Allison Hargreeves | #00.03 (
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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Part of him suddenly regrets this; he isn't sure where to begin.
He clears his throat, fingers floating against the door, wanting to close it behind him but not daring to just yet. "Can I come in? It's— nothing serious, just wanted to chat. Pick your brain about stuff."
God, he was bad at this. This was so much easier when they could just walk in on each other anywhere in the house, while she was making coffee in the kitchen or while he was reading in the living room. And he knew the conversation always got better once it started rolling — it always came easily with Allison in a way it didn't with anyone else — but Luther was always terrible at initiation, that first step before setting his shoulder to the grindstone or pushing the boulder uphill.
For a fleeting crazed second, he considers how it would be easier, simpler, if they could just settle on some kind of code phrase he could use as a shorthand for this sort of thing. Soyuz still meant she'd been kidnapped and he ought to come teleport and rescue her immediately. Themis, the Lady of good counsel, meant he wanted to talk to her, run something by her that was meant for Allison alone.
But they didn't have that, so he'd just have to flounder for a little while first.
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She has to give him the credit of at least trying to say it isn't serious, even if he looks so momentarily uncertain -- like he might just turn around in a second if didn't find words or the ability to breathe -- that she half wonders if it's a well-meaning lie. The other half of her wonders if it's more the space or just whatever subject it is he's decided he wants to 'pick her brain about.' If it is something important, even if it's not serious or deadly.
(Or if it's that, and the edges of uncertain space suddenly.
Ther uncertainty heightened. Or maybe made even more uncomfortable.)
"Sure." Allison closed her device, leaning over to put it on the bed table. "I'm not doing anything important as it is."
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A slight press of his fingers and the door swings almost-shut behind him; the touch was too light at first, though, so he has to push it again until the door closes all the way. And that click feels like the sound of a thundering bullet, too loud and too portentous and too presumptive, but it protects them at least somewhat from prying ears down the hall.
Luther glances around the room, tries to find a place to sit. There's a tiny bench in front of a delicate vanity, both of which look like he'd probably shatter them both with his weight if he tries to sit down. So he takes the squishy armchair instead, sinking into it; it's better than hovering awkwardly and better than planting himself on her bed. He runs his hands along the arms of the fabric, patting it awkwardly. "This is nice," he says. "More comfortable than my desk chair. Not as comfortable as the couch in the old house, though."
He is so bad at this.
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She feels the small sound in her throat -- like the removal of an escape, or like it shifts the balance of the little space, that she feels more possessive of than expected -- but the tension in her shoulders is only growing as he takes his time. Closing the door. Looking around the room again. Deciding to settle into the chair, she doesn't use it as much as she thought she would when she moved it out and in again. Maybe if there was more light in here. Maybe if it didn't remind her of things (and people) it isn't.
One of her eyebrows rises when Luther decides he should go from 'we should talk -- it's not serious' to complimenting the chair that's definitely been sitting there for any number of months. Rambling about it, like it's a lifeline somehow to keep him from whatever it is he's not starting, and at least one of them can be a little more direct about that.
Allison's agreement is noncommital, shifting into, "But it wouldn't fit. Not unless I decided to remove this--" With a gestured at the bed under her. She likes this house, has nothing terrible to say about it, but they were very different places, with very different purposes, picked for different groups of people.
Especially when everything had shrunk down to hovering in the den most. Still, Allison isn't the one for distractions. "You wanted to discuss something with me? Which, unless I'm wrong, probably isn't about furniture for your room?"
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He'd almost asked her via text, before, during her trip. Maybe broaching this would've been easier via text.
Except he already knows that he prefers it this way. He wants to pick Allison's brain about this, to hear her voice, to be able to chat back and forth in that comfortable ebb-and-flow of conversation with pretty much the only person in this universe that he'd take advice from at face value. So:
"Do you like your job?" he asks, suddenly. Finally ripping off the band-aid, now that she's put her foot down on the distraction (and thank god for it). "Like, here, since it's pretty similar to what you did before. Have you ever considered doing something else? And how did you settle on acting, back home, out of all the options outside the Academy?"
