostly sober (or at least in the stages of withdrawal), she would allow him to stay as long as he wanted and provide him with whatever he needed. She’d buy him clothes and even purchased a waffle maker for when he stayed over. She also made sure he was using protection with his other sexual partners so that he didn’t catch any diseases or get anyone pregnant (Leo had an IUD and was even looking into finding a doctor willing to tie her tubes-it was a bit difficult finding one willing to perform permanent sterilization on a 30-year-old childless woman-so there wasn’t much risk there) and had made him go to a clinic regularly to get tested. She’d talked about letting him become her permanent roommate if he ever got completely sober, even offering to get him a job at a strip club she had heavily invested in.
The one thing she did not tolerate, however, was his use of drugs. When Klaus would show up at her place high was the only time she would really get violent with him, although it was hard to tell if her rage was directed at him or the drugs themselves. She would scream at him and punch him, telling him that he was killing himself and that he would be nothing more than a useless drain on society if he kept it up. Occasionally, if he showed up at her place high too often, or if she was already angry for whatever reason, she would use her clones against him as well. She had almost killed him this way once, beat him to the point where she thought he was dead, panicked, and decided to drive his body a few hours away in order to burry him in the woods where nobody would ever look. Thankfully, he woke up as she was digging his grave, and didn’t end up buried alive.
“Klaus, you need to leave her for good.” Ben had told him after that incident. “I know I say this a lot, but this is going to be the death of you. Leo almost killed you, and this isn’t the first time she’s seriously hurt you before. Next time she might go too far and end your life for good.”
“Unlike our family, she hasn’t given up on me.” He replied. “She wants me to get better, and this is the only way she knows of doing it. Besides, she only beats me when I’m high.”
“If you’re going to keep seeing her, maybe you should treat this as the reason you need in order to finally get clean. Or at the very least, you could stop showing up at her house high.”
“I can manage all of my vices just fine, thank you very much. And I’m trying my best not to go see her when I’m high, but sometimes I just need to get to a safe place, and I don’t know that many addresses. Besides, do you think it would be a better idea for me to go back home to Dad? Leo didn’t mean to almost kill me, and I doubt she’ll do something like that again.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Maybe I should stop giving you advice since you never seem to follow it.”
“Well, I never ask for it, either, and that never seems to stop you.”
Although Klaus was aware that this timeline’s Leo would have no memory of their time spent together since he wasn’t even technically born in this one, that didn’t stop him from wanting to go see her. If they could somehow end up together in the original timeline, despite him being a junkie and her absolutely despising anyone who used drugs, it was more than likely they could end up together now that he was sober. After all, so long as Leo had experienced the same upbringing in this timeline, there was no reason she wouldn’t still be her wonderfully insane self.
While Klaus couldn’t be sure that Leo was born in this timeline due to the strange deaths of the mothers of himself and his adoptive siblings-plus the similar deaths of 21 other women who were likely also the mothers of the other children like him-none of the deaths had happened in Italy according to the articles his mother’s sister had given him. There were nine other surviving children born that day besides the Sparrows, so it wasn’t impossible that one of them could be Leo.
He hadn’t gone to visit Leo before the world ended the first time, and he did regret it a bit, but he’d been busy with other things, including fighting in the Vietnam war, falling in love with and then losing Dave, quitting hard drugs for good, and of course, the end of the world itself. Plus, he had this crazy thought that they would pop back into each other’s lives like they always did, apocalypse or no apocalypse. In a way, he was kinda right, considering the world had technically ended and she was presumably still alive out there.
While he knew he had to go see Reginald and confront the old man about killing the mothers of himself and his siblings (along with apparently the mothers of unrelated children that were born in the same way he was in the original timeline), he wanted to go see Leo. Sure, she would have no idea who he was, but that would be lesser of the two painful bandaids he had to rip off. Besides, he knew she had a lot of connections. Maybe one of them would be somehow useful in saving the world. If he could talk her into forming a bond with him back when he was a junkie, he could certainly do it now.
“I’m going out.” He told Five after they returned to the Obsidian hotel. “I’ve got a few things I’d like to do before the world ends again.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re planning on getting hooked on drugs again so you can ride this one out high.” Said his brother. “I know you’ve never been the most useful member of this family when it came to fights, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need you.”
