After years of falling off the bandwagon and ending up in rehab, it was a miracle that Klaus Hargreeves was ever to make anything resembling therapy work for him. He had been through so many attempts to get him to care about the world around him. When push came to shove, he simply did not care about anyone else but himself. Why should he? His family didn't seem to care if he lived or if he died.

Well, that was not entirely true. Diego sometimes acted like he cared, but Reginald Hargreeves had a way of ripping the family apart as if they were a science experiment, just to see what made them all tick. He would put them through torture and claim it was training them for the apocalypse. What good was training for the apocalypse when it pushed Klaus to the brink of welcoming it with open arms?

But then Miss Marigold, one of the most eccentric therapists he had ever met, had introduced him to oil painting. He was mildly convinced that she was actually the reincarnation of Bob Ross, which honestly with his ability to commune with ghosts would not even surprise him in the least at this point. The point was, she was able to press a brush in one hand and shove a palette of paints into the other and successfully turn off the ghosts for long enough for him to paint a canvas. Although the finished result was nothing to write home about, it still worked. Klaus cried that day.

But it didn't stop there. When he learned about figure drawing, the assignment was to draw the people you see around you. It started with just the people at group sessions at first, but then when he was discharged from rehab and released back into the world, he started drawing his family. He was so afraid if he stopped drawing that the ghosts would close in on him again and he would be tempted to find his next fix. Instead his fixation morphed into something a little bit closer to home. He hadn't meant to draw so many sketches of Ben, but when they began to share an apartment together, he became his world. It just seemed fitting, was all.

The more that he drew Ben, the more things started to settle into place for Klaus. He was so sure Ben would notice and yet if he did, he certainly seemed to ignore the attention he was receiving. Before long, he had memorized enough of Ben's features to be able to sketch him without any references. He must have filled at least three sketchbooks by now since starting up this art therapy schtick, and of those at least half the pages were of his brother. That wasn't weird right? Why should it be? They lived together, so who else would he be using as a muse?

Ben was never supposed to see the sketchbooks. So when Klaus came home one day to find his brother flipping through them, Klaus froze. Surely he had been found out, his secret exposed. And yet Ben just smiled that sweet smile of his, the one that always calmed him down during the worst of times, and told him that he was so talented and that he would love Klaus to paint him sometime. And Klaus just bit down on his bottom lip as he smiled, crossing the room to envelope Ben into the strongest hug he could fathom. Thank you, he whispered into Ben's neck, I love you, too, Ben whispered back. Suddenly, the world didn't seem so bleak.