Nibblin' on sponge cake
Things were, for once, shockingly…slow. Calm. Decidedly un-violent. The news every morning reiterated the same sweet feel-good stories from the night before plus some weather forecasts, and the news every evening covered a couple car accidents and occasionally the odd close call. Diego was this close to provoking a cult or a mob boss just to have something to do.
“What is the point of all of us getting back in business if there’s no goddamn business to be back in?”
Klaus hummed from where he was sprawled out on the floor. “Deep,” he said.
“Yeah, alright,” Diego muttered. “Seriously. I think we did too good of a job fixing the apocalypse, because I went out last night and I couldn’t even find any muggers.”
“You went out last night?” Vanya asked softly, lifting her head from the book she was immersed in. Of everyone, she seemed the most utterly unbothered by the lack of cases, concerns, or crimes.
“Yeah, yeah, don’t get on my ass,” Diego said, shooting a glance particularly hard at Luther and Allison. They were sitting at a small table playing chess. The pieces looked comically tiny in Luther’s hands, and Diego didn’t know how chess worked exactly, but he was pretty sure there was no scenario in which holding more than one piece at once made any sense.
Allison just shook her head. She’d apparently used up all of her don’t go out and do your vigilantism routine alone when we all know you are perfectly capable of dying if you trip and fall through another window like the Sparrow Academy incident energy.
“You know,” Klaus posited, “Last year when I tried to track down my birth mother and I got lost in pre-war Germany, I had that same feeling of meaninglessness and environmental cabin fever…”
Diego crossed his arms, waiting for Klaus to continue.
“And?” Sparrow-Ben snapped. Diego shot him a glance. It was hard to get used to adult-Ben when your only interaction with any iteration of Adult-Ben was him as a spirit possessing your cult leader brother, let alone when the new version was a version that was kind of a giant asshole most of the time and being sometimes not an asshole was a very new part of the version’s personality. It gave Diego a headache.
“What?” Klaus said, lifting his head to look at Ben. Something shifted on his face as he made eye contact. Diego chewed the torn-up skin inside his cheek. Klaus seemed the least well-adjusted to the new Ben being part of their lives, and Diego had to wonder if it was that he kept forgetting that it wasn’t the Ben he was constantly glued to for over a decade.
“You didn’t finish your sentence,” Luther said. He set down both of the chess pieces he was still clutching.
“What sentence?”
“Oh, my god,” Allison said.
“Oh,” Klaus said. He laid his head back down and wriggled slightly, maneuvering his speckled, gossamer shirt down where it had shifted up his torso. “That was it. It was tremendously boring.”
“Well, alright,” Diego muttered. “Do any of you have anything we could put our time towards?”
“That Italian place down the street had a salmonella outbreak from their onions,” Klaus said. “They were closed for a week.”
“Do you think someone poisoned their supply?” Diego asked.
Five snorted and Diego leapt up, turning around to look over the back of the couch he’d been sat on.
“Have you been here the whole time?” Diego asked, staring down at where Five was sitting against the back of the couch.
Five shrugged.
“I can tell you with absolute certainty that there is nothing you could possibly do for the world,” the muffled voice from under Five’s shirt said.
Diego swung himself over the back of the couch and held a knife out against Five’s chest.
“Let him out,” Diego said. “I want to look in his beady little eyes.”
Five rolled his eyes and tugged down his collar just enough so that the tiny deformed head of his older-looking-self peeked out, sneering.
“I don’t want to hear another peep from you, you little Kuato-looking-ass tumor man,” Diego said, prodding him with the only-slightly-sharp back end of his knife. “If it were up to me, I’d cut you right off.”
“Well, it’s not up to you, is it?” Regular-Five said, pulling his shirt back into place hard enough to stifle the Thing on his chest. “I’ll dispose of him when it suits me. I don’t tell you to excise your overinflated daddy issue swim bladder, do I?”
“What does that even m—”
“Hey,” Vanya said. “I actually found something.”
“You probably just don’t know how to get rid of it,” Ben said, taking Diego’s abandoned spot on the couch and peering over at Five. “Let’s be real.”
“I’ll have you know, sparrow boy, that I could erase you from existence just as easily,” Five snarled.
“Hey!” Vanya said, louder. “I said I found something!”
“Could you three please try to get along?” Allison sighed.
Luther scowled and stood up, lumbering towards the back of the couch.
“Don’t you start, Luther,” Allison said. He froze and pivoted slightly, heading over to the window to look out as if it were his intent from the start to gaze out at the city street below.
“I, for one, think Five is much more calm now that he has a companion again,” Klaus said. “I think I’d rather imagine him and the Thing being intimate than him and a mannequin, but—”
“I resent being called the Thing!” the Thing said, muffled by Five’s tightly buttoned layers.
“For the love of god,” Vanya said. She climbed up on the coffee table and shook a newspaper over her head. “I don’t care about Five’s Thing. Diego, if you want something to do that isn’t threatening to stab your brothers, you should take a look.”
Diego frowned and finally looked away from the uneven bulge at Five’s collarbone, past his back-from-the-dead but not the same person asshole demonic tentacle boy brother, past his high-on-life brother who seemed to be administering a self-massage on his small intestine, and finally focused on Vanya, who was finally above ankle height thanks to her spot atop the coffee table.
“What is it?” he said, climbing over the back of the couch again and taking a seat at the furthest point from Ben.
“Everyone listening?” Vanya said. Diego watched Klaus watch Vanya; watched the grin spreading across his face. Vanya was very different post-1963, post-sexuality revelation, and post-getting to save the day for once with the Sparrow Academy debacle. A chair scraped loudly against the floor as Luther took his seat at the chess table again. “Okay. There have been some murders—”
“Murder!” Klaus cried. He threw his hands up towards the ceiling and wriggled them around for a moment. Diego reached out with the toe of his boot and nudged the side of his arm. He was ninety percent sure that Klaus had hopped back on the sobriety train last year, but sometimes he made him doubt that.
“…Anyway,” Vanya said, “there’s this resort in Florida, The Sunshell Bay Resort, and sixteen people have died there in the last decade, which seems…”
“Suspicious,” Luther said firmly.
“Yeah,” Vanya said. “So.”
“That’s it?” Ben said. “What kind of people? What time frame? Is that all we get?”
“Shut up, Ben,” Allison said. “Vanya, is there any more detail?”
“That’s really all I figured out,” Vanya said. She shuffled awkwardly and climbed down from the coffee table with about one one-thousandth of the grace that should come with being an extremely powerful telekinetic superhero. “I think the resort tries to keep it all a little hush-hush.”
“Well,” Five said, groaning as he climbed to his feet, like he was actually in the body he belonged. “I, for one, will resign myself to traveling to this place to investigate.”
“A vacation,” Allison said softly. Diego shot a glance at her, trying not to actually turn his head to look at her. It felt like walking on eggshells with her since she discovered that in their new timeline her daughter had never been born.
“I’m fine with it,” Diego said.
“Since we don’t know what kind of demographics are being targeted, it’s really only responsible if all of us go,” Vanya said innocently.
“If all of us go, nobody will be here to address any other threats that arise,” Ben said, rolling his eyes. “Amateurs.”
“Well, you can stay home,” Klaus groaned. He sat up enough to lean on his elbows. “I’ve actually never been to Florida, so I have to go.”
“I’ll find a travel agent and start making a reservation,” Luther said. He stood up fast enough that the chess table rocked, sending the pieces flying. He sped out of the room. Subtle. He was probably sweating already thinking about the possibility of seeing Allison in a bikini. Oh, god, Diego thought. Luther would be in a swimsuit too. He blinked hard to send that thought away.
“Have you ever been on a vacation, Diego?” Klaus asked, reaching for Diego’s ankle. Diego let him shake it slightly before hooking his foot over the opposite knee.
“Before she…yeah, Lila and I went to Cape Cod,” Diego said.
Klaus cringed. He was probably remembering the incident with even more clarity than Diego. He’d never gotten around to asking if Lila’s ghost ever made appearances in Klaus’s life, but he imagined if she did it would be even more traumatizing than the spontaneous explosion had been in the first place. Diego crossed his arms and sank back into the couch cushions. Everyone always looked at him when Lila came up.
“Cape Cod is not a vacation,” Five said. “If I could have, I would have allowed the timeline where it sank into the ocean to become a reality.”
Diego rolled his eyes and shut them tightly. He should have let the near-silence of the room stand rather than ruining it all with his big mouth.
Luther cleared his throat an indistinct amount of time later and Diego blinked back awake through the fog of a half-nap.
“So, uh,” Luther said. He was standing stiffly in the doorway, the phonebook tightly clutched between both hands. “There’s a slight problem.”
“The resort burned down,” Klaus said.
“It’s fully booked?” Allison said.
“I got the name wrong?” Vanya said, flipping the newspaper back open.
“What? No,” Luther said. “I, uh. It’s a couple’s resort.”
The room went quiet for a moment. Diego lifted his gaze to the ceiling. What did a couple’s resort entail? Ballroom dance lessons and couple’s yoga?
“Well,” Five said. “Good thing you’re all broken human beings perfectly willing to play pretend and embrace the fine line between codependency and incest.”
“Five…” Allison groaned.
“Well, I, you don’t really…” Luther frowned, like his sentence was a stray cat crossing his path.
“Oh yeah?” Ben said.
“Shut up,” Diego said.
“I booked it for two of us,” Luther said finally.
“Ohh, for who I wonder?” Klaus said, climbing to his feet. “You and I, big man?”
“What? No—”
“You and Allison,” Five droned. Luther blinked.
“Well, I just thought—”
“More of us should still go, right?” Vanya said. “In case whoever’s doing this doesn’t take an interest in the two of you?”
Diego frowned. It did sound nice to spend some time on a resort, especially a resort with a murder mystery to deal with.
“Klaus?” Vanya said. “You and I could be another couple.”
“Oh!”
“No,” Diego said, cutting off whatever Klaus was about to say. One by one, everyone turned to face him. Klaus and Vanya wore blank, expectant expressions. Allison, Luther, and Ben were all frowning quizzically, like something was wrong. And Five—Five was staring, squinting like Diego was a bug underneath a microscope that he could pull apart and figure out.
“Well, I just—” Diego felt his pulse quickening; his cheeks growing hot. “We already have one straight couple, what if the killer is looking for a…a gay couple?”
Most everyone’s faces melted into that quintessential lips-pulled-down-at-the-edges ‘huh, interesting’ expression, but Five still watched him with that stupid squint.
“That’s a good point,” Luther said. Diego raised his eyebrows at him. It wasn’t often that Luther thought anything Diego had to say was a good or insightful thought. “Well,” Luther continued, sounding more than a little harried. “For Diego.”
“Diego,” Klaus said, “I had no idea you cared.”
Diego shut his eyes and enjoyed the momentary sensation that there was nobody else around him.
“Ben?” Vanya said. “You and I, then, if that’s alright?”
“I already said,” Ben said, “Someone has to stay behind.”
Vanya’s brows ticked down, and her eyes cast towards the ground.
“Why don’t you and Five stay at a nearby resort as backup?” Allison suggested, walking over to Vanya and nudging her softly.
“Oh,” Vanya said, a bit of color returning to her face. “That sounds good.”
Allison smiled. She could probably tell as much as Diego could that Vanya very badly wanted to go somewhere warm and more relaxed than their stuffy home. Five sighed and zapped out of the room, his absence causing the slightest of shifts in the air.
“That’s that then?” Klaus asked.
Diego shrugged.
“I’ll make us a reservation,” Klaus said, winking open-mouthed at Diego as he drifted towards the door.
“No, I’ll do it,” Diego said sternly. Knowing Klaus, that reservation process would somehow spiral out of control in one way or another. Baskets full of rum waiting for them in their room, or a giant jacuzzi in the middle of their room or something.
“I can’t believe you actually want to spend that much time with Klaus,” Luther said. Allison shot him a glare.
“I didn’t say I did, I said we should—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Allison laughed. “Right.”