Allison Hargreeves | #00.03 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
numberthree) wrote2021-04-12 10:49 am
numberthree) wrote2021-04-12 10:49 am
Entry tags:
Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post
INBOX
Voice | Text | Call | Video | Surprise Me
A flat computer automated voice comes on and states in monotone:
"This is the voicemail box for Allison Hargreeves. Leave a message at the beep."
text / october 1 onwards
To: Allison Hargreeves (Private)
From: Luther Hargreeves
Okay. Keep me posted.
[ During this. Despite Allison's intent, it isn't the most reassuring thing he's ever heard from her; they often lie about being okay when they're not, and the erratic typing worries Luther more than anything else could've. Has him stewing over it even as he goes about relocating Diego, moving injured people as easily as lifting a puppy, shifting rubble. None of it is physically draining, not for him, but he's still exhausted. Feels the emotional weariness like a deep soul-ache. ]
There's a lot of damage in Nonah but the house is mostly alright. Family's OK. Getting guests medical attention now.
[ No assignation of blame. Flat, terse status reports like something he'd have relayed from the frontlines, a lifetime ago. ]
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on her knees on the street, holding Vanya and the violin, vanishing in a sickening lurch.
She can't bring herself to look at it long the second time Luther's name pops up,
flips it off her vision almost too quickly when the second one comes, unable to look away from Vanya.
Still unconscious, and so very small. The details feel too much like responsibility. Too much like shackles.
Too much like they are missing the other shoe that isn't in his words.
He let her go, and she still let him down.
(And she still chose Vanya. At the end. Again.)
When it happens, it's only five or ten minutes later, but it feels a world of after.
Horror is still in her eyes while she's staring at Vanya. Trying to take it in.
What happens, happens almost without her ability to realize, to focus, to coordinate.
The shock feels too great. It's as much reaching for an anchor while still reeling from too much.
Words. Facts. Words. The. Reason. For the party. For. For ... everything. And somehow he thought now. ]
Klaus stole Dad's journal.
For that box he kept it in.
For his next fix. He didn't.
He left the journal in the dumpster outside the Academy.
Luther. That's how Harold knew. About Vanya. About everything.
That's
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But I shook him down.
[ Beneath it all, an annoyance with himself. An I should have caught this. He'd loomed over Klaus like a bully shaking someone down for lunch money; he'd thought he'd gotten a hold of everything, retrieved all of Dad's artefacts. Evidently not— ]
That Peabody guy went through our fucking trash?
[ Luther rarely swears, but it slips out now. ]
{ At least an hour later }
[ It's a good while before another message comes. A litany of some questions for Vanya. But not really. Because that was in figuring out the why, and there was still processing her, and there was watching her sister stripped of anything on her that might be dangerous, and there was watching her sister put into a cell. There. was. .... a lot.
She could check the time to know how long, but she doesn't want, doesn't care.
Can't tell if she's numb, or nowhere near numb enough.
(Only Number Four was ever numb. Closed himself off. Drowned himself out. The same excuse for two decades straight, and his only answer. One, Two, Three were always so good at the hypervigilant focus. Survival, focus, overcoming at all costs and in all circumstances, experiments, field tests, and then the actual thing. Three can't close her eyes. Even a decade hasn't taught her how to do it.)
Allison leans, rubbing at her temples, as she writes finally.
She'd opened the box intending to say something, anything to Luther, no clue. But then there'd been his message.
The one she forgot she never answered, and that was as good as anything else when she felt like she was grabbing for any small world. ]
She didn't know. Vanya said she saw the journal only after what happened at the cabin.
But Klaus left it there. So either that, or someone else did that he got it from.
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But even then, when her response comes, it takes him another fifteen minutes to figure out what to say. He's been talking to a fireman standing on the Nonah street; they're trying to get some of the water mains locked down, and they could do with his help moving rubble. In a spare moment, he finally mentally types out: ]
Harold, or Leonard, or whoever the hell he was.
How did he use it?
[ Because Luther hadn't actually known the details. Or what had happened to Vanya, with Vanya. He'd only seen the aftermath, and come in with too little information. Allison's body, bleeding out. But he'd been absent for so much of the sleuthing, and that inadequacy and dereliction of duty ground like a stone in his shoe, too. ]
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[ When Vanya's not busy with Finn, and maybe out of the first wave of shock that seems to have kicked in once she woke up, not even feigning that she couldn't remember what she'd done. The hell she just created, even if it is so much smaller than what happened back home. The dominoes that poured out from that spot.
She sends it, and she sits staring at the box. At their words. At them. Through them.
The world an almost shiver of vertigo that hasn't hit in hours attempting, even as she blinks it back.
Even as she can't stop looking at the box. Wants to say something. To hear Luther again. Doesn't have a clue what. Knows it's like considering leaning her head on a shattered plate of glass. Probably not advisable. Doesn't know if she can. Is certain she shouldn't be allowed. But she can't stop herself, from finding the first applicable thing she can put to words, that sounds nothing like the desperate exhaustion in her head. ]
How were all the guests? How's Diego? Klaus?
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Diego's fine. I carried him to his room and he woke up a while later -- with a killer headache, but he's fine. Refused to go to the doctor, because he's Diego.
Klaus is at the hospital with Ben looking in on him. Hasn't woken up yet.
[ If this had been audio, she'd have heard the stiff worry in his voice at those words. Instead, in blank text, it manages to look clinical. ]
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Just like if he needed to worry about what was happening to Vanya, she'd tell him. She would.
Wouldn't she?
(Like she had earlier?)
Allison closed her eyes.
Reaching up to rub them, before her hand dropped lower.
Not quite on the new locket so much as her chest above it. Fingers across the twin pieces of the golden chain, and the locket itself bumping up under her pinky and ring finger partly. Everything. Everything in shambles again. They still had a world. Or this world still had itself, one or the other. And both of the people who had any more answers were in a hospital bed or a cell. More bodies. More destruction. ]
I might be here a while.
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[ He sounds understanding, and he does understand, but there's still that irrational little twinge of selfish disappointment when she says it. He'd been hoping to see her tonight, before he went to bed. Not because he especially needed to, but because he wanted to. Because it would function as the comforting full stop on this entire long hellish day, and would quiet that dull roar in his ears a little. Would reassure him that she was okay. Luther felt restless, on edge, not having seen her since the street blew up and she ran out into the disaster.
But at least there's this. These messages. ]
How's Vanya?
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Opens her eyes and looks off toward where she can still hear Finn's voice but not quite his words. ]
Shaken.
Scared.
Angry, too, obviously. But it's more the other two.
More like what I remember before I blacked out in the cabin.
She isn't hurt, but she passed out in the street after what happened.
Woke up a little after getting here. They have her powers neutralized.
[ The last words are the ones that are hardest to write. She knows why, but still locked Vanya away because of her powers was the first thing she fought Luther on when she woke up. A punishment that larger than the crimes that outweighed it. Something she was culpable to, even though Vanya was, also, awake and able to say whether she was okay right now, too. ]
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Guilt. Relief. ]
How? Some kind of power-neutralizing bracelet or something?
Or a cell?
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Tonight was already a lot, and there was some foreign grey line there. She could feel it. Or she was jumping at the shadow of assuming it was there. Somewhere between asking because she said, asking because it was information worth knowing, and asking because he needed to beat himself up with it.
She wasn't close enough. She wouldn't be.
She couldn't lie either. ]
A collar. Light, thin, silverish.
[ She hits send before she can stop herself. Not wanting to put the other part. The other part that mixes it too close. The other part that won't change. The other part she still really can't avoid or ignore or not tell him. ]
But she is in a cell, too.
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And she's staying calm? Now that she's away from Diego's powers, and... well, everything. Everything else.
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I might not tell her about where he is until morning. Unless she asks first.
[ Luther is one of the people Allison pretends the least for, but even she knows that's not entirely still not at all. But she doesn't have it in her to tonight. Not after everything. And it's not like he doesn't know. Like she doesn't try to make things easier for him at times, too. Maybe once upon a time, it had only been him. Forever and ever ago. And now. But now, not only him. That she didn't feel the need to explain or apologize. Either.
Which is maybe why she does have to add something. Too threadbare. Too clear. Too necessary.
Between the two parts of her so divided they stretched a chasm, while she tried to hold both. ]
She turned away, Luther. At the last minute.
She was there, and whatever it was that was happening, that happened last time, too. She was looking at me, because I was trying to talk to her. And whatever it all is, she has, it was too much. But she turned away. At the last moment. She didn't know how to stop it, but she knew it was me in front of her, and she turned away so none of it came at me. Or the house.
I saw it. In her eyes. I know I did.
She didn't hurt me. Specifically. She did everything she could not to.
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She sure didn't turn away from Klaus.Luther's still lying on the sofa, dusty with plaster and debris, an oversized arm flung over his head to block out the distant sound of Nonah sirens. Firemen. Police. Still dealing with it. What their sister had done. Luther has a clear view of the gaping hole in the wall, the exposed pipes and wiring.
But he trusts Allison about Vanya more than he trusts himself with Vanya — that's been made abundantly clear, even to himself — and so he sighs. Carefully taps out the response. ]
Yeah.
This house is still standing.
That's at least one better on last time.
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[ It's not a reprimand or a rebuke, but she looks at it for a long number of passing second trying to decide if it looks like one, and if she has any clue anymore. Because everything feels bare and raw, both like she could pass out given five minutes to try and like she could keep going for days, if it was needed of her, of the situation. She doesn't know what is yet.
But it's not wrong either. Yes, it's still horrific. Yes, Klaus is in the hospital. Again.
And there are some innocent people dead. And a lot more hurt. And there's property damage.
But it's still so many fewer than six short of everyone in a world's worth of seven-eight billion people. ]
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Could've been worse.
[ And how fucked up is that, that an entire wrecked neighbourhood counts as small fry in the grand scale of things, and in the wide spectrum of damage that a Hargreeves can do? But they've already seen the worst-case scenario. Lived through it. They know exactly how bad it could've been.
Another pause, then: ]
Do you need anything?
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She can close her eyes and his words are right there.
It's more than last time, and skies above more than a year ago.
It's enough. It has to be. ]
I don't know.
I'll tell you in the morning if I think of anything? I should know more by then about how long Vanya'll be here, too. Then, I can make a better guess about whether she'll need clothes and food and the rest. What Aegis provides, and how long, how badly this might all end up when the higher ups wake up, too.
[ When morning comes and it isn't just Finn who knows here. ]
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[ A lurch of self-consciousness, queasy in his throat, at the thought of Aegis having to handle this mess. He'd half-wished that this whole thing could have gone miraculously unnoticed, swept under the rug. But no. Of course they would be involved.
The thought of Ashley at the party and seeing it all, or Jacob getting the report and seeing the name Hargreeves, and suddenly knowing—
He presses it all down. It's not important. Not as important as the rest.
(But that irrational shame is still there.) ]
I'm going to try to catch a couple hours. But-- text or call anytime, if you need me. Even if it's the middle of the night.
I'll keep you posted on things over here.
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I want to know the moment we hear anything from the hospital, too.
[ There'd be time for everything that came after it, after that. After Klaus was out of the hopsital. After Vanya was out of pre-self-imposed prison. There's a want, exhausted somewhere in her bones, to think about sleep. But she can't yet. Not in this big, sterile bulding, with it's bright, floursecent lights that she'd seen last on a harmless, kind tour from Jacob, himself.
And now it was all sideways. She didn't even know if she could stay, or where she'd sleep if she did.
If she'd sleep at all tonight, before knowing really what was decided tomorrow morning.
But at least one of them could try.
She added another line and sent it, too. ] Good luck.
Oct 2nd Morning
Any updates over there?
[ Then, a second later. Because it is still dark. ]
Sorry, if this wakes you for nothing.
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Let alone the fact that there's a hole in the wall and their entire neighbourhood is wrecked and they have guests in the hospital. Or which 'us' Allison is referring to. Her and Vanya. Or her and the house. If she even slept at the house last night. He suspects not. ]
Don't worry about it.
Hospital says Klaus is stable, but still unconscious. She did a number on him and he's not as durable as I am.
[ Luther should've gotten to the fight sooner. Still wished that it had been him. He could've taken it. ]
Still no deaths reported.
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Between the two of us, hopefully, he'll turn out at least as durable as I did.
Given everything, he's come back from almost dead more than anyone of us.
[ It's brisk, but there's a brittleness under it. One the letters don't have, but her thought did, and her voice probably couldn't have hidden. She hates that she'd have to abandon Vanya, leave her utterly alone in that cell, to go see Klaus, but she's worried about Klaus, too. The same as she knows Klaus would have been worried about her that night, too. She still remembers him in the car, over Diego's shoulder, in that dreamscape. Him, in the front seat, with all of them, and her bleeding body.
They may not get along, and she might not approve of pretty much all his life choices, but Klaus is family,
and she'd rather kill someone for him, than have to live through another one of them actually dying. ]
Small favors.
No brass back at Aegis yet either.
But that's probably not long off.
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I wish they hadn't had to deal with this. But glad that they have the resources.
[ He lets slip that admission without quite intending to, because he's sleep-mussed and just woken up and disoriented, stumbling through the dusty hallways and to the kitchen, searching for coffee. Trying not to look too closely at the hole in the wall as he passes it. Remembering the sight of the old mansion crumbling, falling apart on its foundations.
At least this one is still standing. ]
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She studied the menu over the coffee shop registers, ordering two coffees, and two breakfast sandwiches, and leaning to look at the bakery. When her breath caught looking at something she hadn't expected to see there. Which just seemed like another sudden brick of surprise dropping itself. Before ordering a few of those, too.
It's probably three or four minutes, once she done when she's finally able to answer Luther.
Holding the bakery bag and waiting on the rest. Restless at this time already. ]
Not that it changes anything, but I wish none of us did.
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