Klaus

User Name/Nick: Conwooooooooosh!
User DW:
E-mail: michael heroin at gee mail dot com
Other Characters: Rhys

Character Name: Number Four aka Klaus Hargreeves
Series: The Umbrella Academy
Age: 29
From When?: In episode 7 Klaus dies briefly in a club. He will be coming to the Barge from this moment.

Inmate/Warden: Inmate - Despite a traumatic upbringing and a terrifying ability, Klaus uses his past to justify his actions, instead of trying to meaningfully change.

He is very much ruled by a fear of sobriety – a state which leaves him at the mercy of his powers – and in pursuit of drugs he shows the single minded ambivalence towards the harm or consequences of his actions that often comes with addiction. He steals from his family. Threatens to frame a stranger for money – even alluding to having been in prison before, suggesting a longer criminal history than we see on the screen.

Ultimately, Klaus might love his family, but he doesn't see the material benefit to being a better person, so he doesn't do it.

He says as much after a brief stint of sobriety. Despite having more control over his powers, and easing the pain of his brother Ben's ghost, who has spent years watching Klaus throw away a life that Ben had stolen from him, Klaus explains his reasoning for wanting to get high again:

“I can't talk to the person I love, people still aren't taking me seriously-- I want to be numb again.”

And if Ben doesn't like it? Well, Klaus doesn't care.

When the police officer who comes to save him from days of torture gets shot in the head? Klaus doesn't care.

When the end of the world is coming? Klaus doesn't care.

Arrival: - Klaus was snatched at the moment of his death. It wasn't willing but he'll be pretty chill about it at the time.

Abilities/Powers:

Mediumship

When sober, Klaus is able to communicate with spirits/those who are in the afterlife, although it's hard to tell how many of the voices that Klaus hears while sobering up are of actual spirits, and how many are his own mind conjuring flashbacks to traumatic early uses of his power. When he's fully sober, he can see and speak to the dead as if they're solid human beings, often still dressed in the grizzly wounds of their demise.

HOW I'D LIKE TO DEAL WITH THIS ON THE BARGE

Since facing his fear of the dead is crucial to his graduation, I think it is important that this power still be in tact / present enough that there is still something to be afraid of. The spirits he communicates with in the show are clearly not constrained by space or time, as we see two assassins who are haunted by the spirits of people they've killed all over the world, from across the full vastness of time – but obviously I wouldn't want to set a precedent for how the afterlife works that messes with anyone else's canon / breaks the Barge's internal workings.

What I'd like to suggest is: NPC spirits pass through the barge. Sometimes former passengers of the admiral who we stole this ship off, sometimes people who have a beef with our Admiral. Some of them graduated and went back to their home world, some of them failed to graduate and just vanished. None of them are here permanently, none of them are trapped on the Barge, none of them necessarily know any more than anyone who's currently on the Barge.

The most useful thing they give Klaus – if he ever sobers up – is the ability to obnoxiously name drop people who the Admiral may or may not remember from past voyages. For example:

“Hey Admiral! Joe Briggs wants to know why there wasn't a shark while he was on board! I'll stop passing on his messages when you drop your boy some chronic!”

WHAT ABOUT DEAD FRIENDS OF CHARACTERS ON BOARD?

I'd like this to be possible under really strict conditions – because again, I think it could make for some really good character moments, both for Klaus and other characters, but I don't want it to be open to abuse. So my suggestions for restricting this:

Klaus can't reliably pick a dead person and have them willingly show up to talk to him. It's much more likely to be – someone you know, who misses you / is angry at you, happens to be passing through and Klaus has a chance encounter. If there is someone who a character specifically wants to talk to, it'd be a long term struggle to try and call their spirit. They might simply never show up at all. Probably Klaus won't want to stay sober for long enough to get them.

No writing characters from other players canons without explicit prior communication with the other player, setting out what can and can't happen in the encounter, no doing it without a good plot / character reason to do it, and no doing it without considering emotional consequences for their character.

I won't do direct dialogue of any of these characters – you will only get Klaus's second hand messages from their “spirits” / a somewhat unreliable translator.

Following the same rules as the ones set for NPC Spirits – No one is permanently haunting anyone on the Barge, and no one is going to have game breaking knowledge of the afterlife or the Barge or anything else down that alley.

It will be brief, and fleeting, and difficult. If he does it at all, it certainly won't be common.

Evocation

This means that he can physically bring spirits forth, so that they can touch things, pull things, and eventually even manifest both visually and physically in the solid world.

Klaus doesn't know he can do this, and even if he did, the Barge will be nerfing it. No evocation for you, Klaus.

Personality:

We were just strangers living under the same roof, starved for attention, damaged by our upbringing, and haunted by what might have been. We all wanted to be loved by a man incapable of giving love.


Klaus is a showboat. He's dramatic, fashionable, and has very little time or interest in the optics of following in the masculine hero trope that his two older brothers follow. Instead he presents himself as highly androgynous and flamboyant, as comfortable in his sister's clothes as he is in army fatigues.

