numberthree | Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

Yeah. In hindsight I feel like I should've guessed at it, because why only seven? that doesn't make any sense -- but I just never questioned it. We were the only ones, and we were the only ones who mattered, and others never cropped up in thirty years, so I never thought to wonder.

[ They were special, and they had been born to save the world. They heard it over and over as children. Until it was drummed in deep. Special. Unique. With great potential. Until they hadn't questioned that, even when they questioned the man who said it.

Like never questioning why Vanya was normal. It just was. ]

Me, too. Not even when came here.

It makes me wonder how much he knew, and how much we still don't.

Yeah.

Being able to interrogate him properly with Klaus' powers would be pretty useful right about now, huh.

[ How absolutely typical, that when Klaus had actually managed to make post-mortem contact with their father, the man had still been elusive and unhelpful about it. Only saying enough to reveal that he'd committed suicide to bring them together. ]

If only.

[ Wrong world, and it wasn't like it helped much trying. ]

Not sure if it's helpful or not, realizing he really was that much of dick before he bought us even. So much for the stress of seven super-powered children causing all that.

[ So much for the stress of seven super-powered children causing all that. As if it was their fault. As if, on some level, a small part of them all had quietly assumed that they had something to do with it, with how Reginald treated them; if they could just be better, perhaps he'd be better. ]

Yeah.

[ Again, that one word, which just isn't enough. Then after a longer pause, hesitant like he's having to drag it out of himself, but: ]

I went to see him, you know. When I first arrived in 1962.

Edited 2020-09-09 15:47 (UTC)

What?

[ It's out and sent before she can think to temper it. She's obviously not expecting it, and it'd be a lie to say it doesn't blow straight into the sore hole still sitting in her, like a small crater since the first weekend they got back. Makes her wonder, with more flippant speed than can be stopped, if some unconscious and incredibly petty part of her didn't tell him on purpose.

Held something back for the first time here since not doing that.

Except she knows that's not true. Hating herself a little for both thinking it, and for the truth. That she did do it for Ray. That she's not sure she could even do that even now. Especially not here. In the combination of whether to pick being perfectly adrift and alone, even among people who loved her for two and a half years, and a year and a half of truly being seen. By him. By the one person it mattered most to be.

No one ever said that had to be fair. Or equal.

She's an idiot. But what else is new.

It wasn't like Dad was a good subject for Luther almost ever.
Maybe it even made what happen at the dinner make a little more sense. ]

[ It certainly does explain some things.
And it's like some puzzle pieces clicking together. 'Going to Dad' wasn't a move that any of the others would fall back on as their first instinct, as their first kneejerk thought when lost and adrift and alone in a new state, new decade.

But Luther had gone home. To their old house. Expecting help. Still somehow expecting his father, his hero, to fix it and rescue him. Instead— ]

Yeah.

I begged for money and caught a Greyhound home. It didn't go well. Like. It was worse. He was actually even worse than he is in the 2000s. I told Diego over and over that we shouldn't go to that meetup. He'd never help us.

[ Even after the disaster of discovering his mission was a lie, Luther had still believed. But this had been the death knell and final nail in the coffin for his faith in the Monocle. Ripped right out of him. ]

[ She still hates the circumstances Luther found himself in for who knows how many months first. There's a part of her that curdles with no one to flay at the idea of Luther standing somewhere on the side of the street, in the city she was actually in, begging for money. She can't change it, but she still hates it.

Even smarting, her chest a too tense network of an ache she'd rather just ignore to all hell, she's glad this isn't in person, as much as she almost wishes it was. She hates the dichotomy, too. She wants to be able to see his face, or be able to touch his hand. She doesn't want him to be able to see hers. ]

What happened?

Edited 2020-09-09 17:16 (UTC)

It didn't go well.

[ Repeating those flat words, not doling out any further information, any elaboration. Can't they just leave it at that? It's not necessary anymore, it's no longer relevant. Or he could just paraphrase it, skim over the gory details. It's not like Allison needs any further ammunition to hate the man.

— but. But this is Allison. The eternal exception. He's supposed to tell her everything. So, in the end, he does. ]

I walked right into the Academy building. He was hosting a party -- like, an actual cocktail party, with music and dancing and guests and everything, it was really surreal. He was talking to a group of people, and I tried to tell him that I was his son from the future. I even mentioned his secret work to prove it. Tried to ask for his help.

