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I have never written in this fandom before, and I kind of blitzed through a lot of the comic at speed, so I apologise in advance for any important canon details that I may have forgotten -_-;
Title: The Safety Standards Need Work
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Girl Genius
Characters/Pairings: Bill, Barry, Klaus, Judy, Jägers, the Castle. Bill & Barry & Klaus, primarily
Summary: The first time Bill and Barry brought their friend Klaus Wulfenbach home to Mechanicsburg, it ... didn't necessarily go well. On the bright side, though, they didn't kill him! It was a close run thing, but they did not immediately get him killed
Wordcount: 4666
Warnings/Notes: Pre-canon, possibly shaky grasp of canon, canon-typical violence and insanity, dodgy humour
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: The Safety Standards Need Work
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Girl Genius
Characters/Pairings: Bill, Barry, Klaus, Judy, Jägers, the Castle. Bill & Barry & Klaus, primarily
Summary: The first time Bill and Barry brought their friend Klaus Wulfenbach home to Mechanicsburg, it ... didn't necessarily go well. On the bright side, though, they didn't kill him! It was a close run thing, but they did not immediately get him killed
Wordcount: 4666
Warnings/Notes: Pre-canon, possibly shaky grasp of canon, canon-typical violence and insanity, dodgy humour
Disclaimer: Not mine
The Safety Standards Need Work
"Ahem."
Bill startled, the polite, amused little cough behind him cutting through the last of the inventing fugue, and straightened up to find that his hair was mildly electrified and his shoulders were really sore. Oof. He glanced at Barry, found his brother up to his eyeballs in grease and rubbing ruefully at his elbow, and grimaced sheepishly. Apparently they'd been at this for a while.
"If you two are quite done?" Judy asked. Reproachfully, but her smile was still bright with sly amusement. "Dinner's been ready for a while, and I'm sure your guest, at least, must be hungry. Where is he, by the way?"
Bill blinked. Guest? Who-- Oh, Klaus. Right. Yes. You'd think he wouldn't forget a thing like that, given all the effort they'd had to go to get the man here. Convincing Klaus he'd be safe, convincing Klaus' parents he'd be safe, having veiled and alarmed conversations with their professors that boiled down to yes, honest, they promised they would not break their friend over the holidays, they wouldn't bring him back in more (or less) pieces than he'd gone out with, he would be fine. They did actually like him, you know, and not in the 'you are a wonderful specimen, I'd like to harvest you for parts' sort of way either, thank you so very much.
It had honestly been such a relief to finally just arrive this morning, a curious and only mildly wary Klaus in tow, and set about showing him all the amazing and fascinating things in Mechanicsburg that absolutely made up for the odd explosion or the threat of kidnapping from the crazy Castle or the thousand odd grinning jägers who only barely managed to look like they weren't considering eating him. A little time in one of the more interesting of their private labs, a few of the more exotic and less tactically vital clanks to reverse engineer, Klaus had seemed to be settling in just fine. They'd gotten a nice mutual fugue state going, Klaus was great for inspiration, he had the best ideas, he had ... He had ...
*Where is he, by the way?* Bill froze, the question echoing around his skull, Judy's expression beginning to slip a little bit out of idle amusement and into something more alarmed, and slowly, ever so slowly, Bill turned in place to examine the lab. A slow, three hundred and sixty degree sweep of a room that contained, as he'd just begun to realise, exactly three people. Not four. Three. Two Heterodynes and a suddenly very worried construct.
"... Barry?" he asked, very carefully. "Did Klaus step out for a minute? I'm having trouble remembering."
Barry twitched in turn, following Bill's searching study of the room as if their friend might miraculously pop out of the wall and wave hello. Which ... actually wasn't as unlikely as it would have been elsewhere, this was Castle Heterodyne, but if he'd been eaten briefly by the walls he probably wouldn't be waving when he got out.
"Um," Barry said. "I think I remember him saying something about more transistor relays? You know, after he told us not to route the power through the secondary chambers, honestly, did we want to blow ourselves up? He was going to get something purpose made and we were supposed to stay in one piece until he got back, I think?"
"Ah," Bill nodded. Yes, he remembered that. They'd told him that the second lab down the hall should have enough to be going on with, and he'd stomped off in something that looked like temper and was actually amusement, if you knew the man as well as they were getting to. But that had been ... "But that was hours ago," he said, while tendrils of icy alarm crept up his spine. "That was when we were still thinking of a flux-aeonic power supply, before we decided on aetheric modulation instead and started reworking the secondary control mechanisms ... Barry, that was hours ago!"
"I know that!" Barry snapped back, but it wasn't anger, not really, he'd started unconsciously wringing his hands a little bit. "He must have ... Well, I mean, maybe he got lost? It's the Castle, it can be a bit confus---"
They froze. Both of them, meeting each other's wide-eyed look of horrified realisation, and then, very carefully, Bill looked up at the ceiling and addressed the issue.
"Castle?" he asked, and there was only the smallest hint of the madness place around the edges, honestly. "Castle, I don't suppose you have any idea what happened to our friend, do you?"
"Of course I do!" it announced, immediately and terrifyingly cheerful. "I may have to congratulate you on your taste, Master. He's been amazing. Very entertaining, if I do say so myself."
"Oh my," Judy murmured faintly. Bill agreed with her. Or would have, if he'd been able to think around the horror and the rapidly encroaching fury. "Oh dear."
"Castle," Barry said, and Bill wasn't the only one approaching the madness place, there were harmonics in his brother's voice that set several small objects vibrating around them. "You do remember the part where we said that no-one was to hurt, maim, kill or otherwise harm our friend, don't you?"
"Oh yes," said the Castle, with not even a hint of remorse. "I started with the easy death traps, don't you worry. I wanted to get an idea of his capabilities. But I'm happy to say that he graduated from the easy to at least the moderately lethal in truly excellent time! I haven't put a scratch on him, not even with your great grand-uncle's spinning blades or that lovely fire trap on the fourth floor. He's really very athletic. An excellent specimen."