Klaus shook his head. “Of course not. The withdrawals were hell, I’m not doing that again. I’m actually off to visit a dangerous friend whom I occasionally had sex with way back before the end of the world, providing she hasn’t been Thanos snapped away yet.”
“I have no idea what the Thanos thing you’re trying to tell me about is, but even if she still is out there, she won’t have any memory of you. We weren’t born in this timeline, remember?”
Klaus chuckled. “I forgot you missed the last fifteen years and all the wonderful movies that came with it. In order for you to fully understand exactly what the Thanos snap was I would have to explain to you eleven years’ worth of films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe which would take a while, and I really don’t wanna do, especially since I was high for half those movies, and I remember them as more of hellish nightmares than anything. FYI, never watch Avengers in Imax 3D while tripping on LSD unless you want to hallucinate that Iron Man is trying to murder you for the entire movie. Anyways, basically this purple alien guy named Thanos decides that the universe would be better off if half the world vanished, so he collects these magic rocks called the Infinity Stones, and snaps half of them away like what’s happening to people and animals now. I never got to see how it ended since I didn’t see the sequel because I wasn’t planning on the world ending so soon, and with my luck I never will since in this timeline it will probably turn out that DC was the one with an amazing cinematic universe, and Marvel movies are the ones that always suck.”
Five rolled his eyes. “Klaus, I don’t care about some stupid superhero movies; right now I’m a little more concerned with the fact that the world is ending again, we don’t technically exist, and as of right now, the fact that you seem set on going to visit this woman who has no idea that you even exist, and from your short description of her, might decide to kill you due to the fact that she has no recollection of you. And what’s so special about her, anyways? I thought you were into guys.”
“Au contraire, my dear brother. I am what they call Pansexual; I don’t play favorites when it comes to all the genders. Besides, I was never in love with Leo and the sex was just that, but we were friends and had a great bond, even if there were a fair number of reasons that I never introduced her to anyone in the family. She was like the hangover you get after staying out longer than you should, the coming down from a bad high, the post-nut clarity of a regrettable hookup. We met when I once again found myself at a low point, and she made it clear that I needed to change my ways, even if she wasn’t too gentle about it.
“Believe it or not, she was actually one of the other children that were born the same way we were in the original timeline, one of the ones ol’ Reggie didn’t get his hands on. She had powers just like the rest of us, but somehow managed to slip under the radar for over twenty years. When I first got the information about our mothers and the other ones that dad had killed, I was sure he’d taken out her mother, and the rest of the mother who’d given birth to non-Sparrow kids, but as far as I can tell, he didn’t kill off all of them, and Leo’s mother seems to be one of the ones that survived long enough to have her kid.
“I didn’t get to see Leo before the world ended for the first time, so I’d like to at least try to make things right. I know she won’t remember me, but if she’s in this timeline, I’d at least like a chance to say goodbye, just in case we can’t save the world this time around. Maybe everything will turn out alright and we’ll all exist in the next timeline with everyone we knew having their memories of us intact, but maybe not. Just let me do this one thing and I’ll try to avoid getting into my usual bullshit after that, I promise. I’ll be careful and go during the day when there’s too many people around for her to want to get too violent.”
While Leo didn’t care too much about having a violent and unhinged reputation (in fact, she actually preferred it that way, as it kept people from crossing her) she was smart enough not to start trouble out in the open when she knew regular people were around. The last thing she needed were cops showing up to her chop shop because someone called the police over a fight.
Five sighed. “This is an incredibly stupid idea, and I can almost guarantee that it will end badly for you, but knowing how you are, I can already tell that you’re going to go through with it either way, and I don’t have the time nor the energy to stop you from doing so. Go ahead and do the stupid, impulsive thing like you usually do, I’ve got better things to do like trying to save our asses and hopefully the entire world. Just don’t get yourself killed or cause any trouble for the rest of us.”
“Maybe next time I’ll just tell you I’m going out for ice cream or something.” He replied. “Either way, there’s the same outcome of me doing whatever I’ve already set my mind on, and that way we don’t have to waste a bunch of time talking about how I shouldn’t do the thing I’m gonna do either way.”
His brother nodded. “Maybe that would be for the best. Time is one thing we never seem to have a lot of, so I guess things would be a lot easier and quicker if we all didn’t try to talk you out of making stupid choices, considering you never listen to our advice, anyways. Go ahead, go see your dangerous friend who now has no idea you even existed. Just don’t expect any of us to be there to deal with your messes.”
“I knew you’d eventually see things my way. I’ll be back in a few hours. I won’t get killed; I promise.”
Klaus was actually going out to do two things Five would consider to be horribly stupid decisions, but Klaus decided it would be better to only mention going to see Leo, not breaking into the Sparrow Academy to try and get some closure with their father. He knew that one Five would physically stop him from doing if he found out about.
While Klaus’s powers had come in handy from time to time, he never felt that he was as significant in the grand scheme of things as the rest of his family was. They would be just fine in figuring out how to fix the timeline and keep the world from ending again without him. He’d never been overly important when it came to the missions their father would send them out on when they were kids, often getting in the way more than he helped, and things never seemed to change in his adult years.
The area Leo’s garage was located in always seemed to have a high level of ghostly activity, but that wasn’t completely unexpected. Although the area was a bit calmer now, due to most of the criminal activity being forced underground, the spirits of the past still lingered. Leo told him that this area used to be a crime-ridden slum where a lot of poor immigrants lived (granted, it still wasn’t the nicest neighborhood now, but it was at least livable, and parents didn’t seem too afraid for their children’s safety), but a few decades back the mafia decided to clean the place up, seeing as many of them had been children of Italian immigrants living in said slums. Low impact operations that appeared legitimate such as Leo’s chop shop were permitted, but nothing that brought violence or other harm near the children of the area.
If given the chance, Klaus would’ve certainly gone out of his way to visit Leo at her apartment-it was in a far less haunted part of town, and the only ghosts he would typically encounter were Leo’s weeping mother, and on rare occasions her father who seemed to only silently stare at nothing-but seeing as she had no memory if him in this timeline, she would probably assume he was there to rob her, and take his life before he could explain. He didn’t like walking past the ghosts of the area, especially the little girl with an empty eye socket crying out for her mother, or the young man close in age to himself who walked around with his intestines hanging out of a massive stab wound. Things had been much simpler when Klaus could just block everything out with drugs, but he knew his old methods for dealing with his powers were not only killing him but driving away the people who actually cared about him.
Leo’s garage was as busy as it typically was the times he had come to visit her there in the original timeline, but the one person he’d actually come to see was nowhere to be found. Two of Leo’s employees-he was pretty sure their names were Bruno and Vinny-were working on a car (Leo and her crew occasionally fixed cars for people they knew on the cheap in order to seem at least somewhat legitimate with their business), while another employee who Klaus didn’t recognize sat on a stack of tires off to the side, having a conversation in fast-paced Italian into a cell phone, occasionally gesturing as if the person on the other side could see him as well as hear him.
As soon as one of the men noticed him standing there-Klaus wasn’t sure which one; he only knew the names, not who was who-he stopped working, picking up a large wrench before approaching him. The man was intimidating enough without a weapon, but the wrench in his hand let Klaus know that he should tread carefully.
“Can I help you?” The man asked, staring him down.
Klaus was used to less than warm welcomes when he entered a business like this. Despite the fact that he hadn’t used in quite some time, he was still almost as pale and thin as he was when he did. That, coupled with his unkempt hair and unusual style of dress made a lot of people assume he was still a druggie. The man probably assumed Klaus was some junkie scoping the place out to rob later and wanted to make sure he’d think better of it.
“I’m here to see Leo.” He told the man. “I know you don’t recognize me, and the story of why I’m here is so crazy that if I told you, you’d probably just assume I was on drugs, but I just want to talk to her real quick.”
“What the hell did you just say?” He demanded.
Klaus backed up a bit. “Hey, I’m not here to start any trouble, I just want to see her. I won’t take long, and I’ll stay away from here after that, I’m only here to talk.”
“Leo has been dead for nearly two fucking years. If you still want to talk to her, I suggest you go buy an ouiji board.”