He's got an acerbic talkativeness, and often walks a fine line between being warmly overfamiliar, and sharply insensitive, often joking about things that for his siblings are still raw and painful. There is a perception of him in his family as being irresponsible and carefree. He's often accused of lying for attention, and of taking advantage of his siblings. It's a reputation that has run so deep that he's clearly comfortable leaning into it, and letting them believe these things.

The reality, of course, is quite different. Klaus's irreverent demeanour doesn't actually come from being carefree, it comes from a kind of all consuming nihilistic despair. He's given up on himself, and the world, and accepted that the best thing he can do with his life is try to stay away from the very worst of his fears. He can also recognise that his siblings – for all their various troubles, aren't quite there with him, and without his specific power set, will never really understand what he's going through, so rather than do the emotional work of trying to explain himself, he just doubles down on what they're expecting, and lets them assume that he's just getting his kicks in.

It might be a stretch to call him suicidal, but he spends much of the first season leaning casually in towards his own death. From being revived in an ambulance when fresh out of rehab – a location apparently familiar enough that he casually high fives the EMT, to provoking the two assassins who are torturing him, even when one of them is throttling the life out of him. When – in the series – he's told that he is dead, he responds with relief. A calmness that he never has in life.

The truth is that in addition to fleeing from his own demons, everything that Klaus has done for the majority of his life has been in service of slowly detaching further and further from the world. We see him bathing often. Head under the water, eyes closed-- and when his memories – or his powers – interrupt the silence, that's when it's time to sit up, stick in headphones, and smoke another joint. If he can't have nothingness, then he can at least drown out the noise. It's something that he's learned to want, from a combination of addiction, and his abusive upbringing, and part of why he doesn't bother to let his siblings know what he's really going through. Perhaps also part of why it takes him almost thirty years before he has a meaningful relationship, and why he's so destroyed by the loss of his lover.

The reason why it's so easy for Klaus to detach from the world, is because his formative meaningful interactions with it were so entrenched in absolute terror. Since his adopted father decided to train him in the use of his powers by locking him alone in a stone mausoleum for hours at a time, where the spirits of the angry dead tormented him, Klaus has been deathly afraid of his powers, and this fear has been the driving motivation of his whole life. He was still a child, when Klaus realised that drugs dampened his powers, and by hook or by crook, he's been high ever since, no matter who else it might hurt to get him there.

Over the course of the series, this fear is what motivates Klaus's worst actions. He shows up high to his father's funeral, he steals, he discards family heirlooms, he tries to con – then blackmail – a medical technician, after laughing his way through hours of torture he betrays his brother's secrets only when his drugs are being destroyed, and after a police officer dies while rescuing him from said torture, his first instinct isn't to send help or let anyone know, but rather to see if the suitcase he stole on the way out contains money or valuables.

Y'know.

For more drugs.

Despite not being malicious, his fear has made him profoundly selfish, and his detachment has allowed him to believe that he's not hurting anyone but himself in the process, a fact which is particularly damaging to the spirit of his brother, Ben. Ben is, perhaps, the only ghost that Klaus isn't afraid of. In fact, on the contrary, the two are together constantly, and apparently have been for years. This is likely because Klaus is Ben's only remaining connection to the living world, but it's unclear whether Klaus has even told his other siblings that the two of them are together. Instead Ben is with him through all the darkest and hardest parts of his life, and in return Klaus drags Ben along with him, through garbage, rehab, and back out to score drugs. There's a moment where Ben asks if they can go see a movie, or the ocean, and Klaus tells him to shut up and just keeps doing whatever fleeting, chaotic thing he's currently doing.

Despite all of this, Klaus shouldn't be mistaken for someone who's deluded about the kind of person he is, or the reason he is that way. His detachment has given him a level of clarity on himself and his siblings, and he's both glibly manipulative with them, and utterly unsentimental about their late father. He's openly delighted that the old man is dead, entirely cognizant of the fact that his family has always been dysfunctional. Out of his siblings, he is perhaps the only one who's never really critical of the others, who never really buys that they were anything more than just little kids wounded by an unfair world, not of their making.

Barge Reactions:

Honestly, once he gets past the panic of waking up alone in his house and not knowing where his brothers and sisters are? His reaction to the truth is going to be relief, and he'll honestly be kind of happy to be dead.

He won't be phased by meeting people from multiple universes, and his biggest immediate concern about the Barge will be access to more drugs. He'll absolutely not be above befriending, begging, and manipulating people to get them. At first, I think he'll actually throw himself into floods and breaches-- basically seeing them as more ways to escape reality, until he hits some that make him feel more real, and more grounded.

Then maybe he'll change his tune.

Honestly, I very much see Klaus as one of those people who initially sees the Barge as an awesome pleasure cruise, but for whom the shine will definitely wear off.

