hawaii five-o

fifty

He puts himself in Klaus’s doorway all at once, that inborn way of his; the suck of air, the man-made vacuum opening up for him and letting him fall into place, an end the movement started out of sight. He’s there and wasn’t. Same as he’s always been.

“Come here,” says Five, and turns out of his doorway and into the uncertain waters brimming at the hallway. It’s a summons in a biting, literal feel. Klaus's lip curls, who-does-he-think-he-is, but he's is drawn after his retreating shadow and so he hits the coast just like that, on his bare feet, following in his footsteps. The whispers of Five's cotton socks and linen shirt float and fill the silence. He's is too quiet. This all is too quiet. The dead perched on Klaus' shoulders are louder than this.

“Got something up your sleeve?” He asks, needlessly simple, expecting high hell, floodwater. Five glances back just enough say he won’t wait for him. His eye looks disdainful.

“Ben?” He says, the slowest code. Klaus laughs, a fibrous sound in the quiet, the still, and mouths “no”. Ben hightailed it out of his head on the wake of double-dosed Adderall.

“Delores?” He asks, a rebound shot. Something in Five's frame, the cast of his shoulders twitches, then lies flat. He doesn’t respond.

So they have privacy, then, except for the mundane; if Klaus tilts his head, he can almost hear his siblings’ breathing thread from the walls, catch around his neck, his nose, break into cobwebs. This is the lower labyrinth, where the others sleep. Where he sleeps, sometimes.

Five takes a left. Klaus sees spikes of rune-written algebra 'round the corner, peeking past the hinges, scrawled on the door.

He says “Mom would have a fit,” trails his fingers over a nothing jumble of numbers. He grunts.

“She didn’t have fits.”

He grins, tucks his chin down and fits a fist into the shrunken space between his jaw and throat. “Nah, not serious, but- real brief ‘n spirited ones,” he says, “Matronly clap of lighting.”

“Must have been a you thing,” Five says. He faces Klaus standing, hands in his pockets, breaking the clean lines of his uniform shorts.

“So?” Klaus says.

Five reaches up and flicks open the top button of his shirt.

“Ah,” he says, “right,” and take a step back. A reflex.

“Come here,” Five says again, and steps towards him. The padded sound of his foot on the floor, the drifting clicks of his fingernails on the buttons, then buttons hitting the hardwood. Plasticky, small cracks. He’s bared from the waist up, now.

“Gosh, Five,” Klaus says, the words clammy on his tongue, “Whole burlesque show just for me,” and Five screws up his lips, does away with the one-step forward one-step back and pop-s himself closer to him, takes that space away with a shudder of light. Breathing distance.

“Stop talking.” His blue eye are pinheads in his face, standing out of the gloom. Klaus swallows and that’s clammy, too.

“What's the magic word?”

“I said stop,” Five says, spitting it, and grabs the lapels of his bathrobe, wrenches it off his shoulders. He stumbles away just a bit, a laugh burbling in his chest. Five wraps his skinny fingers over Klaus' shoulder, takes him along for the ride when he jumps himself onto the bed. It’s like a ten-story fall, dizzying.