If she’d been dead for two years it meant that not only did her mother avoid being killed long enough to have her unlike so many of the other children born that day in the original timeline, but she hadn’t been killed by whatever was going on now. In the original timeline, she was alive and well by the time the apocalypse hit (as far as he knew, anyway, as it had been a month or two since he had seen her at that point), but she certainly wasn’t killed off two years ago. Something had to have happened in one of the timelines that didn’t happen in the other, something that either caused or prevented her death. Even if he knew it wouldn’t change anything, he had to know what it was.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t seen or heard from her in so long, I figured she was just fine doing what she always did. If I may ask, how did she go?”
“I have no idea who you are, so I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this, but you do seem to have known Leo, so I guess you have the right to know.” Replied the man. “As you can probably guess, you don’t make a lot of friends in the business, and Leo especially had quite a few people who would have liked to see her dead, either because of something she did, or because of the financial or power benefit that her death would have for them. Long story short, some fucker managed to break into her place, kill her, and ransack the place. If we had any idea who it was, they’d already be dead, but if they were able to get into Leo’s place and take her down without being wounded badly enough to prevent their escape, we’ll probably never know who did it.”
Klaus remembered something similar to that occurring a while back. Without the part where Leo was killed, anyway. On the day Leo had thought she’d killed him and brought him well outside of the city limits to bury him, they returned to find her apartment completely ransacked, and almost everything of value taken. Leo was understandably pissed, but too tired to do anything, and told Klaus that he should take a bath since he was covered in dirt and blood, before heading to bed, claiming she’d clean things up in the morning.
At the time, Klaus didn’t think much of it. While he knew Leo had her fair share of enemies, her apartment wasn’t in the safest part of town, and he figured an opportunistic thief entered through the front door that she’d neglected to lock in her haste to go bury his body, or had climbed through the large, picture window that had been shattered after she’d pushed him through it in her fit of rage. Leo had more than enough money in her various accounts to fix and replace everything, and she sure as hell wouldn’t be letting the police anywhere near her place, or even reporting the incident. Klaus helped her clean up a bit in the morning, and they just moved on with their lives.
Klaus had never seen this event as being overly significant, as he knew what Leo did, and they’d come across some of her enemies when they were together before. This just seemed like a random break in that could’ve happened to really anyone. But now that Klaus knew that it was the time he had almost certainly indirectly prevented Leo’s death, it gave him chills just to think about.
Klaus had always seen himself as relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Sure, he’d been a member of the Umbrella Academy in the original timeline, and he’d had a cult back in the 60’s after Five miscalculated and sent them all back there, but he never felt that he had done anything memorable in the way his sibling had, or that he’d really changed the world in any way, but it seemed as if he was the reason someone he cared about hadn’t been murdered, even if the only thing he’d done was show up high when she was already pissed off. Even if his existence didn’t have much more significance than this, at least it was something.
But since in this new timeline his mother had died before he was able to be born, he wasn’t there to keep Leo from being in her apartment when her killer came in. There had been nobody to stop it, as she had no reason to be out at that time. Perhaps the person had known this and had entered with the intent to kill her, both times taking everything of value and ransacking the place in order to conceal their true motives under the guise of a simple home robbery.
Klaus wasn’t sure if that meant he was partially responsible for Leo’s murder or not. It wasn’t his fault that he was never born in this timeline, but then again, he hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to prevent her death the first time around. It really made him wonder how much his seemingly insignificant existence had impacted the original timeline, or how different things were in the new one simply because he wasn’t there. How many people would be otherwise dead or alive if he’d still existed, how many people’s paths were greatly altered simply because he wasn’t there to make the choices he’d made. Even if it never seemed that way before, he did play a role of at least some significance in the original timeline.
Klaus wished he’d paid more attention to the enemies Leo mentioned having in the original timeline so that maybe he could shine some light on who her killer may have been so that some form of justice could be served, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t really matter. The world was probably going to end again, and even if they did save it, the timeline would be different again, and none of this would have happened. And even if he did have any additional details that could pertain to Leo’s death, sharing them would probably just make these guys think that he was somehow involved.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He told the man. “I know Leo wasn’t the most ethical person out there, but nobody deserves to be randomly murdered in cold blood like that.”
The man shrugged. “That’s just the way it goes in the business. Leo knew she’d probably end up murdered one day, but nobody expected it to happen so soon. But even if her life was short, she achieved a lot of things most people can only dream of and built everything she had on her own. These things just happen when you pick a dangerous career path.
“Now, if you don’t have anything else you want to know, I need to be getting back to work. I suggest you don’t return here unless you have actual business with the shop. And just because Leo’s no longer here, don’t think we’ve let our guards down about keeping this place secure.”
Klaus briefly considered giving them a fair warning that the world was likely going to end but thought better of it. They would most likely just assume he was crazy, but even if they did believe him, how would that information benefit them? They would most likely panic about being unfulfilled or try to stop it when there was nothing they could do. It was best to just keep them ignorant of their impending doom and allow them to continue living their lives the way they currently were.
“Don’t worry, you won’t be seeing me back here.” Said Klaus.
As he walked out of the garage and down the street, passing the ghosts he remembered all too well, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted someone all too familiar walking down the other side of the street.
“Leo!” He called after her. “Leo, wait up!”
She stopped and turned to look at him, perplexed that he was even able to see her.
“You shouldn’t be able to see me.” She told him. “I’m dead; people can’t see ghosts. Who are you?”
In a lot of cases, ghosts that were still hanging around the Earthly realm weren’t aware that they had passed on, especially if they had died a violent (and typically recent) death. Humans were amazing at denying the obvious when they didn’t want to confront it, and death was no exception to this. Leo, however, seemed fully aware that she had passed on. Klaus figured she probably felt that she had some unfinished business to attend to if she decided to stick around despite being fully aware that she was dead. That, or her stubborn soul simply refused to leave without a fight.
“Its me, Klaus. You know, ghost boy? I can see the dead. We used to be friends back when I would get high so I didn’t have to deal with my powers, and you would sometimes beat me for it. I’m clean now, though, so I can see you and everyone else who’s haunting this street.”
While Klaus understood that Leo had no way of knowing who he was in this timeline since he didn’t technically exist, it still hurt when it actually happened, a bit like when he’d met this timeline’s Ben, who not only didn’t remember him, but also turned out to be a complete dick. Leo had always been a bit cold and untrusting towards strangers, so her behavior was less of a shock, however.
“I don’t care who you are.” She growled. “You don’t belong here, and I don’t want you anywhere near my shop. I might be dead, but I’m still the one that built the business, and I don’t need some junkie breaking in and stealing shit.”
“I know you don’t remember me, but we were friends.” He told her. “The thing is, I was never born in this timeline, so we never met. You actually survived the night your place was broken into in the original timeline since that was the night you though you had killed me and were planning on burying me before I ended up waking up. I forgave you for that, though.”
Leo rolled her eyes. “Just because you can see ghosts doesn’t make you any less crazy, and I think it would be in your best interest to leave before someone decides to call the cops and have you hauled off to the loony bin for standing here talking to yourself.”
Klaus looked around to see that a handful of people had started watching him, unable to see Leo and simply assuming that he was just a druggie having a conversation with himself.
“I won’t be back here.” He replied. “I just wanted to see you before the world ended again. Goodbye, Leo.”
As he walked further away from the garage and headed back towards the Obsidian, Klaus couldn’t help but wonder what else was different in this world simply because he didn’t exist. In the original timeline, it was unlikely that he would be highly remembered, especially not in comparison to his siblings (hell, he was pretty sure a lot of people had assumed he was dead back then, as safe for the occasional clickbait article, there wasn’t much news about him), but that didn’t mean he didn’t have an impact. Every choice he made, every place he visited, everything he ever did, it didn’t just affect his life. Instead, it rippled into the lives around him, both people he knew, and ones he didn’t. Like everyone else, he played an active roll in the world; he wasn’t insignificant.
But thanks to the fact that he never existed in this timeline, he was never there to make said choices. There were likely other people who were now dead or alive in this timeline due to him not being there, but Klaus didn’t want to think about it. He had to confront Reginald about what happened to his and his siblings mothers, and hopefully somehow restore the world to the way it was.