Ubik [Serelis/Klaus]

Klaus Goravich

In thirty-six years, Klaus had gotten good at packing his bags. He was good at smiling and waving and asking his fellow Victors about their children. He was an expert at going to parties and drinking expensive liquor and slipping out of a back door at around eleven, to avoid having to say goodbye. Klaus was well attuned to empty hotel suites. He never did get used to the tributes, though. 

He kept track for as long as he could. Dragan, Phyllis, Ezra, Faye, Drace, Cleo, Jim, Cerise, Keanu, Annie, Cadman, Future, Ryin, Kia, Dillon, Prism, Kiena, Odile, Leo, Danny, Atticus. Somewhere around the decade mark, he lost count, found faces blurring into one another. Atticus came home, and everything changed, and nothing changed, and another decade passed, and then another, and nobody came home.

Seventy-six times, he had failed. He really, really didn't like his odds. 

At first, Goravich House had been about halting the pattern. He wanted to save District Three from itself - save the most vulnerable, bring up the rest by raising the floor with his own shaking hands. Certainly, it was a gift to see his dining table scattered with bowls of cereal each morning, to hang fifteen sets of sheets to dry every Sunday. But the problem was bigger than street rats and hoodlums. The problem was corrosive, deeply ingrained in the cracks of District Three. The problem went right down to the bone, and decayed inside there. 

The problem was his problem, and he was standing right in front of her, looking her dead in the eye, and doing his goddam best.

"Thank you for making the time to meet with me," he told her. "I wanted to see where you're at. Answer any questions you might have. How have you been managing?"

He paused, then added, "Cup of tea?"

This was his new plan: never give up on anyone. No matter how many times you watch them die. 

Klaus Goravich

When Sera told Klaus her plan, he was impressed. 

He wasn't expecting her to have such resolve, such a clear grip on reality. Each year, the tributes varied from wildly hopeless to deluded; scrambling for a grasp on reality that they ultimately fail to achieve. Klaus could probably count on one hand how many of Three's representatives had taken a mature and balanced approach to the whole ordeal. Klaus was understanding - he certainly hadn't. 

Sera, though, told him plainly and confidently that she understood the odds, but that she wanted to win. Not only that, but without help or guidance, she had already begun to put plans in place, make connections with other tributes, build a strategy. 

"Before you say anything - yes, I know it can't last. But it will give me some security at the start, I think." She said it simply, as though reviewing her grocery list. 

Klaus paused, considering her for a long moment. 

"The best decision I ever made was to trust my allies," he said, quietly. "They are the reason why I am standing here today."

He thought of them often - every day, in fact. He thought of Destiny whenever he heard one of the children sing. He thought of Penelope each morning when he dove into the lap pool and felt the cool embrace of the water. He thought of Fitz Ripley when he held his first grandson, when he woke up, when he went to sleep. These people - these children, who had been barely older than Sera, who should be in their fifties now, but instead were cold in their graves - these people had given him everything he had. 

"Can you trust them?" he asked her, seriously. Her life depended on it. "Perhaps more importantly - can they trust you?" 

Klaus Goravich

It does not take her long to reveal the crack in her foundation. 

Klaus knew it would be there - it always was. Nobody was untarnished, completely solid. He was glad that Sera was quick to let him in, did not delay in showing him where the weakness lay. There was no point wasting time searching for it. That was time they did not have the luxury of. 

He looks hard at her as she tries to dance around the point, paint a picture of herself that is cohesive. He wants to interrupt, but he lets her go on, find the point on her own. 

I don't want to see Safina get hurt... but I don't want to die, either. That's not unfair, is it?

She lands on it heavily, so that the writing is blood-red on the wall. Klaus sips his cup of tea, gives her a grim smile. 

I don't want to get too close to anybody. That's just going to make what comes next even harder. I guess... no, they can't trust me. And I can't trust them. 

Oh, it was a shame she was so clever. Sometimes, it hurt less when they didn't understand that everybody had been cast as the villain. It was easier to live in a black-and-white world, with a binary of heroism and villainy, a fantasy that might carry them through right up until their last breath. This one knew better. 

"Everybody gets hurt," Klaus said, not unkindly. "And all of it is unfair. You just need to decide which way you'd rather be hurt, and which way you'd rather do the hurting." 

Across the room, the baby began to stir. He stood, and gathered the child into his arms, rocking him instinctively. 

"If you want to win, then you cannot shy away from things that are hard. I suspect that losing hurts a lot less." 

Klaus glanced down at the child, who's eyelids had fluttered closed again, settling against the warmth of his chest. Oh, to know nothing at all. 

"Do you want to hold him?"