@paradoxcd : “ and the saddest part of all? you’ll cling to the good memories, as if there were any. ” sorry that he’s being like this *
a picture , in which they are not older than ten , speaking with hushed tones and racing hearts , until they’re far away from the academy — when laughter booms . its constricting walls and controlling inhabitants can’t do anything to them here , so they laugh ( without children , quiet ! ) when klaus tries to do a cartwheel in the middle of the street and somehow fails , and they yell at each other ( without children , behave ! ) when they can’t agree on where to go , until someone pops out from a window and screams at them too , ‘ shut the fuck up ! ’ and they laugh , again , louder the farther they get . it isn’t perfect — but their family , dismantled and resentful , anything but , is what kept ben tethered , what kept him here : he thinks back on the many years spent as a ghost , clinging to his poor brother’s side , nagging him about drugs or life decisions or ‘ klaus i’m bored ’ when he could’ve simply ... left , and wonders if it would’ve changed anything ( it was selfishness , perhaps, a part of it : no one talks about how scary it is to walk into the light , as they say , to leave behind everything you know when what awaits you is unlikely to be any better than what you currently have ) .
he thinks it’s the same for five — it has to be , one cannot spend so many years trying to recover something if there are not some good memories attached to it . maybe it is sad , that the good ones they have are ancient , older than this newlyfound sense of purpose : familiar only in the way that five wears their old uniform , in the way ben can sense them squirm underneath his skin . equal parts depressing and comforting . “ it wasn’t that bad , ” he says , but it sounds insensitive — or worse , untrue . the kind of lie frightened kids tell themselves when they’ve been pushed past their limit . “ we all would’ve gone crazy earlier if there weren’t any . ”
