numberthree | Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

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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

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The mission, this little quest, is a distraction, and he's pleased to see that it's working, based on Allison's humour creeping out from that initial walled-off misery.

"God, it would be so embarrassing," he agrees. "After everything we've been through, The Rumor is finally taken out by a rock on a trail? Klaus would never let you hear the end of it."

They sometimes still talk about their siblings as if they're still around, as if they're just— temporarily misplaced, waylaid, and they'll be back eventually. Because believing otherwise is unacceptable. Sometimes you just hang onto that dumb hope.

He picks his way down the path, occasionally stepping over one of said rocks or a tree root. Eventually their surroundings start opening up, though: fewer trees, wider plains, wide open spaces. Not as desolate and empty as his vistas on the moon; even in the pitch-darkness they can tell that there's still flowers, growing bushes, the distant sound of insects and saw-creak of cicadas.

"Did you ever do any hiking? Before?" Luther asks, and it's not actually small-talk anymore, more a point of genuine curiosity. He's always a little curious about her life after the Academy and before her return; her foray into the real world, such as it was. Did people in LA hike? He doesn't even know. (Luther obviously never got to.)

Allison missed even him. Klaus, being Klaus, always refusing to take responsibility, and ending up in the hospital with all the regularity of home. Aggravating in person, but a notched empty hole inside her in absence. But he, and the others, she could will herself to believe they were somewhere. Having come here, and gone, and come again, in Five and Vanya's cases.

But Claire was undoubtedly last on the planet where the moon crashed into it.
The one that Five all too helpful pointed out would vaporize in two seconds.

Definitely off the list.

Claire was. Vaporized. That never got easier to think. And before she'd even gotten the chance to finish her mandatory therapy and see her again. Trying to distract herself from the darkness in her head that was always worse than the one outside of it, she tried to take not of the overgrowth around them. To picture it bright green with the sunlight.

If I didn't know you better, I could assume you were aimed at the same thing. Out in the middle of nowhere. Without a single soul around. Under the cover of the night. No promise of safety.

Except the last is the biggest teased lie of all those words. She'd never not felt safe with Luther. Even when she was utterly pissed at him over Dad, or Vanya, or when he was keeping things from her last year, last week, it was never herself she felt in jeopardy from or by him. Not once. Not even when he'd only just been learning to control himself and he slipped up so many accidental times before gaining that required control more than any of the rest of them. Certainly more than her.

His question is easy and she's shaking her head even before it becomes typed words.

Not really. Nothing like the things we did before.
Not while settling into LA, and definitely not once Claire was born.

He snorts, just this small sound of amusement as he reads her message (careful not to get too distracted by that pop-up and go tumbling himself, like a giant redwood crashing to the undergrowth). "Takes too long. It's more likely me and Diego will finally snap one day and accidentally kill each other in a fight. No premeditation."

Only the Academy, really, could sound so nostalgic and fond even while joking about killing each other. It's a morbid streak that runs through all of them, even the family members who aren't dead or who don't talk to ghosts. And it feels safer to joke even about the ones who are gone; the missing Diego is less raw than the dead Claire.

Finally, they've reached a flat enough plain that Luther deems acceptable, or good enough, and so he comes to a halt. The stars really are brilliant above them: clear skies (they were lucky with the weather report) and a pitch-black expanse with sharp glittering lights, so so many more of them than they can usually see from their Nonah suburban neighbourhood. Luther rummages around in his backpack and finally pulls out—

A picnic blanket, which he unfurls and tosses down on the ground, and a large thermos of hot cocoa which he hands over to Allison. He looks down at his handiwork, then he tilts his head back to look up at the sky. It takes a little while, and he's starting to worry that the timing's not going to work out at all or maybe they're not visible from here, or...

But then, finally, there's one. A flash of light shooting across the black sky, fleeting and there-and-gone. There'll be more later. He breathes out in relief; looks over to meet Allison's eye as best he can, their faces nothing more than outlines in the darkness.

"Tada," he says. "The Southern Delta Aquariids are visible from mid-July to mid-August, and they just started yesterday." A crinkle in his cheek that might be a dimple. "It's a meteor shower. Thought you might like to see it, too."

Allison, hands unexpectedly full with the flashlight and suddenly now a large thermos, was still confused at first as Luther suddenly shook out and lay down a blanket, before staring upward at the sky. All serious stillness while a knot was starting to shape itself in her throat. Creeping toward her as she watched Luther look up, and had to follow his gaze.

The darkness and its million dots of light. That always made her think of him. Even now with him, standing feet from her, making her look over again. They had for years. The reminder of all his childhood fascinations with space, and then knowing he was somewhere up there.

She missed whatever he sees, but not the way his shoulders relax. Before his silence suddenly broke a tremorous sound and then a sudden gush of words revealing his secret plan, the excitement of what it was, the love for the sky he never lost, all laid out now that they were here, and it was ...

Sweet.
Allison didn't have another word for it. Anywhere in her head. Anywhere in her heart. Anyone else would have collected her into a car and taken her out for drinks, and maybe let her complain or eat her weight in appetizers or trash talk whatever she could get her fingers in to distract her. Anyone else might have just left well enough alone. And Luther did this.

Brought her out into the middle of nowhere.
Away from the whole of this world.
To watch to stars fall.
With him.

It's an unexpected plunge of emotion that has her almost blinking, trying to find her footing inside her head as everything washes out entirely staring at him through the darkness. Leaves her reeling to find anything that isn't the ache spreading through her chest, filling up her throat. That would absolutely have strangled any words if she could speak.

Edited 2020-07-28 23:33 (UTC)

It's a gift. It's a lonely sight, one that he'd grown long-since accustomed to watching, and yet never lost his awe of it — and this time, he gets to share it with her. Watching shooting stars with Shepard hadn't been quite the same, and even that man was gone now, too.

Luther's distracted, watching a few more of them blinking in and out of view above them. And then, as the silence stretches on — 'silence', as it were, without even the text to note her speech — he blinks, trying to clear his vision, as if the notification might have come in and he'd missed it. A crease of worry starts to furrow his brow.

"Is it— okay," Luther says, halting his way through the sentence. Is this okay. Is this alright. Do you like it. Because the thought is starting to occur to him that maybe Allison Hargreeves didn't want to hike into the middle of goddamned nowhere to sit on the ground on a cold night on the plains.

"I know it's, uh, a lot of hassle to drag you all the way out here to the middle of nowhere," he starts again, his words starting to overflow in a nervous ramble. "And there was another viewing party arranged outside Heropa yesterday, that's how I found out about it, but I didn't want to go with a whole bunch of strangers, and I thought it might be nice for tonight, with just you—"

Allison will never understand. How anyone could not love Luther. How their father did what he did. How Luther could even use that word to joke about how he felt about himself. Like no one in the world could truly see him. The way she did. Sweet, and kind, and selfless. Always wanting to make things better. Sharing the things he loved that brought him peace.

Impossibly all of those things, still, even after all those years.

All the things she'd loved before she even knew it was love, and long before she came to any terms with the fact there was no unloving him. This impossible man. Standing there, suddenly gusting out more words, and making Allison realize as they kept falling out, a ramble of justification that edges more into something like desperation, maybe even headed toward some panic, rather than his earlier excitement, she realized she hadn't said anything.

Not that she could have said any of what she had thought.

It's perfect. Really.

It's so Luther, and no one else. Which is about the time she stops looking at him like she's somehow going to bore a hole through him just by being incapable of looking away, breathing, existing without every cell in her body being certain of what it always had about him. Her cheeks annoyingly warm as she was deeply grateful for the dark. Allison looked down at her hand and lifted the thermos.

And this is?

He breathes it out like another palpable ripple of relief, his shoulders loosening. "Hot chocolate. The lid is a big cup, I was thinking you can pour yourself a cup and we can swap back and forth."

And he moves over towards the blanket and folds himself down onto it, a little ungainly and clumsy, before managing to settle in a spot where he's seated comfortably, his heavy shoulders slouched in that oversized jacket (still just a little too large for him, even a year later). And there is something so childishly simple about it all: the checkered plaid, the cocoa, the flashlights, the picnic (that they never got to have). It's not a fancy, expensive night out on the town, a typical date. It's like a pair of thirteen-year-olds heading out to marvel at something that costs nothing, something that needs just a blanket and company.

It is so very them.

The longer it sinks in the better it gets, honestly. Letting him go about sitting down first, and taking a seat in the corner next to where he'd chosen. Grateful for the fact there won't be any random imPort fans randomly popping up to pepper them with questions, asking for photos, signatures, or even people she has to bear through for orders.

No one else do deal with trying not to be annoyed or impatient with, while Luther was the one person who bore her temper, or even her being loudly angry or emotional near him, with a kind of grace that was just as improbably found with no one else. She didn't have to worry about trying to seem happy and bright. About being anything but herself.

Just her, and Luther, a bottle of hot chocolate --

Of course, it is.

-- and a sky full of stars. It's so simple for how surprisingly happy it makes her feel. It doesn't wash away the sadness and anger in her bones, but somehow, in way she can't explain, never could have even drawn into an idea like this, it feels like having a warm blanket tucked around her suddenly. When she would have said an hour ago that whole concept was impossible.

One of her hands freed by being able to set things down, she waved at the backpack.

No more surprises in your bag of magic tricks? No weapons?
I definitely remember you being better prepared the last time I invited you to a picnic.

It doesn't take long for the reference to land, for him to quickly recall what she's talking about, and for him to laugh. (There are so few memories, pressed tight within those bustling and busy years of the Academy compared to the blank canvas that came after. Of course he's gone over them often, over and over like running his hands over a familiar scar. Of course he remembers.)

"The axe is back in the car," Luther says, jokes, leaning back on his hands on the blanket and craning his head again to look up. "Just in case."

It's so many years overdue. What is it now— fifteen or so? Since the brakes had come to a screeching halt on that picnic, Reginald forcibly slamming the door shut on it both literally and metaphorically.

No one here to stop them now, though.

"Jokes aside, I've got bug spray and some chocolate chip cookies and chips in the bag, if you get peckish."

It's quiet out here — no clamouring of fans, no flashing of bulbs and clicking of camera shutters. It's peaceful.

Allison found herself caught up in the laugh that her words earned, grinning widely herself and giving a laugh, even if it was a hollower, quiet approximation of a sound. When she's glad he does remember it, even if it does seem so long ago.

The kind of long ago where she couldn't even imagine how much her younger self would disbelieve her. If she said it was only a few years until they'd part ways. That it would be nearly another half of their lives before something brought them back together. That she'd become famous, married, and have a child before that.

And it would more than not have happened in an alternative universe,
only after they'd actually failed to save the earth and several of their own.

It was like something out of Luther's books.

Allison pressed her lips trying not to smile as he listed what it really was. Cookies, chips, hot chocolate, bug spray, and a big open sky of stars. Somehow it ironically did feel like it dovetailed well into stolen sodas, a cleverly absconded with record player, a secret gift, and all the time she'd put into designing that little fort.

I definitely deserve a cookie for making it out here without badgering your surprise out of you first.

Even for the phrasing, and the request, she still looks up at the sky more than Luther after it sends. Catching her first stars that streaked across the brilliantly lit inky sky over them. Like they might be, for just a little while, the only two people in existence under the sky.

"If there's anyone who could've gotten it out of me, it's you."

There's something else lying under those words, some added significance. Luther doesn't lie to her anymore, but he does omit, or avoid bringing up subjects in the first place — earlier in this month being a key example — but the moment she'd hit on it, Allison had dragged the whole truth and full details tumbling from his lips. The moment she dislodged a pebble, it had turned into an avalanche quick enough. They've always been that way.

They fall back into another contented silence for a while, watching the streaks of light. It's scattershot; occasionally they come in a flurry, other times there's nothing for a while.

"You only stood a chance of seeing things like this two weeks out of every four," he says after a moment. "On the moon, I mean. But god, what a view." A pause, then: "But I prefer it here with you."

It went without saying. Of course he'd take her over that sanity-splintering loneliness. But it's more than that, too: take anyone in the universe and he'd choose to be with her instead. Offer him anything and he'd choose Allison, now, still, over and over and over, He'd chosen poorly the first time; Luther knew himself well enough now that he wouldn't make that mistake again.

