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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[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.

[obediences]

"Yeah. " Because before now, thanks to the vagaries and illogical magic of this place, he'd only ever seen the worst day. The day. The absolute heart-crushing, soul-wrenching nadir of Allison's tenure as a mother.

"It was... nice, seeing those memories," Luther says, and his words are so, so delicate and careful, as he trips over this conversation, trying to find the right way to talk about it without seeming like he's minimising it. But it is important. His memories had been a jagged wound, a still-healing scar, but hers this time had skewed unexpectedly, jarringly positive. A warmth in those memories that ached for how bittersweet it was.

It went without saying, but he said it anyway: "I'd never gotten to meet her, so it— this almost felt like I did."

(And there's that deep, even more bittersweet awareness twisting sharp in his chest: this was his only opportunity to see this version of Claire. To know her.
Unless they manage to go back in time, and fix it.)

[numberthree]

Luther is trying to be gentle, and she started this with pricking the skin of what it stole from him, so she opened herself up to this. He's trying, and she knows it, but it doesn't make it any easier to fail being able to hold his gaze. The press of her lips before she can even find anything like words.

Her greatest joys have only ever later become the glaring, gaping holes in her.
Luther. Patrick. Claire. Her voice. Vanya. All of their family.

There's a breath in her nose as she makes herself shape up again, glance back toward him. She's selfish and self-centered. The loss of Claire is her fault, and what happened to Luther was done to him. They are two very different things. She doesn't deserve to have her failing to realize what good in her life until it was gone, put on that same shelf.

We'll just have to get out of here so you still can.

Allison doesn't know how much she believes in that anymore. They've been here for over a year. Or maybe it's that she believes it even more now. Because the rest of their family have been taken away from this place finally. But she does know the more significant thing than it, if not the how to get there.

Claire would adore him. Claire already adored Luther.
He was the hero of all her begged for Umbrella Academy stories.

[obediences]

They should probably be getting out of here, this room, too — back into the saddle and the fray, out to the crisis, out of this expo center — but Luther just can't bring himself to push them out of this dressing room yet. Not like this. Not just yet, with all that flurry of memories still sitting between them.

His mouth opens; his voice catches, trying to figure out how to ask about the third thing, before his courage fails him and he just clams up instead. Those other memories. The ones that are even blurrier, not as crystal-clear as the other images (by virtue of coming to them via another universe entirely), and yet. And yet.

In the end, all Luther says is, "Yeah," and it sounds awful and inadequate even to him. But it's still a promise, and his gaze has softened. They're often still so secretive, even with each other; not duplicitous, exactly, but guarded. Old habits are hard to break. They'd been trained to never show weakness. Even with each other.

Allison's just always been the eternal exception, for every single rule Luther's had written for him or tried to write for himself.

"I didn't, uh." He still can't find the right words, but if he doesn't say this now, his nerve will leave him entirely and he'll slam the door shut on this entire subject and likely never let it come up again. "I didn't... go insane or anything, up there. I always knew, rationally, that you weren't there. But in the end, it was just... easier. To let it happen."

To cut through the loneliness. To avoid losing your mind. You did what you had to.
(Five would probably understand, if Luther ever got a chance again to ask him about it.)

[numberthree]

If anything, since coming here, they've adjusted the awkward muddle they make of conversations sometimes. The ones about Claire. About their Father. About Vanya. About, really, everything since she left and came back. They're better than they were, but it doesn't mean they are anywhere quiet near good.

Not when it takes being psychically attacked to share things like these.

Allison isn't expecting the single word, that stutters into two, and then roles out into a direction she hadn't expected, but she should have. She should have seen these words coming. Having to be said. By the time he froze. Or maybe when he'd started explaining. But even as he roles into it, she knows better.

It's the one thing she knows most of all.
And maybe she needs to know it so he can, too.

I know.

She can't speak it as fast as she thinks it, but it's only a few seconds before it flies through the air, the network, between them. Because it's not so much about the details, even when Luther is all reason and explanations. He always has been. Cold, hard, firm, logic. A cover over the emotions everywhere else. Especially now. Especially during all the months in this place.

I know you weren't crazy when we all met up for the funeral, and you'd only just come down. He was distant and sad, and angry, in many turns. But not crazy (and she'd seen hundreds of versions of crazy in L.A.)

If there was any moment she'd ever questioned that possibility, it wasn't that first day. It was the one she woke up on the infirmary table and found Vanya with them in the vault. Every time he refused to listen to her and lied to her. But he wasn't crazy, then, either. He'd been scared of how close she'd come to dying, and he'd made a lot of bad choices because of it.

She's not sure she even thinks about it before she does it; aside from that, the room is empty, and she does know, she does. She reached out and laid a hand on his jacketed arm and just looked up at him. Resiting the urge to look away and type it again. That she knew. There wasn't even a shred of doubt. She knew, she knew, she knew. Who he was. The only place she ever felt she belonged. As deep down as anything in her went.

If there was anyone who she knew most in this world, for whatever that said about her, it was him. She knew him, and there was nothing she could be shown that could horrify or frighten or surprise her away.

maybeee end or yours to wrap? ♥

[obediences]

It had seemed crucially, crucially important to have her know that, understand that, and validate it. The fact that Luther hadn't lost it. He was fine, he was just as functional as he'd ever been—

(He wasn't, really, but he kept patching it up until those fractures became less and less visible over time.)

Usually he's the one steering their contact, Allison purposefully leaving it to him to dictate how comfortable he is or isn't with touch. But now she reaches out and she touches him and he doesn't actually pull himself away. Luther just feels that distant pressure of her hand on his arm, and he reaches up, rests his hand gently over hers, squeezes once.

I think maybe you're the only person who really knows who I am and still likes me anyway; and really, he could have said those same words right back at her. Luther's a mess. He's a goddamn mess and he feels such, such a far cry from the person she'd once known, and yet he's slowly, ever so slowly starting to accept that maybe she, too, likes him anyway.

He's not really sure what there is left to say, or how to bridge this gap and everything sitting there, so he just settles for: "We'll be alright."

They aren't yet. But they will be.