{ take everything I am; until it's just your voice in my head

[numberthree]

Oh you're in my veins
And I cannot get you out

Oh you're all I taste
At night inside of my mouth





Allison Hargreeves loves her life.

She loves the power that hovers at the tip of her tongue, ready to spring into any words she might need it for. She loves being The Rumor. She loves saving the day, and taking out the trash of the world and putting it where it belongs. She loves the dazed and doting faces that peer at her and her brothers, pushing, shoving, beating signs as their father’s car returns them to the Academy.

She loves the simplicity, and straightforwardness of it all. She loves the hard fights, that light up every nerve in her body, when her foot or fist or elbow connects with the solidness of bones, and men twice her size crumple in the wake of a pain she washed away paying attention at the age when other children were learning to tie their shoes and write in cursive letters.

She loves the moments when she stands there, a swish of skirts or a gliding shadow of perfect fitting leather, while it’s only the whisper of words that brings a crowd crashing to its knees. Flung to her bidding like the breeze stirring the leaves in the trees. She loves the seamlessness with which all her siblings breathe in and out of each other on a battlefield, less individual people and more like breathlessly synchronized thoughts.

She loves the way that Luther goes first, first in all things, and always, and stations himself at the door, holding it for them, as her brothers slide out of their seats, all neatened socks and straightened ties, most blood and stains wiped away between being picked up in costumes and emerging again in uniforms. The only one of them who truly has trouble with that one, at times, is Ben.

She loves the feeling that anything and everything is possible, is at her fingertips, laced into her fingers, when saving the world is child's play, and they are the only children, though they are far from being just children anymore, who can. Who do. Who can't be stopped. Who are begged for the mercy of the grace of coming to their rescue the world over.

But what she loves most of all, sliding out last of the car, in reaching up so easily to catch her weight and help her stand with the help of the top of the car door, is letting her fingertips glide just so against the edge of Luther’s hand, briefly catching like a skipped stone on two of his last knuckles as her hand falls away with the need for the door, while she gives him the flick of a dangerous smirk, part dare, and part promise, and all reckless heady fearlessness, that anyone else watching might simply find vaingloriously pert.

Before she passes on by, turning her smile on the crowd like a returning queen. Dark fingers linking behind her back, lighter than the black of her jacket, and the smallest floated-skip to her matched and measured Mary-Jane steps, falling in line behind her other three brothers as the car door closes behind her and she knows Luther will fall in right behind her, too.

Comments

[obediences]

The screaming of the fans, the clamouring demands of the reporters to tell them more about the fight, the ache in his muscles or blood caught in his cuticles — none of it touches him. None of it touches that slick and glacial smile, the one he'd practiced in the mirror just like one might practice boxing form. Getting himself camera-ready for the magazines, or the hungry crowds clawing for just one more minute with the Umbrella Academy. Just one more minute.

And it all rolls off him like water off a duck's back, until Allison's fingertips brush against his hand, and he feels it like a ripple up his whole spine, drawing his posture up onto tiptoes. A sudden jolt to his pulse and a small twist of his neck, glancing over to the crowds, the cameras, the Monocle. If any of them saw. If they noticed. If they can tell. What that means.

But their attention is elsewhere — Klaus is mugging for the Times, before Diego chivvies him forward into the manor, and Luther's taking up the rear, Reginald is folding up his umbrella and tucking his briefcase under an elbow, and nobody saw.

This time, when he grins, there's a slyness to it.

The front door slams shut behind them all, echoing in the foyer, and then there's debriefings to be done, before they can even finish cleaning up (he corrals Ben before they enter the study, catches him to help rub one last smear of blood off his jaw where the boy missed it). And then they line up in numerical order for their father's inspection: a neat and tidy row of ducklings, One through Six, and Number One is standing at ready with hands locked behind his back. He keeps rubbing at his ring finger and pinky, absentmindedly touching those knuckles. He's shoulder-to-shoulder with Number Two. If he leaned a little forward and looked too far to the side, he'd see Allison.

