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

code credit

Comments

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.