With the--- "YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO HURT HIM!!!" Bill roared, standing forwards with his fists clenched. Entirely useless, at least as a threat to an animate castle, but give Bill five minutes and he would have any number of threats ready and able to reduce it to rubble. Five minutes. Five.
"I didn't!" the Castle shot back, now beginning to sound somewhat hurt. "I said I didn't put a scratch on him! I do listen to your orders, you know. I might not like them, but I do listen. He's perfectly fine! Or well, I assume he is. There was that slightly hairy moment where he decided to try flying, that was alarming, but that was his idea! I can't be responsible for what Sparks decide to do about things!"
Bill stared, shocked speechless. For a second, anyway. Just for a second. "When he decided to try flying," he repeated dully, and this wasn't an inventing fugue, he thought this was probably a 'going into shock' fugue. "Flying?"
"Yes," said the Castle, grumpily. "He kept trying to get back to your lab. He was really quite determined about it. Excellent dedication to a goal, that one. I made a slight miscalculation in the upper corridor, he moved faster than I expected, and the fun-sized agony dispensers were still there when he arrived. Far too many, even for him. I was going to clear them out, of course, you did tell me not to kill him, but he didn't believe me and decided to make a break for my exterior instead. I'm not entirely certain where he got the line for the improvised grappling hook from, but it perhaps wasn't the best tool for the job. On the bright side, though, he'd already made it most of the way down the south wall before it snapped."
"Oh my god," Barry whispered. "Oh god, we've killed him. We didn't even last a day. We're the first Heterodynes to bring a friend home in generations, and we killed him within a day!"
Thanks Barry, Bill thought distantly. Thanks for laying it out like that. Oh god.
"He's not dead!" growled the Castle, with the annoyance of someone who felt they weren't being listened to properly at all. "I would have told you if he was dead! Or, well, perhaps not, but at the very least I'd have retrieved and revived him for you! He's fine. He wasn't even limping all that much! Goodness, your ancestors wouldn't have made half this fuss. Certainly not over him. He hasn't so much as panicked so far, unless you count the jumping-out-the-window part, and I'm almost certain that was planned rather than panic. He's just given up on reaching the lab tonight, that's all. He stalked off muttering some very nice expletives at me, and grumbling about how he needed a drink. I was even nice to him! I pointed him at a nice bar where he can wait for you and everything! Honestly, Masters, have you no faith in me at all?"
"No," Bill snarled, half on autopilot, while the rest of him was busy gibbering internally in blind relief. Not dead. Klaus wasn't dead. He'd be annoyed, he'd be furious, maybe he'd ... maybe he'd leave and never talk to them again, maybe he'd go away, but on the bright side he wasn't dead. That had to count for---
Wait. Wait. I was even nice to him. A nice bar to wait for you. But the Castle wasn't nice. The Castle didn't even know what nice meant. Where would it ...?
"We're going to meet him," he said, already striding towards the door while Barry hurried to catch up and Judy stopped pressing her hands to her mouth in distress and started frowning in real earnest as she followed them. She was going to kill them later. Bill just knew it. And he'd probably let her, too. "We're going to find him right now. Where did you send him, Castle? Where's Klaus?"
"I dropped him off the moving pavement at Gkika's," the Castle answered, promptly and serenely, and Bill didn't even have to look at Barry to know his brother had started running at exactly the same instant he had. "He was doing quite well the last time I checked, actually. I barely even tired him out at all. I'm very impressed. It's almost a shame he's male, he'd make a fine consort. Well, with some training, of course. He's got rather a lot of will that should probably be driven out of him a bit. But some surgery and a little time in the isolation chambers would do wonders ..."
"Not even a day," Barry chanted, wild and manic under his breath while they bolted towards the jäger bar where their friend was probably even now fighting for what he maybe thought was his life. "We are the worst friends. The worst."
"Shut up until after we've saved him," Bill growled back, but it wasn't as though he disagreed. It wasn't as though he could.
Klaus was never going to forgive them. He was going to march right out of their town and back to his family, and he was never going to speak to them again, and Bill couldn't even blame him for it. They were, really and truly, the worst friends a man could ask for.
But they could at least keep him alive. They could make sure he was alive and in one piece and with all the medical attention he could ask for and maybe an escort back to Wulfenbach, they could send some clanks along to smash anyone who tried to look at him funny in the wastelands, maybe he'd let them do that, maybe he'd let them apologise at least, even if he wouldn't let them fix it, and ...
"Duck!" Judy cried, yanking at his shoulder and rolling them both to the pavement in time to avoid the jäger who'd just gone flying past overhead. Out of a doorway, that doorway up ahead, and oh god, that was Gkika's, the bar brawl was obviously in full swing already, they were already at the 'throwing each other bodily around' part, Klaus was in there. Klaus was in the middle of that. Oh god.
"Bill!" Barry roared, and he'd produced a death ray from somewhere, Bill wasn't completely sure where, or who Barry intended to use it on, but yes, yes, it'd at least make enough of a distraction to stop the fighting, right, yes. He heaved himself to his feet, darted through the door right behind his brother and into the dim, smoky room full of fists and flying furniture and cheerful roars, and the moment where Barry pointed the death ray overhead and brought the silence crashing down felt oddly stretched to him. Thin and surreal, and very far away altogether. Huh. What an odd phenomenon. Someone really would have to study the affect of adrenalin on perceptions of time in greater depth, maybe try to extend the effect to moments of less heart-stopping terror ...
"Klaus!" Barry shouted. Unnecessarily, the silence was really quite thick and probably needed much less than a hoarse, panicked roar to break it, but fair enough. Bill wasn't going to begrudge his brother a little panic right now. "Klaus, where are you?"