He's distracted — she planted that distraction so effortlessly, that little seedling and now he can't get his mind off her — but he manages to rattle off his report anyway. Number of casualties. Civilians rescued. Any issues in the execution of the plan. The building schematics were out-of-date; worth keeping an eye on next time. Even as he talks and his mouth forms shapes and he's ticking through his memories of the fight, he's still just thinking of her, of when they'll all be dismissed, when they'll flock back to their rooms. His room. Hers. Whichever one.

[numberthree]

Legs straight, knees locked, toes and face forward, hands lock, head up as though suspended, gaze unfocused on the memorized unchanging features of the living room, shoulders brushing against Diego who stood straight as a steel ramrod on one side and Klaus, slouched with arms crossed the other direction, an inch from breaking formation to whisper something to Ben already, while their father stood, stern, implacable judge and jury on the retelling of the mission that would inevitably end with instructions on what they should do better on next time, without a word of praise on the fact they won, again, as always.

All of it, and what Allison finds fighting to change the straight line of her mouth, is that she can hear the just barely unseated edge of Luther's voice. As he breaks down details she never once even considered in the field, and why would she have to, that was what was why Luther was their Leader and he did it well, she can hear it. Even though she's more than certain, without a surreptitious look in any direction, that their father and Diego can't.

Still, she'd swear until dark that it is there. Just this smallest edge. The faintest rush to certain syllables.
Maybe unnoticeable to someone who didn't spend all their granted, and stolen, time with that voice in their ears.

But she can't miss it. The same way she can't miss it, always knows, when he's looking at her, even when he has the mask on. It's harder to not smile about it, muscles fluttering a small delighted war with her jaw and cheek muscles, between a different kind of victory and expected seriousness of them in this. Makes the dog and pony show of waiting interminable, toes impatiently shifting in her shoes for this newest grade of sufficient and yet lacking to be passed. As predictable as it was dismissable. A chore to bear out.

Until he reads them his dispassionate rotary of what they will do better next time, and work on in training for starting tomorrow, until they are a perfectly oiled machine. Allison resists from rolling her eyes at all of it, not because she wants to, but because she's counting down to what he'll say last -- and does. Dismissing them (and by them, her father really only dismisses it to Luther, more than them, to lead them away) to their rooms for Studies until Dinner, with two s's because it might as well be silent studies.

But her weight drops a little back into her shoes and in turning toward the door she does get to look at Luther again.
Catching his gaze with smugly, imperious kind of knowing, that just manages to tug the corner of her mouth up.

[obediences]

They're not half so clever as they'd like to think they are. The others have noticed it, because how could they not?: the way that Luther's ears seem to prick up like a hunting hound hearing a whistle, whenever she simply walks in the room. All his orbit gravitating towards her, his attention bleeding away, Allison the only one who's even capable of shattering Number One's concentration so effortlessly. (And it had gotten worse over the last few years, because of course it had: blood thrumming under his skin and leaping in his neck, a heavy swallow in his throat as he sneaks sidelong glances at her. When she stands on tiptoe to reach for a mug out of a high cabinet, and her shirt rides up a bare inch. It's all the little things.)

He likes to think the Monocle hasn't noticed, and he's actually probably right. Because the man only cares about results, about combat and training, and their sticking to their stringent schedule and steering clear of fun and games, and as long as Spaceboy hasn't dropped the ball, then they're all clear. For now.

So the teenagers are dismissed, and they scatter to the four winds while two of them catch each others' eye. Luther lets her go on ahead (because as much as he's the leader, Allison tends to lead in other respects); he has to stand and count off the seconds, until him following her doesn't look quite so conspicuous, before his quick tread up the creaking steps toward the two bedrooms at the end of the hall. At the very last second, where he should have gone left, he turns right instead. Plants himself in her doorway, a shoulder against the jamb, a smirk playing on his mouth. Still wearing the domino mask, because they haven't even had time to change after the mission.

"Unfair," he proclaims, as simple like she's been caught cheating at Monopoly (another thing that has happened).

[numberthree]

They disperse, filing out the same way they filed in.

At least until the make it through the doorway to the livingroom, and then Klaus is already slipping up to where Ben is, and they become a ribbon of quick, whispered conversation. Allison ignores it, and the prickle at the bottom of her neck like the need to look back has become electric. But she doesn't. She doesn't look back heading to the stairs, and she doesn't look down when she's made the top, bypassing Klaus & Ben's dragging feet as they prolong talking before they have to part, and she doesn't look back making it down the room hallway.

Not when and as she breezes into her room, without pausing at her own door even to close it.

Making for the back alcove, where she's already pulled off her mask and loosed her hair, currently looking for something through the endless drawers of her dresser. Which isn't to say she misses the steps coming down the hallway. Or that while other doors have opened and closer down their hallway, the closest one has done neither yet. When the word comes it's impossible to stop the first flush of her smile -- a little too victorious already for so tiny a thing -- but she tamps it down to the barest curl, looking over her shoulder.

It's hard to pretend her heart doesn't pound suddenly harder at the sight of him there, in her doorway, alone, framed by the long empty hallway. All endlessly too tall golden professional ease still clinging to him like a blanket. Like a million eyes were on him, instead of just hers. Though there were, too. Not here. The whole world was watching him -- the rugged, untouchable leader of The Umbrella Academy -- and she'd never been immune to it either. (Obviously.)

Her mouth kept that small, smart curve and her eyebrow raised delicately, "Oh?"

There was a note of a mongered innocent-confusion in her voice,
but there was nothing but a glittering pride in her dark eyes.

[obediences]

That look over her shoulder is perfectly-calculated: it's one she's mastered for paparazzi shots and magazine spreads, the coquettish twist of her head and raise of an eyebrow. Leveled at him like a bullet. Allison's well-aware of her best angles and has been trained to use them to her advantage in the public eye; even here, in private, Luther's not immune.

She's playing mock-innocent, in a way that he'd find infuriating if it didn't already make his pulse pound harder. His attention's split in half, partially stuck on her, partially his shoulders itching to turn around and ears-pricked listening for someone else in the house: waiting for the creak of a floorboard, one of their teammates (or more disastrously, Dad) to come treading down the hallway towards them. He's always on the toes of his feet around her, ready to leap away and resume a respectable distance if they have to.

"You're well-aware," he says dryly, and finally glances over his own shoulder. Checks that the corridor's empty. There's the distant low sound of Klaus singing in his room, but nothing else.

One light tap of his finger against her door and it drifts closed; Luther lets it click carefully into place. With him inside the room. On the wrong side of the door. The forbidden nature of it makes his heartbeat take another jolt, another nervous tremor as if they're back in the field. Actually, no: he's cooler, calmer in the field.

"You're a distraction, Allison Hargreeves."

[numberthree]

She is -- well-aware -- and she does do it on purpose. She is nothing if not purposeful, and direct. A slicing point she's been only too glad to continually train into herself. Unwavering clarity of purpose and intent, the way they've all been trained, but some of them are just ultimately so much better at than the rest. It still throws itself half out the window behind her, when Luther's reaching out on slim longer finger to tap (so much more delicately than anyone even pays attention to anymore, except her) her door closed behind him.

With himself on the inside. Calling her by her full name.

In a way that rides so close to professional rebuke,

in a space that absolutely isn't,
where he isn't supposed to be.

"Is that a punishable offense now?" Allison asks, breezily, her smirk starting to shine through, as her weight settles more on one foot and she tries hard not to already wish she could see his blue blue eyes under the still present domino mask. It's not goosebumps, but the electricity, of the small space, of the forbidden, of Luther, that makes all of her skin prickles everywhere with that door closed behind him. "Perhaps, you need to learn better self-control still, Number One."

There's no apologeticness in her tease, of the longest and strongest thing he can and is and does do, and she only ups her own ante to it by letting go of the clothes she's holding with one hand, and with one finger makes a small gesture in a circle for him to turn around. Toward that door he just closed. Showcasing that she's not sending him away (a thing that almost never happens), but that she's still aiming to get out of her uniform and into plain clothes, and that decorum, that rule they almost live to break without letting anyone quite realizing how much, dictates he isn't even supposed to be there during it, amends to not watching. Or.

[obediences]

Self-control is the exact watch-word, is the exact thing Luther's spent years trying to hone — patience, delicacy, the minute control over himself and his own strength so he doesn't just snap bone and furniture wherever he goes.

But this is a different kind of self-control, and he snorts a small laugh in the back of his throat before he turns obediently around. Ever her dutiful hound, as always, even though he's ostensibly Number One: she has him wrapped around her finger and she never even had to use her power for it, not once. Luther turns on his heel and faces the closed door again, staring fixedly forward as if he's back at military attention, but his shoulders wind tighter as he hears the rustle of clothes behind him. He stares down at his hands folded neatly in front of him; scrutinises his cuticles in case he can spot any dried blood that he missed, but he's already cleaned it off, pristine.

It's like a game. (They aren't allowed to play games.) Turning away and counting to ten. Ready or not, here I come. How long can he stare at the tips of his shoes before his heart-rate gives him a goddamn coronary and he has to turn around.

The sound of fabric shifting over skin, the pleated skirt hitting the floor as she changes.

This is torture.

He can hold out. Not turn around. Maybe if he tells himself that he'll turn to salt if he turns around.

But he can talk. So there's that voice, dry, amused, directly softly at her door: "I'm not sure this is the kind of training that was on my schedule for today."

[numberthree]

If she was a little less brazen, had less of a penchant for running straight off cliffs right beside One and Two, Allison would step to either side of the alcove for some cover. In case. But she doesn't. Doesn't even look in either direction. Honest as anything, doesn't even look at her clothes in her hands at first. Just at Luther, turned around and staring at her door. The way she can't stop looking over there almost only as she starts with her jacket.

The way his blonde hair curls just so at the nape of his neck.
The line of his shoulders. The loose hold of his elbows.

The way his posture ever so suddenly tenses just a little more when she's stepping out of her skirt, and it hits the floor. Too small a space, and none of his music playing through the walls, for it to be missed. And there's a part of her more reckless than anything that pauses just for a second. Thinks about walking up behind him and drawing a finger up his spine. About what his face would look like if he reacted on impulse and spun around to find her still like this.

There's a momentary haze of flashes, even as she doesn't move.

Pulling him down from his obnoxiously tall vantage point over her.
Pushing up his mask, into his hair, possibly along with her fingers.
Kissing him until he can't control that clipped amused tone.


Or his hands.



Except she doesn't move. At least not forward. Only lets her mouth turn the smallest bit crooked, her mouth bunching a little bit, so it scrunches her nose, and steps into her jeans, pulling them up as she lets her voice stay sedately, and mock-sweetly, smug while she zips and buttons them. "And what am I saving you from today? Reciting Keats? Lifting a 16-wheeler? An incredibly boring war, with very, very dead people?"

[obediences]

He laughs (and the sound is so much looser and freer than the straight-laced, tightly buttoned-up creature he'll become in some thirteen years). "How about 'all of the above'?"

Except Luther doesn't actually skive off training the same way she does, and so it's not technically a rescue. He still relishes it, flings himself into weight-training with gusto, bends himself towards the Monocle's regimen with unyielding determination, thinking it's the most surefire way to the man's respect and love.

But still. Some things are more enjoyable than working himself to the bone, and this is one of them: even if it's maddening, even if all his nerves feel alight with electricity, even if not turning around is a goddamned Herculean effort right now. His hand flexes at his side, tightens into a fist, then loosens.

"I was supposed to be studying flight manuals before dinner, actually. And then lifting a car in the driveway to try to wear me out before bed."

Try to being the operative phrase, there. Very little tired Luther Hargreeves.

[numberthree]

The prickle of electricity hovering just above her skin breaks into goosebumps down her bare back and arms as Luther laughs, warm and unchecked, the way he does, and it's terrible how easily he can do that. How much of her body responds to it, to him, and how much it makes her roll her eyes at her self as she's bunching up the bottom of the fabric and pulling a shirt on over her head.

She straightens it once her hands and arms are in. Settles it hanging off a shoulder, loose to just grazing the top of her jeans, and she'll have to put the uniform back on for dinner, but until then. There's a soft sound in her throat. A lilted and unimpressed hmmmm right before she walks toward him, silent, bare feet, as they were all trained to be when the need for it was mission-pertinent. Stopping a foot barely behind him.

Close enough to see the faint lines in his jacket from the car ride, and every strand of golden hair, and the way his pale skin is still just barely flushed with a touch more color from the exertion of the Academy's earlier outing. The way she considers it for a second. Reaching up and brushing the skin right where his hair stops. Or, like the earlier thought, down the line of his jacket. Or --

The choice makes itself as soon as her gaze gets there.

Allison reaches out, and it's the ghost of fingertips over knuckles clenched just this side of too tight in the faintest quiver of a fist at his side. The way she asks, her voice thrown low, but her tone already so so so aware of the answer, warm to the edge of the fire with the constant reminder of how it keeps not changing. "Should I let you go, then?"

[obediences]

"No."

It's the quickest answer he's ever thrown back at her, though his voice comes out rough, a little shaky, a tremor set in motion by Allison's fingertips grazing across his knuckle. He can feel her presence behind him, now: just a light tiptoeing weight on the floorboards, a seething warmth just a couple feet away from him. Her hand is too warm; it feels like it's a match, setting him ablaze.

If either of them had been telepaths, they'd have been absolute goners. Those mental images flooding through her head even as he, too, kept wondering what he would have seen if he'd turned around. At the sound of that fabric hitting the floor. What he, they, could have done. Crossed those creaking floorboards already. Not had to wait.

Luther's hand twists blindly in hers, catches her wrist by just a couple fingers, hangs onto her like he couldn't when she was flouncing past him on the front steps. A pause, a heartbeat pounding heavily in his throat and his mouth dry even as he asks: "Are you decent yet, Number Three?"

Even as what's running through both their heads is, guaranteed, perfectly indecent.

[numberthree]

Her pulse skips to a hard marathon of its own under the fingers that suddenly trap her wrist, a little tighter than she's sure he even meant to let happen, in suddenly demand that she has to stay right there. Frees him from the one hint in his entire posture that it was getting to him, but makes her the weathervane that can feel it in the air. The way that even if Luther doesn't tremble, could withstand hours and days if their father told him to stand somewhere in perfect posture, how it's right on the other side.

A breath from breaking through that perfect unbreakable resolution.

"Am I ever?" Rolls out far too quickly, caustically, so incredibly pleased with herself, it nearly shines.

But she doesn't give him the chance to answer that in the slightest. Takes the faintest of small steps, the toes of one foot lightly, purposely brushing the back of the shoe on the same side as his hand. Dividing that foot or less of space into even smaller infinitive inches while her heart skips in her ears, shaving away space into less than grasping splinters in an already too dangerous game that they both always, always lost. "What happens if I say no?"

[obediences]

"I gave you enough time." As if it was hide-and-seek or tag, as if he was standing there running a countdown along with his pulse, each beat of his heart measuring out another second before he could turn around and go for her. "You're a terror."

True. Accurate. Out of all of them, with their terrifying powers, hers are actually the deadliest.

His grip tightens even further, riding that knife's edge where it almost hurts but he knows, from long practice and careful restraint, that it won't harm. Just enough that he can feel her pulse rattling along beneath his fingertips too— good. Okay. Not just him, then.

Finally, another inhale and exhale and then Luther turns around, twisting in her arms until he's switched hands and they're standing so, so close, his head bowing to look down at her. Still domino-masked, his blue gaze now running up and down Allison's clothed body. Catching on the bare arc of her shoulder, that artfully-arranged careless angle of her shirt falling. His mouth twists under that mask. A smirk.

"We have some time until dinner. I could read that flight manual later."

A small rebellion, all things told, but he has a bigger rebellion in mind: his eyes are riveted on the curve of her jaw, her answering smirk.

[numberthree]

Allison doesn't fight him when he moves. Doesn't flinch or step away or even duck her head. All shameless delight as she watches the faintest shadows of thoughts play on the little of his face visible, as only the tilt of his face, and the hold of his mouth as he breathes and the swallow of his throat, gives away the clues to the way she knows his eyes have fallen down across all of her, to be sure of which way the real answer she hadn't given was.

It's in that, the intensity of it, the psychology of stripping away the gateway of human connection with someone's eyes, that leaves it bleeding, blinding intensity only. They all have it — the Umbrella Academy. But none of them have it the way Space does. It's the thing, all careless, arrogant smile that sends people running the first second they catch sight of it, not knowing it's already too late. Sends a shiver down spines.

Something in the animal hindbrain that knows better.
That screams the electrical impulse for flight before a predator.

One Allison has never in her life felt looking up at him. Hesitation, once upon a time, had existed for entirely different reasons. Still, it had cast itself on forgotten shores, and she'd stopped caring about its foreign whisper on that day it cracked forever.

It's why even though she wants to start at his mouth, at the sharp dangerous promise that curves profanely around the angelic suggestion of being good they are still toying with, she reaches up, up, up, until her fingers can catch the edges of his mask and push it up, up, up, over his forehead, into his hair, until she can see the blue lightning of his eyes, chiding with played-up disapproval, "You aren't supposed to wear this with me."

[obediences]

"I didn't have time to change." He should've, really; he was supposed to stop by his room first, neatly hang up his Academy blazer, and send the tidily-pressed trousers and rumpled white shirt downstairs for Grace to soak out the bloodstains.

Instead, he'd come right here. So Luther's still in his field attire, and it still smells a bit of gunpowder, from the shots they'd taken at him: the grey blazer with burgundy trim is unbuttoned, and his tie's slightly loosened, but that's as far as he got. It had just been too painfully important, imperative, to follow Allison's unspoken call and come to this room hot on her heels.

Her fingers comb into his hair as she pushes back the mask and he feels it send an answering shiver down his spine. She and Grace are the only ones who ever touch him kindly, or outside of fight training. He's starved for it like all of them are, so Luther tilts his head into the contact, savours the light press of Allison's nails.

And then, because while he's got that vaunted willpower and he's withstood it this long, he is still human and he's painfully aware of the timer ticking down to dinner and they need to steal these moments where they can— Number One finally cracks and caves. He closes the rest of the distance between them, lets Allison's arm settle around his neck instead, her winding him closer even as he captures her mouth in a kiss.

Their first-ever kiss had been gentle, cautious, exploratory, in case they had to rapidly backpedal and undo what they'd just done.

This one isn't; this is one of dozens, hundreds, they can't count anymore, and so Luther takes another step closer, crowding her backwards towards the wall.

[numberthree]

She shouldn't like it as much as she does. Shouldn't feel the thrill of it this deep. When Luther still feels the need to explain himself, as though missing that mark didn't somehow have to do with her (as though he couldn't have done it at any point while facing the door). The way his head just lists into her touch, and his whole body shivers just even slightly more noticeably than his fingers had. But she does, too. Like it. Watching those things happening.

Watching the moment where he trips straight over the line of how far they can both push each other before someone has to fold.

Before it's the game where all the cards fall off the table. Because they were never creatures made for patience.

They were built for the offensive, direct, and deadly aim, no second thought. Allison's never had any of those where it came to him, is the last truly sensible thought Allison has, as her hand curls the back of his head, slides to his neck, while he's already leaning in, already pushing them further from that door and the world outside of it. When she's already pushing up on to her toes, and her fingertips are digging into his neck, and he's finally kissing her, and she's only been thinking of this since he decked someone out a window.

(Or since breakfast, and the regimental silence of trying to pretend
that breakfast and the news were more interesting than snatching glances at each other.)

Which really, as her fingers slide back up into his hair, pulling him closer, pulling him further down, lips parting in a silence they've memorized all too well, while still pushing up, is basically, like saying it's every second she's breathing -- and not in the middle of fighting -- since the first time. Since the last time. Since a second ago, when a first kiss only has to be a second, a third, a forgetful, uncounting madness of fire, and close, that rule of all rules where only shoulders brush for marching lines and hands for sparring, is still nothing like close enough again, even when Luther can blanket her in seconds.

[obediences]

It's that spark she lit when she brushed against him outside (which looked so careless, but was calculated to an inch as their actions always are), but now stoked into a five-alarm fire that's burning him up from the inside. His hands go straight for the hem of Allison's loose shirt, sliding under it until he can reach soft bare skin, his hands hot against her stomach, the small of her back.

Luther's still having to tilt his head at an awkward angle to reach her lips, that growth spurt having hit with a vengeance; which elicits a frustrated little noise in the back of her throat which he answers with another laugh, briefly breaking away before his hands slide back downwards, to the back pockets of her jeans, easily lifting Allison up for her legs to wind around his hips.

They've calculated this, too. An easy familiarity with each others' bodies that transferred from the sparring mats to her bedroom, to his: the best ways for them to get as close as possible, just a little leap and he carries her effortlessly, not noticing the weight at all. All the ways they fit together like they always have, for years, until this latest iteration and variation on the theme just felt inevitable.

His mouth is against her throat, then her ear. "Where do you want me?"

[numberthree]

Allison's heart is somewhere in her throat, shot upward toward the top of her head, when Luther's hands find her skin.

Slides across it large, and long, and with no sign of anything like uncertainty in touching her any longer. Like a dam gone and broken entirely from the first crack. Until he's stopping to laugh, stopping to have to lift her, and she's only narrowly not hitting his chest with her hand, mostly because she's got one of them knotted in his tie again, and she'd have to stop longer than it takes to just those seconds.

Longer than wrapping her legs around his waist, and an arm around his neck, hand on the muscles of his upper back, than pulling him right back too disastrously close. Just as gone, and just as aware she is gone. That as much as either of them laugh and lie and play tug-a-war with who is in control, and who has lost it entirely every time any door closes, that there's only an inch of even her own smoking in the remains of this.

This thing. This want. When Allison hasn't in her whole life had to want something longer than the requesting of someone to give it to her. (Aside from her father's regard, respect, affection.) But this. This thing, where Luther's lips brush her skin, rough and soft all at once, and her heart hammers a slamming, deafening, roar at the nearness, at the offer, at the promise. This is a thing that having only makes the wanting even greater. Drags a small, unfair sound out of her mouth, against his cheek, lips tracking the edge of his jaw that she can reach.

When here and now and even the bed are all things that logically should not populate into her head, and the fourth one is even worse. If she were one for blushing, it would have crept up her throat for that one. Because these rooms and their layouts are so perfectly set up, so a single swing of any door down the hallway gives a clear view of the room in question. They all do. Just like their Father likes. Just like their Mother makes a careful sweep of all the area of when she checks on them.

Except that hers has one small thing, one no one else's does the same way: that alcove.

The one she hadn't hidden in any part of it changing. That had edges and corners she spent childhood nights of covered from view, curled up near the window of with a cup and a string in her hand, whispering through the night. And maybe she hates hiding, hates that it's the urge, but when she pulls back for a second (lips shiny and pinked from friction, gaze crossing his face too fast, before she's leaning in to kiss him, a little harder for the fluke of a faint actual frustration) she may hate the rules, and sometimes their Dad's standoffishness, but she never hates Luther. Only.

Only wants more of him. Which is just an endless cascading thing when he's like this. Again. Finally.

"Back." That with a hand thrown above her shoulder and in the right direction, even when she's not looking that direction, and her weight is not something she's even thinking of, as her hands are starting to peel back the jacket that had been under her hands. Him and his far too many layers of his uniform that still existed, especially when her bare skin still felt burned everywhere he’d touched it.

[obediences]

She sheds the jacket from Luther's shoulders and he shrugs it off, making sure to deposit it on her bed rather than the floor — he's too well-trained still — but then Allison says Back, and Luther obeys, arms looped around the small of her spine. Walking them both forward and forward to the little nook where she's holed up so many times, painting her nails or reading magazines or cracking open the window to whisper to him after lights-out.

It's a cozy little alcove: where Luther's room is dull greys and blues and browns, blandly-checkered rug and tartan curtains, Allison's is an exercise in delicate femininity like something out of the housekeeping magazines. Sheer billowing curtains that make the dimming afternoon light soft and diffuse, fluffy pillows that cushion her landing as he deposits them in the alcove in a pile of muffled laughter and her shushing him with a kiss.

His equivalent of the alcove, he'd wasted on setting up a boxing bag. More fool him. So Allison's room is the only place with a scrap of privacy, with a place where she can sprawl back on the pillows and Luther can follow after, his long lean body pressed against hers as he kisses her, hungrily, his thumb tracing the line of her cheek. He could do this forever. They could do this for hours.

They don't have hours.

So his hands are already roaming again: not pulling off her shirt because they're well-versed in this, in treading around the lines, in forever having that voice in the back of their heads that says plausible deniability. That's prepared to stamp a foot on the brakes at the sound of footsteps down the hall and pretend that they were only studying, despite Luther's flushed skin and Allison's ragged breath, suddenly having to rearrange their faces into practiced innocence (she's better at that part than he is). For now, though, there's no one, it's just them, just them and Luther's spry fingers sliding up her stomach, under the edge of her bra as he bites at her lip.

[numberthree]

All the differences Luther is with her — the teasing, the laughter that brushes warm against her cheek as they drop in not quite a heap, that causes elation more than the worry she never actually has with him — is all part of this. All the multifaceted sides that only seem to spool out on her fingers, against her lips, when she’s kissing that laughter like it was something she could taste, pure in itself. 



“Stop, stop, stop.” They are silly words to choose, when her whole body is a bowstring of movement, a crescent straining into his, following that laughter, pretending she’s not smiling sharp and insane—almost laughing herself, just from the sound of it. Dissolving on the sound of it from Luther from all people. That she can do this. That he freely lets himself. Or as freely as they can. There are still some lines they don’t cross. Know they can’t.

Don’t know what the cost would be. Or punishment.

Only that it would pull them apart, which feels as impossible as not breathing when they are this close. “And you say I like to play it dangerous.”

Because she does, she always has. In a more dangerous way than Space and Kraken both, too. Pressing their Father’s rules as far as they can go. Disregarding him, insulting him, commenting on his choices, actions, to his face, in front of their mother, in front of the rest of the team. She’s never learned to hold her tongue. Not really. Especially where it comes to their Father.

There’s a small, sharp inhale against Luther’s teeth (a success in itself, the sounds of surprise they’ve all trained themselves never to have) when his fingers slide up her ribs. She can’t, doesn’t try to, stop her spine from arching, pushing herself into him, into his hands, this madness that feels like the truest thing she’s ever known.

Where she wants his hands all over her. Where she wants to undo every button and discover every inch of him she can, that they’ve all seen in snippets, seen in training, in the worst of missions, felt beneath the thinnest veneer of cloth. Wants to break all the last rules they don’t. That they don’t have time for. Cover for. They shouldn’t. But how could she ever not want?

(It might be the truest thing about her.
The wanting. The way she takes those things.)

The logic, knowing it, only makes her want it more.

Has her kissing him harder, tugging his tie looser, if not undone entirely, and the first of his buttons, if not all of them. Wanting more of him against her fingers tips, her mouth, when she contorts slightly, pulling some of it askance, to find the place where her lips can meet the space where his neck and his shoulder connect. The even softer skin just below there, right above his collar bone.