He supposed this was untraditional: Celebrating a birthday that wasn’t really yours to begin with but, thanks to a mysterious amalgamation of lives, was, and one not just shared among a handful of people in the world, but with six siblings and thirty-six other superpowered individuals that your would-be father couldn’t find, buy, or otherwise steal from their unsuspecting parents. Henry supposed, if nothing else, that had made the say something special - that day which had already passed by two, but that just meant the weekend had been left open for whatever trouble it was that two of those said individuals, the only two who had ever shown up in this universe to his nearly year-long knowledge of the matter.
And just like he had been in October of 2019 when San Francisco had all but turned on its side thanks to haunted mansions, Murderworld carnivals, and cannibalistic nightmares, Henry was no closer to figuring it out no matter what good and bad had ultimately fallen in his life. The start of the month as well as current events had given him pause for reflection, but just like every time before since returning from Krakoa, since fighting with and losing the battle against Mister Sinister, there seemed an ever-tightening sieve on his mind when he tried to access those dark and dangerous parts he was not to even if for Sinister’s own malevolent reasons.
So, he stopped, and in the presence of cake, it wasn’t difficult to do. While it was of questionable mindset to say that Mom had toiled over the recipe when one considered she was simply a well-programmed A.I. built by The Monocle to care for children he had never wanted in a personal sense in the first place, it would have been negligent and downright rude not to not appreciate nor partake in the effort made and gesture given to two individuals who, on this side of the shift, weren’t her children - at least not how she had known them, young and terrified of the world that they never had a stable place in other than behind domino masks and superpowered feats.
This, thankfully, was just a cake. Perhaps old-fashioned, perhaps not in the rotation of what one might have found in a grocery store, made from scratch down to the frosting and in enough quantity to feed seven children had there been seven children present, and that wasn’t accounting for the candles which, considering the age difference between Henry and Nick, was of no good indication of how old they were in Mom’s mind; but none of it had to do with the end of the world. Had that been the case, he would have expected to see all of them in one place, even if he was a specter while it happened.
It had been of his persistence that they hadn’t “waited up” for anyone else, the fact remaining that none of their siblings were going to show up though Henry didn’t broach the topic with Mom as she walked into the kitchen after cutting each of them a slice. He, in fact, waited to discuss anything further on the subject of siblings or the shifts or what they were actually going to do versus waiting for a hopeful inevitable that seemed not in the cards to occur.
“So,” he said, cutting into his slice with his fork only to take a modest bite. Hungry? He never was and he especially wasn’t after the questionable events of the prior week, appetite eaten by what guilt still lingered in his mind, but there would be an effort of good faith to eat at least some of the almost obscene slices. “And don’t get any ideas from Klaus: What do we do to celebrate this non-birthday?”
Nick wasn’t the type to be someone called ‘sentimental’ and he certainly wasn’t one to say that he fully accepted the world he now existed in that it seemed many others like him shared. It rattled out a new sobriety of the normalcy that he had once taken advantage of before he had been pushed into the back of his mind, only able to witness (when not inebriated) by whatever Klaus took to function like a somewhat normal human being to his own standards. Something that Nick liked to distance himself from on more than one occasion when he was left pondering what details he had been missing or what motivations had been lost somewhere along the way from Klaus to Nick. Other people seemed to have a much easier time adjusting to the world and the other half of themselves much easier than he did, it seemed from those he had met.
But over time it was becoming more and more evident that there was no escape from this. Nick didn’t just end up moving into the Hargreeves mansion because it felt like the right thing to do, but it felt like the easiest way to connect. To Klaus. To Ben. Maybe to Henry who had slowly been slipping into his thoughts with more of a sibling concern than a friend he had met because of a connection that he tried to pull himself away from. It didn’t mean, by any stretch of the concept, that he was willing to tell himself there were more similarities between Klaus and himself than he was ready to admit.
It just meant that he was open to trying to accept that he wasn’t going to get rid of him. He might as well make the attempt to try to understand him, even though he was still on the fence about some of the antics that seemed to come out of left field. To Nick, it just meant that he was trying to get some sort of attention after years of being neglected by The Monocle, or the man that had taken them in -- by all definition, their father but through blood.
Nick was still becoming accustomed to Mom’s presence in the house and how she would call him Klaus, regardless of his attempts to try to say that he was Nick. It hadn’t really stuck in the time that she had shown up there but one of the things he had benefited from her presence was that she seemed to make him food, set the table before he would have usually just eaten some chips and gone off to work. Nick’s own dietary requirements were typically neglected by himself when it came to just his life being centered around his work and whatever obscure hobby he would decide to attempt to pick up.
He did see a point in celebrating their… “non-birthdays” since it was the one thing that did end up bringing them into each other’s lives. Their relation through the Hargreeves brothers as Nick eyed the huge cake that had been set in front of them and was going to make the attempt to say that he didn’t need as big a slice before it was set in front of him. “It looks like diabetes on a p--thank you, mom.” He smiled before taking a bite of the cake. “Oh well there goes my idea of doing lines in a Walmart parking lot.”
He took another bite of the cake before setting down his fork, “You want to go to a haunted house? Like the gimmicky kind, not the real kind. My heart isn’t equipped for it.”
As soon as there had been some normalcy found in being the sixth sibling in an adopted troupe of seven which all had some sort of super power an old and crotchety alien could take advantage of, Henry had found his life steering towards another tide, ebbing and flowing back and forth through the cryptic waves of the magical and otherworldly, dimensions he never knew existed accessible through means that didn’t involve monstrous limbs making headway into reality from his stomach and ability found in ancient and archaic tomes not to be read by mere mortals. It was as if he had found another foothold on the ladder of extraordinary - if not just plain strange - and the learning curve of normalcy had been reset; and before he knew it, it had been reset again.
But who, in the presence of their mother, robotic as she might have been, would go so far to suggest his ventures into wickedness and corruptive insanity had placed a crown on his head and put a realm at his fingertips? Who, in their right mind which had only recently been found again from external factors he couldn’t readily understand, would bring up such infernal stature in front of their would-be brother when there was cake already laid out in front of them for a birthday that felt both right and wrong to celebrate?
There would be a time and place for them, those secrets that had roiled in his mind for some time during his venture overseas, to be told, and it wasn’t with a mouthful of cherry cake.
“Are you sure?” He asked once he had finished off the bite, chin bowing towards his neck as if it would help the mouthful of sugar go down smoother than it was, clinging to the walls of his throat as if he had just taken a spoonful of peanut butter instead. The taste was good - there were no complaints about that - but cake was hardly a dietary staple when one’s appetite consisted of instant noodles and jelly cubes found in milk tea.
“Because you know,” Henry pointed out and literally so as he pointed his fork towards himself, spying what frosting remained on it for a second before it was unceremoniously stuck back into the piece of cake, “I am a very excellent purveyor of things that will never make you want to sleep again…”
“…if not outright give you a heart attack,” he amended after a beat, eyes turning up to Mom as she walked back in, setting on the table a couple glasses of milk as if Henry’s thoughts had been heard.
“Now, are you planning on scaring your brother?”
“Only if he wants it,” Henry said, this time leaving no time for a beat between the question and answer, one which got a downcast, yet mildly so, shake of her head. It was easily a motherly motion and emotion, an example of one of the more successful automations of Sir Reginald Hargreeves that didn’t essentially turn into a nightmare or, as his favorite experimental test subjects were so often, ape-like in nature; and, sentimentality found once more, Henry shrugged his shoulders as if chided by the look even at twenty-nine years old.
“He can say ‘no’,” he assured, eyes going back to Nick as his eyebrows piqued on his head and, as if to make sure he didn’t say anything further in regards to scaring him, he shoved another bite of cake into his mouth.
Nick couldn’t honestly say he knew of Henry’s moonlighting into the dark side or that he would be entirely...supportive of it. In his own mind, there had to be a reason as to why they were shifters and he could only think it was for the betterment of the world around them. Not to lay waste to the city and the world that they knew. Not that Nick could say Klaus had any marketable ability that could be used for heroics or that he would jump at the chance to lay his life down for anyone that wasn’t his family. So many things had occurred in the last year and Klaus was just...an observer. Weaving through the mayhem with a forty in his hand and his mind fogged up by alcohol and whatever drug that was in his system at the time. Nick knew where his mind was currently, just as he knew that right now didn’t feel as wrong as he had originally believed when it came to the life that he was familiar with to the life that he was now dipping his toes into and imagining that there was something that he could do with himself that wasn’t what he normally did. Celebrating the life of the lone Hargreeves brothers in a world that they weren’t used to was one of them.