Luther's never really done something that someone didn't tell him to do.
Being Number One and working for Reginald had been bred and sowed in his bones, so closely entwined to his entire identity that he hadn't been able to unthink it. Working for Joe here had been assigned to him by the government. Working for Jack in Dallas had practically fallen into his lap. He'd taken it out of desperation — which everyone knows isn't really a choice.
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She's been thinking about that a lot lately, and it's almost sharply surprising to have Luther put his finger on it as a question directed at her as though he somehow reached right in and pulled it out of her. The surprise lingers in her expression even as Allison's expression knits into any number of other feelings and thoughts. Conflicted and complex.
"I hadn't actually given it much thought here until we came back. Anything was better than the gossip column position originally--" says the girl who never knew she'd go on to being a janitor, accountant, and eventually passable-enough hairstylist for a salon. "--and I guess it was easy to go back to it here. Especially now."
Except she wasn't sure whether she liked the choice or not. If she did it not like she had the earlier year here for the money specifically, or because she actually got something out of it. "It's--" Allison hazard's trying to find words for the confusing network of it. "--easy to just let it happen, but it's strange."
Doing what hardly felt real. "Going back to it now." After everything.
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"That's... yeah, that's pretty much how I feel, too. For just sticking with what they assigned me. And I mean, Joe's a great guy and I don't mind the work, and I'm good at it, especially with my televator ability, but... But sometimes it just doesn't feel like something Number One should be doing with himself, if that makes sense? But then I wonder if that's the wrong thing to be concerned about, anyway."
Luther's mouth purses, a nervous thinning of his lips as his hands flex against the arms of the chair. He's more talkative now as the words just spill out, thoughts that he's had on his mind for weeks now. "I'm not sure if it's something I'm thinking for myself, or if it's just some... specter of Dad, and still trying to live up to his expectations. So I was wondering if you were happy, with yours."
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Happy is the wrong question.
Allison's not sure how long she'd have to go back for that benchmark.
She'd never had a choice in Dallas and knew to be grateful for the fluke that found her that first night. She'd never been anything like purely happy here, before they'd left here, doing the work that was the barest shadow of herself, reduced to the barest shadow of herself. She hadn't been happy at home, before this world, even if the world thought her untouchably perfect, the dream to aspire to still, not for at least the whole last year then.
"Being happy with it really wasn't part of my job here ever," Allison says, truncating it to change, with no clue how to put any of the rest of it into words, especially when this isn't about her. "Do you have something else you're thinking about trying instead?"
This place seemed to have most of the normal jobs their world did. But he wasn't talking about normal entirely, either. Not calling himself by his number and referencing the bigger thing they were all raised to believe they should be. Though the rest of them had the last decade to wrestle with the questions Luther was just getting to. Who and what were you supposed to be. Who defines it, and are you always going to be disappointing yourself no matter which way you turn.
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Then he has to stop and backtrack, because, right. He's trying to be better about this part. Trying to be less vague. Luther starts again: "I have a friend, Brandon. He used to work private security for the imPort mayor of Maurtia Falls, but the mayor Ported out a while ago, so he's been trying to figure out what he wants to do with himself now, too. He's considering starting up his own firm, and would need people to staff it. It'd be... more active than just carrying people's couches. A bit more like what I did for Jack, just, y'know, minus the crime and the bare-knuckle boxing."
He tries an attempt at a smile, a weary self-conscious flicker at the corner of his mouth.
"And— then I was thinking, too, about maybe going full-time with Aegis. Or at least part-time but as a proper agent, instead of just the reserves. They're understaffed, with all the Port-Outs. The team is supposed to be a full fifteen, but they're only at eight right now, so it feels like they could do with the help. And that feels like the right sort of application of my skills, and something more... generally useful for the public, but something about that doesn't feel quite right either."
