numberthree | Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

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.

"Yeah, makes sense."

Claire, Patrick, Vernetta, Ray. She's had so much more experience than any of the rest of them with the rituals and trappings of a normal life, and actual families. Which of course elicits that creeping, nagging thought: Who the hell is he to say that she can't have a normal life? How is that any of his business?

But.
They'd all seen how that had ended, and where it had gone.

Luther can't even really remember where he was going with this, finds himself lost for whatever he was about to say next. It mostly just happens with Allison, where the topic always meanders and roams like this, skidding unpredictably along like a boat bobbing along on a stream. He could ask her if she'd ever tried to find her birth mother like Diego had tried with his — but it all feels monumentally irrelevant now, even more than it did when they were in the right universe for it.

"At least the three of us can put together some kind of Thanksgiving thing. Later this month."

Allison nods, a little absently. Memories of the two Thanksgiving before it, blurring into the realization she and Ray hadn't even gotten to the first one that would have been just theirs. The oddest facts that just presented themselves to her, unthought and unconsidered, until a domino made it fall out.

It's not worth saying out loud; she knows that.
It would be awkward, especially with what Luther knows now.
What she did. She broke the scale of deserving to mourn those things.

Instead, she lets it wind the direction Luther originally shifted it, after asking her to think of families had and families she wasn't allowed to have (and the daughter she would do anything not to let go of, and yet had buried deeper than a single whisper). To the last here, again, dramatic, but at least they'd been together. She really would take the one for the other, if they would just appear again. Even cancel the whole dinner if that was the only small price. But.

"It'll be smaller. But we'll manage."

Mask or Menace ☂ IC Phone Post

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Endish for now, or yours to end?