Klaus is silent as Diego talks. As he tries to picture it- Diego in his beat up sedan, rushing into the ER. Watching him the same way Ben would whenever he ended up there. And part of him wants to be angry that he didn't stay. That he wasn't there when he woke up.
But can he blame him?
Can he blame him, after Ben's death had torn them apart? After they'd been ripped at the seams and scattered to the winds and unable to look back? "... Can't blame you for not staying, not the first or last time I ended up there." He turns his back to Diego, exhaustion clear in his voice as he starts setting up two mugs for tea. "Surprised you didn't hear I got arrested. Twice."
"I wasn't stalking everything you did, Klaus. I just... sometimes listened for that. Because it's what I expected." Does he not understand the gravity of that? That he was literally waiting to hear that he'd died in some back alley somewhere? He hates the way Klaus twists everything into a joke, flippant and facetious to the end.
Silence lapses, and it's not something Diego is a stranger to. He's sat in plenty of silences in his life and he really prefers it to incessant, needless chatter most of the time. But this... is a harder sort of silence, because he's trying to figure out how to say what he really wants Klaus to understand in all of this. And so much of it feels useless, because he's not convinced Klaus wants to hear any of it. To heed any kind of advice he might try to give. But... he's still his brother.
"Klaus... can you just explain to me why you keep running? You run from everything. The ghosts. The fuck-ups. The family." He tilts his head up to look at Klaus, who's busying himself with making tea. "You've been running for nearly two decades... aren't you sick of it?"
"I know, I know, I just... I mean, you knew all those cops and you were going to the academy, I thought me getting arrested might have made it on the radar." He shrugs slightly. The kettle is whistling, and he pours two cups, letting it seep. Quietly staring at the liquid as it starts to take the tea leaves.
He's so tired of running. He's tired of running because he doesn't have the numbness to fall back on. And it's leaving him drained, leaving him exhausted. Like he just wants to curl up in his blankets and disappear. Sleep until he can find a reason to keep going.
The one good thing he'd ever had, the one person he'd ever loved more than himself- and his ghost had been... It hadn't been him. It couldn't have been. Not with how he acted, not with how he blamed him, not with...
"... You don't want to hear it." He laughs, but it sounds hollow. Empty. Tired. "You never want to hear it."
Because it's an excuse, huh? He hates his powers. He fears them. Waking in the middle of the night as a child with a corpse standing over his bed, or someone slipping into his skin and the terror that he might not ever get his own body back. Ben following him around like an albatross around his neck, a reminder of the fact he couldn't save him. Did Ben blame him? Did he as good as kill him?
The first taste of freedom from those ghouls was when he'd fallen down the stairs and the carefully administered pain medicine their mother and nurse gave him made him unable to see the usual specters in his training. And after he'd healed? Well. No hard thing to start stealing drinks from their father's well stocked bar or scoring some weed from an avid fan for a kiss and a wink. When Vanya cut him off from her pills - those few brief months where he had felt so removed from his powers it was absolute bliss- he'd had to go to other sources to get his fixes, and it snowballed from there.
And after Ben had died? After Diego left? After he turned 18 and was no longer Reginald Hargreeves's ward? He'd fallen, hard. He'd chased that high and never and tried to come down.
Because running was easier than fighting. Running was easier than talking. Running was easier than having yet another shrink look at him like he was crazy when he tried to open up about his powers, about the abuse all of the Academy suffered, about the people who came and haunted his dreams when he was sober. Than trying to explain why a locked door made him panic and how he couldn't breathe any time a space was too small, too dark, too closed off.
Because running was the only thing he's known since he was 13. And because that high is the only time he's ever known peace outside of that thin, dark place between life and death that he's always been just shy of crossing over.
((OOC note: Headcanon about the pills being shared/stolen is 100% collab between Ari and myself ))
Diego doesn't pay one ounce of attention to the mention of being around cops or the road it tries to force his mind down. He locks it away and not even a flicker of the emotion he felt shows on his face. He wasn't as on Diego's radar as he seemed to think, it was just a here and there thing. If mentions of an overdose showed up, he paid attention, he listened for specific descriptions, and dreaded the day he had to find a way to tell the rest of their siblings that he'd finally gone and done it.
"I asked, didn't I?" The words are practically a challenge, eyebrow lifted in defiance of that half-laughed out, hollow statement. But it isn't long before he adds, "Or are you just going to tell me it's because you're scared, and traumatized? Because newsflash, Klaus, you aren't the only one Dad fucking traumatized! He did it to all of us, in specifically tailored ways, and it isn't a goddamn contest you can win, as to who has it the worst." Because if that's all he was going to say? Yeah. He's right. He doesn't want to hear the same, tired excuse that he's been spinning since Diego could remember.
"The ghosts. The crypt. The dark. Those are things you run from regularly. They are not the reason you run from us. So try. again." His words are spoken slowly, bitten off in sharp points, because Klaus isn't the only one that's tired. Diego is tired of the circular way every conversation with Klaus comes back to this. Of trying to help him, when it's so clear all he wants to do is go trip face-first into a pile of cocaine. Or jam a needle in veins that have been so abused through the years that it's probably hard for him to even find one that he hasn't blown out at one time or another. Toss a handful of unknown pills down his throat just to see what happens. It's stupid. It's all so stupid and Diego can't even pretend to understand the logic of an addict. A junkie, because Klaus really is more that, than just the subtle, softer sound of addict.
"Because this isn't just everything of the last two decades. It's more and more here, being piled on top of it, too. Every time something blows up, you dip out. You can't stay here, you have to go crash on someone's couch for a week. For fuck's sake, you're talking to Allison right now like you don't even fucking live here! And that is some of the most emotionally manipulative fucking bullshit I've seen from you yet." He scoffs and shakes his head, "You try to carve sympathy out of everyone around you and the second someone stops trying to coddle you and be real with you, you flip out and try to turn things around on them, pointing fingers at everyone else, all while you never own up to your own part in anything.
"It's bullshit and I don't think I'm wrong in saying I think we're all sick of it. But me and Allison are just the only ones that actively say so, so directly. Luther is disappointed. Ben is the worst offender of coddling all of your bad habits. Vanya vacillates so hard between hating all of us so much that she can't stand the sight of us, to being too terrified to say the wrong thing to us to even speak to most of us. But I really doubt anyone is chomping at the bits to have to go pick up the pieces Klaus has blown himself into again, over the same old shit that he always does it for."