Because it's not the Academy. And as long as he stayed on the reserves list and not a full member, it somehow hadn't felt like a betrayal of the Academy. He glances up and away from her eyes, as if Allison's ceiling might by chance hold all the answers. There's nothing there, not even anything like the glue-on glow-in-the-dark stars that decorated his bedroom back home.
"Being a superhero is what Dad told me to be, and what the government here tells us to be, so then I wonder how different is that, really. And how much of this is my choice anyway, even if I think it's what I want to do."
He exhales a long breath, all the thoughts spent. "Sorry. That's a lot. I'm not sure there's an answer."
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She tries not to let the prickle of annoyance that flickers into life when he first started reach her expression. She knows it's not the point. But it continues to back up a completely different one, and not the one Luther's in her bedroom for. A fact alone that stands out every time she remembers it.
"There might not be," Allison says easily enough, even when nothing about the subject is easy in the slightest. "Or at least not one that's going to be totally right. Or easy."
She tucked a foot under her and let the other hang off the bed.
"I knew you'd been thinking about Aegis." She couldn't miss it.
Aegis, and moving from reserves to part-time and then full time, was the most predictably Luther things Luther could do here. In line with the dictate of their childhood to save the world with no care for the circumstances around it. In line with having someone tell him where to go, what to do, who to be, that didn't cause him to have to leave any of the boxes forged by The Academy. Their father. The man Luther had never even stood up to until a few months ago.
"But--" It lingers, hovers, still isn't where she goes first. Luther as a boxer (with that ludicrous name) in underground rings, working for the mob, still seems such an anthesis that it slides to the side until she has to look at it straight on again. "Did you like what you did back in Dallas? Who would the private security be for here?"
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Because that wouldn't be the entire truth, would it.
"I did, sometimes," he admits instead. "Even the fighting ring part."
Blood in his teeth and on his knuckles and the satisfying crunch of bone beneath his hands. It was ugly and brutal and vicious and it was the closest he'd felt to being alive, that whole time. Like without the rest of the Academy, all of his family dead, he was a dormant weapon on the shelf and only sometimes dusted off, brought back to life himself.
"I think it also feels... familiar. Like what I, or that other version of me, did in the City for Gabriel, for better or worse. But if you're worried about the clientele... the details aren't sorted, but I think it'd probably vary based on the job and the contract, so not a permanent gig like the mayor was. And nothing— nothing like Jack. Brandon worked at City Hall, so it'd be above board. Hell, maybe it'd even be security for special events. Arrival ceremonies." He tilts his head. Another twitch at the corner of his mouth. "Project Walkway red carpets."
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Following isn't hard, but it makes her wonder, as he's explaining, if he realizes he's just clarified both of the options all pertain to following in the footsteps of something he already did. For The Monocle. For the government. For Jack. For Gabriel. None of his suggested options stepping outside of it for something he'd discovered without someone else placing that role on his shoulders first.
There's something sharp under her breastbone that wants to remove all those associations. That wants Luther to never ever be seen as someone's windup attack dog ever again. That Luther is so much more than that. That she's not even sure that Luther knows it, believes it, given where he'd ended up the last year, but she does. She knows it in every inch of every bone in her body. She has for decades.
Still, that last flick of his almost-smile, and that set of words where he tries to bring her, and her work in it, diverts her, and she shifts to it for the briefest, smirking, flip off, "Oh, is this to keep an eye on me now, too?"
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That glint of humour, though, Luther catches. Follows. Reciprocates.
"Hey. Not an eye on you. On your rabid fans, on anyone who might decide they want a piece of the model they shouldn't have." A raise of a bemused eyebrow. She can take care of herself; they both know it. (And yet Luther had always been there anyway. Even as teenagers, immediately and unthinkingly planting himself between her and any crazed wannabe who jumped the fence and tried to reach for The Rumor.)