Celebrating like he was one of them, beginning to accept that he was -- was just another thing on the list of things that he had been involved in. “T’is the season isn’t it? Isn’t that what they say?” Nick mused over the piece of cake in front of him before taking another bite and was sort of thankful that it wasn’t something that most would consider dry from a cake like this. It was probably the best cake he’d ever eaten which did nothing to help his standard sweet tooth and perchance of following wherever sweets were being held for the moment. It only helped with just curbing whatever he was craving at the moment, he lost one addiction to pick up another which was something that wasn’t certainly something that he was accustomed to when he was growing up.
“It’s harmless fun, right? Haunted houses with people in masks, I’m sure we’ve both...endured a lot more.” Over the last year it seemed to be something that was building and it was something that he believed was a miracle that they were both in one piece on some occasions, on other occasions -- Nick was blissfully unaware of what exactly Henry had endured when they were separated. Or what he was getting up to in his free time when it was compared to what Nick did during his free time. “You act like I sleep as it is.” Nick leaned back with a smile on his face, somewhat with an air of haughtiness at the idea of “sleep” as a necessary function for living when Nick was an insomniac at the best definition of the word.
Curiosity seemed more than piqued in Nick’s eyes at the mention of giving him a heart attack or scaring him. Aside from the fact that Mom seemed unaffected or just willfully ignoring the fact that they weren’t the same siblings she had raised. “Normally I would, but the way you’re hinting at something I’m going to regret it if I do. What do you have up your sleeve?”
“Exactly.” Henry said, all but pointing his fork at Nick though it did get a flick in the air slightly before it was bedded into the cake once more. It was the season for spookiness and frights and all matters of Halloween shenanigans which may or may not have involved egging someone’s house or toilet papering someone’s trees. He expected it to be something of celebrated reverence considering how the beginning of the year had started and how it had ultimately downturned, but that was where heroics had come into play, and Henry found himself only mildly curious about just what else the Reality Gem might have changed when they used it to rid the world of the pandemic that had been pushing them all underground for the better part of the year. Kids would be trick or treating, everyone else would be partying, and, unfortunately or fortunately as it might have been, some would even be working.
“I’m still not a fan of anyone with a chainsaw,” he said, shaking his head. No amount of real life horrors, not even being turned into a Horseman of the Apocalypse or nearly dying by the hands of a malevolent avatar of the Rot, could have removed that fear from him, every experience with such a little too close for comfort meaning, frankly, that even just being in the same room with someone revving up chainsaw motors was sure to see him bolt.
“None of us sleep,” Henry agreed, nodding. Though he had gotten some by means of simply exhaustion, his body and mind finally giving up when they saw fit to put him down for a nap, sleep wasn’t something Henry found in droves - be it a problem with getting to sleep because he was too intently focused on a project or a problem with staying asleep when, even with a sleep aid and some tea or a glass of milk, there was always that phantom feeling something wasn’t quite right and a nightmare was only a heartbeat away. Though it had been better of late, he still found those dark corners of his mind when he did take a mental sojourn from the world that only ever pushed him back into the land of the waking with one shriek or jump scare or another.
Henry shook his head, however, at the insistence that he had something up his sleeve, his hands going up as if surrendering. “I am not planning anything,” he said, shaking his head as Pinky took charge of cake duty, taking a rather large, if not sloppy, bite out of the cake with the pink frosting, smacking his lips once he had finished it off. “Nor can I be held responsible for anything that scares other people in said haunted house.”
“That’s your piece now,” Henry said, nodding to the creature who delighted in a second round, Henry putting his hands back down on the table, tapping the edge of his Lantern Ring on the edge of it.