Diego knows everything he's saying is harsh, but honestly, he doesn't care. He's kept most of this to himself for too long, and he's just tired from holding it all in. And sometimes harsh is what people need to snap them back into reality. "Do you realize that I've spent probably more than three-quarters of our time here since that last big OD of yours, just waiting for you to do it again? Because I don't have any reason to believe your half-assed committal to being clean. All you're doing is keeping one foot in that door, keeping it so much easier to slide right back to it again." For a moment, his voice drops the harsh edge it's had through all of the rest of this. "You're not doing yourself any favors, Klaus. If you want to get clean, get clean." But this is a topic too hard for him not to feel strongly about, and that same sharpness comes back a moment late, "Otherwise, stop parading around like you're doing something so grand because, hey, at least it's not coke or heroin, right? That's all that matters, isn't it? Who cares if you continue the same goddamn behavior without it."
There's a pause as he considers that last statement, tilting his head back to stare up at his brother. Twists that statement into a question to push him to answer. "So there's another question for you, Klaus: What's left to take the fall of all those bad decisions, so you don't have to, if the drugs you blamed it all on aren't in the equation anymore?"
Sometimes harsh is what people need to snap back into reality. And sometimes harsh just makes them withdraw all the more. Klaus doesn't turn around as Diego rails into him, gripping tightly to the desk the hotplate is on, trying to focus on breathing, on the tea steeping, on anything other than snapping and turning around duking it out with his brother.
He's sharp knives and snap judgments, isn't he? And does Diego honestly think he doesn't know these things? That dad tortured all of them, that all of this isn't a contest? He knows damn well that dad hurt all of them, but his powers? Those ghosts that he'd seen since he was a child, broken and bloody and bruised? None of them understood what it was like- except for Ben. Ben, who had seen the blood and gore he'd witnessed in the handful of times he'd been sober enough to see ghosts in his adult life. Except for Vanya, who had witnessed his powers on the train, who had seen Leonard as he was at death.
Honestly, he just wants to tell Diego to get out. That Diego doesn't know about his fights with Allison, that he doesn't like feeling constantly observed and judged as he tries to fight what he knows is an uphill battle. It's why he's been keeping odd hours, so he won't be observed. Because he feels like he's under a microscope. Like every mistake he makes is magnified and every struggle, every accomplishment is discarded as an outlier.
He had been proud of himself for cutting off from the harder shit. For coming back, still with the taste of that high that the power enhancer had given him and depressed from his failure, and not immediately chasing down the nearest ecstasy dealer. He had been proud of taking a job in Jeopardy, at a Psychic shop, learning to get over his fears with the shop mascot, Mary. He had been proud of actually going to the fight with OTO, for helping capture an agent, for what sacrifices he'd made when he was confronted by Clotho, even if he couldn't remember them exactly.
And none of it mattered, did it?
None of it mattered because, despite all his growth and progress, he'd had setbacks. He'd had shit from back home come to haunt him here. He'd fucked up and fucked himself over and he feels like he might as well be right back where he started.
So when he answers, its with the quietest voice. Tired, and holding so much back, because he doesn't know how to put his frustration into the right words. It's a discussion he'd had briefly with Vanya, when he'd first come back from that strange space between here and home, between life and death. It's something he's turned over in his mind in the dark of the night, when standing outside smoking and watching the stars as the moon hangs low overhead.
It's something he says in the softest whisper, because even he's not sure its what he wants.
Silence. It's all that he said is greeted with. A nearly endless, slow, dragging thing, that after a few minutes, Diego is convinced Klaus might allow to go forever. There's a tension tight enough to snap in the air of the room. A clear frustration rolling off of his brother in waves, undercut by an equally obvious sort of bone-deep exhaustion that Diego recognizes almost instantly-- because he's just as tired of the circular nature of all of this, too, from the other side of it.
He waits patiently for Klaus to say something. Anything. To turn on his heel and rant and rave back at him. Fall into the bait of the argument, like they are both prone to do at times. But it never comes. Diego is only met with more silence to wait out.
Diego refuses to be the one to break the quiet. He's said his piece, now it's Four's turn to actually explain his own internal reasoning for doing the things he does.
Except. It never comes. Nothing ever comes.
The silence just keeps dragging on. And on. And on. Until Diego is almost certain that his brother has just decided to check out of the conversation, completely ignoring him now.
Until--
Diego's features crack into a scoff and an expression full of bewilderment. "Wow. Really? That's all you have to say to all of that?" He shakes his head, a mirthless, hollow laugh escaping him. "You didn't even answer my question-- though I guess that speaks volume enough, all on its own." After all, silence, lack of explanation, of defense, can all be just as telling as the words that come pouring out of someone.
"How do you think that's the answer to everything? Do you somehow think that if you leave, that all your problems disappear? Because that isn't going to happen, Klaus. That isn't how it works. Problems don't just get swept under a rug to be forgotten entirely if you ignore it long enough-- it follows you, no matter where you go, until you put your foot down and truly work to change it." He's been figuring that out in the hardest way with Vanya, and all the ways he keeps screwing up with her.
"You think I don't know that?!" Klaus whirls around, fists clenched at his sides, fury making his shoulders shake.
"You think I don't know that it takes work?! What the hell do you think I've been doing, huh? I've been training with Ben, and working with Anathema, and after all the bullshit with the journal? Even Vanya and I are patched up- Hell! I even showed up to the fucking apocalypse! But it feels like- It feels like-" He gestures, huffs, and crosses his arms tightly. His nails are digging into his arms, his foot tapping as he tries to find his words.
"It feels like no matter what I do, you and Allison are going to throw this shit back in my face. Hell! On our birthday, I told Allison she was hard to shop for and she ended up pretty much telling me I might as well not live here! Do you have any idea how weird it feels having a place to call my own? Before coming here, the most 'stable' place to sleep I had was an army tent that moved encampments, or rehab, or jail." His hands are curled, and behind him he can hear the crack of porcelain as the mugs behind him start to crack from the base up, a conduit for all his anger and frustration.
"I am trying, Diego! But it feels like it's never good enough for you or Allison, and frankly? I'm sick of being made to feel like shit while I'm trying to make progress!"
He listens to the ranting of his brother, and it's ridiculous that it's more of a relief than the quiet, mostly-silent end he thinks Klaus had been trying to make of the whole conversation moments ago. At least there's feeling in it, a life that is so much better than the nothing of minutes before.
"What shit is that, exactly, Klaus? The OD that happened when you were supposed to be starting this sobriety thing of yours? The fact that you keep half-committing to that, in general? Or is it practically killing yourself repeatedly on a train for a ghost you know isn't the real one? Taking an anonymously handed over power enhancer, nearly killing yourself again to recreate the same thing-- a fake version of a ghost you can't really have or keep?" His next words are strained, his voice thick with emotion, "You're not the only one that's lost someone! I lost two of the most important people in my life, in the same week. Allison lost her daughter-- Do you see us going on suicide missions?"
He shakes his head at the remark about Allison, "No. No way, she wouldn't say that. She's the biggest proponent of the open door policy for the house. She mentions it like-- all the time. She'd never tell any of us we shouldn't live here." He can't make that make sense in his head, not really, not with everything that he's heard from her himself. "And I can't help you for not feeling right here-- I don't know what to tell you. You wanna be a nomad and surf couches forever-- go for it, literally nobody is stopping you."
His eyes snap to the cracking porcelain, but only briefly before he focuses on Klaus again. "I'm never going to coddle you, Klaus. I'm not. That's just not who I am. So, if you want me to leave you alone about it all, just say so." There's a heavy feeling to those last words that hangs on whatever Four's choice may end up being.
Klaus pales when Diego mentions the train, because there's only two people who knows about it, as far as he can remember. Vanya and Ben. When he had gone missing, he supposes one of them told the others, but- but it hadn't mattered. It was like falling asleep and waking back up on the train platform. It wasn't permanent or even damaging, and he'd only done it once.
All that mattered in that week was the moments he stole with Dave. But how could he have known it would all go so wrong? How could he have known? He still remembers the look twisting across the visage of the thing that wore Dave's face. The sneer and the scowl, the rage and the mocking. It wasn't him. It wasn't, and it made him miss Dave all the more.
"How do I do it, then, huh? How do I let go of the only person I've ever loved more than myself? How do I not try to bring him here, to bring him back? I've never lost someone before, not like him. When Ben died, he was right by my side, and he has been for 12 years. When Dave died, I... I can't see him anymore. I can't see him, or hear him, or touch him, and I don't know what to do!" He's furious at himself for the tears starting to spring to his eyes, and he quickly shoves the heel of his palm against them, wiping away the tears.
"I don't know what to do."
The confession rings in his ears, and he crosses his arms defensively, looking down. Looking away. Looking anywhere but Diego's face, and he's grateful he can latch onto a different thread, change the conversation quickly away from his inability and utter confusion when it came to mourning.
"And Allison- Allison pretty much said I may as well not live here because I don't keep the same schedule as the rest of you. And as far as that open door policy goes? Come on, she only cares about it in regards to Vanya, if how she acts about me being in and out of the house is any indication." He waves his hand, but his voice is hollow, and he knows the conversation is going to come back to it. So he tries to cut it off again, clearing his throat, shifting awkwardly.
"I don't- I don't want you to coddle me, Diego. But I just... I don't know, I want patience? I'm not perfect. I'm going to screw up, and I'm going to backslide, but I'm trying. I just. I wish you would see it."
"You think I know shit about grief? Before the week of Dad's funeral, the only person that ever meant anything to me that I'd ever lost was Ben, and we see how well any of us handled that. So--" he spreads his hands, exasperated. "I didn't give a fuck when I heard about Dad. Good goddamn riddance. But--" He hasn't, and still can't, even say her name out loud. There's an obvious struggle against it before he just readjusts what he's saying. "the two of them? I--" he shakes his head and without thinking at all, snatches one of the knives always hidden on his person and throws it at the nearest thing that might make a satisfying shatter. He doesn't feel better for it, but it was something that could be done besides breaking down completely. Something he refuses to do.
"You know Mom was here during that last stunt you pulled?" He spins back toward him, everything about him suddenly so very accusatory. "So tell me again, how she was just a robot nanny." The words, echoing something Klaus had said in an off-handed manner months ago, not long after Diego had arrived, are dripping with venom. No, he hadn't forgotten it, and he hadn't let it go. Because Mom was always, would always be, a subject he never, ever joked about. "I can't see or hear or touch. Them. Either. That's how it is for everyone else all the time, Klaus. You have spent your entire. Fucking. Life. Wanting to be normal. Wanting nothing to do with the ghosts that haunt you. Well, stay the fuck out of Jeopardy and you have your wish. Welcome to the reality everyone else who's ever lost someone has been dealing with forever."
He can only scoff in disbelief and shake his head as he pulls it all back to Allison being the bad guy. "Jesus, Klaus, what the fuck has she done to make you decide she's a villain in your story? She's our sister!" There is something weirdly discordant in Diego, of all people, defending Allison so completely, but this has gone on for so long now and he doesn't even understand the basis of it all. Diego knows as well as, and maybe better than, anyone exactly how intense Allison can be with the words she hands out, but she isn't malicious. Maybe Diego is missing pieces of something somewhere, or maybe there has been a wild misunderstanding between the pair of them somewhere along the way, he isn't sure-- but he is sure of what he says next.
"The whole point of the house was so we all had a place to live together and know the people in it were ones you could trust-- so we could be-- I don't know-- better at being a family." Sort of. That may be overly idealistic, but. The potential was there, if they got enough time to get around the walls, vaults, and security lasers they'd all spent decades building around themselves and ever managed to truly get to know each other.
"I've been here since May... you've done a lot of shit, and I really don't think I've been that hard on you about it before now. I've been patient with you, Klaus, but how many times do I have to keep watching you make the same fucking decisions over and over again? You can't make changes if you keep making the same choices." He tips his head back and lets out a long, slow sigh, before looking at his brother again. "An addict.... can't hang out... with other addicts and think they're just gonna be strong enough to resist it. There's a reason they make you cut ties with those kind of people in help groups. I don't care how much you or any of them tell me they aren't offering you anything... People like Cassidy, and whoever the fuck else it is you party with, are gonna be the reason you can't ever get away from this."
