numberthree | Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

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.

"We've already established, though, that you're not actually some kind of life coach magician who knows all the answers. So all that money's out of reach. Unfortunately." He tips his chin in order to look back at her once again. (It feels safer now, he's had a moment to recoup himself and he's a little better able to handle that radiant smile without just dissolving on the spot.)

Then, hesitating slightly, as Luther's voice turns a little less light, more sincere: "But. You're probably the best substitute, all things considered. Thanks for listening, Allison."

He thanks her like it was some huge imposition; like he perhaps didn't actually expect her to say yes and let him come in and pick her brain; like he was still expecting to be shooed away with a broom. Maybe he was. On some level.

The best substitute for something real that she can't be. It's better it not to try to think of how her mind knits those two statements together so seamlessly and so quickly. Staying pressed back into the shadows, it whispered out of and waved right back toward.

Allison knows Luther didn't mean it that way. All that quiet and tired, the solemnity that he finally looks back at her with. All the, still too tightly stitched, sincerity of the mountain of him turned to her. Saying it like somehow it wasn't always true. Hadn't always been. Except, always is the wrong word. Because they never have or had always done they? Between the Academy, and California, and Dallas.

Which doesn't change the fact it feels it still. Always.
That she'd drop anything in her day (her life), if he needed her.

"Of course," rolls out of her mouth easily. "I'm not sure I helped much, but I'm always here if you just want to talk things out."

There's a slide-half roll of her eyes from a glance at her door, and almost saying something stupid like my door's always open, tongue-in-cheek with the early reference only barely, and it caught like a splinter on the closed door, and the small room. She gives a shrug trying not to let it bite down too hard. "Even if it's just in here."

In here is a sanctum, even somewhat accidentally-made. In here means that hard-won privacy without them tripping over Diego in the hallway or on the stairs or in the living room. I'm always here means he can, maybe, do this again whenever another there's another delicate subject to broach, something that he wants to run by her and her alone. (All those little wayward corners they'd been so good at hiding in, for the better part of eighteen years.)

"Careful. I'm gonna take you up on that," Luther says, and he tries to make it sound like a joke — that protective guise of a joke — but there's a truth buried under it, too. The way they seize on this, take what they can get, carve out these spaces for themselves. In here.

Allison tries not to think about it. Any of her last words. It'll just frustrate her if she thinks about it too deeply. The snake eating its own tail. It can't be fixed (not without breaking other things; ones worth more than her convenience), only accepted. And she's rather good at that. Accepting what she doesn't want to. Sliding it under the carpet and letting it just be ~~ignored~~ fine. It has its own so deeply worn in, well used grooves now.

"Good. Do." Allison pops right back, the smallest rise to her brows like it might be a challenge for him actually to follow through on. The last few months have been a lot quieter while things settled. And in some part, it still feels like it's not just months, but years since Luther was talking to her. It could be a literal closet, if that's what it took to have this again.

He sets his hands flat against his thighs, his knees, a kind of crisp Right then, as if he's on the verge of getting back to his feet and considering the meeting adjourned. (Dismissed, Number One.) But now he's caught in the middle of it, suddenly unsure how to end the conversation. Should he backpedal out of the room now that he's gotten what he needed from her, now that the topic's over? Or should he stay? Is it okay for him to stay?

Floundering, Luther settles for asking, "Reading anything interesting?" as he nods towards her communicator.

He settles his hands, himself, a little more forward. Like he might be done, that might be it. Good game, and break. Her brows just barely shift and knit wondering if it is just that. But Luther doesn't move. He doesn't start trying to push up out of the chair and back onto his feet, doesn't end up towering over her again, where she's sitting, again, yet.

She can watch the uncertainty that flashes too clear for his own good across his face. Awkward and unsettled by his lack of just quite what to do or not do, before making it to a question. It shouldn't make her heart give a disastrously warm swell of amused affection. From her own, at least far better concealed, uncertainty to that suddenly. She lets it turn her lips into a calm enough smile, with a half shrug and a glance between the communicator on her bedtable and him.

"People being people. New people on the network, and magazines on the stands. Nothing all that important." Nothing that he either had to run away for or that she'd felt slighted from being able to pay attention to due to his interrupting it. Randomly, she adds on. "Sometimes I feel like I fall into it, and skimming what's happening, just because it's convenient. And distracting."

"Yeah. It's interesting, seeing what sort of things are on people's minds. I don't really raise questions myself—" except for the once, which had been a combined miracle-slash-disaster, "but I like reading what's out there, and sometimes responding. There was this kid the other day, she's getting to know her grandparents in this universe for the first time, and that made me realise that I'd literally never even thought about it. I mean, we don't have fathers, and our birth mothers are out of the picture. And even Dad never mentioned where he came from, and Mom is... Mom. I dunno, it was a weird blind spot, realising that I'd never thought about it, never considered that we just don't have grandparents. Have you thought about it at all?"

Now it's just a thought experiment, a piece of idle curiosity. He imagines it might've come up with her more, since she'd had in-laws, while Luther still operated with no exposure to anything like a real family.

Still. The topic's sliding back to something safer, more innocuous, less private — this, in fact, is something they could discuss in the living room or kitchen just fine — but the door's still closed. The door's still closed. (It feels almost too selfish, in a way, and too greedy. That he still gets to have this, gets to savour her company for himself after so many years without. Of course he's loath to let it go, even now, after all this time here.)

"Of course." There's some sympathy in her expression for listening to Luther list all those things out. She disagrees with the phrasing and assumptions of some of them as he puts them, but she's had to think of it—vastly more than he has.

"Becoming someone's mom does that." It makes you think about your own parents, theirs. She glances that topic, only skimming the surface with the edges of the wings of her point, refusing to let it land or soak through. "But so did being pulled into Patrick's family gatherings. Claire, being spoiled by his parents."

In a way, that was normal now, but it had been so baffling at first. Always needing to find some excuse for why Claire didn't know or hear from her parents, or any of her Aunts and Uncles. The way it'd been easiest with Luther on the moon, but that left some six other people to make excuses for more and more as Claire got older.

"The same with Vernetta's family basically adopting me in the first year. And Ray's--" --coming in for the wedding, but she doesn't say those words, instead, easily and smoothly making it. "--having long winding phone calls at all the holidays and birthdays."

It was a world she understood, even if she never felt more than half in it.
And she understood what it felt like for Luther, staring at it all from the outside.

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obediences - 2020-12-23 01:01 (UTC) - Expand

Endish for now, or yours to end?

numberthree - 2020-12-23 01:25 (UTC) - Expand