obediences | ic open post & overflow.

The missions had been getting harder and harder since everyone left.

Numbers One and Three were the last holdouts, the last ones standing, and they’d just returned from another fight gone askew; this one was worse than usual, the pair of them barely scraped back into the Televator and limping into the house to be patched up by Mom to the best of her abilities.

The manor had gone empty and echoing where once it had rung with noise and clamour (despite Sir Reginald’s best attempts to pin down the children’s rambunctiousness, trained soldiers should be seen and not heard): the pounding bass of Klaus’ music, movies from Allison’s room, the sound of their mother cooking and humming downstairs, Luther practicing in the gym.

Today, though, their house is more like a hollowed-out skeleton, and Mom is mopping blood from the foyer floor while Allison holds an ice pack to Luther’s swollen eye. He moves gingerly, his entire body a patchwork of bruises; he’s pretty sure he broke a rib.

They’re both exhausted. It had gone so, so poorly. It’s starting to look more and more likely that something’s going to go wrong and they won’t be able to be pulled back from the brink next time (and despite himself, despite everything, Luther finds himself thinking of Ben yet again). His hand unconsciously reaches up, traces the fresh stitches at Allison’s temple. Remembers the sight of her just an hour ago, and how the blood in her hair had struck him cold with fear.

(Head wounds look gruesome, Number One, but they’re a pittance.)

“I should’ve had a better eye on the back exit,” he says wearily. Blaming himself, as always, because he’s the leader and that’s what he’s supposed to do, isn’t it?

"Don't do that," Number Three replies, her voice soft despite the warning. "You can't have eyes in the back of your head, no matter what Diego used to say."

Allison talks about their brother as though he's gone; as though his departure from the house has rendered him lifeless, a figure only to be spoke of in the past tense, even though he still lives in the same city. He still lives and breathes though perhaps it might be better if he didn't (because of everything, Allison finds herself thinking of Ben yet again).

All of the others are dead or gone but only she and Luther remain. She lays her cheek against the palm of Luther's hand, feeling warm against his touch, his nearness, but only for a moment. When Allison pulls away, it shatters something between them; reminds them both that such closeness can't be allowed. She turns her back to Luther, shoulders squared as she breaks apart from him. (She remembers Luther's fury when the others had departed; the hurt in his voice as he accused them of turning their backs on this house, on their family. Despite this, she plunges forward.)

"This mission was doomed from the start." There's a sharp edge to her voice like a cold steel blade forged as she speaks. "We're not a team anymore, Luther. We're a pair." It sounds nearly like an insult. She sighs, permits herself a certain softness to round out the sharp edges of cutting out this part of her life. "It's getting harder and harder to do this on our own."

Edited 2019-03-14 02:17 (UTC)

“I know.” Luther admits it while avoiding her gaze and looking down, at his split knuckles, at his boots still dusty from the debris in the museum. He’s ludicrously stubborn but not delusional; he knows what they’ve been reduced to. The title of team leader tastes like ash in his mouth nowadays, considering the sad dregs of what was once the bustling Academy. Whenever they’re deployed now, he only has the one person watching his back, only the two of them paying attention to the corners. They’re more easily overwhelmed. Even his brute strength isn’t enough to keep it all at bay, and that awareness stings.

“I don’t know what else to do, though. It’s not like we could ever recruit new members.”

Therein lies the difference between them, though: when Luther says he doesn’t know what else to do, it’s a sort of shrugging defeat, an unwillingness to even consider the alternative (that unspeakable alternative, that so many of their siblings have already opted for). Like a wind-up soldier determined to walk in its circle forever.

A silence gestates in the absence of Allison's response as she struggles with the phrasing of her next words. Too condemning of their current lifestyle, and Luther would become defensive; he would buckle down and embolden his commitment to trying again despite the cost to him, to them. His unwillingness to accept defeat was admirable to her, so long as they were still on the same side. This no longer feels the case for her.