Ben had said the same thing, in so much more gentle words. That Klaus had always wanted to be normal, and grieving was part of it. That he needs to let go, to try and mourn and move on. To say his piece about the man he loved, the man he lost, and not let his absence continue to burn like a bullet wound in his heart.
He opens his mouth to say something- to argue about Allison, and how he's only trying to say that they fight. To argue about his friends, and how Cassidy actually steers him away from the hard shit, reminds him that he's supposed to be keeping off of it.
But Mom? Mom being here? He can't let that go. And he finds himself gulping for air, swallowing down his regrets that he didn't help Diego dig her out, that he gave her up so soon. "... Mom was here?"
The wavering and the sudden brakes that little revelation put on everything else feels sharp and jagged and completely uneven. There was so much to deal with, and unpack, in all of this. But of all people, Diego can't blame him for coming up short on that. He'd done the same seeing her in that bunker when Derek was helping him look for the elusively missing Klaus, weeks ago now.
"Don't act like you actually care," he says in a low, dark tone just barely the smoothed edge side of a growl. "She wasn't anything to you besides wires and computer chips. You made that perfectly clear."
"Shit, Diego, I'm sorry. I didn't know." His voice is soft, and he doesn't know what to do. Idly, he runs his hands through his hair, looking away, because his relationship with their mother was complicated. Supposed to be a protector, supposed to take care of them, but she was always bent to their father's will.
Maybe there was a spark there, and he couldn't see it. Maybe in the rare glimpses, the extra time Grace took with Diego, he had seen something the rest of them didn't.
"... I didn't... I didn't summon her on purpose. Any of them." Except Dave.
There is a sudden sweep of grief across the room so tight it's nearly suffocating. The kind of thing that threatens the breath in someone's lungs, trapped in the cage of bone unable to escape because of words about emotion and weakness that their father had repeated so many times through the years that still, all these years later, even escaping it all the second he had a chance, filled every single inch of him. Every lesson so deeply drilled down into his bones that escaping the Academy had done nothing to make it go away, or stop being a party of every way he moved or thought or spoke anyway.
It's an equally sudden snap as it dissipates, a blank thing with no name replacing it-- because those things don't belong in the world, and they certainly don't happen in front of people. They belong in boxes he never touches, locked away to be ignored (but never forgotten, he would never forget).
"I don't wanna talk about it." He says, barely keeping the tremble out of his voice.
Carefully, carefully, Klaus reaches out for him. Long fingers reaching for his shoulder with a hesitation like he expects to be burned. Because he does. Klaus- who had never known the grief of separation, who had never learned to mourn- feels like he's ripped open a still healing wound and dumped salt in it.
And so his fingers tremble, and he hesitates, and he pulls back to place them on his dogtags instead.
The silence is awkward, and awful, and he doesn't know what to say. Only to fiddle with the chain around his neck, clear his throat, look to the side, and maybe open up with a secret. Pry open the scar tissue around his vulnerabilities, rip it open so it goes past the humor, past the anger, past the grief and the exhaustion and every other bone-aching emotion that seeps into his blood.
"Alright." He says, his voice quiet. "We won't talk about it."
"Good." That one word is ground out of his mouth between clenched teeth, like a cigarette under a boot. He won't look at it again, not here or now or in front of his brother. He sees the movement of Four's hand and, unsure if he's going to try to reach for him not, Diego instinctually shifts his weigh to his back foot, to make it obvious he doesn't want it, if that's the intention. Thankfully, he wraps his fingers around that chain at his neck instead.
A part of him wants to end it, to let that be it, and he debates for a long moment about turning on his heel and leaving the room. But no. Klaus had still not answered two of the biggest questions he'd asked before, and Diego decides he doesn't get to not. So he waits a moment before he finally reiterates, "What happened...between you and Allison that's made you...be this way toward her?" He asks again, finally looking at Klaus again, eyes on him more in a fashion of a sniper on a target than simply looking at him. "And when do you stop making the same choices over and over, expecting it to turn out different next time?"
Diego's intensity is met for all of a moment before Klaus turns his head away, dragging the tags across the chain to make a soft rasping sound as he bites his lip and tries to recall the particulars.
"I said she was hard to shop for. Back at the party. And she said I wasn't around to judge her, and it was my fault that we aren't connected. And then after the journal- it felt like she was blaming me for the entire apocalypse. Like I just gift-wrapped the thing and handed it to the guy." The memories are hazy, but the feeling lingered. The anger at being blamed for something beyond his control. Throwing it back in her face that the only person she'd ever even tried to reach out to was Vanya. She's their sister, but he doesn't feel like he belongs. Always the screw up, the class clown, the junkie...
"I'm already making different choices. I'm trying to tell you that."
"And this-- these two things, that's... everything that is the basis for you talking like you don't live here and maybe moving out? Somehow deciding Allison is the worst of the worst here?" He can't fathom it. Allison has been livid with him several times; they've gotten into arguments more than once in all these months living together. He hasn't, not once, considered that he wasn't wanted here. That he had any reason to leave. "Jesus, Klaus, we're going to argue and fight and be pissy at each other-- it doesn't stop the fact that we're all trying to be better with each other, or that we'd rip someone to shreds for hurting one of us."
He really... really doesn't want to get on the topic of the journal, even as Klaus brings it up, because it's this gigantically polarizing thing, as bad as politics, the kind of thing that could really drive the nail in the coffin, here. "It really may not have happened, if he had never had the journal, Klaus... that's just...a fact, not an accusation. Dad's journals were giant guidebooks to everything about us."
He shakes his head. "How much of the last two months have been for same shit, Klaus? The same basic screw ups over and over. Nevermind the last decade.... you don't make up for twelve years of screw-ups in half a year in another universe, it's not that simple. It's- it's not even like there's some kind of scale to balance."
He sighs softly and and scrubs a hand down his face. "Just-- if you don't take anything else out of any of this, and God I hope you do, but if you don't... can you just stop calling yourself sober?" It may be smaller in the grand scheme of everything, but it's one of the things Diego has a big problem with, because it's a lie, a reality that Klaus isn't really ready to accept or handle, so he curbs it, but he hasn't stopped. And it's an insult to people fighting that same battle in themselves every day, to flippantly throw the word around the way he has been doing for months.
"Yeah, she's my sister, it doesn't mean I have to live with her." He crosses his arms tightly, defensive, as he stares down Diego. "I'm not making her out to be a villain. She said I wasn't around enough for it to count, so I may as well not be living here. And you know what? Maybe she's right. Do you have any idea how I felt, coming back after disappearing? How much I dreaded coming here because I knew that you, and Allison, and Luther would all chew me out because I made a mistake? I was this close," he pinches his fingers together, "to finding the nearest dealer because honestly? I'm tired of being like I'm- Like I'm the one to blame for everything."
He crosses his arms again, looking down, a shuddering huff running through his chest. "I screw up. I know I screw up. I know what progress I make doesn't make up for the shit I've screwed up with. But Jesus, Diego, how many times are you going to throw every mistake I make back in my face?"
"You're right. You don't have to live with her. Or me, or any of us. Or even here, in this house at all. Because that's been the whole point all along," Which, until this second, Diego wasn't completely convinced that Klaus was fully understanding-- and he still feels like what he says next might be the truest point in the whole living here or not situation for his brother. "If that's all it takes for you to wanna get out of here, maybe you weren't ready to be here in the first place, Klaus."
Diego had been here from the moment it was decided there would be a house for the entire family to be in, at any time, for any reason, or not at all if that's what they chose. Along with Allison and Luther, Diego has completely be 'in' on the idea of it from day one. There was no doubt in his mind, after showing up in a weird world that wasn't engulfed in flames, the only place he wanted to be was with his siblings. He personally couldn't picture being anywhere else. At home? Sure, it could be easily different, but this place, where nothing was the same, and everything was too off-kilter to be normal, he wanted the only thing that had any hope or chance of grounding him-- his family.
Whatever Diego may be able to deal with and handle, it's Klaus' next point that Four barrels into like a battering ram that sends his head into a spin, lights up his so easily reachable anger in an instant, bright and white-hot. "Fuck you, Klaus." There's something sharp and awful at even having one finger of blame directed at him for Klaus' near-dive into whatever the nearest dealer might shove him toward. Some logical part of him realizes that choice can't ever be his fault, but logic isn't what latches onto that blame. It rises in the back of his throat, acrid and noxious; ties sharp knots in his stomach that wind up to his chest. His voice is thick when he speaks, "I don't blame you for everything. I just want you to accept and own what is yours in it-- home, here, both."
There is only one answer to last that question, and it is burning at the end of Diego's tongue before the words die on Klaus' lips. He moves to stand close, nearly nose-to-nose with his brother, and his voice is low and quiet, not threatening, but still absolutely serious. "Until you learn from it." That will be his ending note-- he can't handle any of this any more. He doesn't even give Klaus time to say anything else before he turns and leaves the room to go down the hall, and back to his own room.
There's something hollow in his chest when Diego tears into him. Something tired and exhausted that makes him shut down. Shut off. He doesn't say anything as he leaves, and he hears the door open. It's only then the anger comes. The frustration. Pouring out of him as he grabs one of the mugs of tea. He doesn't care that the water seeps through the cracks, scalding hot. He doesn't care that it's still full. He throws the porcelain as hard as he can against the nearest wall, the shattering strangely comforting. So he picks up the other. Broken glass and broken pottery as he takes his frustrations, his anger, his grief and his misery out on some of the more fragile objects in his room.
At least his relationships aren't the only thing in this house that are broken now.
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But can he blame him?
Can he blame him, after Ben's death had torn them apart? After they'd been ripped at the seams and scattered to the winds and unable to look back?
"... Can't blame you for not staying, not the first or last time I ended up there." He turns his back to Diego, exhaustion clear in his voice as he starts setting up two mugs for tea.
"Surprised you didn't hear I got arrested. Twice."
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Silence lapses, and it's not something Diego is a stranger to. He's sat in plenty of silences in his life and he really prefers it to incessant, needless chatter most of the time. But this... is a harder sort of silence, because he's trying to figure out how to say what he really wants Klaus to understand in all of this. And so much of it feels useless, because he's not convinced Klaus wants to hear any of it. To heed any kind of advice he might try to give. But... he's still his brother.
"Klaus... can you just explain to me why you keep running? You run from everything. The ghosts. The fuck-ups. The family." He tilts his head up to look at Klaus, who's busying himself with making tea. "You've been running for nearly two decades... aren't you sick of it?"
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He's so tired of running. He's tired of running because he doesn't have the numbness to fall back on. And it's leaving him drained, leaving him exhausted. Like he just wants to curl up in his blankets and disappear. Sleep until he can find a reason to keep going.
The one good thing he'd ever had, the one person he'd ever loved more than himself- and his ghost had been... It hadn't been him. It couldn't have been. Not with how he acted, not with how he blamed him, not with...
"... You don't want to hear it." He laughs, but it sounds hollow. Empty. Tired. "You never want to hear it."
Because it's an excuse, huh? He hates his powers. He fears them. Waking in the middle of the night as a child with a corpse standing over his bed, or someone slipping into his skin and the terror that he might not ever get his own body back. Ben following him around like an albatross around his neck, a reminder of the fact he couldn't save him. Did Ben blame him? Did he as good as kill him?
The first taste of freedom from those ghouls was when he'd fallen down the stairs and the carefully administered pain medicine their mother and nurse gave him made him unable to see the usual specters in his training. And after he'd healed? Well. No hard thing to start stealing drinks from their father's well stocked bar or scoring some weed from an avid fan for a kiss and a wink. When Vanya cut him off from her pills - those few brief months where he had felt so removed from his powers it was absolute bliss- he'd had to go to other sources to get his fixes, and it snowballed from there.
And after Ben had died? After Diego left? After he turned 18 and was no longer Reginald Hargreeves's ward? He'd fallen, hard. He'd chased that high and never and tried to come down.
Because running was easier than fighting. Running was easier than talking. Running was easier than having yet another shrink look at him like he was crazy when he tried to open up about his powers, about the abuse all of the Academy suffered, about the people who came and haunted his dreams when he was sober. Than trying to explain why a locked door made him panic and how he couldn't breathe any time a space was too small, too dark, too closed off.
Because running was the only thing he's known since he was 13.
And because that high is the only time he's ever known peace outside of that thin, dark place between life and death that he's always been just shy of crossing over.
((OOC note: Headcanon about the pills being shared/stolen is 100% collab between Ari and myself ))
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"I asked, didn't I?" The words are practically a challenge, eyebrow lifted in defiance of that half-laughed out, hollow statement. But it isn't long before he adds, "Or are you just going to tell me it's because you're scared, and traumatized? Because newsflash, Klaus, you aren't the only one Dad fucking traumatized! He did it to all of us, in specifically tailored ways, and it isn't a goddamn contest you can win, as to who has it the worst." Because if that's all he was going to say? Yeah. He's right. He doesn't want to hear the same, tired excuse that he's been spinning since Diego could remember.
"The ghosts. The crypt. The dark. Those are things you run from regularly. They are not the reason you run from us. So try. again." His words are spoken slowly, bitten off in sharp points, because Klaus isn't the only one that's tired. Diego is tired of the circular way every conversation with Klaus comes back to this. Of trying to help him, when it's so clear all he wants to do is go trip face-first into a pile of cocaine. Or jam a needle in veins that have been so abused through the years that it's probably hard for him to even find one that he hasn't blown out at one time or another. Toss a handful of unknown pills down his throat just to see what happens. It's stupid. It's all so stupid and Diego can't even pretend to understand the logic of an addict. A junkie, because Klaus really is more that, than just the subtle, softer sound of addict.
"Because this isn't just everything of the last two decades. It's more and more here, being piled on top of it, too. Every time something blows up, you dip out. You can't stay here, you have to go crash on someone's couch for a week. For fuck's sake, you're talking to Allison right now like you don't even fucking live here! And that is some of the most emotionally manipulative fucking bullshit I've seen from you yet." He scoffs and shakes his head, "You try to carve sympathy out of everyone around you and the second someone stops trying to coddle you and be real with you, you flip out and try to turn things around on them, pointing fingers at everyone else, all while you never own up to your own part in anything.
"It's bullshit and I don't think I'm wrong in saying I think we're all sick of it. But me and Allison are just the only ones that actively say so, so directly. Luther is disappointed. Ben is the worst offender of coddling all of your bad habits. Vanya vacillates so hard between hating all of us so much that she can't stand the sight of us, to being too terrified to say the wrong thing to us to even speak to most of us. But I really doubt anyone is chomping at the bits to have to go pick up the pieces Klaus has blown himself into again, over the same old shit that he always does it for."
Diego knows everything he's saying is harsh, but honestly, he doesn't care. He's kept most of this to himself for too long, and he's just tired from holding it all in. And sometimes harsh is what people need to snap them back into reality. "Do you realize that I've spent probably more than three-quarters of our time here since that last big OD of yours, just waiting for you to do it again? Because I don't have any reason to believe your half-assed committal to being clean. All you're doing is keeping one foot in that door, keeping it so much easier to slide right back to it again." For a moment, his voice drops the harsh edge it's had through all of the rest of this. "You're not doing yourself any favors, Klaus. If you want to get clean, get clean." But this is a topic too hard for him not to feel strongly about, and that same sharpness comes back a moment late, "Otherwise, stop parading around like you're doing something so grand because, hey, at least it's not coke or heroin, right? That's all that matters, isn't it? Who cares if you continue the same goddamn behavior without it."
There's a pause as he considers that last statement, tilting his head back to stare up at his brother. Twists that statement into a question to push him to answer. "So there's another question for you, Klaus: What's left to take the fall of all those bad decisions, so you don't have to, if the drugs you blamed it all on aren't in the equation anymore?"
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He's sharp knives and snap judgments, isn't he? And does Diego honestly think he doesn't know these things? That dad tortured all of them, that all of this isn't a contest? He knows damn well that dad hurt all of them, but his powers? Those ghosts that he'd seen since he was a child, broken and bloody and bruised? None of them understood what it was like- except for Ben. Ben, who had seen the blood and gore he'd witnessed in the handful of times he'd been sober enough to see ghosts in his adult life. Except for Vanya, who had witnessed his powers on the train, who had seen Leonard as he was at death.
Honestly, he just wants to tell Diego to get out. That Diego doesn't know about his fights with Allison, that he doesn't like feeling constantly observed and judged as he tries to fight what he knows is an uphill battle. It's why he's been keeping odd hours, so he won't be observed. Because he feels like he's under a microscope. Like every mistake he makes is magnified and every struggle, every accomplishment is discarded as an outlier.
He had been proud of himself for cutting off from the harder shit. For coming back, still with the taste of that high that the power enhancer had given him and depressed from his failure, and not immediately chasing down the nearest ecstasy dealer. He had been proud of taking a job in Jeopardy, at a Psychic shop, learning to get over his fears with the shop mascot, Mary. He had been proud of actually going to the fight with OTO, for helping capture an agent, for what sacrifices he'd made when he was confronted by Clotho, even if he couldn't remember them exactly.
And none of it mattered, did it?
None of it mattered because, despite all his growth and progress, he'd had setbacks. He'd had shit from back home come to haunt him here. He'd fucked up and fucked himself over and he feels like he might as well be right back where he started.
So when he answers, its with the quietest voice. Tired, and holding so much back, because he doesn't know how to put his frustration into the right words.
It's a discussion he'd had briefly with Vanya, when he'd first come back from that strange space between here and home, between life and death. It's something he's turned over in his mind in the dark of the night, when standing outside smoking and watching the stars as the moon hangs low overhead.
It's something he says in the softest whisper, because even he's not sure its what he wants.
"Maybe I should just move out."
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He waits patiently for Klaus to say something. Anything. To turn on his heel and rant and rave back at him. Fall into the bait of the argument, like they are both prone to do at times. But it never comes. Diego is only met with more silence to wait out.
Diego refuses to be the one to break the quiet. He's said his piece, now it's Four's turn to actually explain his own internal reasoning for doing the things he does.
Except.
It never comes.
Nothing ever comes.
The silence just keeps dragging on. And on. And on. Until Diego is almost certain that his brother has just decided to check out of the conversation, completely ignoring him now.
Until--
Diego's features crack into a scoff and an expression full of bewilderment. "Wow. Really? That's all you have to say to all of that?" He shakes his head, a mirthless, hollow laugh escaping him. "You didn't even answer my question-- though I guess that speaks volume enough, all on its own." After all, silence, lack of explanation, of defense, can all be just as telling as the words that come pouring out of someone.