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Allison can't entirely keep her smile away.
But she still raises her brows like it's absolutely untrue.
Jokingly said, but still, she may have more of those soon enough. Her voice being back now is already changing and rewriting the entire trajectory of her earlier career here, and with that came the fact that the removed wall meant fans could actually expect more from her where it came to interaction now, too. To answer questions or talk to them, both on the walkways and in those roving packs of insane fans.
Her expression sobers a little, almost edged apologetically so when she rests her hands on the leg curled on the bed. "In all seriousness, though, it might take you a good while to figure out what it is you want to do, and you might have to try any number of things. It was years and years before I really knew I was good at what I was doing."
Beat. "And even then, it's not like I did anything like it for the last few years."
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For all intents and purposes in Dallas, it had been his first time ever living outside of the house, trying to hold down a job, paying rent. Living life and being normal. It had tasted far more bitter and hopeless then than it does now, though. Not like Luther had been able to enjoy it at all. Whereas here—
"So are you recommending... what, trying out other things that aren't those? Cycle through jobs like you did when you first left the Academy? I don't even know what I'd cycle through, though."
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The one who knew earliest, didn't care about their father's opinion, and still stayed.
"It was less figuring out what it is was for me, and more--" Allison pauses not because she doesn't know what she's going to say or even how to say it (or even because of what it admits to Luther), so much as just making herself say it. When no one had ever really known to be told or understand. "--it took a number of years to figure out if I was actually any good at it. Or just." A small shift of her head. "Getting my way."
The way she always did. Especially then.
Always when she meant to, and sometimes even if she didn't.
"But Diego probably tried a few things before settling on the Academy." She looks speculative, flipping details like cards, even with a slide of her skin still stinging. "Vanya, too." Beat. "Who knows about Klaus, though. I still have a hard time picturing him doing anything for very long that would have required him being sober and straight enough to work."
There's a tip of her head from one side to the other working back to through the fact the one job Klaus seemed to have held down at all, from what she knew of the last decade for him, was three years as a cult leader and one as a Vietnam soldier of some kind.
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Things he wishes he could still ask Klaus today, just to get to know him better, but he's long-gone again. Luther's mouth purses at the thought of consulting Diego about all this, though, reluctant at baring his throat that way. Even with the numbers and ranks supposedly dissolved, it still feels like admitting too much of how much he doesn't know. Tipping his hand and showing his own indecision and hesitation, when that's the last thing he's supposed to be around Diego. Luther's supposed to have all the answers.
His voice is soft, rueful, as he continues. "I guess you were luckier than the others— the rest of us— that way. Always knowing from the start what you wanted."
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Allison doesn't move for a second. She knows it because it feels jarring as sheering some part of a glacier off when her throat finally swallows after those words he said. As though Luther had any clue about what he'd just said so easily. Implied. Impaled into her.
(For a moment, she in the hallway, and on the steps, and pulling away in a cab.
For a moment, she's in her kitchen with Ray, pulling the red ribbon free.)
"Yeah, maybe." If she didn't count the other thing she'd wanted more. The one worth waiting years not to follow her dream, years in the place she didn't want to be. The one that never came true even if she could have named it to before wanting to act. (The one she still couldn't give up on, in her own words.)
"It didn't make it happen easy. Or immediately." Even if she had softened her path in ways other people couldn't. "And making a career out of it for a decade, while balancing everything else that came with it, took a long time to figure out. There were a million other little things involved in it that I could never have guessed at before."
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But she's so good at this. Good enough that even Luther, who knows her best out of anyone, doesn't catch it. Allison pausing has almost become a normalcy, accustomed as he'd gotten to the artificial lingering delays back when she had to use the mental network. So she steps right over it like a juddering skip in the record, and Luther doesn't notice, and he follows where she guides the next few sentences.
"Like what?" He's shifted his position in the armchair; less the rigid posture and hands pressed against the chair like he was lining himself up for inspection, reporting in on a particularly quarrelsome mission brief. Some of Luther's spine has loosened as he leans back into the cushions; one hand (gloved, he's still gloved even here) moves to prop his chin against it contemplatively.
He'd often been curious about it all, even after slamming that door shut himself. He'd devoured what he could — Allison's magazine interviews, news clippings of The Kraken's vigilante streak, Vanya's book — but it was no substitute for hearing about their lives in the outside world firsthand.
"And since you're doing a similar job now... are those million things still pretty much the same here? Or is it different?"
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It's a strange, strained cold that drips down the back of her ribs, pooling quiet poison in her stomach, even as she doesn't stray from the direction Luther continued in. "Not exactly. I'm nowhere near as famous or in demand here as I was at home." Even if they were putting her on a trajectory for so much more than she'd done during the last year here.
"And--" Allison pulls in and lets out a short, heavy breath out of her nose. "--any number of things. How to handle management. What to say yes to, what to say no to. What people were willing to do or say to get themselves wherever they wanted to be, regardless of what it required on the way up. Negotiations of hundred kinds. The unwritten rules of the game that were just as important as the written ones in contracts."
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Life had been... simple under the Monocle's thumb. Daily schedules and rotas, never-changing, unflagging. From the moment their shrill alarms went off, to a silent breakfast while listening to instructional vinyl, then training, training, training, another quiet hour for reading, the relentless click of Reginald's stopwatch and the scratch of his pen as he noted down their performance. Time was broken into ever-smaller pieces, and portioned out to them like a spendthrift. Every minute accounted for, all the rules explicitly spelled out for them (the writing was even sometimes literally written on the wall). Number One knew his position, his role, where he needed to be at all times. Nothing was left to ambiguity.
Outside, everything was so ambiguous.
Maybe this was what he liked about working at Joe's Movers, too. The schedule was set, the parameters so clear: move the items from the inventory from Address A to Address B. No room for interpretation.
Luther exhales, too, unconsciously echoing Allison. He's coming at this a decade late, and it's— frustrating, leaves him feeling indescribably restless and antsy, like there's no possible way he can catch up to everyone else in the world soon enough. "Okay. So I don't think I'll go full-time at Aegis yet. That's... a commitment. But part-time could still leave me with enough time to pick up something else on the side. That way I could still... figure something out."
He still doesn't really know what that something is yet, but at least there's time to work on it.
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It sits under her tongue, still canted at an uncertain angle, silent. Not a thing she thinks about saying. She can't really even say if it's everything they're still pushing their way through or where they are. Settled away in her small room, with the door closed and the strangely uneven spin that throws on it.
"The unwritten rules get to everyone," Allison says. "It takes a while. I doubt any of the others had a graceful entrance into figuring out how to be out in the world, either. There are still dozens of things that Diego and Klaus and Five do that make leaving them under a rock seem like a good option sometimes."
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He wishes it were easier to tease about the rest of the missing family. They can do it, they can always do it — but it's in that second heartbeat after the joke lands, the aching absence of it, the longing that sinks its teeth in right afterwards.
Luther surveys Allison over the expanse of her bedroom. Considers, then: "Do you have any perfect magical suggestions that aren't what I've already mentioned, and which might solve everything for me?" he asks, and there's a touch of gentle levity in his voice. She knows him best; maybe she's got the magic bullet to the whole thing.
(But then again, isn't that simply relegating his M.O. from 'doing what Dad or the government suggests' to 'doing what Allison suggests'?)
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Beat.
"And if there were, people would probably be killing each other over them."
Beat.
"Especially if it was a person they could capture & use like a spigot. Some kind of alternate universe Miracle Magician." Her head tilted as she kept adding to it. "Probably with powers pretty much like mine. But with some kind of altruistic conscience."
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"They'd make a killing as a life coach or motivational speaker," he muses. "Could charge an arm and a leg for a consultation."
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Endish for now, or yours to end?