[ Uggghhhhh he'd almost half-hoped this wouldn't come up again. He hadn't missed the startled questioning look that had crossed Allison's face at the television announcement, or the infinitesimal embarrassed wince that had flickered over his own. ]
[ Somehow, those don't surprise her. It doesn't engender any fondness for the man Luther decided to attach himself to. But he's not wrong, either. About not killing people or starting cults. To which can be added he didn't blow up a federal building, or end up in crazy house.
If anything, somehow, even in the pocket of a mobster, Luther had honestly managed the quietest number of days of all of them really. Still. As he never showed up or seemed to have touched any of that last week of theirs. And if that wasn't a skill. ]
Mmmhhhmm.
You just tell us if you're going to keep the change here, too.
[ For such a large man, and once the poster-child and overbearing leader of the entire Academy, he really is good at fading into the background. The world's biggest wallflower. Allison's next suggestion, though, practically makes him splutter. Even in this realm where none of this is in serious or earnest, his kneejerk reaction is complete aversion: ]
What, like a codename change???
Dear god. No. I'm still listed as 'Space' in the registration documents here, and I'm sticking to it.
Jesus. No.
[ He could suck it up and deal with the name King Kong printed on the flyers, like The Kraken blazoned across Diego's boxing posters — in part because none of the audience seemed to mind, they'd all seemed to celebrate his body, somehow, and its brutish capabilities — but the idea of hanging onto the name now, after they're all back, like a vestigial limb after it's served its purpose... No. ]
[ Every time. Every goddamn time, that sound is going to throw him for a loop and make his heart do idiot somersaults in his chest; he hears it next door like he'd once heard the murmur of her voice through the window or she'd heard the bass of his music through the walls back home, and Luther can feel something inside his ribcage grow three sizes. He's grinning like an idiot in the darkness of his room. Just at having done that, drawn out that laugh again, and made that happen. ]
I think I'm being bullied. Really unfair, for the record.
[ Even after everything, after this past week, there is something so inexpressibly easy about falling into this with her. The comfortable (and comforting) back-and-forth as if it never ended. ]
[ Had she tried to keep that quiet at first? It was hard to tell, especially as the letters sprang up into, pointing out that, whether she had or not, he absolutely could hear her. (And wasn't that novel.) all of which just caused her to snort as she easily flipped back with a few seconds of work. ]
That *is* a shame.
Then, you're really going to hate being reminded, mathematically, I can't ever be the bigger person in this equation.
[ Physically, at least, that has never been possibility in her entire life. ]
[ The familiar banter, the teasing, miraculously managing to pick up their moods out of the dust and out from the morose insomnia they'd both been languishing in at the start. Just Allison's mere presence, like this, already makes it better.
It makes him want to slide out of bed already, pad over to the bathroom in bare feet, move through it and tentatively knock at her door. Why keep using the mental network when they don't have to anymore? When he could actually be hearing her voice again, the quickfire volley of her words out loud?
But old habits die hard; those doors were always unbroachable, for so many years; so he keeps typing. ]
How's the view up there from the high road, miss 'never became a bare-knuckle boxer'? (Even Diego did it.)
Would you like me to come over there and try it now? Was killing one assassin by myself not enough for this week?
[ Plus, potentially maiming that other guy, but she wasn't going there. She wasn't perturbed by the existence or memory of either at the moment. It was just another in a very long line of things she hadn't been able to joke about. In a year. In nearly three. In four combine.
There's something heady as hell to just being able to do it. Say it. Own it. Not feel ashamed of those same things she had.]
Nope. Poker rules. Need two-of-a-kind or even better.
[ They can joke about murder like this, can joke about multiple killings because, well. That's who they are. That's the kind of people they are, who bear it unflinching, who don't shy away from the ugly or bloody. We're different than everyone else. We're special. And good or bad, that means we don't get to live normal lives. Here or anywhere. ]
And I'd like to see you try, Rumor.
[ She's thrown an unexpected gauntlet down between them, and for whatever unanticipated unexpected reason, he can't resist picking it up. Calling her out. It's not like she's actually going to come and box him — if ever there were pairs who would literally wrestle each other in squabbling competitive pique, it was always Klaus and Ben, or Luther and Diego rough-housing — and he's still not quite sure what he expects her to do with that impossible dare, but— ]
Allison's eyebrows pushed up, only a second before she's pushing the rest of her self up. Silent feet on the carpet, communicator left behind without a glance, and pushing straight through her own door, the scant handful of steps to his, and pushing straight through that one, too, fingers not even lingering on the doorknob as she invades the dark of his bedroom in just as easy, even strides.
"This is pretty pathetic if this is what I'm supposed to be afraid of facing." It's all sass, but there's no waver to the arrogance, disdain, and the current of almost laughter right under both of those. Considering him, still in a blanketed mound in the dark, on his bed. Even if he could, she has no real doubt of him. That he could. If he needed to. If someone came in guns, or fists, blazing.
But they won't. It's the middle of the night. In the middle of Nonah. And he's not going to punch her in the dark. (At least she's about 98% sure.)
Sure enough that all she does is pad toward his bed, stopping about a foot away from it, and without waiting, give a wave her hands for him to move further back, with all the serious imperiousness of someone who has a right to their directives being unquestioned. "Scoot already."
And this, ladies and gents, is the face of a man who has gotten in way over his head. Luther blinks in surprise, blinking away the text box that was still open in front of his eyes, having to reorient his depth perception to the sight of her actually standing there. Allison, in his bedroom. Allison, talking. His brain record-scratches for a moment, skipping and skipping and skipping, before it finally catches on something and gives him something to hang onto:
"What did I say about being bullied?" he says, but there's amusement laced in his words and he obligingly slides closer to the wall, making room for her to take the other half.
(They had done this as kids. Sneaking into each others' rooms on the nights they weren't being monitored, usually her into his, exactly like this, because it was no surprise which of them was actually the more daring and the more willing to step outside the rules. She'd always slipped away before she fell asleep, though.)
Luther's still half-buried under the covers, but in the darkness she can see the massive edge of those shoulders, a white tank top barely containing it all. He drags the covers a bit higher, a little primly.
"You said to put my money where my mouth was," is cool as it is challenging.
Like she had no time for whining if he was going to call her bluff and fold, all in the same go. It would all be perfect, if it weren't for the smile trying to tug apart her cool disdain. Making the top of her lip shift refuse to stop shifting insistently, pulling at the muscles in her cheek.
She can't miss that he tugs the blanket up a little more up his shoulder, and that's unchanged, but she doesn't expect it to be. Doesn't really have a need to take it from him. There really wasn't entirely a plan aside from showing up and proving she had always been just a little quicker and wickeder on the updraw for a dare. Even one she accidentally put into play with her own mouth.
No, she doesn't pick up or move his blanket at all, does nothing except to sit on it. One leg curling on the bed, and one hanging off, hands pressed into the blanket itself by her ankle. Feeling absolutely too old to let herself get away with the slight bit of childish this feels like, a little too dangerous to be innocent, but absolutely not wanting to go back to being an adult, in her own, empty, room, just yet either.
"I should've known better than to try calling a bluff. You gonna kick my ass now?"
Luther's wedged himself a little higher into a half-seated position, back propped against the pillows and the headboard; staying lying down would feel too vulnerable right now, and he already feels vulnerable as hell having someone in his space, where no one ever is. Not at this hour, not with the lights dimmed, not alone. (Part of him still instinctively wants to glance to the door, look for movement down the hallway. The crisp and precise tread of wingtip shoes on hardwood. Reginald's cane rapping the floor. Even now, years after the man's death, always waiting to be caught and reprimanded for finding joy in a little thing.)
But even this, it all feels so soothingly familiar even as he wants to climb out of his own skin at her proximity. Because in answering the dare, Allison's proven again that it's still her. The one who would fist-fight Swedish assassins and power mimics, who would jump to a punch even after years in hibernation, her abilities and capabilities smothered. She doesn't turn down a challenge.
Allison's eye narrowed a little watching him try to wiggle around. To figure out how to be half-seated and also not to lose his blanket, neither of which was an equation that worked with the other. Instead, as though to be helpful, Allison reached out and poked his leg. "I will if you don't stop moving so much. Stop trying to actually get up. No one is actually getting up."
If she breezes through it like it's nothing, maybe she can keep it nothing. Like it's not Luther's bedroom, and Luther's bed, and not her bed, or her bedroom, or her other bed, and her other bedroom. Like none of this is strange or weird or awkward. Instead, she just goes for an all in that she can't let herself think about in the slightest as she does.
She turns backwards, and pulls her legs up on the bed, before just dropping the few feet to be laying down on her back. More parallel beside him, if still lower than the pillows, but catching her hands on her stomach and looking at the ceiling, telling herself to breathe. To calm. If for nothing else, so Luther didn't suddenly find a way to merge into the wall itself or tear his blanket in half.
Deciding against anything in the same vein as the earlier words, like a request or command to follow her example. Instead, she gave the darkness and ceiling, and Luther up and off her side, a different question. "That was why your face was all beaten up that first day, wasn't it?"
It is, in fact, easier when Allison reorients herself like that and looks safely back up at the ceiling rather than him; it makes him feel less like he's under the focus of a thousand-watt bulb, even if that's irrational and impossible, even if the room is dark and dim and there's no chance she can see him in clear-cut detail. He still feels himself heat in a blush regardless if she's looking at him.
So her gaze slides away and that burning self-consciousness recedes too, until Luther's able to sink back down into the pillows, shoulder-to-shoulder with her and his face also turned to the ceiling. (It feels a bit like it's missing something. Plane models. Glow-in-the-dark stars. Childish ephemera.)
He exhales, and she can hear him breathe out beside her, his shoulder shifting. "Yeah. I lost a fight," he says, despite the fact that it is, plainly, physically impossible for Luther Hargreeves to lose a fistfight with an unpowered civilian.
There's a beat, a sudden realisation and a pause where he wonders if she can hear the suddenly-rabbity panicky patter of his heart if he has to explain how in the hell that happened, and so he quickly adds, "The matches were usually rigged. I threw that one."
He lets the connotations stand by themselves, let it seem like he was supposed to lose this one. Saying it outright would have been a lie, and she'd be able to pick that up immediately in that nauseating churn of her abilities. But this part and the way he phrased it, well. It's technically the truth.
Her mouth curves a little as he squirms back down the opposite direction under the blankets that tug a bit more out under her, more at the sway of his strength than her own body weight, and sometimes she wonders how old they really are. And how that number can be twenty years ago, and too old for this, too old for all the shit the last four years have thrown at them, all at once.
She really is exhausted under all of it. She just doesn't know how to sleep either.
Allison let her head roll back a little, flat on the bed as it was, without a pillow, not liking the taste of that idea even as he said it. No part of her could like the idea of Luther simply deciding to take a beating. For a job. For another person. For anyone. That wasn't what Luther was for. About. "That--"
She wants to say that doesn't sound like you, but what does she know. Between the newsreel, and his face, and these smallest, plainest details, it is, too. Or at least it had been. For a short time. Like Vanya being happy on a farm. And Klaus' cult, as insane as that was. Her. All of them where they weren't supposed to be, doing anything but laying low.
"Why?" This with a small roll of her head to glance a little in his direction. Even if her gaze doesn't entirely get there, especially given she'd need to either scoot up a bit more or prop herself a little to look over the all too noticeable, higher than normal, rise of his chest, ribs, shoulders. The vast shape of him in the darkness. "Why that? How did you end up in all that anyway?"
Until now, they simply hadn't time to sit down and catch up properly, fill each other in on all the missing gaps. It was the song-and-dance and story of their whole damn lives back home: always outrunning another emergency, another apocalypse, without the leisure to sit and decompress and fill each other in. He's too-aware of those looming gaps, either. (Raymond Chestnut. How. How and when. How does Allison go from one disastrous marriage straight to jumping right into another, from perfect stranger to matrimony so goddamned quickly. He perfectly understands the why but not, exactly, the how.)
But she's asking him about his missing year. Which feels safer to talk about, even if it's still like prying open a box that comes too close to touching on an uncomfortable, recurring trend. (Because of course he can see it. He's not stupid. Reginald. Gabriel. Askeladd. Jacob. Jack.)
Luther's quiet with so many people, but with Allison, his words unfold in the space between them, his voice a low and steady sound in the darkness: "He owns a bunch of bars and night clubs in Dallas. I didn't know it was his at first, I just... wound up there. Drinking."
Having hit rock-bottom again. Rejected by Reginald and effectively thrown out on his ass, adrift, marooned. Alone. Searching for something to grasp onto.
"Drinking too much, kind of. I came back again and again. I was just killing time. But there was a bar brawl one night, it wasn't any of my business but I stopped it, easily. It could've gotten ugly, so the house manager got to talking how they could do with someone like that on staff, as security or a bouncer. And I— I mean, I was literally homeless, sleeping in alleyways. And they had a business connection at a boarding house, who could put me up.
"At first I just needed the money and a place to sleep. But I was good at what I did — overqualified, obviously — so I caught Jack's eye instead of just the manager. Could I drive a car. Could I watch his back, when he had to go to meetings. And that... I mean, it gave me something to do."
Gave him purpose. Gave him someone to obey. Gave him someone to validate him. Good job, kid.
"I was better-trained than any of the goons he had. So he just started trusting me more and more, bringing me along to more jobs. Put me in the boxing ring once he saw how well I fought and when we figured how much money we could make off it.
"And, look, obviously I know, I know, he's a mobster. But— he wasn't the worst, y'know? He loves his dog. He always treated me well."
And coming hot off the heels of Sir Reginald Hargreeves, wouldn't any kindness be life-changing? Luther like a kicked dog himself, slinking in to whoever would pet his head and let him curl up at their feet.
"Through Jack Ruby, I got a job, an apartment, something to keep me busy, people to talk to, and people to fight. It could've been worse."
She hates the beginning of this so much. Her fingers tightening together over the center of her stomach, the most marginal of movements, not wanting to and still trying to picture him homeless. On the streets. Sleeping in alleys. Starving. Drinking. Then, jumping at the first chance he could for stability. Shelter, food, money, a job.
It's not all that different in the terms of how she found her feet, is it?
She was just lucky enough to have run into the right place that first night. Into the hands of people who didn't put her back out on the streets the same night. Who stepped in to help her, when she was still at the edges of barely being able to help herself, still only stumbling steps from nearly having been on death's door that same morning. Who gave her a bed and food, and then work when she proved able.
What wouldn't she have considered if it'd been days, or weeks, later instead?
There's no judgment, but Allison's head tilts a little, like she can't actually keep herself from asking,
He doesn't avoid that particular look; he tilts his head in return, glances over at her. What little he can see of her: the curve of Allison's nose, her forehead, the waves of straightened hair splayed across his covers.
"Are you asking if I ever killed anyone? Participated in crimes?" Luther's voice is carefully neutral, before he shakes his head. "No. Just protected him, and— maybe looked the other way, I guess. Whatever went on in the back rooms, that wasn't any of my business. I watched the door. And for some of it... I mean, who cares about illegal gambling? If we'd landed in Prohibition, alcohol would've been illegal. Mostly it was just trading in vice."
Then he huffs a small noise that might almost be a laugh. "It's ironic, I know. Spaceboy, getting involved with criminals and excusing them. But I didn't know what else to do."
And they'd all been a long, long way from home, and all shoved into boxes that weren't precisely them, in order to survive.
Allison's not sure whether she would have judged him he had admitted otherwise. Like asking Diego so long ago, if he had killed the person the police were coming after them for. It wasn't that there wasn't a right or wrong line -- there was, they'd had it hammered into their heads for near two decades, Luther even more than the rest of them, another decade after, too -- but they, also, weren't built just to be passive guard dogs.
Even saving the world, they'd cut a sea of bodies from childhood forward.
At least this part does sound more like Luther. That careful neutrality, polite abhorrence, professional justification, and maybe, it's both parts of the answer and part of his opinion about her feeling the need to ask to ask the question at all. To doubt or consider what more he would have been willing to do for three square meals and a roof. (To know, somewhere deeper than the marrow of her bones, she wouldn't have moved even if he said yes.)
It's the huff that drags her a little out of her thoughts, and she unhooked her knotted fingers. Her closest hand, curled, knuckles lightly knocking his arm, or side, whichever it managed to be, through the blanket, for a second. "You did what you had to. No one gets to judge you for that."
He wants so badly, so impossibly, to reach out and catch her hand: just a couple oversized fingers grazing hers, ghosting the edge of her knuckles, the trace of her palm. Instead, Luther leaves them resting motionless on the steady rise-and-fall of his midriff; feels Allison's knuckles bump against his tricep, a comradely nudge.
"So did you," Luther says softly, and this, here, is a subject he hadn't wanted to cross again either or anytime soon (or maybe ever). But it's easier in the darkness, not looking at each other, just feeling the weight of her on his mattress and the slight pressure of her fingers against his arm. It's easier to talk about it into the shadows rather than the blinding daylight and public banality of a barbecue restaurant.
"So did any of us, I guess."
A beat.
"How about you? What happened to you, when you landed?"
Allison isn't that kind to herself. Even if it reminds her of him trying to say that initially, and having to cut him off, being genuinely unable even to sit there and let him say the words once, to give her the grace of an absolution she had no right to (and maybe worse, in that second, didn't even care to want). But at least Luther moves it to all of them and then that question.
There's a snort for the question. "I decked someone?"
There's a wry twist to that, like of all people, of course, