Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

[numberthree]

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."

Luther

Diego

Klaus

Five

Ben

Vanya

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[numberthree]

Far across the floor, Allison luckily isn't busy at that moment. She's gotten better at concealing where the words pop up, but she's not perfect at it still. It's going to be hard to ever be, when it suddenly springs up into her vision between herself and someone else, when she isn't expecting it. Though most people don't expect anything from her of it. It's both professional and personal reasons that have it down as a goal to be mastered to flawless. Somehow.

The momentary surprise gave way to the easiest of a very small smile that she concealed in taking a sip of her drink while she wrote back, without any pause. Even if her eyes do keep drifting toward the floating 'we' there. Like it would have been by committee, and it would have been just one, and it would have been just them.

Hmm.

Anyone else? They'd probably guess Chess. Or Risk. For you.
For me, god knows, probably like Mall Madness if we're talking about back then.


Why?

[obediences]

It's even better than exchanging whispers; with the mental network, they can do it mid-conversation, entirely privately, right under people's noses, or even when they're across the room from each other. Luther watches for Allison's reaction, for a slight twitch or a jerk of her shoulders, but of course she doesn't betray the distraction. She's too well-trained for that. (Acting is a different set of skills, not at all the sort of thing he'd ever practiced himself: his poker face is terrible.)

It's a pleasure to take advantage of it, this luxury of instant communication, even if he knows their habit of doing this had been infuriating for Diego to witness when he was here.

(Don't think about Diego. Don't let your thoughts stray there.)

He drags his attention away, back to the present, to this stupidly blinking status message that he's not quite sure how to turn off.

Icebreaker questions. Apparently I'm asking this one of everyone who walks by me now.
I do genuinely love chess, though. It's strategic and I can play it against myself.

There weren't that many games he could play, in those years after everyone left.

[numberthree]

Of course, he did. Would. That part was somehow just as predictable as breathing. Maybe even because she would rarely have the patience for it, or anything like it unless she was expressly making an effort, (Not that she wouldn't have for him.) But it's the last part of his words that makes something in her chest ache. The reference to being alone so long. To playing by himself, against himself. His only companion for all those years before this one.

She doesn't like it, but she's here now. Even if no one else is, she is.

To both keep his secrets, and to put herself in the path of anything like it happening.

(So long as they're together still.)

Weird.

Claire used to have dozens. Her favorites changed about as fast as the years she got older. Different kinds in different moods, and as she learned hot to do more things. Like more things. Especially in the stupid rush of new and shiny releases near Christmas every year.

It's still not easy. That. Talking about Claire is still like slicing her skin with the sharpest blade possible. But it's getting easier for a given of that term, at least to mention her like she is a part of Allison's thoughts. All the time. Not just when her name is unearthed from static hallowed and horrified frozen silence. It's getting slowly easier with him, for him.

Because when, in all their childhood, after they'd become that unspoken rule-bending them,
had she ever not given him even the darkest parts of her heart soul,

no matter what they said about her if she could at all.

[obediences]

It's still a treasure whenever Allison actually opens up about Claire like this. It's so rare, like prying open the iron plating over her chest and exposing her beating heart. It's become more manageable over time, as their emotional wounds scar over and calcify, but it's still not fully healed. It just hurts a little less. She can focus a bit better on the bright spots, the happy memories.

All things considered, it's good you spoiled her wi

He writes a message and it starts to send, appearing in the corner of Allison's vision as usual.

But then
there's a
g̵l̷̖͆ĭ̶̲t̴c̴̘̭̫͈̆̕ͅh̶̫̩͈̥͓͓̤͂̈́

He can't describe what's happening, but his message warps. There's the drone of white noise, an earsplitting pain, a vision blossoming in his skull that isn't the conference center, isn't the AtlanTech expo, isn't even this world or this universe or this time.

It's a wide and empty dusty plain.

She's been on the moon before, but that had been a far different sight: the International Moon Research Base was sprawling and expansive, multiple elegant domes, staffed with dozens of researchers and bustling with activity. Here, Luther looks out onto a vast emptiness. He's grown ragged and disheveled beneath the helmet, his usually military clean-cut appearance gone to seed, beard growing in scraggly, his hair long and unkempt. Because what's the point? Nobody's here to see him. His only contact is his father or Pogo on the radio, fleetingly, and less and less frequent over time.

He watches the sun rise over the edge of the planet below. The expression on his face is indescribable, but there's still a touch of awe to it. He was telling the truth, before: even after years of this sight, you never really get sick of it.

There's no stars in the sky. Nobody ever really prepares you for that, either. Whenever the Earth is visible, its sheer brightness washes out the whole starry sky. Drowns out everything else, leaving just a pitch-black tapestry like the whole world's been drenched in ink.

The two other weeks out of the month, when you're on the dark side of the moon, you can see the stars but not the Earth. Just endless darkness and a night that never ends.

