{ 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]

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.