[ But for all that she changes the name, the point is exchangeable and the same. Klaus and Ben, who'd been that same once upon a time, as interchangeable in that kind of mention as they had. Maybe not in the same way, Allison's not sure anything has ever been, or ever looked like, what they'd been, but it had been close. It'd been the only other and next closest thing in their family until their midteens. ]
I never thought about the fact you could have been aynwhere else. Already off looking for Vanya. Or Harold. Or ... just anywhere else at all.
[ Truth be told, objectively, pragmatically — callously, in that inner voice of his that still sounds too much like Sir Reginald — Luther probably should've spent that time elsewhere. Prioritised the world, over this small and too-emotional concern, that shard buried deep in his heart. Worked the angles of the mystery instead. Helped fix the situation, nip it in the bud before it exploded even further. Maybe could've prevented it from becoming the absolute conflagration it had later. But even with all those considerations, in the end— ]
No. I couldn't have.
[ It might look flat, in text, but she knows exactly what his voice would sound like if he were saying this out loud. Unyielding. As if reciting a fact about the universe. ]
There is literally nowhere else I could've been, in that moment.
[ Allison is quiet a long few seconds, staring at those words in the darkness behind her eyelids. She wonders if this will ever not feel a little wrong. The silence, and the space, and book font words in lieu of the real ones she's lost. She does know what those words would sound like, and even more than that she could have said them before he said them. It's part of what she was trying to say and failing at not quite knowing how to.
Like knowing that the sky was blue, but only just realizing you'd forgotten to look up at it ever. (Suddenly seeing it only when the only other people you'd never have doubted to make the same choice... didn't.)
It didn't change what happened after that, but, right now, she could see the opposite so clearly, too:
none of that changed that he'd done it before all of what happened, too. ]
I'm glad you were there.
I know it's not like that changes that everything was a wreck pretty much from the moment I woke up until --
But. I'm glad it was you. That it wasn't like that. Earlier.
[ Maybe there is something wholly selfish in that. But she's really never apologized for that with Luther in her life.
The whole world fell apart in short order after she woke up, and this world will be fine, even if Ben wasn't there when Klaus woke up, maybe Klaus will be hurt but they'll work it out, but she's still glad for it tonight. For Luther being there. For not having to be scared or worried or confused about that, too. Even just for those second before all hell broke loose even harder. For this small light cupped somewhere in the palm of her hands, in the hollow of her chest. One she knows is there, as much as she'd sworn for a decade was gone, as much as it could never be gone. ]
[ And that makes it all click into place more solidly, suddenly understanding the context of what brought this all up. The reminder of what... wasn't. Who hadn't been waiting there tonight for Klaus.
It's a validation that he hadn't actually been expecting to receive. Allison hadn't even heard what he'd said to her then, the words tripping over themselves in their rush to get out, to be unleashed, a years- and decades-long river that had finally burst its banks and gone roiling across the landscape, a flurry of words and emotions where Luther was normally stoic reserve. Confessing everything.
And she hadn't heard it.
But he hadn't even meant for her to hear it. ]
'You're welcome' doesn't really fit, here.
[ Because it'd be like thanking him for breathing. ]
But I'm glad I was there, too. And that you came back to me.
[ That's probably toeing a line, possibly giving away too much — the safer thing would've been to say came back or came back to us — but Luther can't lie in this, either. ]
[ Quieter longer, there’s something about those words that wrap warm, even in the silence, around the exhaustion that’s become her bones. That is too insidious and far-reaching to need to check that. To check the fact that, though she's thought a lot about being mute, she hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking much about her near-death either. To check to way it slides itself into Klaus throwing his pillow across the room angrily and Ben’s misery.
Into she hurt you and I lost you once this week, I wasn’t going to do it again; into what do you want from me? and nothing; into you can ask me and i'll try my best; into call out of work and you’re the only one I can do that with; into it’s mine and we'll find a way.
Into the first clear voice telling her, through the pain and the panic, she was somehow still alive, being Luther’s, and the way how no matter how eroding the deep hollow anger, and swallowing the even deeper hollow sadness, burrows into her here, it’s Luther, it’s being near Luther, it’s having Luther’s words, spoken or written, that makes her feels more alive than just making it through the day.
She’s not sure there is anything short of death that could stop that. Stop her coming back. To Luther. Hadn’t that been true even when he wasn’t anything more than a ghost in her heart no one could compare to in the end? Any more than his overreactions and bad decisions and a burning planet could stop her. Anymore than her temper or distance or coolness or choosing Vanya could ever stop him.
She's too tired for anything but holding it, in the dark deep of the night, for anything but feeling bare beaten to the floorboard grateful, in a way that is only bloody and just breathing, even without a fight, that he didn't die after that mission, that she didn't die on that floor (that Klaus is alive, alive, alive, again, somehow miraculously, again, and they have nothing new to mourn).
The letters never change, always flat, always regimental, but she knows it would be the barest whisper if she could. ]
[ It's not a lot to go off. Just two words, perhaps indistinguishable from other terse responses she's given him during late-night texts — like one particular exchange that hadn't gone half so well, either, that first night in this world — but he can tell. Pretty sure he can tell what particular cant and tone and emotion goes into that Me, too. The warmth, the relief.
