Allison Hargreeves | #00.03 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
numberthree) wrote2021-04-12 10:49 am
numberthree) wrote2021-04-12 10:49 am
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."
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
Promise me.)
I'll know.
She wasn't sure how she'd bear being away from Claire when it ended. (If.)
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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."
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The deep night-shadows on his face and the curl of his shoulders, and the way his face is tucked downward, at his hands, or the thermos, or his lap, she can't entirely tell. The details don't matter. Her heart aches at any part of his feeling he had to say that. And maybe a little because unlike knowing he regretted that day, her heart hammered a sore-sharp, thrilled, guilty, sad note for the way both of those end with 'you.'
Answering a question she would never ask. Could never ask.
Not even for all that she goaded him about anything else.
They can't change time. He can't change that choice any more than she can change Claire being vaporized. But they can go forward. It's what they have. And they have each other this time. The thought of which turns her mouth a little.
You're here now.
That's more important.
And she means out here under all these million stars, on this sad day.
And she means out here in the middle of a strange, alternate universe.
And she means now in her life, the only person who still understands.
end
"Same goes for you," Luther says quietly, offering her a smile that he's not even sure she can see in the dark. And he cranes his head again, turns back to looking at the meteor shower above. (And he realises, a moment too late, that he did technically just voice a wish under that streaking light himself.)
For a moment, it feels like all those countless times they'd snuck away upstairs and jammed themselves into that attic window together, shoulder-to-shoulder and balanced in that frame, looking out. It's different, of course: they're older now, arguably wiser, he's much bigger, and they're maintaining a casual couple feet of distance between them on opposite sides of the picnic blanket.
But it's him and it's her and it's them, still a united front on this awful day, and that's what matters.