He didn’t think Henry was the type to offer up something that was potentially dangerous for them to embark on. Or questionably legal when it came to certain things that Klaus might have been able to drag Ben into if he was given the opportunity to do so. There was a bit of peace found in the regularity of how things didn’t seem to have deeper ripples than they did and if they did they were well hidden from Nick. Or he just became ignorant to it. He still struggled with the desire to be separate from the life he lived one week of the month that he didn’t want to put any more distance between that person and himself, or anymore that existed as of right now. He could confidently tell anyone that he wasn’t a junkie like Klaus was, an addict. But there was that tether with him always that he tried to pull himself away from the things that were becoming inherently unavoidable. It really didn’t help that he lived with “Mom” and a zombie, he supposed he had buried himself in the thick of things but not doing what he had told himself he was going to do.
“I don’t think anyone is a fan of chainsaws, B--Henry.” There was familiarity with sitting at the table with the other man, even though he told himself there wasn’t. It was becoming more and more difficult for him to tell himself the memories of Klaus Hargreeves were not his own, even though it had him become more tethered with Henry than he originally had been when Klaus had first awoken and his status as a shifter had become more and more apparent. “We’ll avoid the chainsaw-filled haunted houses. Maybe something with clowns.” He mused somewhat loudly as he pushed out his chair. He thought briefly on saving the rest of his piece for Leonard who was creeping elsewhere in the mansion.
But honestly, there was plenty of cake and he knew it would be left sitting in the fridge after they had excused themselves from the table. Not that he was certain that zombies...ate cake. It seemed a little farfetched for them to even think it was something edible but he knew Leonard tried to reconnect with his humanity as much as he was capable. Nick finished off whatever cake he could before pushing himself to his feet and watching Pinky devour the piece of cake that Henry had offered him. “Oh? Nothing?” His brow arched as he watched Pinky before his eyes turned back to Henry. “Just as long as you’re not planning to scare me, I’m fine with it. You want to head out now?” He had already started stepping to grab his jacket. “Don’t make me drag you.” Not that he would but he was actually looking forward to going out to hang out with him a little more.
Illegal outings? That was hardly in Henry’s repertoire while he was in his right mind and even still, there was very little that came with hard drinking or drug use or anything else that would have fallen betwixt a normal pleasant outing and interdimensional mayhem; but as far as an outing to a haunted house, his intention was in simply adding some flavor to what might have otherwise been the bland gamut of the usual and customary scares like murderous clowns, human butchers, spooky ushers, and more than likely someone swinging a chainsaw around - not that he needed that to be scarier than it already was lest he send himself yelling and screaming into the night.
“Maybe lumberjacks,” Henry pointed out as if seeing the sort, and not just some lumberjack-looking hipster in a flannel shirt with a long beard, was normal. In fact, it might have been even rarer to see someone in such an occupation than it was to see something otherworldly. Case in point: A robotic mom who couldn’t quite understand or perhaps wasn’t programmed to recognize the two grown adults in the house as anyone but her “children”, a word loosely used considering all things.
“Clowns are only a miniscule less scary,” he said, “and if you get clown lumberjacks with chainsaws, you might as well just leave me outside with some ice cream.”
While Pinky ate, Henry sat, waiting for the creature to inevitably finish it off. Making sure he wasn’t going to make a mess going back in, Henry waited for the eldritch to disappear, adjusting his shirt as he stood himself up to ensure that there wasn’t going to be any surprise and unintended visits from the great beyond when they were out - something that, thankfully, had found itself in more control in recent months, be it because of the ring or introduction to occultism or simply the type of magic he had taken a particularity to. It was hard to say.
“I mean, I’m try not to scare you, but if you end up an unintended bystander, I cannot be held responsible,” he pointed out, stacking the plates before he too was grabbing his jacket, throwing it on with a level of excitement he wasn’t sure he had felt much of late - not since waking up on the other side of September’s shift with a clearer head. It hadn’t been so crowded there, at least in theory, but he couldn’t for the life of himself remember why which was something that he could say wasn’t foreign or unfamiliar. This time it just felt more permanent even though he knew nothing ever really was.
Patting his jacket a moment, he reached into one of the interior pockets to pull out an envelope - nothing fancy, nothing garish, just a simple black envelope with some writing on the front which, had it been handed off by a stout little man in a black suit, could have bore some concern - which he handed over to Nick. “Just a little Hargreeves birthday gift, to only be used in case of emergencies,” he said considering its contents were, if nothing else, a safety measure to be used in the case of - well, of going off the rails again. “And you’ll know what sort of emergency that’d be if it ever happens which I don’t plan on it… well, happening.”
He intentionally left out the again.
“Actually you might be right, it is part of their occupation to be involved with chainsaws.” Nick corrected himself as he headed towards the front door, hands tucking into his pockets as he started walking. It was the full intent to try to make the most of their “birthday” despite it not being their birthday, whatever made him feel like he connected more with the side of himself that he tried to ignore. He could see why Klaus had become the way he was through the memories that clouded his mind on the brief occasion when he tried to sift through everything, not letting it get to him as much even though times had been trying and 2020 had yet been kind to him in any facet of his life.
“So your weakness is clown lumberjacks, got it. If I ever need to take you down,” the statement was fleeting but it drudged up a memory of a nonexistent future that they might have had to endure once. A decrepit world that had the small vestiges of humanity left over in it, scraping by to survive with Henry at the center of it all. Nick pushed the memory down like bile, jaw clenching as he stood at the doorway. He wasn’t aware of the time between that and now what Henry had been up to and while his tolerance level was strong when it came to the ‘wonderful world of being a shifter’ — he’d have some questions.
He wasn’t even sure if he would have an opposition to it. Not in the way that he believed others might have if they had the same sort of knowledge as he did when it came to a ‘bad!future’ and the dancing on a line that might be best avoided. Nick had, after all, an interest in cultivating their relationship beyond Ben and Klaus. “I don’t scare easily..anymore.” Nick noted with an ominous tone in his voice. “After all, one doesn’t deal with ghosts, zombies, and Lovecraftian cults without growing a bit of an armor against it all.”
He touted, straightening out his shoulders and trying to appear larger or that he had accomplished something in the time that everything had begun. The only thing he knew more was loss and absence. A smile tugged at Nick’s lips when Henry handed him an envelope, inspecting it. “What kind of emergency?” He had slightly remembered that the gift he had gotten Henry was still waiting somewhere in the house in a box, but his attention had turned to the envelope and the other man.
Henry canted his head; Nick did have a point and one could only be afraid of so much before some sense of steeling oneself against it took hold, and there had been plenty of instances where any one of those things had been able to further instill that metaphorical armor plating about really anyone who dipped a toe into this side of shifter life, never mind horrors in the media and, considering the world was one giant horror story in the year of 2020, the ever-present reality around them. For all its improvements, there was still trouble afoot though, thankfully, very little of it had been caused by wayward firestarters with super powers or Pestilence itself, whomever that could have been at the time.
“Clown lumberjacks, yes,” he said, nodding. “This is clearly the reason why chainsaws have only been featured in character designs and not clown makeup, because the amalgamation of them both would just be too horribly for my fragile mind.” Admittedly, quite a bit of that was just being cheeking, joking with a sense of self-effacing since he had seen - and had conjured - much worse; and they were the sort of worse that resided in those places that the living dared not travel unless they had an otherworldly deathwise, ready to be driven mad by the knowledge that such elder beings could transpose about the universe. It might not have been such a bombast fear as a clown with a chainsaw, but sometimes it had been the most subtle of ones that provided the most food for fearful thought.
Not that he expected any of such madness to befall something as benign as a haunted house, but there were still people - people other than himself and Nick - that were afraid of the simplest of things: of snakes slithering out of the holes in the walls where mice should have been; of spiders dropping down from the ceiling from webs camouflaged in low lighting; and shadows that moved through the dark that couldn’t have been anything their imaginations could come up with; and those were the people that were more of amusement than trying to scare his brother from another side.
“The ‘I might destroy the world’ kind,” he said, all joking matter aside about innocent scares in a haunted house set aside for a tone veiled in seriousness considering that, of all things forgotten, that hadn’t been one, and if his dreams in Seoul had told him anything, the would-be destruction of San Francisco of a timeline that had ultimately collapsed on itself wasn’t the one and only occurrence of such a problematic situation. “Like I said, you’d know, and it is magic enough of a text that if the time comes, you’ll be able to read it and make sure it doesn’t happen,” Henry said, making sure the lapel and collar of his jacket were flipped out properly before he crossed his arms.
“So, you ready to go?”