numberthree | Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

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."

Ben

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

"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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

For all that it wasn't a careful move, Allison didn't try to grip the jacket of the arm under her fingers when Luther's settled on hers. When he could just as easily pull her away, hold her away, like all the force in her was less than a blind, newborn kitten, but he doesn't. His hand settles against the back of hers, warm and large, even through the thin cloth, and then it squeezed.

And somehow -- some ways she can't even explain -- it's the breath she pulls in her nose, surprise cut with relief, cut with the warmth and pressure on her hand that almost makes her want to tear up suddenly. Out of nowhere. Because she doesn't want him to feel he has to do, go through, even just live with these things in his head, alone anymore. That he isn't alone. He'll never be alone, not like that, ever again.

Aren't we always?

If the words seem light, her expression isn't. Doesn't change in the slightest. They are who they are. Who they've always been. Who they trained to be deeper than any thought, choice, breath. They don't know how to stay down, and they don't know how to go any direction but forward. Even when every part of them is still cut open and bleeding and everything refused to go right.

It's not a joke.

(It might be the most epic,
least funny, joke of two universes.)

Allison let her hand slide, then. Just a little, to tug him at his jacket, give him a direction to go in as much as a reprieve that he didn't have to keep standing in this second any longer than he still had chosen to (for her?). C'mon. Let's go home.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

maybeee end or yours to wrap? ♥

no subject