Path to Redemption:

With a warden, Klaus would need to work on his fear of his power – something that was instilled into him as a child – and to work on reconnecting emotionally with the world. He's mentions on the show that he's not been sober since he was twelve, meaning that he's only ever experienced the world through a bubble of either intoxication, or terrible fear. That's why the stakes for the death, grief, and pain – even his own – feel so low to him. By his own admission, this kind of growth is work that he'll never do on his own. As he says in the series:

“I need my options taking away. ”

I think that revisiting his traumatic first experiences of his powers would be a good starting point to address this. I also think that meeting people who have similar powers, but who've been able to deal with them healthily would probably help. Finally, he does need to get sober – so that he can learn to accept and engage with the parts of him that the drugs dampen - but abstinence isn't the thing that'll fix him, it's hopefully something that he'll be able to maintain because of the other work that's been done.

Getting him off drugs, without dealing with his fears, frustrations, and his fundamental dislike for himself, will only end with him back on drugs.

History: link!

Sample Journal Entry: [Video clicks on, and-- there sits Klaus, He's wearing a black mesh robe over a button down shirt covered in an obnoxious floral print, and he appears to be sitting in a pastel pink room.

In fact, in the first shot, that robe and shirt are all you can see, because he seems to be leaning forward over the communicator for some reason:]

So, uncle Klaus has noticed-- a lot of long faces out there on that network lately. Lot of-- wrong side of the bed kind of days.

[He leans back, face coming into view, but he's clearly still looking at something beyond the communicator. He runs a finger carefully under one eye, neatening up the black smudged Kohl eyeliner beneath it, before finally glancing down at the camera to point a meaningful finger at it.]

And that includes all my boys and girls from PTSD support! You know who you are! Don't be keeping it bottled up, all right? Survivors together! We're gonna make it through this!

[His gaze shifts back up, returning to whatever he's been looking at off screen, and he brings his hands up to tease through his hair a little.]

Anyway, I was thinking maybe we should do something nice, you know? Something social-y, team work-y, no one gets horribly murdered-y. Something like - drumroll please... [He drums his fingers vigorously on the table that the communicator is resting on:] Bowling! Because this ship has a bowling aisle in it! So! Seven tonight, no excuses, let the kids working dinner duty off early because I expect enough of you there to make at least four teams. Wardens extremely welcome, on the condition that they have to bring the drinks.

[He flashes a grin and a wink to the camera. He's going to milk this social butterfly thing as long as he possibly can before people notice that he's just doing it so that people keep getting him drunk.]

For inmates, there's only one rule: [He picks up his communicator and spins it around so that you can see what he's been looking at. It's a vanity mirror reflecting the image of Klaus, holding his communicator, right back at you.] Dress up nice for once, you bunch of animals! It's called self care!

[This said, he cackles and kicks back away from the dressing table, so that his chair tips right backwards as the communicator cuts out. ]

Sample RP:
Having the run of their family home, with no Dad, or Luther, or even Pogo to smack other people's belongings out of his hands, is still pretty novel to Klaus. So the doors to the bathroom are gone (weird) and a few of the more deadly family heirlooms are missing (probably for the best), there's still a lot of stuff that he's never really had the time to go through before. Maybe waking up hadn't been great, with the first pangs of dope sickness and the distant swell of dark voices and the realisation that none of his brothers-- not Luther, not even Ben were answering him-- But now all of that's sorted out! The nice people at the infirmary had been very understanding about his terrible chronic pain condition, and the nice Klaus at the infirmary had been very understanding about the fact that no one else was here because he was finally, actually, gloriously dead!

The mild codeine buzz that he talked his way into is making it feel kinda nice to be going through everyone else's stuff. Like they're all the ones who died, and he's going through his precious memories of them.

He finds a tank top in Luther's room that's big enough that it's basically an off the shoulder dress on him, belts it with a really cute, vintage-y , fringe-heavy shawl that was definitely mom's, digs out a lemon yellow silk kimono that he bets Allison looked great in, and shoves his own clothes, too fresh and un-faded for the age that they are, into the washing machine.

He doesn't take off the dog tags.

When he spills back out into the corridors of the Barge, he feels just great. Fuzzy opiate warm and fresh laundry clean and happy as a sugar skull on Dia de los Muertos. He makes eye contact. He smiles at people. When he gets to the door of the lounge he hangs around being as charming as he can until he spots someone who looks responsible enough that they might be a warden, and he immediately flashes them his biggest, brightest grin.

“Hey!” He waves at them, the black letters on his hand spelling out a cheery: Hello, “I heard there was a karaoke machine in here or something? You think you could let me in?”

He sprawls back against the door, stretching his limbs up above his head and batting his eyelashes, playing it wanton, comically blatant in his flirting. Channelling the spirit of every sorority girl who ever begged a bouncer to let her get white girl wasted,

“Pretty please? It's my deathday!”

And he absolutely needs a drink.

Special Notes: