The week leading up to the apocalypse (or the ten months leading up to the apocalypse, depending on how you look at it,) is wild, even by Klaus's standards. Their old man was right, Klaus supposes. They were meant to save the world.

They did terribly, though. I mean, acceptable for a first try. Reggie can't expect us to get it all right. But it sure doesn't seem like they're getting a second chance any time soon.

The day before the apocalypse is especially insane. Five had dragged them all out to a little house in the city, supposedly where Harold Jenkins had been staying with Vanya. It'd been empty—a sweet little domestic home, sure, but completely devoid of any clues—and they'd had to go on a wild (fruitless) goose chase in order to find them. They'd been lucky enough to pass a poster tacked up on the wall for Vanya's performance—The Saint Pluvium Orchestra, with soloist Vanya Hargreeves. It had taken a while to get ahold of Luther and Allison over the phone, but they got into the orchestra hall early enough.

Vanya had been onstage. Jenkins had been waiting in the wings.

Vanya looked—Vanya looked awful. Something in her eyes looked she looked insane, dangerous. Her suit was white, and she was so caught up in the haunting and wild suite that she didn't see her siblings peering through the door. Luther, Diego and Klaus had pulled back and ran into the lobby to access the situation.

"So what's the plan?" Klaus asks.

"Oh, you're—" Luther says, and then does that little thing where his eyes flick upward and he freezes for a second. Luther hadn't even thought of him, Klaus can tell. "You're the lookout."

"The lookout?" Klaus cries, but Luther and Diego turn away. "Seriously?" He'd always been lookout as a kid, but he had actual powers now. He'd learned to control them. It wasn't his fault that none of his siblings ever took him seriously.

He's just grabbing a wrap from the food truck across the road when the ground beneath him starts to shake, quiet but steady. "Oh, shit," he mutters, looking around.

"Is that gunfire?" Ben asks, and now that Klaus is listening for it, he can hear it.

"Oh, holy—"

The scary lady—the assassin one from the motel room—is walking down the street, and she looks like hell. There's what looks like a single handcuff hanging off of her bloody wrist, and her face is bloody in a way that Klaus doesn't want to look at for long. She's walking sure and steady toward the theater, and she's got murder in her eyes. The siblings are probably right out in the open, and she's gonna kill them.

"Go time, go time," Klaus whispers to Ben, clapping his hands and turning towards the main doors.

"But what about the shaking? And the gun—" Ben is cut off as the ground beneath them jolts violently. Klaus falls to the ground, and when he rolls over, he sees that the assassin lady is on her side, struggling to stand.

"The hell—" he mumbles, looking up at the theater. The ground beneath him starts its shaking again, slower but quickly growing in strength. "Oh, holy shit."

"What the hell is happening?" Ben asks. They clamber clumsily to their feet, but the quaking ground is trying its absolute goddamn best to keep them down.

Somehow, Klaus manages to stand. He hears a crash from behind him, but doesn't take the time to turn around and see what had happened. Instead, he runs at the main doors of the hall, throwing them open.

There's a crack climbing its way up the wall across the lobby. Dust is raining down. "Guys!" Klaus yells. "Diego, Allison! Luther!" He can hear screaming from inside the concert hall, and he goes to run up the stairs, but suddenly the walls are cracking, and the floor leaps up and throws him down and there's something crashing down on him

Time has passed. There's a little girl in front of him, and then she's gone, and then he doesn't remember her at all.

Something's happened.

Klaus groans a little as he pushes himself off the ground, blinking the soot out of his eyes. They're stinging, and he can't see for a good few seconds. There's something heavy leaning on him and he uses the shaky, fuzzy strength he has to heave it off.

The first thing that registers are the dancing flames everywhere, clinging to the stone and climbing up the walls. Next are the rocks beneath his fingers, scratching into his skin.

When his vision clears, he has to blink several times to make sure that he isn't still half-blind. Everything's either the color of cement or gray, and the buildings around him have collapsed into ashy ruins. The thing he'd pushed off of himself was a solid chunk of rock, seemingly from the roof of the orchestra.

Somehow he's not injured at all. Well, at all might be an overstatement—his shoulders hurt like hell and there's an ugly scratch across his leg, but he's not, well, crushed, which would be expected if the ceiling fell on you.

Klaus looks down at the ground around him, spots a dark lump in the ashy landscape a few meters away. The entire building has collapsed, save a few spare feet of the wall around the outside, so the sky is large above him and he can see everything. (It's light out, which is notable. He could swear that the concert had happened in the evening.)

Klaus pulls his foot out from under a lump of stray cement and shakes it out, pushing himself weakly to his feet. The dark shape is lying just beyond the worst of the chaos—there are shards of polished wood (presumably instruments) everywhere, and way too many bodies. Klaus's limbs are shaky, but he manages to stumble through it all to the largest body, barely reaching out to touch it before he falls back, pulls his hands away like they've been burnt.

It's Luther. The dark shape was his overcoat, and he's lying there and staring up with glassy eyes.

"Oh, no, Luther," Klaus whimpers, and he doesn't bother holding back a sob. Luther has that valiant hero look on his face, and his hand is outstretched and his fingers form a claw, like he'd been holding something. The fingertips are bloody. "Christ," Klaus mutters. The struggle must have been quite something.

Klaus turns and crawls a little farther over, reaching the next body. It's Diego, lying face-down, knife in hand. "Oh, Diego, you dumbass." The sobs are really coming now, and Klaus clamps a hand over his mouth to make them quieter.

Fuck.

He turns and sits squarely down in the wreckage. There are more bodies—he stumbles warily over to Allison's puts a hand on her cheek lovingly. Her hand is up by her head, like she'd tried to catch herself as she fell. Her fingernails are dark red.

She and Klaus used to sit in her room and paint their fingernails together, singing Britney Spears at the top of their lungs. Those were some of the few good memories Klaus had of growing up in that huge, loveless house.

He supposes the house is gone, now actually. Klaus chokes and lets the tears fall without wiping them away. He reaches out, shuts her eyes with shaking fingers.

"Vanya?" Klaus calls, standing up, but his voice is weak and he isn't expecting an answer. What the hell had happened? There was clearly some sort of energy coming from Vanya, but how? Was it her that made the buildings crumble?

She didn't have powers. She couldn't have powers.

Why hadn't she ever told them? Why did she do this? And what did Harold Jenkins have to do with it? All Klaus knows is that Vanya had been dating him during the final week (even though Klaus had been happy Vanya was happy, dear lord she had bad taste) and that Harold had defended her apparently until his last breath. Even as she, Klaus is forced to assume, destroyed the world.

No. No. It was Vanya. Vanya, for god's sake. Their sister. Their sweet little sister, who would perform her violin for them in her bedroom. They would stage little concerts, make a thing of it. Vanya, who would always cry when they fought.

What the hell had happened while Klaus was on lookout?

And of course he was on lookout. Of course Klaus was out buying food with Ben during the literal apocalypse. Of course he did nothing to help, and now everyone was dead. Maybe because of him.

Klaus is always the useless one, always the fucking liability. "God!" Klaus roars, kicking the ground uselessly. All the times he's messed up, all the times he hasn't helped, all the times he's ruined missions by turning up high, or by being afraid of his own power. He'd been standing outside the museum doors, even, when Ben had—

Fuck all of this. Dammit.

Klaus feels the beginning of a raging headache building in his temples, and he sobs weakly. "Oh, no," he whimpers.

Sobriety. Completely overrated. He wants to see his siblings, but he can't quite control who comes and who doesn't. And the number of people who must've died is staggering. Even the thought of all of them manifesting makes Klaus feel like he can't breath.

"Well, you're lucky," Diego had said. "At least when you lose someone you can still see them whenever you want."

Ha.

As Klaus looks at the wreckage around him, he has the sudden sense of deja vu. Lying down on a blisteringly hot Vietnamese night, blood all over his hands, the only person he's ever loved lying dead beside him. The searing agony in his chest.

Standing on a chilly November day, fires raging everywhere, his siblings lying dead around him. Klaus can't help but laugh. "Oh, of course this is me. Of course. I'm the only—the only one that has no survival instinct, no real power, no real skill. Of course it's me stuck after the fucking apocalypse comes." He raises two choice fingers to the sky, and yells "Fuck you!"

The sky says nothing.

Klaus wipes the tears off his eyes again, probably doing terrible damage to his eyeliner. He steps not-too-gingerly over the wreckage towards a spot a few feet behind Luther, looking for a certain someone.

"Yeah, there you are," Klaus says, squatting down by the body of Harold Jenkins and grinning down at him. "Hey, I bet you're happy. I bet you're just overjoyed at the way things turned out," he says, patting Harold's cheek a little too roughly.

He gets no response.

"Is this what you wanted? Huh? Is it? Well, I really hope it is, because my brothers and my sister, are over there dead! Do you hear me? They're fucking dead because of you!" Klaus turns and kicks one of the chunks of rock, trying to get some of his anger out, but he must have overestimated his strength, because it just really, really hurts. "Dammit! Shit," Klaus says, and then roars wordlessly at nothing and everything.

Klaus feels a wave of nausea rush over him and he grits his teeth. He's learned over the past few days that he's got more control over his power than he'd thought possible, but keeping the ghosts back is an effort that's getting more difficult by the moment. He wants his brothers and sister back, he wants them back so bad, but he doesn't have the control to let only them through, and he can't stomach the idea of being overwhelmed by the dead. Klaus lets out a half-laugh, half-sob. He's a pathetic coward.

He needs a drink.

There was a bar, a few buildings down from the concert hall, he remembers. Klaus clambers over the chunks of cement, not looking at the mess that the seating area had become. There's an area full of broken glass, and Klaus rushes over, getting on his hands and knees and rifling through the broken bottles. He can't care less about the scratches, and his hands are soon covered in fresh blood. "Thank Christ," he mumbles, pulling a small, miraculously intact flask out from the mess. He unscrews the bottle, almost dropping it, and downs the contents. "Oh, thank god," he mutters as the edges of everything blur. He sits down, drops his head back, lets his eyes fall shut. "That's. . .that's nice."

What does he do now? The world is dead, and it's not like he knows how to survive. He'd learned how to live off the land in Vietnam—what plants to eat, what to use to bandage a wound. But he's not in Vietnam, and even if he was, all the plants have been killed, buried in the wreckage.

"Oh, no, go away," he moans when he sees a small figure walking out through the ruins. Not the ghosts again.

But—

But he's drunk. Well, not drunk, he can handle much more than this, but not sober. Klaus pushes himself up, wiping his eyes. "Hey!" he yells, waving both arms above his head. The boy turns.

Klaus knows those schoolboy shorts.

"You," Klaus says, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. "Hey, Five!"

There's nothing friendly in Klaus's tone, but Five must not notice, because he starts clambering over the rocks towards Klaus, a relieved smile breaking over his face. "Kl—Klaus? I didn't—I saw your body. I thought you were dead. Are you the only one that survived?"

Klaus can't believe this. "What the hell, man?" he yells, and Five stumbles to a stop.

"Excuse me?"

"So what did you do? Did you jump forward? Skip the dirty part? Too pretty to die with the rest of us?"

"I don't know—what the hell are you talking about?"

"You saw my body? Did you see everyone else's? You were supposed to save us, Five. You were supposed to come back and save us. But they're dead now, because you jumped off and didn't do shit to help the rest of us."

"Klaus, I—I don't know what—I wasn't even there, dumbass. I don't know what the hell happened!"

There's something broken in Five's face, plus something else that Klaus hasn't seen in a long, long time. But Klaus's vision is blurred from tears and he can't bring himself to care about the finer details. "So what's your grand plan now? Going to save us all miraculously? Use your powers to go back and stop it from happening? Or are you just gonna give up, go on your—on your merry way?"

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about. All I did was jump from dinner, and here I am. Someone fucked up, but it wasn't me!"

"I—" Klaus says, but cuts himself off. Five's crying. Klaus didn't think he'd see any vulnerability from the old man ever again, not after he got stuck in the apocalypse for fifty years. Unless—what did Five just say?

"Aw, shit," Klaus says, stepping backward, both hands over his mouth in shock. Five steps back, looking up defiantly. "You're him! You're him."

"The hell?"

"How old are you?"

"I'm thirteen," Five says dubiously.

"Oh, my god," Klaus says, and he can't keep the emotion out of his voice. A different emotion now. He steps forward and pulls Five in for a hug. "Oh, kid, I'm so, so sorry."

"Are you high?" Five asks, and there's venom in his voice, but he grabs Klaus tightly. "What the hell happened?" His voice is quieter, broken.

Klaus's mouth quirks as he pulls back. "Yeah, I'm not sure—I don't know if I can say, spoilers and all," he says, and he lets out a sob. "Oh, god, you're so young."

"What do I do? What role do I have in this?" Five gestures vaguely at the destruction around them.

"No, no, you did nothing. You were magnificent." Klaus grins, and it's genuine. Our little psycho. "I suppose, actually. . .I suppose your body's somewhere here too."

"Jesus," little Five breaths, sitting in the rubble. "We lost?"

"Yeah, we um—" Klaus looks up at Five "—we lost. And I'm so, so sorry. You—you deserve better. You. . .tried your zappy thing, right?"

"Yeah, it doesn't work." Five wipes his eyes, steps back. Something in his face hardens again. "So if we want to get out of here, we gotta get busy. Did you have a plan? Is there something we can do?"

Klaus wants to give him hope, wants to tell him that they can time travel back, that there's a way out of this. But he knows that that's not the case. He knows that Five is here, alone, for a very, very long time.

Klaus doesn't lie, unless it's about his own well-being. But Klaus looks up at Five, and he's so, so young. There's such innocence in his angry little eyes. So he says it anyway. "Yeah, yeah. I mean, no plan, but we can, y'know, we can figure something out."

"Okay," Five says, nodding fast. "I'll. . .go look for food."

"Yeah, you, you go do that. I think there's a convenience store somewhere off in that direction. I'll figure something out," he says again, and Five turns and hurries off.

Klaus reaches into his coat pocket on instinct, and who could've guessed, there's a joint there. "Of all the things to get through the apocalypse," he says, and pulls a lighter out as well. All of his clothes are intact, too, thank god.

Sobriety is definitely overrated, and definitely not worth being drowned in the ghosts of the entire world.

He watches Five hurry off. Klaus can't connect him to the man he knows Five will become. To the angry, exhausted man that had dragged them all on this little journey this past week. Klaus lets himself wonder for a moment what might have happened, had Five stayed at the academy. Had he not run out during dinner. Would he be as messed up as the rest of them? Maybe, but at least he wouldn't've been alone.

But it's too late for that.

Oh, well. Best get comfortable.

I'm not sure whether or not I want to make this into a multiple chapter fic, so please write a review if you want more! as always, thank you so much for reading and please leave a like or a review if you enjoyed it!