"How do you think that's the answer to everything? Do you somehow think that if you leave, that all your problems disappear? Because that isn't going to happen, Klaus. That isn't how it works. Problems don't just get swept under a rug to be forgotten entirely if you ignore it long enough-- it follows you, no matter where you go, until you put your foot down and truly work to change it." He's been figuring that out in the hardest way with Vanya, and all the ways he keeps screwing up with her.
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"You think I don't know that it takes work?! What the hell do you think I've been doing, huh? I've been training with Ben, and working with Anathema, and after all the bullshit with the journal? Even Vanya and I are patched up- Hell! I even showed up to the fucking apocalypse! But it feels like- It feels like-" He gestures, huffs, and crosses his arms tightly. His nails are digging into his arms, his foot tapping as he tries to find his words.
"It feels like no matter what I do, you and Allison are going to throw this shit back in my face. Hell! On our birthday, I told Allison she was hard to shop for and she ended up pretty much telling me I might as well not live here! Do you have any idea how weird it feels having a place to call my own? Before coming here, the most 'stable' place to sleep I had was an army tent that moved encampments, or rehab, or jail." His hands are curled, and behind him he can hear the crack of porcelain as the mugs behind him start to crack from the base up, a conduit for all his anger and frustration.
"I am trying, Diego! But it feels like it's never good enough for you or Allison, and frankly? I'm sick of being made to feel like shit while I'm trying to make progress!"
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"What shit is that, exactly, Klaus? The OD that happened when you were supposed to be starting this sobriety thing of yours? The fact that you keep half-committing to that, in general? Or is it practically killing yourself repeatedly on a train for a ghost you know isn't the real one? Taking an anonymously handed over power enhancer, nearly killing yourself again to recreate the same thing-- a fake version of a ghost you can't really have or keep?" His next words are strained, his voice thick with emotion, "You're not the only one that's lost someone! I lost two of the most important people in my life, in the same week. Allison lost her daughter-- Do you see us going on suicide missions?"
He shakes his head at the remark about Allison, "No. No way, she wouldn't say that. She's the biggest proponent of the open door policy for the house. She mentions it like-- all the time. She'd never tell any of us we shouldn't live here." He can't make that make sense in his head, not really, not with everything that he's heard from her himself. "And I can't help you for not feeling right here-- I don't know what to tell you. You wanna be a nomad and surf couches forever-- go for it, literally nobody is stopping you."
His eyes snap to the cracking porcelain, but only briefly before he focuses on Klaus again. "I'm never going to coddle you, Klaus. I'm not. That's just not who I am. So, if you want me to leave you alone about it all, just say so." There's a heavy feeling to those last words that hangs on whatever Four's choice may end up being.
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All that mattered in that week was the moments he stole with Dave. But how could he have known it would all go so wrong? How could he have known? He still remembers the look twisting across the visage of the thing that wore Dave's face. The sneer and the scowl, the rage and the mocking. It wasn't him. It wasn't, and it made him miss Dave all the more.
"How do I do it, then, huh? How do I let go of the only person I've ever loved more than myself? How do I not try to bring him here, to bring him back? I've never lost someone before, not like him. When Ben died, he was right by my side, and he has been for 12 years. When Dave died, I... I can't see him anymore. I can't see him, or hear him, or touch him, and I don't know what to do!" He's furious at himself for the tears starting to spring to his eyes, and he quickly shoves the heel of his palm against them, wiping away the tears.
"I don't know what to do."
The confession rings in his ears, and he crosses his arms defensively, looking down. Looking away. Looking anywhere but Diego's face, and he's grateful he can latch onto a different thread, change the conversation quickly away from his inability and utter confusion when it came to mourning.
"And Allison- Allison pretty much said I may as well not live here because I don't keep the same schedule as the rest of you. And as far as that open door policy goes? Come on, she only cares about it in regards to Vanya, if how she acts about me being in and out of the house is any indication." He waves his hand, but his voice is hollow, and he knows the conversation is going to come back to it. So he tries to cut it off again, clearing his throat, shifting awkwardly.
"I don't- I don't want you to coddle me, Diego. But I just... I don't know, I want patience? I'm not perfect. I'm going to screw up, and I'm going to backslide, but I'm trying. I just. I wish you would see it."
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"You know Mom was here during that last stunt you pulled?" He spins back toward him, everything about him suddenly so very accusatory. "So tell me again, how she was just a robot nanny." The words, echoing something Klaus had said in an off-handed manner months ago, not long after Diego had arrived, are dripping with venom. No, he hadn't forgotten it, and he hadn't let it go. Because Mom was always, would always be, a subject he never, ever joked about. "I can't see or hear or touch. Them. Either. That's how it is for everyone else all the time, Klaus. You have spent your entire. Fucking. Life. Wanting to be normal. Wanting nothing to do with the ghosts that haunt you. Well, stay the fuck out of Jeopardy and you have your wish. Welcome to the reality everyone else who's ever lost someone has been dealing with forever."
He can only scoff in disbelief and shake his head as he pulls it all back to Allison being the bad guy. "Jesus, Klaus, what the fuck has she done to make you decide she's a villain in your story? She's our sister!" There is something weirdly discordant in Diego, of all people, defending Allison so completely, but this has gone on for so long now and he doesn't even understand the basis of it all. Diego knows as well as, and maybe better than, anyone exactly how intense Allison can be with the words she hands out, but she isn't malicious. Maybe Diego is missing pieces of something somewhere, or maybe there has been a wild misunderstanding between the pair of them somewhere along the way, he isn't sure-- but he is sure of what he says next.
"The whole point of the house was so we all had a place to live together and know the people in it were ones you could trust-- so we could be-- I don't know-- better at being a family." Sort of. That may be overly idealistic, but. The potential was there, if they got enough time to get around the walls, vaults, and security lasers they'd all spent decades building around themselves and ever managed to truly get to know each other.
"I've been here since May... you've done a lot of shit, and I really don't think I've been that hard on you about it before now. I've been patient with you, Klaus, but how many times do I have to keep watching you make the same fucking decisions over and over again? You can't make changes if you keep making the same choices." He tips his head back and lets out a long, slow sigh, before looking at his brother again. "An addict.... can't hang out... with other addicts and think they're just gonna be strong enough to resist it. There's a reason they make you cut ties with those kind of people in help groups. I don't care how much you or any of them tell me they aren't offering you anything... People like Cassidy, and whoever the fuck else it is you party with, are gonna be the reason you can't ever get away from this."
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He opens his mouth to say something- to argue about Allison, and how he's only trying to say that they fight. To argue about his friends, and how Cassidy actually steers him away from the hard shit, reminds him that he's supposed to be keeping off of it.
But Mom? Mom being here?
He can't let that go. And he finds himself gulping for air, swallowing down his regrets that he didn't help Diego dig her out, that he gave her up so soon.
"... Mom was here?"
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"Don't act like you actually care," he says in a low, dark tone just barely the smoothed edge side of a growl. "She wasn't anything to you besides wires and computer chips. You made that perfectly clear."
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Maybe there was a spark there, and he couldn't see it. Maybe in the rare glimpses, the extra time Grace took with Diego, he had seen something the rest of them didn't.
"... I didn't... I didn't summon her on purpose. Any of them." Except Dave.
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It's an equally sudden snap as it dissipates, a blank thing with no name replacing it-- because those things don't belong in the world, and they certainly don't happen in front of people. They belong in boxes he never touches, locked away to be ignored (but never forgotten, he would never forget).
"I don't wanna talk about it." He says, barely keeping the tremble out of his voice.
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And so his fingers tremble, and he hesitates, and he pulls back to place them on his dogtags instead.
The silence is awkward, and awful, and he doesn't know what to say. Only to fiddle with the chain around his neck, clear his throat, look to the side, and maybe open up with a secret. Pry open the scar tissue around his vulnerabilities, rip it open so it goes past the humor, past the anger, past the grief and the exhaustion and every other bone-aching emotion that seeps into his blood.
"Alright." He says, his voice quiet. "We won't talk about it."
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A part of him wants to end it, to let that be it, and he debates for a long moment about turning on his heel and leaving the room. But no. Klaus had still not answered two of the biggest questions he'd asked before, and Diego decides he doesn't get to not. So he waits a moment before he finally reiterates, "What happened...between you and Allison that's made you...be this way toward her?" He asks again, finally looking at Klaus again, eyes on him more in a fashion of a sniper on a target than simply looking at him. "And when do you stop making the same choices over and over, expecting it to turn out different next time?"
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"I said she was hard to shop for. Back at the party. And she said I wasn't around to judge her, and it was my fault that we aren't connected. And then after the journal- it felt like she was blaming me for the entire apocalypse. Like I just gift-wrapped the thing and handed it to the guy." The memories are hazy, but the feeling lingered. The anger at being blamed for something beyond his control. Throwing it back in her face that the only person she'd ever even tried to reach out to was Vanya. She's their sister, but he doesn't feel like he belongs. Always the screw up, the class clown, the junkie...
"I'm already making different choices. I'm trying to tell you that."
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He really... really doesn't want to get on the topic of the journal, even as Klaus brings it up, because it's this gigantically polarizing thing, as bad as politics, the kind of thing that could really drive the nail in the coffin, here. "It really may not have happened, if he had never had the journal, Klaus... that's just...a fact, not an accusation. Dad's journals were giant guidebooks to everything about us."
He shakes his head. "How much of the last two months have been for same shit, Klaus? The same basic screw ups over and over. Nevermind the last decade.... you don't make up for twelve years of screw-ups in half a year in another universe, it's not that simple. It's- it's not even like there's some kind of scale to balance."
He sighs softly and and scrubs a hand down his face. "Just-- if you don't take anything else out of any of this, and God I hope you do, but if you don't... can you just stop calling yourself sober?" It may be smaller in the grand scheme of everything, but it's one of the things Diego has a big problem with, because it's a lie, a reality that Klaus isn't really ready to accept or handle, so he curbs it, but he hasn't stopped. And it's an insult to people fighting that same battle in themselves every day, to flippantly throw the word around the way he has been doing for months.
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"I'm not making her out to be a villain. She said I wasn't around enough for it to count, so I may as well not be living here. And you know what? Maybe she's right. Do you have any idea how I felt, coming back after disappearing? How much I dreaded coming here because I knew that you, and Allison, and Luther would all chew me out because I made a mistake? I was this close," he pinches his fingers together, "to finding the nearest dealer because honestly? I'm tired of being like I'm- Like I'm the one to blame for everything."
He crosses his arms again, looking down, a shuddering huff running through his chest.
"I screw up. I know I screw up. I know what progress I make doesn't make up for the shit I've screwed up with. But Jesus, Diego, how many times are you going to throw every mistake I make back in my face?"
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Diego had been here from the moment it was decided there would be a house for the entire family to be in, at any time, for any reason, or not at all if that's what they chose. Along with Allison and Luther, Diego has completely be 'in' on the idea of it from day one. There was no doubt in his mind, after showing up in a weird world that wasn't engulfed in flames, the only place he wanted to be was with his siblings. He personally couldn't picture being anywhere else. At home? Sure, it could be easily different, but this place, where nothing was the same, and everything was too off-kilter to be normal, he wanted the only thing that had any hope or chance of grounding him-- his family.
Whatever Diego may be able to deal with and handle, it's Klaus' next point that Four barrels into like a battering ram that sends his head into a spin, lights up his so easily reachable anger in an instant, bright and white-hot. "Fuck you, Klaus." There's something sharp and awful at even having one finger of blame directed at him for Klaus' near-dive into whatever the nearest dealer might shove him toward. Some logical part of him realizes that choice can't ever be his fault, but logic isn't what latches onto that blame. It rises in the back of his throat, acrid and noxious; ties sharp knots in his stomach that wind up to his chest. His voice is thick when he speaks, "I don't blame you for everything. I just want you to accept and own what is yours in it-- home, here, both."
There is only one answer to last that question, and it is burning at the end of Diego's tongue before the words die on Klaus' lips. He moves to stand close, nearly nose-to-nose with his brother, and his voice is low and quiet, not threatening, but still absolutely serious. "Until you learn from it." That will be his ending note-- he can't handle any of this any more. He doesn't even give Klaus time to say anything else before he turns and leaves the room to go down the hall, and back to his own room.
End
At least his relationships aren't the only thing in this house that are broken now.