Mama Gkika opened her mouth, somewhere between startled and annoyed at their abrupt and rather rude appearance, Bill thought, the jägers shuffling silently and worriedly away from them, but then something else moved in the corner of the room, someone else strode forward to glare at them, and Bill was entirely too busy being desperately relieved to bother about it.
"Barry, we have been over this, death rays are not an indoor weapon!" Klaus growled, coming to an extremely aggravated halt in front of them, glaring fit to kill from the eye that wasn't swollen shut by a truly spectacular shiner. He was ... He looked ... He didn't seem to be overly injured? He only had half a shirt left, and there was a bloody tear in the trousers over one shin, but it looked like cuts and bruises mostly, it looked okay, why was he carrying a jäger over one shoulder? A live one, Bill meant. Jaxarl waved cheerfully at him from where he was hanging down Klaus' back, a gallon tankard in one hand to match the one in Klaus' spare one, dented heavily along one side where it'd obviously been used as a bludgeon. Klaus' was somewhat more intact, if not any more full at this point.
"Klaus, you---" Barry tried, and then just sort of stopped. Helplessly. And looked at Bill as if for help.
"Are you alright?" Bill found himself asking. Not much more intelligibly than his brother, but at least it was a full sentence. That was an improvement, right? "Klaus, you're not ... hurt, or anything? The Castle was telling us ..."
"Hrrr." Klaus snorted, extremely visible disgust and more than a little anger in the sound. "I can just imagine what that thing has been telling you. Your family has the most fascinating taste in architecture, Heterodyne."
"Ho yes," one of the jägers, Fane, agreed. "Der Kestle is sure sumtink, alright. Hyu is running into it, then?"
"You might say that," Klaus murmured, dry as the miniature desert in the south wing. "Apparently I'm very fit, and 'almost challenging enough to be entertaining'. I'd make a terrible minion, though. Entirely too grumpy and uncomplimentary towards my 'masters', and nowhere near respectful enough of tradition."
"Oh god," Barry murmured again, and desperately palmed at his face. With the death ray in one hand, which maybe wasn't the best idea, but at least he didn't poke his own eye out. "We are really sorry?" he managed, muffled by his fingers, and Klaus for some reason cracked a smile. Not a terrified one. Not an angry one. A real one, amused and maybe a little bit sympathetic, and Bill stared at him in shock.
"I'm hardly about to blame several centuries worth of malevolent architecture on you," he murmured, handing his tankard back to Jaxarl so he could reach out and pat Barry gently on the shoulder. "Although I will admit, it definitely explains some of your odder ideas about the appropriate uses of death traps and/or death rays while inside buildings. And your tendency to try and talk corridors into rearranging themselves for you when you're sleep-deprived."
"Uh-huh," Bill agreed, still sort of shocked enough just to be making random noises nearly for the sake of it. He struggled to think of something sane-sounding to follow that up with, something normal, or Spark-normal at least, and then just sort of gave up. This was not a normal day. Not even by his standards. "Klaus?"
Klaus looked at him, and he struggled to pick out a question. Are you sure you're not hurt? Are you insane? Did you really throw yourself out the window? Do you really ... do you really not hate us? But he couldn't ask that, he really couldn't, and wasn't there something else that had been bugging him ...?
Oh. Right. That.
"Why do you have a jäger over your shoulder?" he tried, staring at Jaxarl a bit. The jäger saluted him with the two tankards, grinning a grin full of very sharp teeth, and he swung around a bit as Klaus shifted to look down at him, swaying like a cheerful pendulum across Klaus' semi-shirtless back. It was. Well. It was more than a little odd? And he was saying that as a Heterodyne. He knew that of which he spoke, here.
"Oh, that," Klaus said, vaguely surprised, as if he'd honestly forgotten about it. "He landed on me a while back, during the chandelier swinging competition. He was rather dazed, so I let him stay for a bit, and then he turned out to be a pretty decent rear defence. Apparently there's no rules against tag-teaming in these brawls, and having fists fore and aft is very useful."
"Ve is doink great," Jaxarl agreed, very enthusiastically. "Klaus is knocking Drogi out vit vun punch, und hy is catching Maxim across his schtupid head, und den ve throw Petrik through a table---"
"Und dey is very good vit de chairs, too!" Fane rumbled happily. "If'n hyu is stayink for de veek, ve is having de chair-fencing competition next Tuesday? Jenka is de reigning champion, but hy tink hyu is in vit a preddy gud chance. Hyu have de reach on her, and hyu is not sacrificing strength, from what hy is seeink."
"Oh," Klaus said, and looked suddenly bashful, and more than a little flattered. "Well, I think I'm staying for a while? They invited me for the holidays, but after the Castle I'm not sure ...?"
"Staying!" Bill yelled, and then clapped his hands over his mouth hurriedly. Klaus stared at him, the bemused look that meant he was being weird even by incomprehensible Heterodyne standards, and Bill went brick red and dropped his hands to stammer out an explanation. "I mean, yes, absolutely, you can stay if you want? Stay the week! Stay the year! Never leave again, ahahahaha! Oh god, Barry, help me shut up, will you?"
Barry made a noise, his hands pressed against his face again, and it came out less a word and more a high, giddy "Mrrble!" that frankly did nothing to help matters. Bill hiccupped in despair, and Klaus stared between them with an expression that was rapidly approaching honest concern. An expression which was, alarmingly and rather bizarrely, echoed by every jäger in the room, and Bill was about two seconds away from asking the Castle to open the floor beneath their feet and save them from the crushing embarrassment when Judy, beautiful, wonderful Judy, stepped forward to rescue them.
"I'm sorry, Klaus, I'm afraid they're both a little panicky still," she murmured, very carefully not smiling as she wrapped an arm around each of their shoulders and steered them gently to stand in front of their friend. "What they mean to say is that yes, of course you can stay, for as long as you want. They're very sorry about what the Castle did to you, and they're planning to fix it, and they would like it very much if you could forgive them enough to spend the holidays with them. Once they've talked to the Castle to make sure it doesn't scare you like that again, of course. Do you think you might consider it?"