She tries not to read too much into that. Fails probably more than succeeds, when her gaze skips from the stars to over him while he's talking, before lingering. Speculatively as the first glance of it brush away quickly enough out of habit. Out of tonight's circumstances. Out of. Well. Everything.

It's complicated. Everything about space -- and the moon -- was for Luther. The lie he'd so carefully and diligently done all of that work and made all of those sacrifices for. Those memories she'd gotten, of his hallucinations there. In that small place, barely fit for anyone to live a short time, no less a near half a decade.

Allison looked down, busying herself with opening the thermos, even as she was writing.

That's still quite a bit, isn't it?
Half a year of things like this.

Of the moon leaving him in darkness. Of the Earth rising over him, bright and blue and as far from her as the white, pale, quiet moon hung high in the sky had always been from her. She poured out the cup for herself, letting it balance on her knee briefly, before holding out the thermos for him. Briefly wondering how often this even happened here. Or at home.

Do they still look like this up there, or different?

Her knowledge of the moon still mostly circled what snatches she could remember of Luther's excitement over a decade ago more than facts, and beside it, the few facts in Claire's kids books which were so watered down for age content she knew they weren't wrong, but they weren't much help in knowing anything specific or scientific much either.

"Similar. But brighter, clearer — there's no atmosphere to interfere with the view, so they feel like they're so much closer to you. Right above you." Luther takes the thermos, and takes a sip straight from it while Allison nurses the cup. The cocoa was made from a powdered mix (the greatest chef, he still isn't), but at least he used real milk so it's rich.

The moon was complicated. The culmination of Luther's childhood dreams and the scene of his devastation, a pointless waste of four years, a lie. But it's still beautiful. That never changes. Like he'd told her a while ago: he can't fully hate it, not even now.

Claire, on the other hand, is painfully uncomplicated. He takes a deep breath. Considers the situation. He's managed to get Allison to talk about her sometimes, chipping away at it from oblique angles, getting the occasional harmless anecdote. Thanksgiving stories. Claire and the holidays. He's been successfully keeping them off the subject, purposefully not naming it for what it is, but—

"If you... ever want to talk about Claire, you know you can do that, right?" Luther says, delicately. Hating the fact that he's probably ruining the mood, but needing to address it anyway. He'd hate it even more if Allison felt like he was just ignoring it entirely, refusing to hear more about Claire, trying to sweep her existence under the rug.

"If it helps. If you want to remember. If you want to share some more good stories, at least until we can get back there and fix things." Spoken so plainly, as if it's a given that they'll do so.

"But if it makes it worse, then we can stay off it, too."

Allison studies the sky and its spray of racing stars, that aren't stars, as he speaks, glancing back now and then, but trying to imagine it. From the edges of his memories that weren't of this, and her own one day, here, up on the moon. Hypothetically, she could see it for herself. They could even be seeing this from up there. But it's not the same.

She wishes she was there, had been, and she wishes he was never there, wishes he'd left when he said he would, and she knows, with razor-edge shame, she'd never change the warped path her life had taken, leaving, Dad, The Academy, even him, because of the one thing she couldn't ever consider not happening: Claire.

She'd been made to give up Luther once already, but she couldn't even consider it with Claire. Not when they all took part in how the world ended, not when they'd survived, supposedly to stop it. Even if Allison had to agree to never see her again, but Claire'd be alive, happy, and whole somewhere, a full bright future ahead of her, Allison knew she'd take it at the cost of herself. In a heartbeat. This moment even.

It's almost like he's there in her thoughts, with her, and her guilt and her grief, when his words shift and softly, uncertainty, press down on the same place she'd gone. She kept going there with so many of her thoughts. She tried to think of even how to say anything. How did she pick a drop out a torrent, on a day where all it did was drown her harder.

He means well. Still. Surprising her.
Bringing he out here. Making her laugh.

But still not making her forget everything either.

Her gaze moved here and there, barely, in front of her, more out of consternation than any silence that ignored him. If there was someone who deserved any words she could put together, it was him, wasn't it? And hadn't she already spent the day just choosing not to say any of them to him? And he was still doing all of this for her?

Even phrasing it as only the traction that held them here until they could fix it. Would fix it. That thing she still held on to so fiercely it got under everything, in between her and everything here. Everything that wasn't Luther. And now, Five, again, too. Allison started writing even without any idea where to start.

It doesn't get easier.

I keep remembering it's not two years for her.
It's not even one. Since she's not --

It's just me. With these two years.
With all this time. Another life.

I wasn't supposed to ever have a life without her.

Reading that last sentence is like a jagged splinter in his heart, a sudden sharp twist in his gut. A bolt of pain as surely as if he's been stabbed. Allison's grief is still a grief that he can't touch, can't relate to, can't understand although he tries.

It's probably a blessing that they're seated on this blanket in pitch-darkness; their eyes adjusting enough to see each others' outlines, the faint movement of their faces under the stars and the moon, but they can't catch the details. It's a little piece of privacy.

"Yeah. I know. But at least... it means she doesn't have to miss you. She doesn't know that you're here, away from her. You're— I mean, you have to suffer, in knowing, but for her, when we fix it," there's that when again, "it'll be the blink of an eye. As if no time has passed. It'll just suddenly be right again."

There's the chance he's said the wrong thing, that he's shoved his foot in his mouth again (because really, there's nothing right to say, no way to properly scrub away that aching pain). But Luther reaches out, settles his hand over Allison's in the darkness, squeezes once. Small physical gestures like this still aren't common for them, he's only done it a few times, but the habit gets a little easier and easier each time.

He does it almost too well.

Vitriolic spite flaring in her too fast at the beginning of his words, before he's already named exactly what it is, why it happens, in the next ones. That desperate fear of eight months, that her daughter hadn't missed her magnified by years. Not because it was logical. Only because it was so terrible to be apart from her.

But the reminder, the logic, that it is only her.

She knows it and somehow she still needs to hear it, too. That Claire isn't somewhere, going through anything like this. That if Claire isn't missing her, she's, also, not not-missing her either. That even if she doesn't want Claire to be gone, she doesn't want any of those either. She'd rather be the only one who had to carry it. Even if she hates that she does have to carry it.

The hand that covers her is as much as a surprise as it isn't.

There's something almost predictable about it -- about Luther reaching out to touch her when she's like this, says anything like this, about this -- that she tries hard not to think about being predictable, because predictability is manipulatable and there are so many things she keeps trying not to be anymore. So many things she's been and never wants to be toward Luther.

(Her mind whispers, in regretful, unregretted, rage,

Promise me.)

I'll know.

She wasn't sure how she'd bear being away from Claire when it ended. (If.)

Edited 2020-07-29 19:04 (UTC)

"Yeah. You'll know, and you're gonna carry that weight." Luther's voice sounds regretful, almost apologetic, in how it's laying out this truth. This logical, sensible, rational truth. He always known the additional burdens he carried for that mantle of team leader, and she's shouldered hers from being a parent, and maybe some of the similarities are there after all.

"But you can do it. You shouldn't have to, and I wish you weren't. But I know you can. Until we get back."

Knowing the whims of this place, it's perhaps a baseless hope to keep hanging onto — they have no power to affect it, no way to make it happen — but it's all they've got.

She keeps right on surviving longer and longer without Claire than she ever thought possible. She wouldn't have held it together, even as much of a disgrace as she'd been, in that courtroom, if she'd known it would be years before she saw her daughter again.

Was there even a limit to what she would have been willing to do, if she'd known.

Maybe it was good she didn't. Which feels black to even think. Maybe she couldn't have survived it, then. Maybe she didn't want to know how much further she might have to do, might have to hold out, might not be able to survive that knowledge even now, as the days kept rolling on.

She wasn't Luther, or even Five.
She kept going because there was no other option.
Because she had to believe somehow, someway they'd get out. Back.

Allison watched a few more of the lights as they fell in a shower across the sky, wondering how it was that Luther had any of the faith in her he still did. The faith no one else, who knew so much less of her and yet more of the worst of her, did. They weren't wrong, and Luther's voice still held all of. That.

She picked something true, as true as supposing could be, but not as painful.

Claire would've loved this.

She'd make a wish on each one of them,
and never be able to keep them secret.

Another twinge in his chest at that. Something warm like a spreading furnace, radiating through his ribs, rising up into his throat. Allison had already told him that Claire knew all about him; Spaceboy was her favourite; he was her own personal superhero. Part of him had been overwhelmed, awestruck and beaming at the idea. The other part had panicked at the prospect of meeting her at the time, had backed away from it — terrified by the real world and the prospect of a niece he'd never met, with a pop culture-infused idea of what he'd be like and it was impossible to live up to that image, those standards. Children had no filter, and blurted out the truth. He'd pictured the girl's brow crinkling in the sort of youthful consternation that Allison had wielded once upon a time, the confusion, the words but that's not Spaceboy already on Claire's lips.

But now he'd take even that. Who gives a shit. The fact that she'd be there matters more.

So he feels that warmth, and this time, doesn't let it burn him.

"What are her hobbies? Like, what does she do for fun? I'm gonna guess it's not painting miniatures." Kids these days didn't do that sort of thing, did they? It was the sort of antiquated hobby he'd picked up from Reginald; Luther had unconsciously modeled himself after the man and his generation as best he could.

Allison lets herself imagine it briefly, taking the last sip of hot chocolate from her first cup. Claire, dissolved into giggling and that brighter than the sun little smile, pretending to whisper without lowering her voice or remembering to say it in someone's ear, revealing too happily, too quickly every little thing her heart wished for. All that tremulous joy and adoration she'd looked past too quickly so many times.

Her heart aches and twists at the picture of it. At the wish that she could just reach out and touch her daughter's cheek, her hair. Hear her laughter. Her voice. She'd never prized the last ones, the last dozen, hundred of those, the way she should have. The way she would even one now.

There's a glance to the side at Luther's voice asking questions that come almost from the far left field of her thoughts, though still have much to do with Luther. The twitch at the edge of her mouth isn't a smile. It's ironic. No one was a child like Luther was. That much he had well down even in that.

Allison supposed there were some, but it seemed unlikely. Luther sat apart in so many ways to her, from the rest of the world. But even for the light reference, it's not about him, and her thinking about it that way is just stalling the inevitable. Allison handed her cup toward him for more.

Dolls, and books, and dress up.

She played soccer, and she liked the things the daycare did.
Anything that made a mess. Beads, and feathers, and hand painting.

Luther refills her cup, careful not to spill in the darkness — it's hard to tell how high the level is — and then nurses the thermos back to his chest, the metal warm against his gloved palms. (Still gloved, even in July, even when it's just with her.)

"Way more hobbies than we ever had." Their closest thing to a team sport was more like group homicide. "Does she destroy all the boys at soccer? Somehow I feel like any daughter of yours would have to, by default."

It's bittersweet, that he's had to cobble together and simply imagine this idea of what Claire is like, while he hasn't ever gotten to see it for himself, actually meet the girl, build his own impressions. She's a collection of anecdotes and a picture in a magazine and a small voice on a phone, which made his heart climb into his throat while talking to her. That one small tinny proof of her existence, for the briefest moment, crammed into a phonebooth while Allison crumpled beside him.

Another extra-bright meteor streaks by overhead and his jaw tilts upwards, following its path. Make a wish, he thinks, a childish little flare of a thought, but he doesn't say aloud. He knows exactly what Allison would wish for.

Allison took her cup back, holding it between her hands, as she let out a breath through her nose. Everything the warm, humid of summer, even in the dark, deep night here. The thing is, she wonders sometimes. If her daughter likes what she likes. If there are too many dominoes she touched. If it spreads like a disease. If Claire wanted to play, or just did because Allison said she made the team that one day.

Her eyes briefly closed for a second, and she tried to reach back to something else, even as she did it without looking away from the bullet, while it bit into her heart. The way she deserved it to.

Sometimes. She was good. You know, for kid's sports. Last I saw a full game, they were still falling over each other and the ball sometimes more often than managing to make it across the whole field always.

Sir Reginald would not have let any of them fail so terrible at anything. Especially not in front of spectators. Yet parents and kids did it, supposedly, the world over. She hates herself for remembering any number of times it was just inconvenient. To put herself in a crowd of people, given who she was. Especially if a new movie had just come out. Or that it just seemed so boring, sometimes, when she could just watch the games.

Like if there'd been a way to get everything wrong, maybe she'd done it.

She definitely had more time to try and figure those things out than any of us. It was so strange, and backward, at the beginning. Years, where it was basically like the only free time she didn't have in a day was when she was sleeping.

Instead of their upbringing, and the so many things they mastered,
and the so very little time they had that was considered free.

"That must've been a little weird to get used to. As a contrast to what we had." It's not like any of them had had any positive familial role models, any idea of what a parent was supposed to be like. No idea what being a child was like, either.

He wants to tell her that she did the best job she could, given the parameters and influences she was working from.
But he suspects she probably wouldn't accept it. That wound is still there, the damage she'd done to her daughter.

Luther's seated comfortably enough now, legs sprawled out as he thinks, and then admits: "Even here, in this world, when we first got here... I felt like I was wasting time? That I needed to be working out and training and practicing Diego's empathy and Klaus' telepathy and telekinesis, and that if I wasn't working then what the hell was even the point of me. It took me a while to figure out what downtime is supposed to look like."

And they'd eventually gotten better about it; the two of them could settle into those domestic rituals nowadays, just sitting around in the living room while he read a book and she watched TV. That blessed, unthinkable luxury of free time.

"At least she gets to have the room to figure that out."

Luther says it in the present tense, and all she can think, for all that it damns her, is that Claire isn't in the present tense. It makes her mouth tightens and she doesn't allow herself the reign to even breathe out this time. For a moment her teeth touch, and she swallows, and then lifts her cup and drinks the thin powdered hot chocolate, letting the rest of his words sort out on her.

Looking up at the stars. The mostly fixed million stars that were different here, but still the felt the same as ever to look up to, as they ever had when she was out on in LA.

As weird as it might sound, I think I took to it more like Klaus, of all people.

I knew what I wanted when I left, and that never changed, obviously, but everything was new and exciting and distracting. I wanted to try so many things, do so many things, that I'd never even thought of until they were there in front of me, and I was so ready for everything and anything that wasn't Dad.

Somedays there weren't even enough hours for it all.
Sometimes I could even almost let myself forget in it all.

She's not sure she was wrong, or even that she'd undo those years. She'd done so much, and learned quite a lot, but she'd also used anyone she needed to survive, then. Especially right at the beginning. She'd had even less context, then, for what asshole's people really could be under even the friendliest veneer. She learned at least as much by slamming face-first into doors as using her power to open them.

It wasn't anything like regret, even looking back at it now. Staring with dull disgust at the primrose path she walked all the way through the decade that would give the most precious thing, she truly treated for its worth, and took it away again. All of the dominoes. All the way that far back then. Long before Patrick, and the red carpets.

That present tense is a purposeful thing; a piece of stubborn and intentional hope, even if it makes Allison's breath catch. But when she starts writing, what Luther isn't prepared for and isn't expecting is how it suddenly makes his own heart twist sharply in his chest. Envisioning it.

He'd always imagined what she was up to, of course — ten years of being something like a matchstick boy with his face pressed to the window, getting only glimmers of her life second-hand, third-hand, filtered through tabloids and headlines — but somehow it feels all the more impactful hearing it in her own words. Allison describing that excitement, a kid in a candy shop and with all the independence she could demand and seize and take. That freedom. Even if it led to heartbreak in the end.

He takes another sip of hot cocoa, stares down at his hands. Weighing over an admission that he's been biting back for so long, that he'd never actually voiced, although she'd seen it on display after he touched the Chalice.

"I wish I'd been there with you," Luther says. It's a quiet and frank statement, the sound of a conclusion that he's gone over again and again and again and doesn't even need to think about it anymore. Doesn't have to question it.

"Getting to see all of that with you."

(no subject)

numberthree - 2020-08-03 02:22 (UTC) - Expand

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obediences - 2020-08-03 02:46 (UTC) - Expand

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