For the thousandth, ten-thousandth time, Luther feels his heart turn over in his chest. An ache. ]
[ She doesn't really question it, the question or the reason for it, and doesn't even move to change anything, even on the chance, that she hadn't since walking in, and losing her heels, and dropping on top of her bed in the dark. It's too trivial, and the day was too almost-bleak to care about anything that small, and she's not sure she'd want to move, has the energy to, even if she cared about that at all.
She's too tired, and if it happens, it's definitely nowhere near the worst Luther's seen of her recently. And if he doesn't, well, she'll probably drift off soon enough. The exhaustion only more complete, heavier where she felt so much lighter for just saying. ]
[ Once upon a time, it would've just been him rolling over in bed and delivering a wordless rap of the knuckles against his wall: a light tap-tap-tap and Morse code and the little Allison-Luther codes and signals they'd worked out for themselves, too. Should I put on a song. Are you up for talking. I need to sleep. But with the advent of these communicators comes texts, but—
Sometimes text just isn't enough.
So Luther rolls out of bed, tugs on an oversized hoodie, and quietly lets himself out into the hallway. He hasn't yet memorised the creak of the floorboards here like he had back home, all those times tiptoeing out — but this isn't as old of a house, either. He stands on the landing for a second, glancing down the hall, before opening her door and slipping in. Quirks a rueful smile at the fact that Allison wasn't actually dressed for bed yet; it looked like she had just dropped there, like a stone, as soon as they got home. ]
Sorry. I won't be long. I just—
[ Wanted to see her again. The flicker and byplay of expression on her face. Wishes he could hear her voice again, too, but. ]
Today was rough on all of us. Wanted to see if you were okay. Texting from next door felt weird.
[ Weird but also right, too, because of course they would. Still, sometimes it just isn't adequate. ]
[ As her door opens, Allison opens her eyes for the first time since sending her first message to him, and blinks a few times, putting Luther and the shadows into something like focus. Luther filling the doorway, and Luther, making it all recede from any of her focus beyond him, too. She reached up and rubbed at her eyes, only to stop and look at him again as the deep rumble of his voice filled, and defined, the silence of her room.
There's the temptation to give him the serious answer. The easy one. The one that fills her head too quickly, and is all her therapists' voice; no one is entirely okay yet. No matter what any of them might be entirely too well trained at. But she lets it drop for the last words, as much as the first one. One corner of her mouth being dragged a little crooked. ]
Still in one piece.
I'd at least wait until tomorrow to think about showing up Klaus.
[ Maybe it is a little too easy, or too flippant. Light where everything feels a single breath, a single word from pointing out it wasn't only a minute ago, isn't still, not really, only a wall between them away, that wasn't between them anymore. When Luther is there filling up the space and the silence, knotting that feeling behind her breastbone. With all she'd said, and all she thought, and how much it was true.
Every day, but especially in the glaring light of today, tonight. ]
Good. [ It's a small, exhausted exhale. ] I know you guys are probably frustrated, but— it just wasn't the time to lecture.
[ Pressure was one of the things they'd always lived with, one of the intangibles that Luther had found himself monitoring in those years of the Academy. How many hairline fractures could crack and spiderweb across a surface before it shattered. Luther had misjudged that before, in the past. Had leaned too hard on Ben and watched him die for it. Had seen Klaus fracture and break under the weight Sir Reginald had placed on him. (Had felt his own spine bow and bend, under that pressure.)
He watches Allison from the doorway, his shoulder leaning against the jamb. Considers everything he could ask or say about her own hospital wakeup. Luther's own.
For the pass of a second, Allison almost says yes, against a flicker of tired fondness at the offer, but she was exhausted enough without it really, and by the passing of the second it really doesn't have anything to do with that answer anyway. It's like when Claire would come to their bedroom door, their bed, for a glass of water, for a nightmare, 'because she couldn't sleep,' and it was never those specific things, but whatever had to be pulled out from underneath them.
When she doesn't have to ask what's underneath this. She knows exactly what they both just said,
and that Luther hardly needed to ask if she needed water, or if she was in one piece. To come to her room and ask either, when they'd already been talking.
Which is maybe why she finally pushes up, with a large, but soundless breath pressing out between her lips. Slides her legs off the bed, and lets her bare feet find the floor and her hands the edge of the bed on either side of her legs. Leaving a sizeable space from her to the end of the bed. Head tilted, expression solemn enough even for the quasi-dark, when she simply tosses it back, as the question it isn't.
Do you?
Water. Whiskey. Something else. A reason to walk away already.
Something else. Maybe even that something else which rumbles beneath the surface, every so often, right whenever he thought it might be dead and buried — but it's always still there, looming inconvenient and permanent.
His blue gaze follows Allison's movement; the line of her shoulders, the shift of her hands, the space still left on her bed. Where he could probably sit, and join her.
(So many times as teenagers, he'd sat there on the edge of her bed, shoulder-to-shoulder and thigh-to-thigh and so close that he could feel the warmth of her skin radiating through the soft-worn cotton of their clothing. So goddamned close that his heartbeat had thundered in his skull. Offering comfort. She'd napped against his shoulder, in the old days, or he'd dozed off in her bed while reading a book and while she touched up her nails at the vanity. The way things used to be between them.)
It's an excuse. There's always been an excuse, sidling away and sidestepping the real question.
So: "I could do with a drink," Luther says, instead.
If she's a little surprised -- that he does at all, and that it's an option Luther keeps in his options now, after what happened -- there's some part of her that reminders her he's still in her doorway. He's still there, and she's even in the conversation that's a part of it. Even if it's at a hard angle from where it all started, now that they are in the same space suddenly. But she didn't say either of the things she did because they were easy, or even because they might not trip things up, but because they had to be said.
Overlooked too long, even if they were too big to ever be said more than lightly. Even if it's at odds from anything exactly direct, he's still here, and he did offer.
It's a fresh addition to his repertoire, still so comparatively new in relation to everything else. For lack of any other vices -- all so stringently, ferociously forbidden during the years he lived under Reginald's roof -- Luther has wound up latching onto caffeine and alcohol. Some nervous snacking, too.
Because as coping mechanisms go, it's better than the alternatives. So, so much better, and they've just had a firsthand reminder of it in the hospital tonight.
"I haven't started keeping a flask next to my bed," he says wryly (and okay, so some things haven't changed about him yet), "so. It'd have to be downstairs. But I could bring something up." Because she looks tired, and Luther had always gone and obediently fetched things for her in the past anyway, even without being rumoured into it. A forgotten tie or misplaced gloves, or a magazine she simply didn't feel like walking across the room to get.
Allison can't help the way it makes her mouth crinkle into part of a smile and the faintest shake of her head when Luther thinks he's being cute with that first, most obvious, retort, even if her question had been half lost on him for what she'd actually meant to be asking. But he got close enough to what she meant when she asked it by the end of his own words, and so she just nodded instead.
The clarification isn't worth the time, and even if it's a lot like Luther's found a reason to vanish from her doorway and her room as quickly as he invited himself to it, he'll still be right back in a few minutes, too. Right back to this second he's finding a way to exit from, but back and with a drink. She's too tired to try and unknot that. It's easy enough to just leave it at that nod, and just send,
Okay.
Bring me a glass, too.
Whatever it was, and if that was all it really took (as if anything was ever that simple here), it was so little to tacitly agree to after today. It wasn't like she was the only one who was tense, and exhausted, and keyed up, and who had to live through today, too.
Stepping away and taking that long, long walk down to their massive kitchen is actually a relief -- it's a breather, giving him some space to recollect himself and figure out how he found himself in Allison's doorway to begin with. He'd just needed to see her face. Had wanted that ease of seeing her expressions, of continuing the conversation without cold hard text or literal physical walls between them. But then Luther hadn't known what to do with himself once he was there. Should probably just hand over the drink and then get out of her space again, back to their separate sides of the wall. But--
By the time he's poured two glasses from a bottle of half-empty whiskey in the family's extensive liquor collection and then made his way back upstairs, he's managed to slingshot right past 'recollected' and back to 'in a tizzy'. She hears him coming up the stairs, then down the hall; there's really no masking that heavy footfall.
"I never had a nightcap back home," Luther says quietly as soon as he re-enters, his gaze riveted to the two glasses as he half-tiptoes toward her, so careful not to spill any. "I know Dad did--" That impeccably-locked liquor cabinet that none of them were ever allowed into, "but this is a first, I guess."
Allison is left there, oddly enough, to reach up and rub her face, while Luther's steps get further and further away. Not certain if she's trying to rub more awakeness into her face, and herself, or if it's just because she's tired, or because that was a bit awkward. Which hadn't been the point either.
Allison picked up a pillow and scooted back to the headboard, a little grateful she didn't have to worry about making the bed she'd never even unmade, only dropped on top of. She put the pillow in her lap and flattened her fingers on the soft fluff as she let herself lean back and waited. The dark silence of the house that was stillness. Five and Diego likely long gone to bed, too. The rest of the near-empty house spread out in the space beyond her door. Where Luther was.
She didn't regret saying it. She told herself that twice, as she dug her fingertips a little into the pillow waiting, trying not to give any court to the idea Luther might take as long as he could if he really had been looking for any reason to go once stepping in. It wasn't exhaustion. It wasn't a mistake. She still meant it. It still changed nothing. But that was a lie, too. Because somehow it loosened something inside her, too. Something she hadn't even realized until she saw what it was to not have it.
Allison closed her eyes briefly. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Until those steps start faint and quiet, getting louder the closer Luther gets in coming back, before he's another large shape in the shadows that wanders back into the room. Careful, slow steps as he makes his way to the side of her bed, and she took one, and deciding simply, and straightforwardly, to start somewhere she hadn't really even though of before her fingers touched the glass,
You should close the door.
She could say it's to keep the sound from traveling, from waking up Diego, or Five, in bedrooms all not too far away, even if not as close as they'd all been once upon a time in that tiny hallway, but she never made a habit of lying to Luther. And she's pretty sure that one would be just as transparent all of this, too.
He goes immediately motionless — still, stock-still like a deer in the headlights, and she sees that questioning flicker race through his expression and the slight rise of an eyebrow, his emotions ever an open book when they give him away — before he consciously sets that reaction aside, loosens back into movement, and goes to obey.
It's to not wake up the others, he tells himself. Diego's room is right on the other side of that wall. They'd done this so many times when they were younger, carving out these small moments of privacy in hushed voices and whispers and muffled laughter and huddling under the blankets, lights out. The two cans and string draped between the windows.
So Luther presses the door shut with one hand, palm resting against it for a heartbeat longer than necessary, before he turns back. Turns his attention back to his glass of whiskey, and he's glad for that distraction, too, and for something to do with his hands. He's still standing next to the bed, looming too much, too conspicuously near the center of the room. He is just too tall.
When Luther freezes Allison wonders if it is too far. A suggestion as much as a direction (as a command, without any sound to inform it), and nothing like the end of a question. Wonders if it's too much like gutting the only escape route, and if he needs one of those. From her, and not so much from her, as much as in general. The last thing she actually wants to do is make him feel trapped.
Except that he yields right then. Turns back, crosses to the door, and closes it. Hovering a little longer than necessary by the door. Long enough Allison swears she can hear it in a couple of too loud beats of her heart. Even as he listens. Luther is obedient in so many things, in so many ways, and the barest pauses before and within his obeying are an entire language she somehow hasn't forgotten. Uncertain if she's pushing too hard, but continuing on, Allison decides to take point on at least off-settling some of that too blatant frozen awkwardness from the first time he stepped half-in.
Bed? Floor? Desk chair?
I'm not picky, but staring up at nearly the ceiling will give me a crick in my neck, so you should choose something.
That one is an exaggeration, but she doesn't add anything beyond the hyperbole of it. It's strange to have to choreograph it. When they were young the place they felt the second most themselves was wherever and whenever they'd managed to squirrel away the time and space to just exist in the same space together. Strange to feel that same anxious uncertainty that wants to force it into order, order it to be orderly, lest it fall apart, dissolve into sands trickling out between her fingers, before she can even figure it out for herself, no less try to make any part of it easier for him.
There's that eternal instinct of eyeing escape routes, never being backed into a corner, a soldier's habits honed over a lifetime. Except Luther's never needed one from her, never; but nowadays he'd claw off his own skin in order to not be too near her, or anyone, anymore. The park on the moon base, the waiting room, at least those were in semi-public. None of it's the same as closing the door.
So he glances at the bed and she watches that consideration flit through his mind, before he shifts and pulls up the desk chair instead. Moves it closer until he's seated by her bedside (and that, too, reminds him of a hospital bed and him bowed over her motionless body). At least taking the chair is imposing a little bit of safe distance, to keep his head clear even as he takes a deep swig of that whiskey.
He wishes this were normal again. Like the old days. Like they used to be.
He can see his fingers wrapped around that tumbler, dwarfing it.
(Just a couple weeks ago, they didn't look like that.)
Luther's visibly sorting out what to say — he's never really been at a loss around Allison, but he is now. He needs to find something else to talk about, something other than the looming question of Klaus and what to do with him. So his free hand drifts to his neck, fingers gesturing at his throat. Asks what he hasn't yet, until now: "Does it hurt?"
Just because she isn't picky, doesn't mean she didn't have a preference in that list, but Allison isn't sure that isn't the exhaustion talking, too. Or if it's the exhaustion that's unmasking what she doesn't have the energy to just gloss over caring about. The thing is she knew when she offered it, and it's not because it was the safe one, it's because it's the one that would be most comfortable for him. She doesn't know how not to do that. Too.
She doesn't know that she wants to pick it apart. Her toes flex a little under her thighs, still sitting with her legs crossed, back to the headboard, and the pillow in her lap, and she settles it with the fact he's still there. No matter what it is. Still there, and not like he's searching, frantically, for a reason to leave. She takes a drink of her whiskey finally, letting her eyes close just a little as the warmth seers down the inside of her throat, and she considers how to open that box again. The one in between them.
Which puts her at the surprised disadvantage of his question, which seems to come out of nowhere. At least nowhere she's expecting, wrinkling her brow briefly, before she shook her head, resting the side of her hand and the bottom of the glass on the pillow while choosing easy words.
No.
It did at the beginning, after I woke up, obviously, but not since getting here.
Not like the day before it, when breathing and swallowing had felt like they were tearing her apart from the inside to match the out.
Allison lets herself do what she hasn't once with anyone else, gaze going a little unfocused as she reaches up with her free hand to touch, with only the tips of her fingers, the scar on her skin that glares at her in every mirror. The ungraceful line marring the column of once unbroken skin, caught in a million pictures and one million rolls of film. Hard to say if it's the lack of wanting to be seen self-conscious or lack of wanting to let anyone in further than she has to with what it requires of communication already. That she doesn't worry about as much with Luther, even if it doesn't entirely make it comfortable either.
The subject shift was somewhat out of nowhere, but his mind's following a tangled skein of leaping from topic-to-topic. Her gratitude for him waiting by her side until she woke up. Her coming back. Hospitals.
What she came back from.
The scar has been covered up as best as possible, every time she's been out in the world here; makeup cleverly applied, masking herself from view. But here, at the end of a long day, it's more visible. And Luther knows that sensation when assessing the damage after a battle, the careful probing the edges of a wound, the ragged healed ridges of it. He unconsciously leans closer (Allison's like a wild animal showing its throat, a mark of vulnerability), and his free hand moves from his own body to hers, fingers splaying gently against her hand, a thumb against the soft skin of the scar.
Not the bloodied mess of bandages from that day. Not the ugly sight she woke up to. A month and a half healed now, but he still hasn't gotten to take too close a look at it; she hasn't let anyone close enough to.
Her shoulders press into the headboard before she's more than processed the raise of Luther's hand, and it feels like everything inside of her skin and her bones trembles incomprehensibly when Luther's hand covers hers, and it's not just her own fingers against that thin jagged line of thicker healed skin.
It's his.
Theirs mixed.
The very short distance to Luther's own face she can't help from looking to now, against a flush of some hot, sticky combination of shame and fear and nervousness and forcing herself to breathe, which only, unconnected until it's happening, makes her feel it even more. Her breath. Her pulse, ratcheting. Their fingers there, on her skin. Her throat. Even when half of every impulse is to pull away, even without shifting to a side, because she knows he'd stop if she did even that much. Said a single word. She knows it without question.
Makes herself not pull away. Not look away. Picks three words.
See. Doesn't hurt.
Except that everything about those words is wrong now.
With the mental network, it's almost tempting to say that it's easy to forget she's mute. Whenever they've caught her most off-guard, tripped her up entirely, her text even comes in an organic ramble that makes him smile and feels like she's actually talking again. When it comes like that, he can hear it like she's reading the words out loud to him, imagine it thrumming in his eardrums.
But it isn't actually easy. Nothing's easy.
Everything has to be such an effort, for her. And Luther misses the sound of Allison's voice, the husky catch of her laugh. A voice he'd carved into his heart for years. A thing he had taken for granted.
It feels like her heart transfers to somewhere between the placed their hands are and her ears. Unable to focus away from it at all, and unable not to nod when Luther says those words. More than a little even. Like she'd agreed and nodded, and though about it again, and did again. She hates a lot of things about this, and even this place, but it still true. It is still better than the alternative. Dead on the floor in that cabin, all of her blood racing out of her, vision blurring so quickly into spots and blackness, breaths shorter and shorter.
She thinks, again, for a second of seeing the still frame of that car, behind Diego, when she hadn't thought Diego was real, hadn't known the memory was. Her body across their laps, Luther and Diego's, bloody and squished in that small space. For more hours than she wants to think about still. Even at this second. Like somehow that's still more than she can stand being real. Having to hold Luther having done.
Yes.
Allison presses send on that, but it's not where it ends. She can see, feel, how unfinished it is, and without having even figured out how exactly she was going to get back here, they are. And it is right here. Right now. Maybe it's impetuous as much as it is some terror, but neither ever did stop her much. She moves without hesitation, smooth and fast, even for how small it will be. Not even her wary sane patience with the understanding she's not supposed to push him is more than a whisper against this topic, against the need that decides her.
Both. Her hand shifted under his, fingers spreading to link between his own as she lifted her hand from her throat and ducked her head a little at the same time. Moving the still small distance that put her hand, and his around it, against her own cheek, for saying it (even if it was never actually 'saying it') with him there, too. Better than dying, and better than waking up alone when I hadn't.
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obediences) wrote2019-03-28 10:51 am
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[ But for all that she changes the name, the point is exchangeable and the same. Klaus and Ben, who'd been that same once upon a time, as interchangeable in that kind of mention as they had. Maybe not in the same way, Allison's not sure anything has ever been, or ever looked like, what they'd been, but it had been close. It'd been the only other and next closest thing in their family until their midteens. ]
I never thought about the fact you could have been aynwhere else.
Already off looking for Vanya. Or Harold. Or ... just anywhere else at all.
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No. I couldn't have.
[ It might look flat, in text, but she knows exactly what his voice would sound like if he were saying this out loud. Unyielding. As if reciting a fact about the universe. ]
There is literally nowhere else I could've been, in that moment.
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Like knowing that the sky was blue, but only just realizing you'd forgotten to look up at it ever.
(Suddenly seeing it only when the only other people you'd never have doubted to make the same choice... didn't.)
It didn't change what happened after that,
but, right now, she could see the opposite so clearly, too:
none of that changed that he'd done it before all of what happened, too. ]
I'm glad you were there.
I know it's not like that changes that everything was a wreck pretty much from the moment I woke up until --
But. I'm glad it was you.
That it wasn't like that. Earlier.
[ Maybe there is something wholly selfish in that.
But she's really never apologized for that with Luther in her life.
The whole world fell apart in short order after she woke up, and this world will be fine, even if Ben wasn't there when Klaus woke up, maybe Klaus will be hurt but they'll work it out, but she's still glad for it tonight. For Luther being there. For not having to be scared or worried or confused about that, too. Even just for those second before all hell broke loose even harder. For this small light cupped somewhere in the palm of her hands, in the hollow of her chest. One she knows is there, as much as she'd sworn for a decade was gone, as much as it could never be gone. ]
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It's a validation that he hadn't actually been expecting to receive. Allison hadn't even heard what he'd said to her then, the words tripping over themselves in their rush to get out, to be unleashed, a years- and decades-long river that had finally burst its banks and gone roiling across the landscape, a flurry of words and emotions where Luther was normally stoic reserve. Confessing everything.
And she hadn't heard it.
But he hadn't even meant for her to hear it. ]
'You're welcome' doesn't really fit, here.
[ Because it'd be like thanking him for breathing. ]
But I'm glad I was there, too. And that you came back to me.
[ That's probably toeing a line, possibly giving away too much — the safer thing would've been to say came back or came back to us — but Luther can't lie in this, either. ]
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Into she hurt you and I lost you once this week, I wasn’t going to do it again; into what do you want from me? and nothing; into you can ask me and i'll try my best; into call out of work and you’re the only one I can do that with; into it’s mine and we'll find a way.
Into the first clear voice telling her, through the pain and the panic, she was somehow still alive, being Luther’s, and the way how no matter how eroding the deep hollow anger, and swallowing the even deeper hollow sadness, burrows into her here, it’s Luther, it’s being near Luther, it’s having Luther’s words, spoken or written, that makes her feels more alive than just making it through the day.
She’s not sure there is anything short of death that could stop that. Stop her coming back. To Luther. Hadn’t that been true even when he wasn’t anything more than a ghost in her heart no one could compare to in the end? Any more than his overreactions and bad decisions and a burning planet could stop her. Anymore than her temper or distance or coolness or choosing Vanya could ever stop him.
She's too tired for anything but holding it, in the dark deep of the night, for anything but feeling bare beaten to the floorboard grateful, in a way that is only bloody and just breathing, even without a fight, that he didn't die after that mission, that she didn't die on that floor (that Klaus is alive, alive, alive, again, somehow miraculously, again, and they have nothing new to mourn).
The letters never change, always flat, always regimental,
but she knows it would be the barest whisper if she could. ]
Me, too.
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For the thousandth, ten-thousandth time, Luther feels his heart turn over in his chest. An ache. ]
Are you in your room?
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[ She doesn't really question it, the question or the reason for it, and doesn't even move to change anything, even on the chance, that she hadn't since walking in, and losing her heels, and dropping on top of her bed in the dark. It's too trivial, and the day was too almost-bleak to care about anything that small, and she's not sure she'd want to move, has the energy to, even if she cared about that at all.
She's too tired, and if it happens, it's definitely nowhere near the worst Luther's seen of her recently.
And if he doesn't, well, she'll probably drift off soon enough. The exhaustion only more complete,
heavier where she felt so much lighter for just saying. ]
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[ Once upon a time, it would've just been him rolling over in bed and delivering a wordless rap of the knuckles against his wall: a light tap-tap-tap and Morse code and the little Allison-Luther codes and signals they'd worked out for themselves, too. Should I put on a song. Are you up for talking. I need to sleep. But with the advent of these communicators comes texts, but—
Sometimes text just isn't enough.
So Luther rolls out of bed, tugs on an oversized hoodie, and quietly lets himself out into the hallway. He hasn't yet memorised the creak of the floorboards here like he had back home, all those times tiptoeing out — but this isn't as old of a house, either. He stands on the landing for a second, glancing down the hall, before opening her door and slipping in. Quirks a rueful smile at the fact that Allison wasn't actually dressed for bed yet; it looked like she had just dropped there, like a stone, as soon as they got home. ]
Sorry. I won't be long. I just—
[ Wanted to see her again. The flicker and byplay of expression on her face. Wishes he could hear her voice again, too, but. ]
Today was rough on all of us. Wanted to see if you were okay. Texting from next door felt weird.
[ Weird but also right, too, because of course they would. Still, sometimes it just isn't adequate. ]
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There's the temptation to give him the serious answer. The easy one. The one that fills her head too quickly, and is all her therapists' voice; no one is entirely okay yet. No matter what any of them might be entirely too well trained at. But she lets it drop for the last words, as much as the first one. One corner of her mouth being dragged a little crooked. ]
Still in one piece.
I'd at least wait until tomorrow to think about showing up Klaus.
[ Maybe it is a little too easy, or too flippant. Light where everything feels a single breath, a single word from pointing out it wasn't only a minute ago, isn't still, not really, only a wall between them away, that wasn't between them anymore. When Luther is there filling up the space and the silence, knotting that feeling behind her breastbone. With all she'd said, and all she thought, and how much it was true.
Every day, but especially in the glaring light of today, tonight. ]
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[ Pressure was one of the things they'd always lived with, one of the intangibles that Luther had found himself monitoring in those years of the Academy. How many hairline fractures could crack and spiderweb across a surface before it shattered. Luther had misjudged that before, in the past. Had leaned too hard on Ben and watched him die for it. Had seen Klaus fracture and break under the weight Sir Reginald had placed on him. (Had felt his own spine bow and bend, under that pressure.)
He watches Allison from the doorway, his shoulder leaning against the jamb. Considers everything he could ask or say about her own hospital wakeup. Luther's own.
It isn't territory he actually wants to touch. ]
You want anything from downstairs? Water?
[ A beat. ]
Glass of whiskey?
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When she doesn't have to ask what's underneath this. She knows exactly what they both just said,
and that Luther hardly needed to ask if she needed water, or if she was in one piece.
To come to her room and ask either, when they'd already been talking.
Which is maybe why she finally pushes up, with a large, but soundless breath pressing out between her lips. Slides her legs off the bed, and lets her bare feet find the floor and her hands the edge of the bed on either side of her legs. Leaving a sizeable space from her to the end of the bed. Head tilted, expression solemn enough even for the quasi-dark, when she simply tosses it back, as the question it isn't.
Do you?
Water. Whiskey. Something else.
A reason to walk away already.
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His blue gaze follows Allison's movement; the line of her shoulders, the shift of her hands, the space still left on her bed. Where he could probably sit, and join her.
(So many times as teenagers, he'd sat there on the edge of her bed, shoulder-to-shoulder and thigh-to-thigh and so close that he could feel the warmth of her skin radiating through the soft-worn cotton of their clothing. So goddamned close that his heartbeat had thundered in his skull. Offering comfort. She'd napped against his shoulder, in the old days, or he'd dozed off in her bed while reading a book and while she touched up her nails at the vanity. The way things used to be between them.)
It's an excuse. There's always been an excuse, sidling away and sidestepping the real question.
So: "I could do with a drink," Luther says, instead.
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Overlooked too long, even if they were too big to ever be said more than lightly.
Even if it's at odds from anything exactly direct, he's still here, and he did offer.
Up here or down there?
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Because as coping mechanisms go, it's better than the alternatives. So, so much better, and they've just had a firsthand reminder of it in the hospital tonight.
"I haven't started keeping a flask next to my bed," he says wryly (and okay, so some things haven't changed about him yet), "so. It'd have to be downstairs. But I could bring something up." Because she looks tired, and Luther had always gone and obediently fetched things for her in the past anyway, even without being rumoured into it. A forgotten tie or misplaced gloves, or a magazine she simply didn't feel like walking across the room to get.
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The clarification isn't worth the time, and even if it's a lot like Luther's found a reason to vanish from her doorway and her room as quickly as he invited himself to it, he'll still be right back in a few minutes, too. Right back to this second he's finding a way to exit from, but back and with a drink. She's too tired to try and unknot that. It's easy enough to just leave it at that nod, and just send,
Okay.
Bring me a glass, too.
Whatever it was, and if that was all it really took (as if anything was ever that simple here), it was so little to tacitly agree to after today. It wasn't like she was the only one who was tense, and exhausted, and keyed up, and who had to live through today, too.
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By the time he's poured two glasses from a bottle of half-empty whiskey in the family's extensive liquor collection and then made his way back upstairs, he's managed to slingshot right past 'recollected' and back to 'in a tizzy'. She hears him coming up the stairs, then down the hall; there's really no masking that heavy footfall.
"I never had a nightcap back home," Luther says quietly as soon as he re-enters, his gaze riveted to the two glasses as he half-tiptoes toward her, so careful not to spill any. "I know Dad did--" That impeccably-locked liquor cabinet that none of them were ever allowed into, "but this is a first, I guess."
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Allison picked up a pillow and scooted back to the headboard, a little grateful she didn't have to worry about making the bed she'd never even unmade, only dropped on top of. She put the pillow in her lap and flattened her fingers on the soft fluff as she let herself lean back and waited. The dark silence of the house that was stillness. Five and Diego likely long gone to bed, too. The rest of the near-empty house spread out in the space beyond her door. Where Luther was.
She didn't regret saying it. She told herself that twice, as she dug her fingertips a little into the pillow waiting, trying not to give any court to the idea Luther might take as long as he could if he really had been looking for any reason to go once stepping in. It wasn't exhaustion. It wasn't a mistake. She still meant it. It still changed nothing. But that was a lie, too. Because somehow it loosened something inside her, too. Something she hadn't even realized until she saw what it was to not have it.
Allison closed her eyes briefly. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Until those steps start faint and quiet, getting louder the closer Luther gets in coming back, before he's another large shape in the shadows that wanders back into the room. Careful, slow steps as he makes his way to the side of her bed, and she took one, and deciding simply, and straightforwardly, to start somewhere she hadn't really even though of before her fingers touched the glass,
You should close the door.
She could say it's to keep the sound from traveling, from waking up Diego, or Five, in bedrooms all not too far away, even if not as close as they'd all been once upon a time in that tiny hallway, but she never made a habit of lying to Luther. And she's pretty sure that one would be just as transparent all of this, too.
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It's to not wake up the others, he tells himself. Diego's room is right on the other side of that wall. They'd done this so many times when they were younger, carving out these small moments of privacy in hushed voices and whispers and muffled laughter and huddling under the blankets, lights out. The two cans and string draped between the windows.
So Luther presses the door shut with one hand, palm resting against it for a heartbeat longer than necessary, before he turns back. Turns his attention back to his glass of whiskey, and he's glad for that distraction, too, and for something to do with his hands. He's still standing next to the bed, looming too much, too conspicuously near the center of the room. He is just too tall.
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Except that he yields right then. Turns back, crosses to the door, and closes it. Hovering a little longer than necessary by the door. Long enough Allison swears she can hear it in a couple of too loud beats of her heart. Even as he listens. Luther is obedient in so many things, in so many ways, and the barest pauses before and within his obeying are an entire language she somehow hasn't forgotten. Uncertain if she's pushing too hard, but continuing on, Allison decides to take point on at least off-settling some of that too blatant frozen awkwardness from the first time he stepped half-in.
Bed? Floor? Desk chair?
I'm not picky, but staring up at nearly the ceiling will give me a crick in my neck, so you should choose something.
That one is an exaggeration, but she doesn't add anything beyond the hyperbole of it. It's strange to have to choreograph it. When they were young the place they felt the second most themselves was wherever and whenever they'd managed to squirrel away the time and space to just exist in the same space together. Strange to feel that same anxious uncertainty that wants to force it into order, order it to be orderly, lest it fall apart, dissolve into sands trickling out between her fingers, before she can even figure it out for herself, no less try to make any part of it easier for him.
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So he glances at the bed and she watches that consideration flit through his mind, before he shifts and pulls up the desk chair instead. Moves it closer until he's seated by her bedside (and that, too, reminds him of a hospital bed and him bowed over her motionless body). At least taking the chair is imposing a little bit of safe distance, to keep his head clear even as he takes a deep swig of that whiskey.
He wishes this were normal again. Like the old days. Like they used to be.
He can see his fingers wrapped around that tumbler, dwarfing it.
(Just a couple weeks ago, they didn't look like that.)
Luther's visibly sorting out what to say — he's never really been at a loss around Allison, but he is now. He needs to find something else to talk about, something other than the looming question of Klaus and what to do with him. So his free hand drifts to his neck, fingers gesturing at his throat. Asks what he hasn't yet, until now: "Does it hurt?"
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She doesn't know that she wants to pick it apart. Her toes flex a little under her thighs, still sitting with her legs crossed, back to the headboard, and the pillow in her lap, and she settles it with the fact he's still there. No matter what it is. Still there, and not like he's searching, frantically, for a reason to leave. She takes a drink of her whiskey finally, letting her eyes close just a little as the warmth seers down the inside of her throat, and she considers how to open that box again. The one in between them.
Which puts her at the surprised disadvantage of his question, which seems to come out of nowhere. At least nowhere she's expecting, wrinkling her brow briefly, before she shook her head, resting the side of her hand and the bottom of the glass on the pillow while choosing easy words.
No.
It did at the beginning, after I woke up, obviously, but not since getting here.
Not like the day before it, when breathing and swallowing had felt like they were tearing her apart from the inside to match the out.
Allison lets herself do what she hasn't once with anyone else, gaze going a little unfocused as she reaches up with her free hand to touch, with only the tips of her fingers, the scar on her skin that glares at her in every mirror. The ungraceful line marring the column of once unbroken skin, caught in a million pictures and one million rolls of film. Hard to say if it's the lack of wanting to be seen self-conscious or lack of wanting to let anyone in further than she has to with what it requires of communication already. That she doesn't worry about as much with Luther, even if it doesn't entirely make it comfortable either.
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What she came back from.
The scar has been covered up as best as possible, every time she's been out in the world here; makeup cleverly applied, masking herself from view. But here, at the end of a long day, it's more visible. And Luther knows that sensation when assessing the damage after a battle, the careful probing the edges of a wound, the ragged healed ridges of it. He unconsciously leans closer (Allison's like a wild animal showing its throat, a mark of vulnerability), and his free hand moves from his own body to hers, fingers splaying gently against her hand, a thumb against the soft skin of the scar.
Not the bloodied mess of bandages from that day. Not the ugly sight she woke up to. A month and a half healed now, but he still hasn't gotten to take too close a look at it; she hasn't let anyone close enough to.
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It's his.
Theirs mixed.
The very short distance to Luther's own face she can't help from looking to now, against a flush of some hot, sticky combination of shame and fear and nervousness and forcing herself to breathe, which only, unconnected until it's happening, makes her feel it even more. Her breath. Her pulse, ratcheting. Their fingers there, on her skin. Her throat. Even when half of every impulse is to pull away, even without shifting to a side, because she knows he'd stop if she did even that much. Said a single word. She knows it without question.
Makes herself not pull away. Not look away. Picks three words.
See. Doesn't hurt.
Except that everything about those words is wrong now.
Maybe not physically.
(But.)
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But it isn't actually easy. Nothing's easy.
Everything has to be such an effort, for her. And Luther misses the sound of Allison's voice, the husky catch of her laugh. A voice he'd carved into his heart for years. A thing he had taken for granted.
See. Doesn't hurt.
Liar, he could say. But won't.
Instead: "Better than the alternative," he says.
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She thinks, again, for a second of seeing the still frame of that car, behind Diego, when she hadn't thought Diego was real, hadn't known the memory was. Her body across their laps, Luther and Diego's, bloody and squished in that small space. For more hours than she wants to think about still. Even at this second. Like somehow that's still more than she can stand being real. Having to hold Luther having done.
Yes.
Allison presses send on that, but it's not where it ends. She can see, feel, how unfinished it is, and without having even figured out how exactly she was going to get back here, they are. And it is right here. Right now. Maybe it's impetuous as much as it is some terror, but neither ever did stop her much. She moves without hesitation, smooth and fast, even for how small it will be. Not even her wary sane patience with the understanding she's not supposed to push him is more than a whisper against this topic, against the need that decides her.
Both. Her hand shifted under his, fingers spreading to link between his own as she lifted her hand from her throat and ducked her head a little at the same time. Moving the still small distance that put her hand, and his around it, against her own cheek, for saying it (even if it was never actually 'saying it') with him there, too. Better than dying, and better than waking up alone when I hadn't.
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