"I didn't scare him that much," the Castle grumbled distantly, decidedly put out but thankfully, thankfully, not adding anything that would shatter their chances of persuading him all over again. "He's not that fragile, you know!"
"Fortunately not," Klaus agreed, with a kind of dry sarcasm that Bill really rather envied. Then he looked at them, really looked at them, at the desperate and hopeful and very sorry expressions they both had to be wearing, and he smiled suddenly. Soft and almost shy, and he was over six feet of power and ingenuity with a jäger slung casually over his shoulder like it was nothing, he had no right to look so goofy and stupid and hopeful all of a sudden! No right at all, but he did, and Bill so very much wanted to keep him. It had been the panic talking, mostly, it had been the stupid relief, but he really, really would not mind if Klaus stayed and never left again.
And if Klaus had any idea what he was thinking right now, Bill acknowledged ruefully, if he'd any idea how much Bill really would cheerfully like to kidnap him and never let anyone so much as sneeze in his direction ever again, then Klaus would be hightailing out of Mechanicsburg so fast they'd have to get out the seven-league stompers to catch up with him.
"I'd like to stay, if the offer's open?" Klaus said quietly, looking at them, and Barry meeped softly beside Bill and managed to juggle the death ray across to a handy jäger before grabbing the man's arm in a grip that would have done damage if Klaus wasn't quite possibly jäger proof, never mind Spark proof. "It's been an interesting first day, but I enjoyed the clank experiment, what little I saw of it, and the brawl was a lot of fun too, and I wouldn't mind staying at least until the chair-fencing competition? If you'll have me, that is?"
Bill clamped his mouth shut, shoved both hands across it to keep from saying something extremely unwise, and Barry wasn't exactly much better, but thankfully they had Judy, they had the best friend and the best construct any Spark ever dreamed of, and she reached across to pat Klaus on the shoulder for all their sakes and tell him that of course he was welcome, he was always welcome, she hoped he'd enjoy himself a lot more now that things had been sorted out. And Klaus didn't beam, he'd probably already used up his smile quota for about the next week, but his shoulders straightened and there was a lightness in his eyes that looked almost like relief, and Bill honestly didn't care that he couldn't hear himself think over the cheers of a bar full of jägers who'd found a new playmate.
They hadn't killed him. They'd been the first Heterodynes to bring a friend home as something other than spoils of war in decades, maybe centuries, and alright, it hadn't gone as well as it could have done, but he wasn't dead, and he didn't hate them, and he actually wanted to stick around, and Bill was really, really not going to complain right about now. Not about anything in the world.
"We're, uh," he started, hesitantly and then more confidently, more happily, as Klaus only looked at him steadily and with that slightly sarcastic edge that said he wasn't very impressed, Heterodyne, but he liked you enough to be going on with. Bill grinned at him, and felt something much more confident bounce through him. "We're happy to have you, Klaus. Any time. You know?"
"... I begin to understand, yes," Klaus agreed, with a wry look around the bar, but he didn't mean it meanly, and there was that crinkle around his eyes that said he was more amused than anything else. "You certainly lead an interesting lifestyle in Mechanicsburg, I'll give you that one."
"Yes," said Jaxarl, elbowing Klaus gently in the ribs and grinning slyly up at him. "But hyu is fittink in really well, hy is tinking? Hyu is lookink right at home already."
Bill bit his lip, and looked up at the man with as straight a face as he could manage. Which wasn't very, but he really wasn't going to be doing any better any time soon. "He's got you there," he said, resisting the urge to giggle at Klaus' expression. "You really are, uh. You're really very sturdy, aren't you?"
Klaus raised an eyebrow at him, a whole world of commentary in the expression, but all he actually said was: "One would have to be, I think. Fragility is not advisable in strangers around here, I imagine."
Well, no. No, probably not. But that was alright. In this case, that was perfectly alright. Apparently they'd managed to pick the least fragile friend on the face of the planet.
And it was sad that they'd needed to, he realised that, they probably ought to work on that, try to make the next friend last longer than one day before he had to outrun a Castle full of death traps and fight a bar full of supersoldiers, but the fact remained that they couldn't have picked a better candidate for the initial attempt if they'd tried. Of all the people in the world to take a chance on them, somehow they'd gotten Klaus. With that kind of luck, maybe there was hope for this 'peaceful friendship' thing after all? Hell, it had to be worth a try, at least.
Later, though. Much later. For right now, Bill thought that they should maybe just feed Klaus, instead, patch up his injuries some and try to make a better impression on him than the last four hours or so had managed. Even if he had forgiven them for it, they probably ought to, ah, put some work into making up for it a little bit first? That seemed like something they ought to try doing, yes.
"Bill?" someone murmured, a low voice from very close by, and Bill looked up in startlement to find Klaus watching him, a twitch in the corner of his mouth and a very gentle sort of look in his eyes. "I'm fine, Bill. I'm not frightened, you didn't break me, and I'm not about to running screaming out of town if you turn your back. You can relax, you know. I promise nothing bad will happen." He paused for a second, grimacing a little, and then added more ruefully: "Well, nothing bad that I'm responsible for, at any rate. But it's alright. You did fine."
They blinked at him a little bit, Bill saw Barry out of the corner of his eye, and then he caught Klaus around the shoulders, or around one shoulder and one jäger, and grinned in his face with all the manic energy his Spark possessed.
"You are so wrong about that," he murmured, with a heterodyne hum in the back of it. "You are actually so wrong it's approaching critical mass. But! But. Nobody's dead, everybody's got all their limbs and no new ones to be worrying about, and that's all a Spark can ask for, right? I think that means we'll call this experiment a qualified success, hmm?"
Klaus blinked at him, stared for a long, long second, and then reached up to rub the bridge of his nose with a sigh of such long-suffering bemusement that Bill immediately wanted to bottle it. Essence de Klaus, vintage Mechanicsburg. It'd be a best-seller.
"We're really going to have to work on your experimental standards, Heterodyne," their friend murmured, and nothing in all the world could have kept the happy smile from Bill's face that second.
Not one solitary thing.
A/N: On a final note, I almost half wanted the jägers to be singing some version of 'No-one fights like Gaston' during the brawl with Klaus. I am a terrible person. It wouldn't even really have fit, but I confess I was sort of humming it slightly as I was writing. *grins sheepishly*
"Ahem."
Bill startled, the polite, amused little cough behind him cutting through the last of the inventing fugue, and straightened up to find that his hair was mildly electrified and his shoulders were really sore. Oof. He glanced at Barry, found his brother up to his eyeballs in grease and rubbing ruefully at his elbow, and grimaced sheepishly. Apparently they'd been at this for a while.
"If you two are quite done?" Judy asked. Reproachfully, but her smile was still bright with sly amusement. "Dinner's been ready for a while, and I'm sure your guest, at least, must be hungry. Where is he, by the way?"
Bill blinked. Guest? Who-- Oh, Klaus. Right. Yes. You'd think he wouldn't forget a thing like that, given all the effort they'd had to go to get the man here. Convincing Klaus he'd be safe, convincing Klaus' parents he'd be safe, having veiled and alarmed conversations with their professors that boiled down to yes, honest, they promised they would not break their friend over the holidays, they wouldn't bring him back in more (or less) pieces than he'd gone out with, he would be fine. They did actually like him, you know, and not in the 'you are a wonderful specimen, I'd like to harvest you for parts' sort of way either, thank you so very much.
It had honestly been such a relief to finally just arrive this morning, a curious and only mildly wary Klaus in tow, and set about showing him all the amazing and fascinating things in Mechanicsburg that absolutely made up for the odd explosion or the threat of kidnapping from the crazy Castle or the thousand odd grinning jägers who only barely managed to look like they weren't considering eating him. A little time in one of the more interesting of their private labs, a few of the more exotic and less tactically vital clanks to reverse engineer, Klaus had seemed to be settling in just fine. They'd gotten a nice mutual fugue state going, Klaus was great for inspiration, he had the best ideas, he had ... He had ...
*Where is he, by the way?* Bill froze, the question echoing around his skull, Judy's expression beginning to slip a little bit out of idle amusement and into something more alarmed, and slowly, ever so slowly, Bill turned in place to examine the lab. A slow, three hundred and sixty degree sweep of a room that contained, as he'd just begun to realise, exactly three people. Not four. Three. Two Heterodynes and a suddenly very worried construct.
"... Barry?" he asked, very carefully. "Did Klaus step out for a minute? I'm having trouble remembering."
Barry twitched in turn, following Bill's searching study of the room as if their friend might miraculously pop out of the wall and wave hello. Which ... actually wasn't as unlikely as it would have been elsewhere, this was Castle Heterodyne, but if he'd been eaten briefly by the walls he probably wouldn't be waving when he got out.
"Um," Barry said. "I think I remember him saying something about more transistor relays? You know, after he told us not to route the power through the secondary chambers, honestly, did we want to blow ourselves up? He was going to get something purpose made and we were supposed to stay in one piece until he got back, I think?"
"Ah," Bill nodded. Yes, he remembered that. They'd told him that the second lab down the hall should have enough to be going on with, and he'd stomped off in something that looked like temper and was actually amusement, if you knew the man as well as they were getting to. But that had been ... "But that was hours ago," he said, while tendrils of icy alarm crept up his spine. "That was when we were still thinking of a flux-aeonic power supply, before we decided on aetheric modulation instead and started reworking the secondary control mechanisms ... Barry, that was hours ago!"
"I know that!" Barry snapped back, but it wasn't anger, not really, he'd started unconsciously wringing his hands a little bit. "He must have ... Well, I mean, maybe he got lost? It's the Castle, it can be a bit confus---"
They froze. Both of them, meeting each other's wide-eyed look of horrified realisation, and then, very carefully, Bill looked up at the ceiling and addressed the issue.
"Castle?" he asked, and there was only the smallest hint of the madness place around the edges, honestly. "Castle, I don't suppose you have any idea what happened to our friend, do you?"
"Of course I do!" it announced, immediately and terrifyingly cheerful. "I may have to congratulate you on your taste, Master. He's been amazing. Very entertaining, if I do say so myself."
"Oh my," Judy murmured faintly. Bill agreed with her. Or would have, if he'd been able to think around the horror and the rapidly encroaching fury. "Oh dear."
"Castle," Barry said, and Bill wasn't the only one approaching the madness place, there were harmonics in his brother's voice that set several small objects vibrating around them. "You do remember the part where we said that no-one was to hurt, maim, kill or otherwise harm our friend, don't you?"
"Oh yes," said the Castle, with not even a hint of remorse. "I started with the easy death traps, don't you worry. I wanted to get an idea of his capabilities. But I'm happy to say that he graduated from the easy to at least the moderately lethal in truly excellent time! I haven't put a scratch on him, not even with your great grand-uncle's spinning blades or that lovely fire trap on the fourth floor. He's really very athletic. An excellent specimen."
With the--- "YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO HURT HIM!!!" Bill roared, standing forwards with his fists clenched. Entirely useless, at least as a threat to an animate castle, but give Bill five minutes and he would have any number of threats ready and able to reduce it to rubble. Five minutes. Five.
"I didn't!" the Castle shot back, now beginning to sound somewhat hurt. "I said I didn't put a scratch on him! I do listen to your orders, you know. I might not like them, but I do listen. He's perfectly fine! Or well, I assume he is. There was that slightly hairy moment where he decided to try flying, that was alarming, but that was his idea! I can't be responsible for what Sparks decide to do about things!"
Bill stared, shocked speechless. For a second, anyway. Just for a second. "When he decided to try flying," he repeated dully, and this wasn't an inventing fugue, he thought this was probably a 'going into shock' fugue. "Flying?"
"Yes," said the Castle, grumpily. "He kept trying to get back to your lab. He was really quite determined about it. Excellent dedication to a goal, that one. I made a slight miscalculation in the upper corridor, he moved faster than I expected, and the fun-sized agony dispensers were still there when he arrived. Far too many, even for him. I was going to clear them out, of course, you did tell me not to kill him, but he didn't believe me and decided to make a break for my exterior instead. I'm not entirely certain where he got the line for the improvised grappling hook from, but it perhaps wasn't the best tool for the job. On the bright side, though, he'd already made it most of the way down the south wall before it snapped."
"Oh my god," Barry whispered. "Oh god, we've killed him. We didn't even last a day. We're the first Heterodynes to bring a friend home in generations, and we killed him within a day!"
Thanks Barry, Bill thought distantly. Thanks for laying it out like that. Oh god.
"He's not dead!" growled the Castle, with the annoyance of someone who felt they weren't being listened to properly at all. "I would have told you if he was dead! Or, well, perhaps not, but at the very least I'd have retrieved and revived him for you! He's fine. He wasn't even limping all that much! Goodness, your ancestors wouldn't have made half this fuss. Certainly not over him. He hasn't so much as panicked so far, unless you count the jumping-out-the-window part, and I'm almost certain that was planned rather than panic. He's just given up on reaching the lab tonight, that's all. He stalked off muttering some very nice expletives at me, and grumbling about how he needed a drink. I was even nice to him! I pointed him at a nice bar where he can wait for you and everything! Honestly, Masters, have you no faith in me at all?"
"No," Bill snarled, half on autopilot, while the rest of him was busy gibbering internally in blind relief. Not dead. Klaus wasn't dead. He'd be annoyed, he'd be furious, maybe he'd ... maybe he'd leave and never talk to them again, maybe he'd go away, but on the bright side he wasn't dead. That had to count for---
Wait. Wait. I was even nice to him. A nice bar to wait for you. But the Castle wasn't nice. The Castle didn't even know what nice meant. Where would it ...?
"We're going to meet him," he said, already striding towards the door while Barry hurried to catch up and Judy stopped pressing her hands to her mouth in distress and started frowning in real earnest as she followed them. She was going to kill them later. Bill just knew it. And he'd probably let her, too. "We're going to find him right now. Where did you send him, Castle? Where's Klaus?"
"I dropped him off the moving pavement at Gkika's," the Castle answered, promptly and serenely, and Bill didn't even have to look at Barry to know his brother had started running at exactly the same instant he had. "He was doing quite well the last time I checked, actually. I barely even tired him out at all. I'm very impressed. It's almost a shame he's male, he'd make a fine consort. Well, with some training, of course. He's got rather a lot of will that should probably be driven out of him a bit. But some surgery and a little time in the isolation chambers would do wonders ..."
"Not even a day," Barry chanted, wild and manic under his breath while they bolted towards the jäger bar where their friend was probably even now fighting for what he maybe thought was his life. "We are the worst friends. The worst."
"Shut up until after we've saved him," Bill growled back, but it wasn't as though he disagreed. It wasn't as though he could.
Klaus was never going to forgive them. He was going to march right out of their town and back to his family, and he was never going to speak to them again, and Bill couldn't even blame him for it. They were, really and truly, the worst friends a man could ask for.
But they could at least keep him alive. They could make sure he was alive and in one piece and with all the medical attention he could ask for and maybe an escort back to Wulfenbach, they could send some clanks along to smash anyone who tried to look at him funny in the wastelands, maybe he'd let them do that, maybe he'd let them apologise at least, even if he wouldn't let them fix it, and ...
"Duck!" Judy cried, yanking at his shoulder and rolling them both to the pavement in time to avoid the jäger who'd just gone flying past overhead. Out of a doorway, that doorway up ahead, and oh god, that was Gkika's, the bar brawl was obviously in full swing already, they were already at the 'throwing each other bodily around' part, Klaus was in there. Klaus was in the middle of that. Oh god.
"Bill!" Barry roared, and he'd produced a death ray from somewhere, Bill wasn't completely sure where, or who Barry intended to use it on, but yes, yes, it'd at least make enough of a distraction to stop the fighting, right, yes. He heaved himself to his feet, darted through the door right behind his brother and into the dim, smoky room full of fists and flying furniture and cheerful roars, and the moment where Barry pointed the death ray overhead and brought the silence crashing down felt oddly stretched to him. Thin and surreal, and very far away altogether. Huh. What an odd phenomenon. Someone really would have to study the affect of adrenalin on perceptions of time in greater depth, maybe try to extend the effect to moments of less heart-stopping terror ...
"Klaus!" Barry shouted. Unnecessarily, the silence was really quite thick and probably needed much less than a hoarse, panicked roar to break it, but fair enough. Bill wasn't going to begrudge his brother a little panic right now. "Klaus, where are you?"
Mama Gkika opened her mouth, somewhere between startled and annoyed at their abrupt and rather rude appearance, Bill thought, the jägers shuffling silently and worriedly away from them, but then something else moved in the corner of the room, someone else strode forward to glare at them, and Bill was entirely too busy being desperately relieved to bother about it.
"Barry, we have been over this, death rays are not an indoor weapon!" Klaus growled, coming to an extremely aggravated halt in front of them, glaring fit to kill from the eye that wasn't swollen shut by a truly spectacular shiner. He was ... He looked ... He didn't seem to be overly injured? He only had half a shirt left, and there was a bloody tear in the trousers over one shin, but it looked like cuts and bruises mostly, it looked okay, why was he carrying a jäger over one shoulder? A live one, Bill meant. Jaxarl waved cheerfully at him from where he was hanging down Klaus' back, a gallon tankard in one hand to match the one in Klaus' spare one, dented heavily along one side where it'd obviously been used as a bludgeon. Klaus' was somewhat more intact, if not any more full at this point.
