He blinks.

“No”, he answers in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own.

“I heard you scream”, Ben insists, but he’s gentle about it. Klaus wonders if he too is remembering how normally familiar this would be for some other family ― one that doesn’t have dead children and children that can talk to the dead, for instance. He also wonders what is like to remember the past once that you’re dead and literally everything is the past for you. Even this moment, for Ben, can not be considered the present. Because he’s not present. Ah!

He snorts out loud, then covers his eyes with one hand, staring at the ceiling through the space between his fingers. His nightmares hardly leave any memories behind. They are usually just a mix of fluorescent lights, corpses, tentacles and siblings who never returned home. And bears. For some reason, a lot of his nightmares involve bears, even though Klaus has never seen a bear in his life.

“There was a bear in a box”, he says then, because it’s easy and safe and because he needs to talk about it, even if he doesn’t know what that it is. And Ben knows about the bears. He used to claim to be scared of eels, but that in his case it was only natural. “It was really pissed off.”

“Because someone stole its fish?”, Ben inquiries politely, leaning on the bed with his elbows, and Klaus can almost feel his brother’s weight over the blanket. He shakes his head no.

“It had its fish”, he answers. “It wasn’t about the fish at all, you know? It was just that he missed his family, I think.”

Across the bed, Ben frowns. Klaus knows that, even if he shouldn’t know that. He’s trying his best not to look at his dead brother, after all.

“You don’t get angry when you miss someone”, Ben objects.

“No?”

“No.”

Klaus breathes in the dark, slowly, taking his time.

“Don't you ever get angry? At us, I mean. Don’t you miss us and get angry at us for being alive? Because when you died I missed you, and I missed Five, and I hated you both for being dead. Except, you know, for Five not being dead. Maybe I should apologize to him, it was unfair on my part to hate him for being dead when he was just alive in the future.”

His words leave an echo in the silent room. In the last few years Klaus has lived in overcrowded rehabilitation centers, shabby apartments by the train stations, on park benches and, on more than one occasion, under the bridges like some common troll. He’s forgot all about the quiet of this huge, old house

“Do you still hate me?”, Ben asks, and he doesn’t sound offended or sad by the thought.

“Not since you came back”, Klaus answers to the ceiling.

He remembers the nights right after Ben’s death. Those nightmares never really disappeared from his life, unlike the person who, up until a few days before, had the power to send them away.

And then, the day of his funeral, there he was: sitting on his own gravestone, smiling up at him, and Klaus had thought it was just the ketamine putting him into a good k-hole. He knew about the deads, and they did not smile.

“I never hated you for being alive”, Ben offers in return, and Klaus feels him shuffle a bit to get up on his feet. “You’ve a pretty shitty life, to be honest. Nothing to be jealous about.”

He’s smiling now, and Klaus smiles back. Behind the hand still draped over his face, his eyes are wet, but it’s dark and Ben wouldn’t make fun of him in any case. He never did.

He shifts back on the bed, rolling towards the wall to leave enough space next to him for Ben to lie down. Thinking logically about it, there's no need for him to do that, but if Klaus thinks logically about any of this, then Ben couldn't yawn and let himself fall next to him with an exhausted look.

They remain silent for a few minutes, and that's enough for Klaus to start falling asleep again.

“Klaus?”

“Mh?”

“You know how they say that you can sleep when you’re dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, don’t believe them”, Ben sighs. “They’re fucking liars.”