#also i officially started my first real tua fic today

[likeshipsonthesea]

can i make a klave request for 76? i love your work, btw!

from this list 76. “You’re so weird.” “You have no idea.” I modified it a little for soldier talk, hope you don’t mind. enjoy!

“I need two,” Klaus tells Fitz when he gets to the front of the chow line.

Fitz raises his eyebrows, unamused. “You know the rules, Hargreeves. One ration per soldier.” Klaus flutters his eyelashes, which makes Fitz snort but doesn’t soften the hard set to his jaw. Klaus sighs. 

“Fitzy, baby, I’m gonna level with you. I need a second ration, and I’ll tell you why, I’ve done and got myself the shits. Real bad ones. Just, like, fuckin’ geyser shits, but I don’t need to tell you, I’m sure.” Klaus gives him a wink. “So you and I know both know that I gotta eat double to keep something in my body or who knows what could happen. What am I gonna do when I’m out there shitting my guts out and Charlie comes up outta no where to kill me? Now, I’m sure you don’t want me scrambling to get my pants up and gun out with the only the strength of a barren empty stomach to support me, now do you?”

Fitz blinks for a few moments before shaking his head with a sigh. “You’re are so fucking weird, Hargreeves,” he says, filling up a second plate.

Klaus grins, taking it. “You have no idea,” he says, turning and swinging his hips away.

Fitz chuckles. “Say hi to Katz for me.”

“If I had a free hand I’d flip you off!” Klaus yells over his shoulder but he doesn’t mean it. Fitz is of a good sort, as far as the platoon goes. Klaus doesn’t think he knows, but he doesn’t think Fitz would go out of his way to say anything if he did. That’s about the best they can hope for, out here.

“Hey baby,” Klaus purrs, pushing into the tent with the rations. Dave sits up from where he was napping, resting his ankle after hitting it funny on the trek here. “Got you some chow.”

“Aw, canned ham and crackers, my favorite.” Dave smiles, taking the plate. “You’re too good to me.”

“It’s only ‘cause you put out,” Klaus says around a mouthful of crackers and Dave shakes his head, still smiling.

They don’t talk much as they eat. It’s habit, even if they’re far from any enemy territory. Klaus munches on the stale crackers and thinks about Fitz, and the rest of the company along with it.

It’s weird to fight for the lives of people that might turn on him if they ever knew who he loved. Fitz is really an exception to the rule, and though it’s an open secret amongst the platoon that Klaus and Dave are close, implying anything beyond friendship is always meant as a jeer. Even Klaus, with his eyeliner and sashaying and calling everyone and their mother “baby,” still gets roped into the nights when they reminisce about girls back home. The guys still think– refuse not to think– that Klaus and Dave are straight as they shoot.

It makes Klaus think about back home. Not that the Academy was ever home. But he worked alongside his siblings and he still isn’t sure if all of them are okay with his inclinations. He assumes Allison must be, working in Hollywood and all, and Vanya is definitely repressing something under all those button-ups and undiagnosed neurosis.

He knows Ben doesn’t care, at least not more than he cares about not seeing what Klaus gets up to. “I don’t need to see this,” he’ll whine or, more lately, sigh, and drift off to wherever he goes when he isn’t haunting Klaus. He acts as if Klaus never gives a warning, like there isn’t build-up before the actual dicks come out. Though, to be fair, there’ve been many a drug deal that went down downtown, if you catch his drift, so possibly Ben had a point.

Klaus thinks Luther is too repressed to even know what a dick is and Diego might be the straightest person Klaus has ever met– come on, the knives are most definitely compensating for something only someone giving it would worry that much about. Neither of them screams “ally.”

There is Five, though. Klaus wonders. Anyone who hits a Diamond Anniversary with a damned piece of plastic is in no place to judge, but Klaus doesn’t know. He wonders what Five would think, though. Think of Dave.

A foot nudges Klaus’ knee and he looks up. Dave is smiling. He’s always smiling. Typically it would irritate Klaus, someone smiling all the time, but knowing what Dave goes through here, what he sacrifices just to be able to smile, it feels so much more than the empty victories Klaus is used to, in smiles.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Dave says, and Klaus is almost positive that the phrase is out of date, even for today’s date, but it’s so perfectly Dave, so sweet and genuine and– fuck, Klaus is so gone for him.

“Wondering what my family would think of you,” Klaus says, because he doesn’t know how to lie to Dave and doesn’t have any inclination to start. It’s weird, but in the good way. Like pedicures or wax figurines.

“Oh? And what seems to be the verdict?”

Klaus thinks about it. “Luther would be confused by you.” He glances at Dave’s body. “Intimidated, maybe. He doesn’t know what to do with people who aren’t more broken than him.” Dave frowns slightly, so Klaus adds a nice thing. “I think he’d make you laugh, and I think he’d like that.”

Smiling again. Score.

“Diego might pull the protective older brother thing because he likes that kind of stuff. He might threaten you with a knife, we don’t know.” Klaus shrugs and Dave shakes his head. “You’d be too earnest for it, though, and he’d give up and probably make you talk about sports. Ugh. Men things.”

“You’re a man,” Dave says, giggling a little the way he always does when Klaus is being ridiculous.

Klaus waves a hand. “Semantics. Moving on.” Dave chuckles and Klaus smothers his own smile by talking. “Allison would see how drop dead gorgeous you are and congratulate me on the spot.” Dave flushes but doesn’t comment. Klaus goes soft, looking at him. “She’d also like how kind you are, I think. She’s always liked that stuff. Vanya, too. She’d talk music with you I think. You’re both huge nerds for that.

“Ben would love you for much the same, he’s a huge nerd too.” Klaus curls his hand around Dave’s unhurt ankle. “He’d like how much you love me. And how much I love you.”

Dave presses his toes into Klaus hip, smile warm like the first rays of sun after days of rain. “My folks wouldn’t know what to do with you,” he says but it isn’t harsh. “I think they’d like you for how good you are for me. They always said I was too quiet and such, needed someone to balance me out.”

“Well I damn well tip the scales,” Klaus preens, fluttering his eyelashes at Dave, who laughs, again.

“Sometimes you’re almost too much to hold,” Dave says, so damn earnest and heart pounding and Klaus can’t help himself, daylight be damned, he leans in to press his mouth to Dave’s smile, and they keep at it, slow and too much, for minutes longer than they should, but Klaus doesn’t care one bit.

They settle into sleep a mere hour later, needing to be up bright and early to keep moving. It’s cold at nights, always is, so they huddle together for warm, Dave the little spoon because Klaus got to be it last time.

With his cheek pressed to Dave’s shoulderblade, Klaus thinks about Five, inexplicably. How would he react to Dave? Assuming he isn’t a bigot, assuming he cares at all, would he like Dave?

They had so little time together, but that’s not it because the rest of the house dispersed within years of Five’s disappearance. The only thing Klaus can base his other assumptions on is who his siblings became later. He never got to see that with Five.

He suddenly, achingly, wants to. He wants to see Five grow up, see who he is beyond the impending apocalypse. Is he funny? He was funny as a kid, Klaus remembers. The dry kind of wit. He’d say something and have Klaus in stitches while the rest of the group hadn’t caught on to the joke. He’d been a condescending asshole, yeah, but he shared some of his cooler facts with the rest of them.

Klaus remembers mentioning once, halfway into a panic attack or something, that he couldn’t tell if he was awake sometimes because the ghosts haunted his dreams. Within days, Five had read several books on the subject of nightmares and, offhandedly, unimportantly, dropped tips on telling the difference between dreams and reality when he was around Klaus. Klaus wouldn’t have known, but he’d been looking for his mask one day and found a whole stack of books, and Five shooed him out of his room yelling, but Klaus had known.

He’d found out Five’s biggest secret: he cared.

Klaus’ chest clenches thinking back to it. Five had spent decades trying to get back to them to fix the apocalypse. To save them. Klaus couldn’t figure out why, thinking on it, because they were all seven shades of fucked up, but maybe they weren’t, when Five left.

There’d been a time when they were as close to a family as Dad– Reginald had let them be. Sneaking out to play after dinner, sharing comics and inside jokes, fighting over the bathrooms and defending each other from the world. Five had left them a family and come back to find them fractured.

Klaus always thought they were strangers who grew up in a house together, but they hadn’t been strangers, really, until after they’d left. After they’d stopped trying. After there’d been something else to hold onto aside from each other.

Five never had that. Neither had Luther, come to think of it, and Ben only had it tangentially. None of them grew up, and the rest of them grew– wrong.

For a moment, clinging to Dave’s sleepless form and shivering despite the sleeping bags he’s cocooned in, Klaus wants desperately to go back. Go back to a time before they all gave up, before it got too hard. Grab on to each other instead of let go, help each other.

Maybe it’s being in the marines, having Dave and Fitz and all the other guys, but Klaus finally knows what being on a team can mean. What it can be.

“You okay?” Dave mumbles, mostly asleep. Klaus nods against his back. “Go to sleep, matok.”

Klaus squeezes closer. No use wondering over the past now– or the future, or whatever it is. Klaus is here, with Dave, and that’s what matters now. Klaus doesn’t have to wonder if Dave loves him or wants him or any of that. He knows the answer, and the comfort in that is worth more than anything his siblings could give him.

Klaus presses his lips against Dave’s shoulder and quickly falls asleep.