[ Luther had felt such actual comfort at first in listening to his father's pompous overbearing voice, lecturing the crowd as they attended to his every word. That self-assurance, the firm conviction. You could hang your belief on such conviction. You could build an entire world on it. (Luther had.)

Then, Luther's voice cracking on 'Please. I need your help.'

He doesn't even have to struggle to remember what Reginald had said in return; it was burned into his memory. For a man of such tremendous size, he had felt terribly, terribly small. ]

He tore me to pieces in front of the whole party. Said there was absolutely no way he was going to adopt kids in 1989, because he has a deep dislike of children. Said that even if he did adopt children, he'd expect more from us than-- let me get this straight-- "a scruffy face, poor hygiene, and your grotesque simian proportions". And the "stench of failure".

So.

You know. Total success.

[ "Fuck."

The air has gone out of the room, and every other thought, and Allison's knuckles are white on the edges of her device, and anyone on the side stage with any brains would take one look at her face and inch very quickly on the furthest away direction. It starts with confusion, shifts to horror, and ends somewhere almost too hot to simply be called rage.

She wants to say he's wrong. She wants to say she's sorry. Luther's been carrying this around for over a year now, and without memories of this place, there's every chance there were barely even weeks between Luther finding out about the moon and, then, this, too. ]

That asshole.

[ The man with the key to every weakness Luther ha,d who had been the cause of every single thing, stomping on every part of what everyone else tiptoed around for Luther's sake. In front of a crowd. There's not much worse that could be added to it.

No wonder he blew up at Elliot's.

No wonder he's started yelling at the table. ]

Edited 2020-09-09 18:04 (UTC)

[ It's nothing new, at least for her. It's the same thing she'd said the last time she heard this sort of thing about Reginald.

If anything, Luther is kicking himself and feeling so goddamned stupid for still being so slow on the uptake. For having taken so long to reach the same realisations everybody else already had thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years ago. ]

Yeah. So I'm learning.

[ She hates this. She hates this. She hates this so much.

She can't fix it. She wasn't there. It's forever ago now. Another scar, in with all the others. Even if she were, Luther still would have taken as hard as she assumes he must have this whole time. Hard enough, he blew through every wall of decades of restraint, yelling at the miserable excuse of a man who called himself their father over the table and tearing his shirt open. Demanding not to be dismissed for the first time in his life. ]

I'm sorry. He shouldn't have done that.

[ But was their father made of anything except all the things a parent shouldn't do? He'd pinned Diego like a bug with a long stinging line of words, and even nearly a decade and free, they'd all just sat there, basically turned back into children afraid to be next. Made them all ashamed to even shift in their seats. To say anything, until Luther suddenly was shouting.

Luther.

Luther, who somehow had still believed. Hoped.

Still gone to him. Even after the moon.
(Thinking they were dead.)

She wants to hug him. She wants to hurt her father. Someone. Anyone else. As a stand-in. She wants to go home. Or wherever he is. She still has hours here, unless she were to fake something. Or rumor someone. But she can't even think of that long. Only Luther, somewhere, staring at the words he'd just written. Writing them like they couldn't be forgotten by time. Not given by that voice. ]

He's not right. About any of it.

Edited 2020-09-09 19:23 (UTC)

Isn't he?

[ She can't hear his voice, but she can hear that bitterness accidentally slipping, letting loose. ]

Haven't exactly done much with myself.

[ Then a second later: the bristling panic, the realisation they've somehow, accidentally skidded into a territory he wasn't expecting to land on today. ]

Sorry. That's not why I texted you today-- I mean, you're at work. You're busy. We don't have to talk about this.

[ She doesn't need to hear him to know that tone.
To know how much deeper it goes than that even.

The last line actually makes her eyebrow twitch.
Her lips press, because that's not happening.

Nice try. But it's not. ]

No. He's not. And he's the last person who gets to judge anything you do or are anymore. You just survived a whole year in the past, and even longer here, with the insanity that is always going on here, and we just saved the world from an Apocalypse, very likely two. Together, all of us, and with no help from him in the slightest either time, from either end.

[ And. And. Her thumb hovers, throat catching.

She wants to touch the other part. But she doesn't know how.
They don't. They haven't. It's not. The Monocle is still so wrong.

But he gave Luther only more ammunition against himself.
To add to every opinion, he so rarely is willing to show.
The hate and disgust driving his stupid plan.

Why couldn't he just stay dead?
Have been unfindable. ]

Edited 2020-09-09 20:43 (UTC)

[ And for a moment, Luther is ferociously, painfully relieved that she doesn't touch on the other part. He doesn't even know or where to begin with that either. It had been too sharp, too perfectly-cutting: Reginald, as always, somehow intuitively knowing and finding exactly, exactly the right angle to shear right through Luther's (already feeble) defenses and flay him down to the bone.

Grotesque. ]

Apocalypses that we keep causing, and which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for all of us.

But. Yeah. I guess.

No. Not true. He is still at fault for both of those. Everything he did to Vanya is still HIS fault first and foremost. [ Even if Allison can still feel in her bones how much she doesn't entirely agree, or believe that. How unlikely it was he could have managed how it at all started without her. Her power. How it might have gone differently the first time if anyone had just listened to her every time she said no. ]

And she got to actually do more than just be a bomb that he left ticking to explode finally. She was one of us out there on that last day. Where she always should have been, and would've been if it wasn't for him.

It was him at the start, sure, but it was all of us at the end too. I fucked up. I played a role. We all played a role.

[ It isn't easy for Allison to gain traction on this particular angle. Luther's had too long to himself to think about it. Once the adrenaline and panic passed, once he'd gotten a full night's sleep and wasn't running on fumes and with the memory of Allison's blood on his hands, once he was stranded by himself (or so he thought) with an endless span of time in which to lick his wounds, mull over his decisions, and see precisely where he'd gone wrong. A year's worth of lonely self-flagellation, without even the distraction of his family and Aegis, like he'd had here. ]

Just glad it didn't happen again and that we managed better second time around.

~~Does that mean third time's the~~

[ Maybe there should be more of a reaction to it for her, but it feels ( and is in some ways) something she was fighting for anyone to acknowledge over three years ago. When they wouldn't, and didn't, for anything that could be pointed at someone else, slipped under some other excuse, well-intentioned or just as messed up by their dad at the same time.

It doesn't entirely help that she can't tell, on those flat black little letters, if the whole part about Vanya's actual earned and acted on autonomy received no direct reference for a reason. Or is supposed to be just tucked into that last sentence there. She lets it set, but she comes back to only the same thought a few times. ]

I wish she was here.

Believe it or not, I do, too.

[ For Allison's sake, mainly. He'd been scared to death of Vanya, the last time. But seeing her in Dallas— it had blunted some of that fear. It had given them a reprieve. Had meant the pair of them, One and Seven, usually opposites and at such cross-purposes, had surprisingly been able to carry on an actual conversation without that old baggage weighing them down.

(Those text messages blowing up his phone, and which he'd still never told anyone about.) ]

[ She doesn't think he's lying. She doesn't even need to hear it to know that. Everyone had been knit together at the need of necessity in that last two days, and even before that around Vanya without any memory of them. It wasn't the same thing she felt. That empty space in her with Vanya's name -- like Luther's, like Claire's -- that hadn't filled up with anyone else in those two and half years, even as she spoke Vanya's name just as-never as everyone else's. But she does believe he wants her here. It's a step.

But, sadly, it happens at the same time as people are moving though.
Which shifts her first response to being different. ]

I might have to vanish shortly.
Waiting forever might finally be over.

It's almost like you have a job to get back to or something.

[ That light touch of dry humour. Sometimes grateful for this veil of the mental network, even as it distances them. Luther almost types out another apology for taking up her time, distracting her while she's on call — but he erases it before sending. Even he can tell, sometimes, when he's tripping over himself too much for comfort. ]

Don't get fired, and thanks for the talk. I'll see you at home?

[ It's not something she's going to comment on, but gaze hooks on the 'thanks for the talk', thinking how entirely, strangely roundabout this whole thing is, that he's ending somewhere near there, after showing up to check on her Wedding Anniversary, on her. She only studies it a second before pushing through. ]

Pretty sure they wouldn't let me go even it I quit at this point.

[ It's been a few years (and it hasn't), but she still remembers exactly what it looks like when someone is seeing her as a monetizable asset more than herself. She was the best kind of unexpected good press and future bankshot. They were going to milk it for as long as it lasted and as much as it turned out she could do. She knew that; and even more, she knew what she could do.

If she continued to put her mind to it,
to carve even more and more time out for it. ]

And, of course. I might be later than normal.
Depends on how long this runs, but I'll be there.

Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject