[ For the second time in a week, Allison has not the slightest urge to be awake, to leave her bed, to go to the bastion of bloodsuckers that is her job. Unable to sleep, unwilling to move, tears long since dried, but sore from the strength of the sobbing that had wracked her on the sudden jarring crack of waking from this newest dream with her daughter’s face and voice so perfectly clear once more, as though she hadn’t remembered it as clearly somehow as she swore never to lose.
But morning waits for no one. Allison's communicator rings, even though she ignores it. People who want to know where she is. A thing she doesn’t have to worry about from her daytime sleeping roommates. Eventually, she does have to move, late into the light that doesn’t permeate the house of blackout curtains in every room. Pretending it’s not a little surprising, a little painful and yet painfully relieving both there isn’t something from Luther already for the first time in days.
She remembers too well that girl at the door — her face. Luther’s admission it was his. (Luther’s words at her shoulder. The blasphemy of her own choice. The guilt within it. Selfishness.)
Reginald Hargreeves daughter, broken toy soldier, to the last, when what she turns to, instead of messaging him, herself, is the Network. Surprised not to find the reports of the newest worst turns of this attack on reality but endless messages and news updates about how nothing has happened since dawn. How all the objects and people pulled from dreams are gone. All the changes and powers and dreams brought to life have vanished as though they’ve never been there at all. Wariness more than anything clings like a bur even as she scrolled.
It’s that more than anything that pushed her finally out of bed, into clothes, and into the city she has little love for. There’s a hollow wariness and a perceptive relief, but the further she goes the more it’s true, the more conversations she overhears continues to keep that truth, the more buildings have returned their original shapes, sizes, appearances, and that more than anything digs into her gut.
Sinks more and more hooks into that reluctance each time she looks at her communicator considering. No matter how much she does not want to open the door that already blew itself down like there were never any hinges and locks on that door. Doesn’t want to know what he thinks of her now. Knows what he thinks of her now. Worse than that look in the living room when he realized.
There was a difference between the joke of using her power to solve the problem of having her daughter taken from her, and using her power on her daughter herself. There was a difference between merely saying she’d thought she’d had an advantage and being judged by a body of her peers and sentenced a child abuser. Her father’s daughter to the last. Gone from his house, but not from his training here either.
But even as shame and disgust flare in every direction making the reoriented world barely seen for more than that, she can’t forget either.
Luther’s face in that long frozen moment in the foyer after his shirt and the jacket gave way with the chandelier. Horror and shame and fear before he ran away from all three of them, her, her most of all, as the only person he’d stared at. Horrified. Ashamed. Afraid. Luther’s hand catching her wrist, careless of the grind of the delicate bones there, to keep her from touching him again, asking her to drop it, telling her he was fine when everything about him said he wasn’t.
Four years later and nothing near to anything like fine.
Luther calling her first and foremost a week ago. Uncomfortable, yet easier, in his own skin.
But there’s silence.
It’s not the same. It is. The silence. What it means.
Her world might be ripped open, but no one she passes on the sidewalk, stands next to getting coffee, can tell, can see it, even pauses for longer than second in looking at her. The same would not be true of Luther; from the second he woke up. She hates herself. Every breath still feels an inch from proving she is still broken wide open, a shatter of shards forgotten how to pull together once again. But every single one she can’t forget. His admission. His regret. His face everytime. He called first. He called first. He called first.
He hasn’t called at all.
That she has to. Even if she doesn’t want to.
Allison finds a bench in a park that looks as run down as she feels. Sits drinking her coffee staring at the empty text box in her vision. Not the Network, itself. Not her communicator. Nothing open to the public. She doesn’t expect she's welcome. Wanted. She doesn’t even want to do it. Which doesn’t change she needs to. Needs it like breathing, too. Might be the only person who can. You’re the only person I can talk through things with, he said. How many times had she snapped at him? Things forgotten. Things unsaid. Things avoided. Things kept from her. How many things hadn’t she explained herself that he'd seen now?
She is a hypocrite at the highest level.
It doesn’t excuse her from this either.
With a breath in, Allison closes her eyes, even as the box stays in front of her vision all the same, against the back of her eyelids and the tracery of red-orange from the sunlight behind them, and sends the only question she can. Even if she knows the answer already. ]
[ Luther picks through all of the possible responses, sifts through his words, erases them just as carefully. It had been a temporary reprieve, he knew that, some things were simply too good to be true, and he had to have known it would go away eventually — and yet. And yet he can't help that helpless sting of bitter disappointment and grief when, for the third time in his life, he wakes up transformed overnight. Back to rough and leathery skin with its pockmarked scars, the ones that did not come from battle; those oversize hands; that clumsiness. He's been trapped in his room all morning, called in sick and unable to even step out into the hallway. Can't face the strangers in his house, or on the street. Any of them. Even the Hargreeves.
He'd lied to her before. Claimed it was fine. But Allison can see right through it, and so: ]
[ She waits. She waits. She waits. Her heart beating faster and slower in swings. Uncertain he'll answer. Uncertain she should be selfish enough to feel hurt, to feel like she deserves something, needs him to, doesn't want him to, does, for him, for her. It's not about her. None of this about her. It's about Luther. Whatever he needs. Whatever he wants. Even if that isn't her. Especially if it isn't now.
She has to try; let him know, she knows, she's here. He's not alone. It doesn't mean he does. Have to answer. Have to care.
She sits. Drinks her coffee. Watches the derelict park in this ever contentious city, where children aren't. Freezes against that overwhelming wave that catches like a rock in her throat, in her chest, strikes her eyes, to a stinging degree when a response even pops up, before opening it. It's only one word, and her heart aches even harder for it. For it not being the two words she expected. For the finite, heart stabbing, heartbreaking, honesty.
For having no clue how honest it might be. How deep and dark that tunnel. She doesn't know enough. Doesn't know anything. Enough to know nothing, enough to know there's so more. Maybe even knows too much already, in his opinion. But he answered. So she does, too. She started this. I'm sorry is the wrong words. Same with thank you. Same with I know. She grasps for something else after a few too long seconds. ]
[ They're being honest — trying this on for size, settling in past those atrophied years of distance, re-learning how to exist in each others' lives again — and so he keeps that up. Answers that impossible question as best he can: ]
Not yet.
[ Because maybe there is, or isn't. And even Luther can't predict that yet, craning his head to look up out of that deep, deep, black pit he's in. Superstrength and yet he can't even gather the will to climb out of bed. What a fucking joke.
And then, because even now Luther's aware he's not the only one who lost something, and they were both flayed down to the bone and forced through the wringer last night: ]
Expecting them enough she sighs, a hollow woosh of air and nothing else, and leans back on the bench, at the impass of what she knows and what she can't change and what she can't make better. And still wanting to somehow do more. Say more. Help. Anyway. Somehow. Allison isn't expecting the three-word question that appears before she can plan her response. The question that cuts its teeth on her heart like it's nothing, arrowed for her center.
When she wants to say I'm fine, even though she isn't, even though he knows she isn't. Isn't fine. That it's the reverse? That on some levels she's not sure she's ever okay. Not entirely. Not anymore. And not since just getting here. Here was just a heightened level of it, that danced right at the edge of logic-as-madness and hope-as-desperation. But good enough for government work. For lights, camera, action. Handling it the same way she has for over half a year. Herself.
Are you done with your pity party, yet? She can hear the bland voice of her therapist, in her head at least and not just right beside her, suddenly breathed into life. Berating her in public.
His honest answer, raw and unexpected, sits only a few lines up still. She stared it all another few long seconds. At war with it. ]
No.
[ No reason. No excuse. No embellishment. No lie. No pointing out this is the first time she said anything about it that true, in months, since that first day in the living room, when he said we used to tell each other everything. ]
[ He doesn't even have the energy for his usual straight-backed optimistic platitudes: yeah, but we will be or someday, but it takes time. It's exhausting. He's exhausted. Curled in on himself in that too-small bed, spine bowed, his whole everything arcing down to this phone as this tiny, manageable string to the outside world. ]
[ It's a strange, broken comparison that springs into her head when her words dissert her at his one.
Of afternoons, or late evenings. In the attic, in the window. In one of their bedrooms, after lights out.
Sitting alone, in the silence, of those worst days growing up. Unfixable except with endurance. Her rage at her father's cold clinical treatment of everything, or his punishments for using her power too flagrantly. Luther's brooding judgment, his own judge and jury even beyond their father's disappointed expression. When one of the others wasn't pulled into line right and something was cost. When he'd forgotten to control his own powers in some fashion, broken something aa.
Together even when they couldn't fix things. Together against the world. Together even at their supposed worse. Naive enough to think it was unbreakable. Naive enough to think it about themselves, each other, their ... friendship.
It's like that. It's not. It's all broken. There's so much distance. So many years. A chasm that can't be filled.
Any yet. He's there. At the other end of this pitiful excuse for being there. And she's here. Both saying the truth. Neither of them giving a patented lie that anyone else might get. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
obediences) wrote2019-03-28 10:51 am
May 9th { what goes unsaid, doesn’t go unheard
But morning waits for no one. Allison's communicator rings, even though she ignores it. People who want to know where she is. A thing she doesn’t have to worry about from her daytime sleeping roommates. Eventually, she does have to move, late into the light that doesn’t permeate the house of blackout curtains in every room. Pretending it’s not a little surprising, a little painful and yet painfully relieving both there isn’t something from Luther already for the first time in days.
She remembers too well that girl at the door — her face.
Luther’s admission it was his. (Luther’s words at her shoulder.
The blasphemy of her own choice. The guilt within it. Selfishness.)
Reginald Hargreeves daughter, broken toy soldier, to the last, when what she turns to, instead of messaging him, herself, is the Network. Surprised not to find the reports of the newest worst turns of this attack on reality but endless messages and news updates about how nothing has happened since dawn. How all the objects and people pulled from dreams are gone. All the changes and powers and dreams brought to life have vanished as though they’ve never been there at all. Wariness more than anything clings like a bur even as she scrolled.
It’s that more than anything that pushed her finally out of bed, into clothes, and into the city she has little love for. There’s a hollow wariness and a perceptive relief, but the further she goes the more it’s true, the more conversations she overhears continues to keep that truth, the more buildings have returned their original shapes, sizes, appearances, and that more than anything digs into her gut.
Sinks more and more hooks into that reluctance each time she looks at her communicator considering. No matter how much she does not want to open the door that already blew itself down like there were never any hinges and locks on that door. Doesn’t want to know what he thinks of her now. Knows what he thinks of her now. Worse than that look in the living room when he realized.
There was a difference between the joke of using her power to solve the problem of having her daughter taken from her, and using her power on her daughter herself. There was a difference between merely saying she’d thought she’d had an advantage and being judged by a body of her peers and sentenced a child abuser. Her father’s daughter to the last. Gone from his house, but not from his training here either.
But even as shame and disgust flare in every direction making the reoriented world barely seen for more than that, she can’t forget either.
Luther’s face in that long frozen moment in the foyer after his shirt and the jacket gave way with the chandelier. Horror and shame and fear before he ran away from all three of them, her, her most of all, as the only person he’d stared at. Horrified. Ashamed. Afraid. Luther’s hand catching her wrist, careless of the grind of the delicate bones there, to keep her from touching him again, asking her to drop it, telling her he was fine when everything about him said he wasn’t.
Four years later and nothing near to anything like fine.
Luther calling her first and foremost a week ago.
Uncomfortable, yet easier, in his own skin.
But there’s silence.
It’s not the same. It is.
The silence. What it means.
Her world might be ripped open, but no one she passes on the sidewalk, stands next to getting coffee, can tell, can see it, even pauses for longer than second in looking at her. The same would not be true of Luther; from the second he woke up. She hates herself. Every breath still feels an inch from proving she is still broken wide open, a shatter of shards forgotten how to pull together once again. But every single one she can’t forget. His admission. His regret. His face everytime. He called first. He called first. He called first.
He hasn’t called at all.
That she has to. Even if she doesn’t want to.
Allison finds a bench in a park that looks as run down as she feels. Sits drinking her coffee staring at the empty text box in her vision. Not the Network, itself. Not her communicator. Nothing open to the public. She doesn’t expect she's welcome. Wanted. She doesn’t even want to do it. Which doesn’t change she needs to. Needs it like breathing, too. Might be the only person who can. You’re the only person I can talk through things with, he said. How many times had she snapped at him? Things forgotten. Things unsaid. Things avoided. Things kept from her. How many things hadn’t she explained herself that he'd seen now?
She is a hypocrite at the highest level.
It doesn’t excuse her from this either.
With a breath in, Allison closes her eyes, even as the box stays in front of her vision all the same, against the back of her eyelids and the tracery of red-orange from the sunlight behind them, and sends the only question she can. Even if she knows the answer already. ]
no subject
[ Luther picks through all of the possible responses, sifts through his words, erases them just as carefully. It had been a temporary reprieve, he knew that, some things were simply too good to be true, and he had to have known it would go away eventually — and yet. And yet he can't help that helpless sting of bitter disappointment and grief when, for the third time in his life, he wakes up transformed overnight. Back to rough and leathery skin with its pockmarked scars, the ones that did not come from battle; those oversize hands; that clumsiness. He's been trapped in his room all morning, called in sick and unable to even step out into the hallway. Can't face the strangers in his house, or on the street. Any of them. Even the Hargreeves.
He'd lied to her before. Claimed it was fine. But Allison can see right through it, and so: ]
no subject
She has to try; let him know, she knows, she's here. He's not alone.
It doesn't mean he does. Have to answer. Have to care.
She sits. Drinks her coffee. Watches the derelict park in this ever contentious city, where children aren't. Freezes against that overwhelming wave that catches like a rock in her throat, in her chest, strikes her eyes, to a stinging degree when a response even pops up, before opening it. It's only one word, and her heart aches even harder for it. For it not being the two words she expected. For the finite, heart stabbing, heartbreaking, honesty.
For having no clue how honest it might be. How deep and dark that tunnel. She doesn't know enough. Doesn't know anything. Enough to know nothing, enough to know there's so more. Maybe even knows too much already, in his opinion. But he answered. So she does, too. She started this. I'm sorry is the wrong words. Same with thank you. Same with I know. She grasps for something else after a few too long seconds. ]
Is there anything you need?
no subject
[ Because maybe there is, or isn't. And even Luther can't predict that yet, craning his head to look up out of that deep, deep, black pit he's in. Superstrength and yet he can't even gather the will to climb out of bed. What a fucking joke.
And then, because even now Luther's aware he's not the only one who lost something, and they were both flayed down to the bone and forced through the wringer last night: ]
no subject
Expecting them enough she sighs, a hollow woosh of air and nothing else, and leans back on the bench, at the impass of what she knows and what she can't change and what she can't make better. And still wanting to somehow do more. Say more. Help. Anyway. Somehow. Allison isn't expecting the three-word question that appears before she can plan her response. The question that cuts its teeth on her heart like it's nothing, arrowed for her center.
When she wants to say I'm fine, even though she isn't, even though he knows she isn't. Isn't fine. That it's the reverse? That on some levels she's not sure she's ever okay. Not entirely. Not anymore. And not since just getting here. Here was just a heightened level of it, that danced right at the edge of logic-as-madness and hope-as-desperation. But good enough for government work. For lights, camera, action. Handling it the same way she has for over half a year. Herself.
Are you done with your pity party, yet? She can hear the bland voice of her therapist,
in her head at least and not just right beside her, suddenly breathed into life. Berating her in public.
His honest answer, raw and unexpected, sits only a few lines up still.
She stared it all another few long seconds. At war with it. ]
No.
[ No reason. No excuse. No embellishment. No lie. No pointing out this is the first time she said anything about it that true, in months, since that first day in the living room, when he said we used to tell each other everything. ]
no subject
no subject
Of afternoons, or late evenings.
In the attic, in the window. In one of their bedrooms, after lights out.
Sitting alone, in the silence, of those worst days growing up. Unfixable except with endurance. Her rage at her father's cold clinical treatment of everything, or his punishments for using her power too flagrantly. Luther's brooding judgment, his own judge and jury even beyond their father's disappointed expression. When one of the others wasn't pulled into line right and something was cost. When he'd forgotten to control his own powers in some fashion, broken something aa.
Together even when they couldn't fix things. Together against the world. Together even at their supposed worse.
Naive enough to think it was unbreakable. Naive enough to think it about themselves, each other, their ... friendship.
It's like that. It's not. It's all broken. There's so much distance. So many years. A chasm that can't be filled.
Any yet. He's there. At the other end of this pitiful excuse for being there. And she's here.
Both saying the truth. Neither of them giving a patented lie that anyone else might get. ]
no subject