Once the dawn passes, Luther turns and heads back to the station. It's small, cramped, just about the size of an RV: it'd be a tight fit for anyone, let alone someone of Luther's size, let alone someone of Luther's size after the accident. He moves carefully to not knock into any of the monitoring equipment, which sits quietly humming along, measuring nothing.

There are stacks and stacks of books. A single umbrella plant, which he keeps alive using a portion of his precious water rations.

There's no coffee up here, so he takes a bulb of water, sips absentmindedly at it, cracks open a journal and starts writing. (There are several journals scattered around, pages upon pages filled with his neat handwriting. Seen through his eyes, you can see that they always start off as curt reports, but then... they meander. It becomes his thoughts, a diary, half-scribbled lines of terrible poetry. Nothing work-related at all.)

"Morning, Luther. Up early as ever."

Luther jolts. Stares out of the small window, doesn't turn his head to see who could possibly have spoken.

The emptiness and silence has been pressing on his eardrums, but a familiar voice breaks it.

"I'm in a new movie this month, you know."

"Yeah, I know." The way he answers her, it has the weary nonchalance that this is nothing new. That this is a conversation he's had before, and he's not surprised to see the impossibility of Allison Hargreeves somehow seated primly on the counter, hands against its edge, her head cocked.

She looks younger than she actually is in this time. Luther's seen publicity photographs and the occasional movie, but that version of Allison isn't his Allison. When he remembers her best, it's her at this age: eighteen and coy and filled with an easy confidence.

"I don't know when I'll be able to catch it," he says, finishing his water and dropping it into the cycler.

Once upon a time, he used to ignore her. But much like the shaving, there's just no point.

He'd rather have this than nothing at all.

Her knees are jutting into the narrow aisle of the station; Luther pauses while trying to walk past, looks down at her legs, then up at her. There's a pained expression on his face. If he keeps going, he'll walk right through her and he knows it. This isn't actually Allison.

This is a haunting.

"Allison," he says, a question, a request.

The phantom sighs, crosses her legs, shifts the angle so he can squeeze past without breaking the illusion.

Other days, he hears classical music, like what Vanya used to practice in the study by herself. It's a distant rustling or scuttling, or the droning buzz of bees. It's whatever sporadic of memory his brain can summon up, anything, literally anything to break the monotony.

All things considered, he much prefers this particular hallucination.

He moves past her, marks off a day on the physical calendar he keeps, uses the discarded pages as scrap paper.

Rewatching it now, today, Luther wouldn't have been able to say what day or month or possibly even year this memory had been.

The days were all so very much alike.

When it fades, he realises that he's on his knees and noise and chaos is erupting around him as the glitch spreads. He struggles back to his feet, wades through the crowd, tries to find her. But when he sees Allison next, it's still not the expo, and it's not the false version of her that kept him company in space. It's her, back then, with Clai—

[numberthree]

Allison had just finished signing an autograph for one of the attendees when chaos broke out with a wave of chaos. There was a slam of pain that rocketed into her head, tightening down her spine and through her body, even as she grabbed the high chair she'd been earlier sitting display-style on. Cries of pain and panic were coming from every direction, but she couldn't see them, make herself focus, as light buffet across her mind.

Light, and then darkness, and then a million-million stars.

Then Luther.

And.

(She was never on that moon.)

And.

(He wasn't even on the moon when she was that young.)

And.

(What is this? What is happening?
Is this part of whatever is attacking them?)

Even as her nails dig for purchase on the chair, her mind digs for the purchase their father gave them, to overcome, and she knows it isn't real, can't be real when that was happening she was --

There's a low tea table, a toy version, but not too inexpensive either, set up in the living room, with a game spread out across it. It's flat and looping, but there are green plastic hill-mountains, and white carousel turner, little cars, already filling with tiny blue and pink people-pegs.

Claire already shouting out, "Momma, momma, momma, come play!" over and over when Allison rounds the corner on the living room, where Claire and Patrick are seated across the tea table, the game board. She's all enthusiasm, and he's quiet, not quite readable, curiosity.

It might be more the second than the first that makes her tip her head, playfully bluffing to think it out before she says okay. It's worth it for how delighted, and deafeningly, Claire squeals while she's dropping her purse on a counter, and stepping out of her heels.




"Watch me," Claire yells, a little smaller this time, and Allison hasn't stopped, but she calls out that she is. Not that Claire can tell. She's not even confident Claire can hear her. But it's a semi-crowded playground, and her eyes haven't left Claire (except, occasionally, to look at the script notes in her lap). Grabbing the bars of a small carousel, and running around and around, before jumping on, to shriek in mad delight then.

All of her, a tiny bundle of joy and flapping little ribbons in her small corn-rowed ponytail that follows her, flying through the air.




Allison is practicing lines & spacing in the massive sitting room when she steps back on a white giraffe that lets out a squeaking noise, and nearly falls. She calls out for Claire, who had been watching Sesame Street, about putting her things away, but there's no answer.

With a huff, she walks that way, toy still in hand.

There's a moment her heart freezes at the empty room,
before there's a small quiet giggle.

"Claire?" Another giggle, and Allison's worried look shifts into a half-amused on, let the annoyance go for whatever new game this is, as she walks in, looking at the tops of the chairs and couch and the toward the paintings on the wall. "Are you in here?"

"Where are you?" she sing-songs, ("I can hear you") looking behind drapes, and ("Maybe - over - here. No? Hmm.") chairs at the furthest point of the room, and then near, but passing right over (Or over here?), the bouncing head of black curls and laughter that isn't nearly so well hid as she thinks, right in the open, under pillows, on top of the couch.




There's a clatter loud enough it sends both Patrick and her running, nearly colliding into each other once leaving the kitchen and the second time trying to both get into their bedroom fast enough.

Somehow, the hanging bar from one side of the closet is half falling from its holder in the wall, and the clothing is an avalanched kaleidoscope of colors, patterns, types. And in the center of it, looking two parts relieved, one part worried, and one part triumphant is Claire.

One of Allison's red-sequence dress tops pulled over her pj's, and Patrick's black ball cap on her head, a Santa hat on top of that. One foot in the toes of a heel (the back-half of which goes nearly to the back of her knee). One hand is still clutching a silver patterned tie that looks very much like it is still attached to the pile and the culprit which must have brought down the closet.

Allison isn't even sure which of them starts laughing first.
When they both are, she's pretty sure they didn't mean to either.

(But.)




Allison is making a noise she'd never admit to anyone.

It goes something like "Ahh-woo, ahh-woo" over and over, while she helicopters a finger before her daughter's face, before tapping her nose incredibly lightly at the end of it each time. Watching those eyes cloud curiously-confused at the spinning fingers, only to break out in a grin when her nose is tapped.

Her hands still flail everywhere, unable to accurately aim for Allison's hands, and sometimes she'll tap them, too. Once or twice, capture them and kiss them. Before returning to what she started with. Ahh-woo. Ahh-woo.

When it makes Claire gurgle a giggle for the first time in her little life,
Allison thinks she might never stop. Damn the whole world of appearances.




The moment --


(a small, warm bundle, placed slowly, delicately,
into her shaking arms, Patrick's around them both

swirls of hair still wet, nose still running,
eyes still murky as the tiny head polled

her body feels broken open
her every muscle hurts

but none of it matter

nothing matters

at all)


-- the world reoriented entirely.

[obediences]

It's dizzying.
It's a glimpse into something he never thought he'd ever see.

She's talked about Claire before, she's described the awful bone-breaking importance of her daughter — it's Allison's whole soul, ripped away from her — but this is his first time seeing it. The court date doesn't count. She'd already been torn apart then, beaten down and defeated. Here, it's the best of times. It's her falling in love with her child immediately, unquestioningly, unconditionally, pouring her whole heart out into her hands and giving it to this little girl. The sort of love none of them had, growing up.

It's a look he's never seen on Allison's face, a softness and a tenderness he wasn't even sure she possessed.

And he's struck, now, by the full realisation that he never saw this. He missed all of this. Luther knew of Claire and Patrick only from afar, as names printed on a magazine page. He could have been there, could have gotten to know this little girl who was fully all of Allison's heart, he could have told her stories about old missions and cracked jokes and given her piggy-back rides, and seen that impossibly soft expression on Allison's face flourishing. He's wasted so much time. He's wasted so much time and now this entire goddamn world is gone, burned up to a crisp, and he's never going to see this—

The memories shift again. They're dizzying, like whatever virus is chewing its way through the expo has latched onto this connection in particular, because their inboxes are already clogged with each other already, because they can't stop looking at each other across the room.

Patrick walks through a doorway smiling, but even as Luther watches, then—

It isn't Patrick anymore, and it isn't their home town anymore, and it isn't Heropa either.

It's a small house in the City that's familiar-but-isn't. There are well-known, recognisable elements to it: the percolating coffee machine, the mug of coffee (flavoured with cinnamon) Allison presses into Luther's hand, the vinyl player in the corner, the way they both leap into action as soon as the alarm is called, two well-drilled machines humming along as they run to do the government's bidding.

And there are unfamiliar things, too: rumpled sheets.

There is only one bed.

There's lipstick on the white collar of his shirt, after getting back from Gabriel's charity auction.

There's his thumb wiping a smear of blood off the angle of her cheek, a tenderness and casual familiarity in the touch, as opposed to the usual way they jolt if their hands even briefly touch.

There's a loose possessiveness with each others' bodies when they're in private, like they haven't spent the past decade-plus walking circles aroudn each other instead: a hand at the small of her back, a touch to his jaw as he finishes shaving.

He's Space again, his body long and lean and cut in regular proportions. There's the sound of Allison's voice, her actual voice, throaty in a laugh. Neither of them are broken. Both of them break others, instead.

There's the memory of his strong hands lifting someone easily, her legs winding about his waist, as he presses her against the wall and they kiss each other breathless— except instead of cheap nightclub liquor, she tastes of Allison's favourite brand of high-end whiskey—

It's too much. Did that happen. Did that actually.

It's a dream they already woke up from, a full month and a half ago, lingering only in muscle memory and odd little flashes of ghostly recollection, blink-and-you'll-miss-it, easy to dismiss, easy to shake off like some phantom limb. But now Luther is seeing a clearer recollection of it, and he bites down on his tongue hard enough to draw blood. Did it actually.

Or is this just his private yearning made real, cobbled together into a vision? He had done that, last year. Accidentally manifested what he wanted. This one, he hadn't even let himself look at too closely, to even admit that he wanted it. He can't tell if this is real.

But in the end, it doesn't even matter.

Allison

He sends the ping, blindly, across the span of the exhibition hall. He just needs to make sure she's okay. That's all that matters.

[numberthree]

It's a reeling thing. Every flicker of laughter and joy that sprouted with a memory felt so bright, so clear, and made it feel like it was a knife stabbing her chest. A reminder of what had mattered. What she should have chosen. What she should have focusing on, instead of taking short cuts and doing in the other times the kind of parenting her father probably would have approved of.

There isn't much time for anything more than the heartbreakingly beautiful pain of Claire's face, Claire's laughter, before it receding again, too. Something she has to way to reach out and try to hold on to when it's already turning sideways. When there's another house, and another life, suddenly rippling across it all, washing everything out. Claire. Patrick.

It's disorienting, confusing, she can feel her fingers tips digging into metal, but she can't get her eyes open. She knows this place, too. The carpet and the counters. It's only the two of them, only the two of them, only ever the two of them in that world. And where it turns hazy. Almost unable to breathe, it's too close to too many too well-known dreams she's had.

Except it feels more real than that. Like nothing else ever was.

Hands that don't touch her like she precious and delicate, but like she's a storm. To be challenged, fought, met, chased, embraced. A searing kiss, fierce and breathless, an attack on the edge of control, while the backs of her shoulders as hitting a wall, and her fingers pushing into the shortest strands of hair, grabbing the back of someone's head, pulling them even closer still, and all of it is cut through with words she just can't hear.

Except she knows there's something.
She's straining towards it—every nerve.

A rumble on the cut of sharp teeth and sharper gasps,
but she can't quite make out the words, pressed into her skin.

Even as it bubbles at the edge of her thoughts, her body goes rigid when Luther's demand of her name suddenly imprinted over everything in her vision. It makes her cringe back. Gives her back the feeling of impossible tension of her fisted hands. Pushes herself through pain and overwhelming orientation.

Still standing

Sometimes she's still too much her father's daughter. She hates him for it. But she thinks it when those are the first words she sends. Not even about whether she's here, whether she's okay. That she's still standing. Hadn't fallen (even if she hasn't let go of the chair yet). Ready, if she has to be. Needs to be. Is. It throws another shade of sharpness of the galloping speed of her heartbeat (the strange twisted hot-cold confusion of her skin).

What the hell was that?

It looks like it's everyone over here, as far as I can see.

Where are you?

[obediences]

Coming

And they do have Reginald to thank for this. For the way they don't hesitate; for the way that even now, years gone from the Academy normal, a crisis still feels like their element. It's what they were born for, bought for, trained for. Sharp weapons honed until they wouldn't flinch when the world goes to hell around them.

And Luther's bulling his way through the crowd, unheeding for once of who he might accidentally knock aside or elbow out of the way, as he lumbers straight towards where he saw her last. The photo ops. The chairs, the rope barriers, the lines of people.

(Still remembering those disorienting flashes. Those visions. Those visions.)

He spots her, then, with her usual pair of assistants hovering around her, chaos all around them too, and Luther just tosses the cordon aside. Metal goes flying. He's in the meet-and-greet area now, drinking up the sight of her, his panic receding slightly now that Allison's in front of him again. Now that he knows she's alive, and okay, and still standing.

"I don't know what the hell is happening," he admits, straight off, but he's looking at the tumult around them. Normally, he'd want to jump them both into the fray, defend people, fight back the threat. But it doesn't look like there's even anything to fight.

"I— I think we—" He's about to issue an order, the crisp snap of a command, but he's grinding unexpectedly to a halt instead. All his ideas blank, without an enemy to punch in the jaw. (And those memories, churning up a storm. Claire. Claire, laughing. The moon. The loneliness, the hallucinations, his mind coming apart at the goddamn seams after four years of madness-inducing isolation. Claire hiding in the sofa. Allison. Allison. His hands sliding up the line of someone's thighs and under a skirt and he can't quite— see their face—)

He shakes his head, as if to clear himself of the distraction.

"I think we need to leave."

[numberthree]

She can see Luther before he's even near her before his expression changed, and he spots her as well. He's head and shoulders above this crowd, like every other, and impossible to miss. A mountain moving in her direction, and somehow, just the sight of it, him, is steadying. Like the ground feels more solid under her.

There's no flinch even as her aide's shriek when the cordon's go flying. Not a single tremble. She's never been afraid of Luther. Never feared that he would intentionally hurt her. She stands a little taller, a little more sure, even as her eyes keep scanning everyone trying to get up, helping those around them back up. Even as she looks back and what she hears isn't his the words, his mouth moves to make, even as she can see them more than hear them.

("Allison."

That voice. Where others would say it was blank, she can hear the plea.
She can, watching, outside of herself, as she moves to let him pass.
With that sigh that sounds like inconvenience, and acceptance.

On the moon. She can't see everything. But cramped. So, so small.)


She was never there, and yet that thought suddenly jerks another.


(I wish I'd been there with you.

You were.)


She finds herself only half-hearing the words Luther is trying to find, eyes searching his face, the familiar long hung shadows that don't leave him, that weren't there when she left him (when he chose not to come). Weren't there on endless, broad, beaming broadcasts of Space Boy's Grand Posting to protect the Earth from the moon.

All that inky blackness, bleeding, bleeding, bleeding from the sky. Everywhere.
But everything she'd seen of Claire, that was real. Those were memories.


Did that mean? Had he? Had it?



Was it so much worse than he'd ever been willing even to imply?

(Even worse;

Had he tried to tell her from the beginning?
Within days of getting back to Earth?

Had she just not been listening?)


There was a confused nod. Missing whatever else he must have said, staring up at him in, in, she didn't even know. Which made her look down, to a side, back. I need to change, then.

Presentation pieces were rarely ever hers, and they were rarely let out of the sight of people who feared having to pay the exorbitant prices if anything happened to happen to this one of a kind, top-end designer display piece.

[obediences]

"Okay. Let's move."

He wasn't as familiar with the rules and restrictions of Allison's modeling work, but he rolled with it as soon as she said it: following where she pointed and led, waving off the paranoid aides as the Hargreeves moved away from the chaos. It was hard for Allison to move and fight in that getup, so it made sense by his own rubric and rationale, too.

Not that there was anything to battle yet— there weren't any fights breaking out, just people reeling from what seemed like telepathic assault.

"Reminds me of that psychic squid attack," Luther says distantly, thoughtfully, casting his mind back to one of hundreds of missions back home, as they hustle into the expo room set aside for the modeling agency. It's empty now, but there's still clothing scattered around (for both men and women), racks of coats, makeup tables, abandoned cameras. A few privacy screens set up. And Luther turns on his heel, dutifully turns his gaze away from her and back to the door like a watchful guard dog, while Allison starts trying to extricate herself from the ensemble.

He should be used to that rustle of clothing. They'd all had to change around each other before, with similar brisk efficiency, a quick wardrobe change to their field gear.

He isn't used to it anymore, though. It's been so many years. So his ears start heating in something of a blush, even as he stares fixedly at the closed door.

[numberthree]

She's done this enough times across enough years that she knows how to be as careful as she needs to be even with dealing with expediency. As well as without the aides. Most of the time. Which she will. Right now, again. Because that's a thought process, she's not even going to let open a door. She'll manage. She always has. She always does.

Doesn't even look over to where Luther is.
Not even the direction of him through the screen.

Not when her skin prickles, her pulse rattling, at the release of zippers and pins, last-minute stitching done by aides who knew how to make it look like a dress was a glove, created as though born for her alone. It's too weird. Even when she's been in these circumstances with hundreds of people on stages, on sets, in wings, in changing rooms over the last decade.

It's not the same. It never could be.

She tries not to think about it when the cold air is against more of her skin than not. Straps on hangers. Shoes on a chair. This happens every night, every morning. Just with more walls and doors between. This used to happen daily when they all had costumes and uniforms to switch between. It's an emergency. Because of what -

Her pants are almost done up, dress hanging on the wall, when she pauses. Remembering again. Her name. Her name in the silence. That wasn't silence. Because it had been her voice. And if she could stop herself from letting a word out when she first saw him, the eerie pure silence of the rooms, with only the murmurs of the chaos outside their walls, she can't this time.

Luther?

[obediences]

Still facing the exit, Luther's focus slides to the corner of his vision, to the familiar pop-up of her message — always an inadequate substitute for the actual warm sound of her voice, and it feels even more galling now, when he's still reeling from the memory of it, Allison's actual laughter and voice and words in three different permutations, and it feels like it was only a few minutes ago. It's a pale substitute, as ever, but her messages are always permanently tagged as high-priority, and they surface above anything else that might be coming in via the network.

"Yeah?" he asks the door.

[numberthree]

It takes a little more care to pull her shirt over her head, without messing up her hair and without letting it brush across her face. She does not need to deal with her hair or makeup. That could come a lot later.

His voice, when it fills the space again, is still the at-attention of a dangerous, uncertain situation. But it is, also, nothing near the expectation of knowing what she has in mind. She knows that. Because it's not starched tight as it could be. She doesn't even know if she should, especially when they don't know yet.

What's happening, whether this is about to get worse.

She digs a foot into one boot and zips it up her inner calf over her pants.

When that thing hit, did you see anything?

There'd have been a pause right in the middle of those last four words if it was out loud. More prevent, more indicative probably of her purposes, but there are no pauses in writing. Only in the second between the second and the third word. In bulling forward. In trying not too loudly to hate that there isn't another way. She can't be quiet. There is no gentleness, no emotion in those unchanging typed letters.

[obediences]

If it's at all possible, he goes even more still than he already was. Frozen, carved motionless like a statue, chin rigid as he keeps his gaze riveted to the door. He tells himself it's because he's watching for any external threats or anyone else come barging in, but he knows it's because he can't stand to look at her or meet her eye just now.

Luther hadn't known for sure. He'd seen things, visions that had the touch of veracity and real lived memory to them, details about Allison's everyday life that he wouldn't even have known to make up, but he hadn't known if Allison had also seen—

"I, uh. Yeah," he says, his voice stuttering partway through. His skin suddenly feels like it's burning, prickling with pins and needles. Self-conscious.

"A few things. I wasn't sure if... I saw the moon. Claire. The City."

He keeps it as brief as possible, sharply and curtly biting off his words, not explaining further.

[numberthree]

It's not that she wouldn't have shared the good parts of raising Claire with him if she could. Maybe slower. Maybe not at all. It's hard to list things like that. That are so strangely normal and yet not normal, not like anything they grew up. Everything that it still feels like she's lost the right to even reach back into her mind and touch, lest she find a way to sully and break that, too.

And. Well.

It was still uncomfortable, felt almost incompatible, putting thoughts about Luther and Patrick in the same place. Especially now. Whatever system she'd had to deal with it in her marriage, with Luther long gone and Patrick right there -- someone who had loved her, chosen her, and in the end, the same, left her -- it wasn't the something she could do with Luther in reverse. Too much bled through. Too much demanded, always with him, that she had to be real. She couldn't hide. Divide. Pretend. Lie.

At least she hadn't asked for that reason.
Even if it would get there sometime. Probably.

Her second boot zipped, she came back around the partition.

Done.

She only waited for the faintest flicker of movement across his muscles, though, before she sent the other sentence that had been sitting to the side. And maybe that was rude. Manipulative. Banking on the fact he'd be facing her, or halfway to it, and have to decide whether or not to when it arrived.

I wasn't on the moon.

It's not an accusation. It's not even a sentence truly, even for all that it ends in a period. Her expression is too uncertain. The edge of something concerned. Wanting to understand and aware already that she might not be allowed if she wasn't supposed to know. If he'd tried to tell her long ago and she'd just blown it off as politely politic in their first days.

[obediences]

It looks like a statement, but there's a question sitting underneath it instead, and he knows exactly what it is. What it's getting at. When Allison announces that she's done and Luther turns around, there's a strange, strained expression on his face. Stiff. Uncomfortable. He hadn't ever expected this to come up again, or come up properly. Had hoped they could just sweep it under the rug permanently.

But Allison is Allison, and if there's anybody he's honest with, it's her. Even before she got that lie detection power.

"You weren't, no," he says, and there's something so delicately careful about the way he says that. As if he's any more careless with his words, he might shatter and come apart entirely.

He'd almost told Vanya, of all people, about it. A long furious communicator message that went scrapped, unsent, deleted from his screen before he could let any of those words slip. He hasn't told anyone. Had wanted to bury this as deep and low and smothered as possible. For a fleeting while, he'd considered talking to Five about it, considering his brother must be one of the few people on this whole damned planet who knows what it's like (Delores)— But then Five was gone, whisked away from them again, and Luther hadn't had anyone to talk to.

When Allison looks at him, she can see right through him. The corner of Luther's mouth twitches; he's trying to smile reassuringly, but can't. There's nothing reassuring about this. And how in the hell does he explain it?

I lost it, for a while, up there.

The pause goes on too long, before he manages to scrape something together. "I... read about it afterwards," he says. Approaching the subject askance, from the side. "It's the lack of stimuli. The monotony. Your brain tries to fill it up with something. Visuals, sounds. They've done studies. It happens."

As if he can make this sound impersonal and scientific, parse it down to logic and rationale and research, as if it makes complete sense and as if it wasn't him. As if it's a piece of information, rather than something that he went through.

[numberthree]

Allison watches his face and the hold of his shoulders. The rigor of a near refusal to move, waiting to see what he'll decide. It's serious. There's no way it won't be. Because there's no way it makes sense, she was on the moon she's been never on, and what does that mean then. It's an easy register of more and more impossible things, like it being some kind of projection of all the recordings done fo her, or robot made to look like her, or.

But none of them stick.

(None are that silent, desperate plea under the use of her name on his lips.)

None of them are the blank way he's staring a little past her, or the way his expression changes just a little, in the smallest, almost unmissable ways. If she was anyone other than herself. But she isn't. And it's almost akin to the idea he'd rather he looking anywhere else, because the set of his shoulders, his jaw, and his tone could make this a careful, regimental report to their father. All facts. Even if they are sideways a straight forward answer.

Because looking at her -- the real her -- almost seems to make him flinch. Just barely.


You had hallucinations?

It's not a statement again, this time with proper punctuation, but like last time it's not the questions taking up residence in her chest suddenly. How long? How much? What did he end up seeing?



(Why was it her?

And how -- and why -- even all those years later? More than half a decade?
Poking fun at him, absently, without judgment, and bragging about her newest movie.)

For how long? When did it start?

[obediences]

Even in confiding this, what he hadn't mentioned was that every human experiment into social isolation that he'd read about, they'd terminated it early because the side-effects were too severe.

Luther at twenty-five hadn't known any of that when he'd accepted his mission and been sent up there. Not like he'd had any choice, even if he had known better or known enough to try refusing. Astronauts in other universes, they have other astronauts in the space stations to keep them company. To talk to. Scientific experiments to run, to keep themselves busy. He hadn't had any of that.

He's recoiling from digging any deeper into this, she can see his hesitation dragging in every word, but he says, slowly like it's being wrenched out of him, "Yeah. Started... maybe a year in, the first time? It wasn't all the time."

Then it eventually became more often. More common, as his radio calls from home became more infrequent. Like a steep graph correlating the two.

"Was more frequent towards the end. I got... I was bored."

Bored. As if it was that simple, or that innocent. That one word contains multitudes: the endless endless hours and dark sunless weeks, his appearance run ragged, and even the things she hadn't seen, the source of some of his new scars.

He's now thanking the universe that she hadn't seen that part. Even this is bad enough, his walls crumbled down, bared to view.

[numberthree]

Bored is the wrong word. Bored is a lie, but Allison doesn't think it's one on purpose. It's probably not even a wrong description for the time in question. But like his earlier answer, it's skewed sideways, rather than taking this head-on. It slides from being ruthlessly honest. About the moon. About him. About their Father.

Every muscle in Luther's body reads that he'd rather be anywhere other than right now, and in that Allison's shivers on the edge of questioning whether she should stop, but he keeps answering, too. He doesn't say it the way she would, but she doesn't hold that against him. He never did. Maybe never would. Their father was an asshole, unquestionably. Who'd sent him almost to his death, alone. Barely made sure he didn't die. And then sent him to, and left him, on the moon. Abandoned. Ignored. Given him a mission that hadn't even mattered.

And it had what? Slowly driven him mad? For three years?
And he hadn't bothered to even check on him, for documented problems?

(And she just hadn't noticed at all when she saw him in the house? She'd thought he seemed fine, if distant? Still himself. And if distant, they had their owns reasons for that, too, which had gummed everything up right along with it?)

She wants to ask more, specifically, about her, why her, why then, but she knows this is the wrong place, the wrong time. She can't even be arrogant about it still being her. She hates their father too much. Everything he put Luther through, the stack of which never seems to stop growing. It fills her blood, rushed in her ears, with no one to hurt for these suns, and pushes out any part of her that gives too much of a damn about whether she mattered at all the decade after she left.


She chooses, instead, something else. Just as troubling. As confusing originally.
It was so dark. It never looked that dark in the documentaries.

She should have known better.

You never can believe what people put on the screen entirely.

[obediences]

This part is safer ground. A little bit easier to talk about, but barely. Luther exhales and nods, just the smallest upwards tip of his chin. "Yeah. It looks better in the movies when you can see all of the Earth and the stars behind it, but that doesn't happen. Planet's too bright. It's like light pollution when you're in a city. It's two weeks of the Earth but no stars, then two weeks of stars but no other light. When you're on the dark side of the moon."

If he can keep talking about it like flat description, just telling her what looked like up there, maybe his voice won't quaver.

As kneejerk reflex, he almost tacks on a Don't worry about it, I'm fine, but her power makes it impossible. She'd hear the lie immediately.

[numberthree]

When do we stop lying to each other, she wondered. When do we stop having to strip out skin off admitting things no one was supposed to know. Except that's so incredibly in the black of pot kettle it'd make the dark of space seem light.

No. No, that's too flippant right now.
That darkness almost swallowed Luther.

She has no right.



But it didn't. It didn't swallow him hole. He's still here. With her. Figuring out this place. It's been a year. But none of it feels like a year. That memory, like all the ones from The City, feels like it was only second ago. Fresh. Fully detailed. It's almost physically painful how much she wants to reach a hand out and lay it on his arm.

Just remind herself. It's been all this time.
None of them are fine, but they are here. Together.

Allison shook her head, and said the only true thing she had.
He'd shown her the moon and laughed at her awe. Only weeks after this.


I don't understand how you could love any of it still.

She hated all of it. She hated every bit of learning how terrible every moment of his being on the moon for four fucking years only seemed to get worse and worse and worse. Like some undending diatribe, constantly released sequel series, of the ways their father found to break one of the brightest dreams Luther'd had for their whole childhood.


I hate him.

No regret. No remorse.
The unfairness of him being dead.
Safe from anything he deserved now.

[obediences]

He fidgets then, a hand rubbing at the back of his neck. (And as always, the muscles still feel too thick and broad under his fingers, the sprawl of his neck and shoulders too wide, still not what he expects to feel even after so long.)

"I hate parts of it," Luther admits, and that's more than he's ever said to anyone else about it. All the times he's picked people's brains about space, absorbed Ashley or Shepard's stories about the world they'd come from, their society reaching out into the stars. "The quiet. The loneliness. Did you know that Aegis Force, they have a particular watch assignment on a satellite called Panoply Station— I can't do it. I've thought about what sort of work I'd be interested in with them and I already know I can't do that one."

His voice quavers, talking about it. Shit.

He forces it to even out, trying to make himself level again. "But other parts, it's still beautiful. The International Moon Base? It's so much bigger and better than that fucking tin can I was in."

Vitriol. Profanity on his lips, where it almost never sits.

"That base, here, is what it should've been like but wasn't. So I guess that's what I hang onto. Somewhere, people did it right."

Somewhere, maybe he could still do it. Pull together the scraps of that childhood dream and still accomplish it, instead of that oppressive four-year solitary confinement that almost broke him clean in two. Not at all the glamorous mission it'd looked on the news reels or the press releases. Not at all what he had been promised.

I hate him, she says, and Luther tries to dredge up some heat, some anger at their father to mirror hers, but mostly he just feels empty. Tired. Exhausted, at having been so clearly, viscerally reminded of what that imprisonment up there had felt like. Been like. Does he even hate Sir Reginald? It's hard to say. He'd been furious, then he'd defended the man after hearing he'd killed himself to bring them all together, then he'd been furious again, then he'd wished his father was here to tell him what to do, then he'd been furious again. The emotions came and went in ebbing, unpredictable waves.

It would be so much easier if he could just hate him, and nothing else.

[numberthree]

There's a flicker of movement from her brows when Luther swears because Luther never does. Because it's different when people who usually do and people who never do choose to use those words to describe something. Luther is one of those, and she only barely manages not to press her lips. She wished something substantial, and evil had attacked this place, so she had something to beat this out on.

She still doesn't love the idea of Aegis, but any argument she had of a better option vanished weeks ago now, and now it may be the thing Luther needs to keep himself together. Of the two of them, she's the one better at being alone. Being without a team. But, even that's a partial lie, because she knows that she's only partly-okay with it on the grounds that no matter how far he goes with it, he's not leaving her to do it.

Which is selfish. It feels stunningly selfish and weak in comparison to all this.
(Was there ever a day in her life that her greatest weakness wouldn't be him, or about him?)

There's a nod as she thinks about his words, and tries to think of anything else to say. Anything hopeful. Anything helpful. About their moon, and its future. If it wasn't ever in a million pieces burning up the whole planet. Except she can't reach it. There's anger burning at the edges of everything, and a want to just keep all of this from happening again. However she can. To undo what she can't undo.

What she would have burned the world to stop happening, if she'd just known.

There aren't words, though.

The insane part is, she thinks she'd be ranting, or snippy if she had her voice. She thinks she'd just be letting things fall out everywhere. But trying to put words together into full sentences in her head, for her keyboard, just feels like it's a drone of angry buzzing she can't build correctly into the only words she has right now.

[obediences]

His skin feels like it's itching again, his whole body burning up under Allison's scrutiny. (And for once, it's not the body itself: it's the knowledge she has behind her eyes, the new awareness and understanding when she looks at him.)

Silence with Allison is a strange thing, these days. Because she's always silent, but there also aren't the usual cues that someone's still about to talk. No clearing of the throat, no mouth opening and closing or hesitating. Just that half-distracted, abstracted look on her face sometimes when she's looking into space and formulating her words, pinning them down in the text box.

He doesn't think she's doing that right now. Which means this is Luther's first potential parachute out of this entire conversation, and so when the stricken silence stretches on a bit too long, he takes his own swing, even if it's just slamming from his wounds to hers, to all the raw subjects they so rarely touch:

"I saw Claire. Your memories, if the... others were anything to go by. You looked... you looked happy."

[numberthree]

Allison's eyes blink, refocus on him from the screen in her vision, but there's nothing like surprise in it. She doesn't have the words, and she isn't surprised he deviated at the first chance that she didn't. And, she knew that would come up as well, didn't she?

Allison's expression shifts in its own subtler way, but it's more sad than angry. Or even hurt. It's both hard to look back at them, and not hard at all. She doesn't know why these and not some others, how they were picked. By whom. For what purpose. Her heart feels more burdensome for shifting that way. The residual, unusable anger, lighting along the lines of someone feeling they could just muck in her head, with her daughter.

Yeah.

They weren't all bad days.