She clasps his shoulder with a grip firm enough to bolster him here before her. It's now. It has to be now. "We could leave." The entreaty hosts yearning but also ferocious confidence. Not only does she want this, but she believes they can do it. Together, most preferably.

"Leave?" He echoes the suggestion, in numb disbelief. It catches on the gears of his mind, snags like something's trapped in the wiring. Luther's trying to process it and failing. Because the others left, one-by-one trickling out of this house. But Allison doesn't leave. She's not supposed to be the one to abandon him.

"What do you mean?" he asks, even though he knows exactly what she means. He almost shrugs off that hand on his shoulder, but looks up at her in blinking surprise instead. (He realises, then, that his jaw is aching and not from the earlier brawl; he's clenching it tight enough to grind the teeth, waiting for the next blow from her words.)

"What I mean is —" a scoff catches in her throat as she peers somewhere past him, this house, somewhere she's been dreaming of for a long time, and yearns to seek it out. She furrows her brow as though it pains her, being captured here instead. "Don't you wanna get out of this musty old house? Move out on our own, get out from beneath Dad's prying gaze?"

The memory of a dusty afternoon in the attic floats to the forefront of Allison's thoughts, but she also remembers the glint of light off of their father's monocle, and the happiness from that memory blackens like ash. This place darkened even the brightest of moments throughout her childhood. (Not only hers, but Luther's too.)

"We can leave the Umbrella Academy, Luther," she says, giving him permission if he's only willing to take the leap. She's there to take it with him, always. "We can leave, go out and get a place of our own, and be adults?"

Edited 2019-03-17 00:35 (UTC)

Their father was a looming silhouette in the manor, a weight across Luther's shoulders with the burden of the man's expectations. One that had just become heavier and heavier as each sibling left, leaving Luther carrying what remained. There was a strangled panic tight in his throat at the thought of it, of being the only one left.

What is a leader with no one to lead?

So. Maybe he could go. Just set it all aside. Leave with Allison, leave it all behind, and carve their own path in the world—

But the thought of that sets a different kind of fear clenching his chest, like a vise around his heart, and he can't breathe. What would Luther even do, out in the world? What job could he have that wasn't trotting to Sir Reginald's drum? Allison wanted to act, they'd known that for years, she'd talked and dreamed about it. But cut Luther Hargreeves out of the academy, then what the hell is left of him?

He pulls away from her.

"I can't," he says stiffly. Voice cracking. "I have a responsibility here."

"You can," Allison corrects him. "You should. What responsibility is there?"

She thinks of the dozens of missions to which they'd been dispatched since the age of 12. She can count on one hand the number of times it did any good. So what if this museum got robbed? The curators had a multi-million dollar insurance plan in place to offset the burden of such a loss as might have occurred tonight. And for their pains, she and Luther had suffered injury and risked their lives. It was such a fucking waste.

"No one is grateful for us, Luther. Doesn't that make you angry? Doing this for other people?" Her voice rises in pitch, peeling back the mask on her resentment and hatred of what their father has done to them. She's done such a good job at hiding it from him of late.

(The agent did tell her she'd be a magnificent actress.)

She waves off this thought of hers, but seems dismissive of Luther instead. "What do you want to do for yourself, Luther? Not dad, not the world—you?"

Edited 2019-03-17 03:11 (UTC)

She's asked the exact question which has his eyes glazing over trying to answer it, unable to muster up anything except: "I don't know." There's a free-wheeling existential terror at the thought of it, a complete blank slate spinning out ahead of him. What does he want to do with himself. What does he want to do?

This panicky energy makes him restless and fidgety, and despite the pain still stinging his joints and bruises, Luther rises to his feet and starts pacing the confines of Allison's room like a caged panther, desperate for somewhere to go but reluctant to just outright walk out on this conversation. He's always had too much energy with nowhere to put it, had banished it through push-ups and crunches and the stationary bike. Honing and carving his body, his weapon, the part of him that makes him useful to the academy.

But this isn't a problem he can solve by just punching it hard enough.

"They don't need to be grateful," he says, mouthing off the justification he's been taught to. "I'm not in it for their gratitude. We're in it to make the world safer."

Still, it would have been nice. He'd strutted and mugged for the cameras once, a beaming poster-boy for the academy, flashing a dimpled smile and a wave. Nowadays, he's grown into a tall, strapping young man -- still primed for the posters, but he ignores the photographers and waves off requests for interviews. The only thing the reporters want to ask about is Ben, is Diego and Klaus, is all their lost brothers. (Vanya, they never remember to ask about at all.)

"This is what we were trained to do. If we don't do it, who will?"

Maybe Dad will get off his high horse long enough to do it himself, she wants to say. Tearing down their father,—a man whose self-absorbedness and caprice contributed to the dismantling of this team long before Five had disappeared—would only make Luther stand his ground more, and Allison could tell he was fighting this with every fiber of him. But there was a part of him there that she could tell didn't want to stay here any more than she did, if not for the same reasons.

She reached out to Luther with her hand. "Does it matter who does it?" Her voice soft once more, entreating him. She won't beg, but she gets damn close enough to it. It would all be so much easier if she could rumor her way through this. But she'd never done that to Luther, and vowed she never would. She takes his hand in hers to ground herself and him. "It doesn't have to be us."

He looks down at her hand and instinctively squeezes back, a reassuring tightening of fingers and knuckles. It's such an automatic thing, this; they gravitate towards each other like a pair of satellites caught in orbit. When they're scared, they reach for each other, offer each other comfort, and always had.

Right now, Number One is fucking terrified.

His heart is pattering in his chest with a more sickly kick than it did in the field just a couple hours ago. Robbers, he knows what to do with, but he doesn't know what the fuck to do about staring down the barrel of a lifetime alone or a lifetime outside this mansion's walls. (And even then, despite all this, that persistent voice in the back of his head asks: What am I going to tell dad when she leaves? I've failed them all. What is he going to think?)

Which is when he realises he's thinking 'when' she goes. Not 'if'. And that, more than anything else, makes his heart feel heavy, leaden, sinking down through his feet. Luther's calloused fingers twitch over hers. He thinks about it longer, stewing and considering, but he already knows that the decision's been made.

Until in the end he says, reluctantly, painfully, as if gouging out a part of himself and in all honesty, he is:

"Allison-- I'm sorry. I-- I can't."

"Luther!" Her tone scandalized and admonishing, a last-ditch effort to save this secret mission. "Luther, don't do this!" She grips for him again, unwilling to let him walk away from this. "I know you. I know you want something more than this, more than what he's told you that you have to do."

Her fingers lock onto the strap of his gear, the tight line of his shirt to anchor him to this moment and to her. "We can figure it out together. It's always been you and me, so why not through this, too?" Please, please, please, Luther.

It is, quite literally, the hardest thing he's had to do in his entire life. Harder than looking at himself in the mirror after Ben's funeral. Harder than fighting through bullet wounds or pinching a brother's artery shut or looking Sir Reginald in the eye after Diego jumped ship for police academy. Because none of them had been Allison, and she's always been the one with the closest hold on him, the one he knew and loved best. He knows you're not supposed to pick favourites in a family, but of course they all had favourites.

Allison's voice is growing louder, her hand against his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. And the thing is, she's standing right in front of him and yet the specter of Sir Reginald still casts its long shadow over them both, and Luther's mind is still trapped in that loop of What is he going to think?

The others have managed to cut themselves loose, and Allison finally seems to be at that point too -- but Reginald's barbs have sunk in too deep, caught in Luther like an anchor. So he shakes his head again, jaw tight, eyes glistening though he wished they wouldn't.

"Please don't leave me," he says, his voice a low mumble.

ic open post & overflow.

for ~rumorist -- backstory / voice-testing

for ~rumorist -- backstory / voice-testing

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject