numberthree | Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

Allison, sitting on her bed, watches the hover of Luther as he first inches in the room and then looks around her room like somehow there might anyone or anything in it that isn't somehow familiar, causing that space between her brows to pucker slightly. She'd almost gotten to a second question, but then he was talking.

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."

He misses it the most, during moments like this. At least if they ran into each other incidentally around the house, they could strike up conversation organically and he could attempt a more natural segue to whatever bugbear was on his mind. Here, with him needing to come to her room first, there's no easy transition for something that shouldn't actually be such a big deal: yet Luther's a bulldozer, doesn't know how to approach a subject delicately or discreetly.

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.

It's still there--the hesitation. The moment when he finally decides to step inside and close the door behind him, and she can still count the number of times he's done that in all these years on one hadn't, can't she? (And what does that say?) She swears she can even catch it. The remotest shift in his posture as the doorknob clicks into the doorframe behind him, and Allison wonders which part of that might be the most to it.

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?"

Even after all these years, privacy is still so hard to be accustomed to. They rarely had this luxury before; had to fight for it tooth and nail, claw it out from underneath Reginald's nose. But now that it's so much easier to come by, he sometimes doesn't know what to do with it.

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.

Luther pulls together at what isn't quite a reprimand to focus, and then the words shove their way out, hot and fast, and like he'd been dying to say them already but just hadn't. A little awkward and intense, both before and during, Allison loses the ability to consider after the first question.

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.

"Easy enough to go back to it, easy to just let it happen," Luther says thoughtfully, echoing her words. It's a strange ripple of accord between them, because she's gone and put words to that strange unsettled restlessness he's had about the corner he's wandered into. It's not even like he's painted himself into it; it's more like he just woke up one day and discovered he'd walked in there by himself.

"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."

How can Luther just repeat her own words and make her suddenly aware of how little like any real thought-through choice they are? Like she just did something, again, simply because it was easier. A smaller thing, maybe inconsequential here, but just the same as everything she'd done just behind her now. (When it hadn't turned out inconsequential at all.)

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.

Edited 2020-11-27 05:40 (UTC)

"Maybe. I know someone who—"

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."

Luther isn't prone to just rambling onward, words spilling out more and more and more as he speaks, and so once he gets on a roll and she realizes he's nowhere near stopping still after the first two moments she thought he might, Allison falls back on waiting. Listening. Sorting into piles the things he's brought up.

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?"

Luther's almost about to teasingly parrot her words back again — Liking it wasn't really part of the job — but the words catch in the back of his throat, and he has to pause then, looking thoughtful, weighing it over more carefully. (He's usually so methodical with all his words, mindful of pinning his thoughts down.)

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."

Allison ends up holding those first words like she's not quite sure if she's surprised or not. Is it possible to be both for very different reasons. The words he chews on before letting out of his mouth. Reminding her all too much of admitting she hadn't been sorry for the last thing she did that was at the furthest from concordant with the life that's gone now.

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?"

And he doesn't realise it. Of course he doesn't. It's walking the only roads he's ever known: in slight permutations, variations on a theme, different shades of the same thing. (Because what else is there? Is he supposed to, what, stock shelves at a bookstore? Sell vinyls? How in the world do you even choose what you're supposed to do with yourself? It's been fifteen years and he still doesn't really know how the others did it.)

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.)

"Sure. A likely story."

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."

"Yeah. Me either."

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."

"No, not like me. I was the only one of us who always knew what I wanted to do." Everyone had known what she'd wanted from not far into her teens. The one then she wanted to do and try and be, and that their father scoffed at, disregarding as a distraction from training, from 'saving the world.'

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.

"Yeah, me either. Now that I think about it, I don't really know how Klaus got by, all those years back home."

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."

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."

Edited 2020-11-29 05:11 (UTC)

So it had it taken her a few years to figure out if she was any good at this. Acting.

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?"

So good, especially now, all these years later, that a silence doesn't look like an omission and an omission doesn't look like a confession. Doesn't look like anything at all. As though the unspoken thing never even existed for the people who didn't know to question. Her. Or that there could have ever been more. It's one thing to have forgotten for whole swaths in those months that she had been, and another to watch it skate by, ever invisible and unknown.

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."

"The unwritten ones are what always get me. Not even career-wise, just... in general." Clearly, considering he'd been tripped up by something as basic as you're supposed to tell your family about your friends and vice versa.

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.

Edited 2020-11-29 06:01 (UTC)

There's some part of her that wishes she could be surprised, but routine and safe predictability, in something he already excelled at, are things Luther clings to. (Not that her choice, or lack of it, paints her any different.) She still feels pretty much the same about it -- and that all too already present and promised yet -- but it wasn't as if he came to ask her opinion about it, so much as just around the whole idea of jobs, and shaking them up. Whether to. How. Why.

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."

"Five's got a good excuse. He's a barely-socialised gremlin." And I miss him.

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'?)

Allison gives him a wan smile, but there's something almost belatedly amused around the edges of it. Her hands touching down together on her calf, as she makes her voice a little imperious even for the fact it makes her seem a little looser and teasing. "I regret to inform you, on behalf of every other beleaguered adult you'll ever meet, that there are no perfectly magical quick-fixes out here in the real world."

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."

Luther tilts his head, neck and shoulders falling back against the chair, as he looks at the ceiling again — not like he's nervously avoiding her eye this time, more like a half-frustrated half-resigned giving into it. Like he's shedding that weight from his shoulders and just letting himself sink backwards, letting the subject shift, admitting the dead end within it as he chuckles. And. Also. She's so goddamned cute when she jokes like this.

"They'd make a killing as a life coach or motivational speaker," he muses. "Could charge an arm and a leg for a consultation."

Luther relaxes, and Allison feels an irrational wash of pride, like somehow she had something, anything, to do with that. Even if this all does feel a little strange still. This whole part where Luther's just slipped into her room and closed the world outside of it out. Too indicative largely, and very long ago, bygone days.

"Now, why didn't I ever think of that. All the money that I could have made."

Before they all realized the great mistakes they made and how much she could never change them back, only again and again, to even more different. That they were stuck with whatever they'd done. Forgotten. Moved on to being like they were now. She knew better than anything close to considering it as a truth or an option, but it was easy to be stupidly light about it. Like there was any part of her, that even in someone else's hands, could make someone else's life lighter. Better.

Like whoever she'd been out there, somewhere, on that island.

Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

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Endish for now, or yours to end?