"Klaus, you---" Barry tried, and then just sort of stopped. Helplessly. And looked at Bill as if for help.
"Are you alright?" Bill found himself asking. Not much more intelligibly than his brother, but at least it was a full sentence. That was an improvement, right? "Klaus, you're not ... hurt, or anything? The Castle was telling us ..."
"Hrrr." Klaus snorted, extremely visible disgust and more than a little anger in the sound. "I can just imagine what that thing has been telling you. Your family has the most fascinating taste in architecture, Heterodyne."
"Ho yes," one of the jägers, Fane, agreed. "Der Kestle is sure sumtink, alright. Hyu is running into it, then?"
"You might say that," Klaus murmured, dry as the miniature desert in the south wing. "Apparently I'm very fit, and 'almost challenging enough to be entertaining'. I'd make a terrible minion, though. Entirely too grumpy and uncomplimentary towards my 'masters', and nowhere near respectful enough of tradition."
"Oh god," Barry murmured again, and desperately palmed at his face. With the death ray in one hand, which maybe wasn't the best idea, but at least he didn't poke his own eye out. "We are really sorry?" he managed, muffled by his fingers, and Klaus for some reason cracked a smile. Not a terrified one. Not an angry one. A real one, amused and maybe a little bit sympathetic, and Bill stared at him in shock.
"I'm hardly about to blame several centuries worth of malevolent architecture on you," he murmured, handing his tankard back to Jaxarl so he could reach out and pat Barry gently on the shoulder. "Although I will admit, it definitely explains some of your odder ideas about the appropriate uses of death traps and/or death rays while inside buildings. And your tendency to try and talk corridors into rearranging themselves for you when you're sleep-deprived."
"Uh-huh," Bill agreed, still sort of shocked enough just to be making random noises nearly for the sake of it. He struggled to think of something sane-sounding to follow that up with, something normal, or Spark-normal at least, and then just sort of gave up. This was not a normal day. Not even by his standards. "Klaus?"
Klaus looked at him, and he struggled to pick out a question. Are you sure you're not hurt? Are you insane? Did you really throw yourself out the window? Do you really ... do you really not hate us? But he couldn't ask that, he really couldn't, and wasn't there something else that had been bugging him ...?
Oh. Right. That.
"Why do you have a jäger over your shoulder?" he tried, staring at Jaxarl a bit. The jäger saluted him with the two tankards, grinning a grin full of very sharp teeth, and he swung around a bit as Klaus shifted to look down at him, swaying like a cheerful pendulum across Klaus' semi-shirtless back. It was. Well. It was more than a little odd? And he was saying that as a Heterodyne. He knew that of which he spoke, here.
"Oh, that," Klaus said, vaguely surprised, as if he'd honestly forgotten about it. "He landed on me a while back, during the chandelier swinging competition. He was rather dazed, so I let him stay for a bit, and then he turned out to be a pretty decent rear defence. Apparently there's no rules against tag-teaming in these brawls, and having fists fore and aft is very useful."
"Ve is doink great," Jaxarl agreed, very enthusiastically. "Klaus is knocking Drogi out vit vun punch, und hy is catching Maxim across his schtupid head, und den ve throw Petrik through a table---"
"Und dey is very good vit de chairs, too!" Fane rumbled happily. "If'n hyu is stayink for de veek, ve is having de chair-fencing competition next Tuesday? Jenka is de reigning champion, but hy tink hyu is in vit a preddy gud chance. Hyu have de reach on her, and hyu is not sacrificing strength, from what hy is seeink."
"Oh," Klaus said, and looked suddenly bashful, and more than a little flattered. "Well, I think I'm staying for a while? They invited me for the holidays, but after the Castle I'm not sure ...?"
"Staying!" Bill yelled, and then clapped his hands over his mouth hurriedly. Klaus stared at him, the bemused look that meant he was being weird even by incomprehensible Heterodyne standards, and Bill went brick red and dropped his hands to stammer out an explanation. "I mean, yes, absolutely, you can stay if you want? Stay the week! Stay the year! Never leave again, ahahahaha! Oh god, Barry, help me shut up, will you?"
Barry made a noise, his hands pressed against his face again, and it came out less a word and more a high, giddy "Mrrble!" that frankly did nothing to help matters. Bill hiccupped in despair, and Klaus stared between them with an expression that was rapidly approaching honest concern. An expression which was, alarmingly and rather bizarrely, echoed by every jäger in the room, and Bill was about two seconds away from asking the Castle to open the floor beneath their feet and save them from the crushing embarrassment when Judy, beautiful, wonderful Judy, stepped forward to rescue them.
"I'm sorry, Klaus, I'm afraid they're both a little panicky still," she murmured, very carefully not smiling as she wrapped an arm around each of their shoulders and steered them gently to stand in front of their friend. "What they mean to say is that yes, of course you can stay, for as long as you want. They're very sorry about what the Castle did to you, and they're planning to fix it, and they would like it very much if you could forgive them enough to spend the holidays with them. Once they've talked to the Castle to make sure it doesn't scare you like that again, of course. Do you think you might consider it?"
"I didn't scare him that much," the Castle grumbled distantly, decidedly put out but thankfully, thankfully, not adding anything that would shatter their chances of persuading him all over again. "He's not that fragile, you know!"
"Fortunately not," Klaus agreed, with a kind of dry sarcasm that Bill really rather envied. Then he looked at them, really looked at them, at the desperate and hopeful and very sorry expressions they both had to be wearing, and he smiled suddenly. Soft and almost shy, and he was over six feet of power and ingenuity with a jäger slung casually over his shoulder like it was nothing, he had no right to look so goofy and stupid and hopeful all of a sudden! No right at all, but he did, and Bill so very much wanted to keep him. It had been the panic talking, mostly, it had been the stupid relief, but he really, really would not mind if Klaus stayed and never left again.
And if Klaus had any idea what he was thinking right now, Bill acknowledged ruefully, if he'd any idea how much Bill really would cheerfully like to kidnap him and never let anyone so much as sneeze in his direction ever again, then Klaus would be hightailing out of Mechanicsburg so fast they'd have to get out the seven-league stompers to catch up with him.
"I'd like to stay, if the offer's open?" Klaus said quietly, looking at them, and Barry meeped softly beside Bill and managed to juggle the death ray across to a handy jäger before grabbing the man's arm in a grip that would have done damage if Klaus wasn't quite possibly jäger proof, never mind Spark proof. "It's been an interesting first day, but I enjoyed the clank experiment, what little I saw of it, and the brawl was a lot of fun too, and I wouldn't mind staying at least until the chair-fencing competition? If you'll have me, that is?"
Bill clamped his mouth shut, shoved both hands across it to keep from saying something extremely unwise, and Barry wasn't exactly much better, but thankfully they had Judy, they had the best friend and the best construct any Spark ever dreamed of, and she reached across to pat Klaus on the shoulder for all their sakes and tell him that of course he was welcome, he was always welcome, she hoped he'd enjoy himself a lot more now that things had been sorted out. And Klaus didn't beam, he'd probably already used up his smile quota for about the next week, but his shoulders straightened and there was a lightness in his eyes that looked almost like relief, and Bill honestly didn't care that he couldn't hear himself think over the cheers of a bar full of jägers who'd found a new playmate.
They hadn't killed him. They'd been the first Heterodynes to bring a friend home as something other than spoils of war in decades, maybe centuries, and alright, it hadn't gone as well as it could have done, but he wasn't dead, and he didn't hate them, and he actually wanted to stick around, and Bill was really, really not going to complain right about now. Not about anything in the world.
"We're, uh," he started, hesitantly and then more confidently, more happily, as Klaus only looked at him steadily and with that slightly sarcastic edge that said he wasn't very impressed, Heterodyne, but he liked you enough to be going on with. Bill grinned at him, and felt something much more confident bounce through him. "We're happy to have you, Klaus. Any time. You know?"
"... I begin to understand, yes," Klaus agreed, with a wry look around the bar, but he didn't mean it meanly, and there was that crinkle around his eyes that said he was more amused than anything else. "You certainly lead an interesting lifestyle in Mechanicsburg, I'll give you that one."
"Yes," said Jaxarl, elbowing Klaus gently in the ribs and grinning slyly up at him. "But hyu is fittink in really well, hy is tinking? Hyu is lookink right at home already."
Bill bit his lip, and looked up at the man with as straight a face as he could manage. Which wasn't very, but he really wasn't going to be doing any better any time soon. "He's got you there," he said, resisting the urge to giggle at Klaus' expression. "You really are, uh. You're really very sturdy, aren't you?"
Klaus raised an eyebrow at him, a whole world of commentary in the expression, but all he actually said was: "One would have to be, I think. Fragility is not advisable in strangers around here, I imagine."
Well, no. No, probably not. But that was alright. In this case, that was perfectly alright. Apparently they'd managed to pick the least fragile friend on the face of the planet.
And it was sad that they'd needed to, he realised that, they probably ought to work on that, try to make the next friend last longer than one day before he had to outrun a Castle full of death traps and fight a bar full of supersoldiers, but the fact remained that they couldn't have picked a better candidate for the initial attempt if they'd tried. Of all the people in the world to take a chance on them, somehow they'd gotten Klaus. With that kind of luck, maybe there was hope for this 'peaceful friendship' thing after all? Hell, it had to be worth a try, at least.
Later, though. Much later. For right now, Bill thought that they should maybe just feed Klaus, instead, patch up his injuries some and try to make a better impression on him than the last four hours or so had managed. Even if he had forgiven them for it, they probably ought to, ah, put some work into making up for it a little bit first? That seemed like something they ought to try doing, yes.
"Bill?" someone murmured, a low voice from very close by, and Bill looked up in startlement to find Klaus watching him, a twitch in the corner of his mouth and a very gentle sort of look in his eyes. "I'm fine, Bill. I'm not frightened, you didn't break me, and I'm not about to running screaming out of town if you turn your back. You can relax, you know. I promise nothing bad will happen." He paused for a second, grimacing a little, and then added more ruefully: "Well, nothing bad that I'm responsible for, at any rate. But it's alright. You did fine."
They blinked at him a little bit, Bill saw Barry out of the corner of his eye, and then he caught Klaus around the shoulders, or around one shoulder and one jäger, and grinned in his face with all the manic energy his Spark possessed.
"You are so wrong about that," he murmured, with a heterodyne hum in the back of it. "You are actually so wrong it's approaching critical mass. But! But. Nobody's dead, everybody's got all their limbs and no new ones to be worrying about, and that's all a Spark can ask for, right? I think that means we'll call this experiment a qualified success, hmm?"
Klaus blinked at him, stared for a long, long second, and then reached up to rub the bridge of his nose with a sigh of such long-suffering bemusement that Bill immediately wanted to bottle it. Essence de Klaus, vintage Mechanicsburg. It'd be a best-seller.
"We're really going to have to work on your experimental standards, Heterodyne," their friend murmured, and nothing in all the world could have kept the happy smile from Bill's face that second.
Not one solitary thing.
A/N: On a final note, I almost half wanted the jägers to be singing some version of 'No-one fights like Gaston' during the brawl with Klaus. I am a terrible person. It wouldn't even really have fit, but I confess I was sort of humming it slightly as I was writing. *grins sheepishly*
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