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]

"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.

[numberthree]

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.