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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[numberthree]

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.

[obediences]

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.

[numberthree]

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.

[obediences]

"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."

[numberthree]

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.

[obediences]

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."

[numberthree]

It's the last thing Allison expects Luther to say, and it almost feels too real, and too fragile, that it's not even just that it's the last thing she expects him to say, it's not a thing she would ever need him to actually say out loud. She wants, irrationally, to take it back from the air and the forest hearing it even. Her surprise has her looking at him, through the dark, before she realized she'd forgotten the stars entirely.

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

[obediences]

His chest aches, but it's a familiar feeling by now: just the usual radiating warmth and flutter of pleasant butterflies lodged somewhere in his belly thanks to Allison, everything Allison. Offering so much in just six words. He's here, with her, after a detour of so many years which had their paths diverging from each other. Here, in this universe, where almost everyone else bar Five has left them. Here, tonight, on this blanket.

"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.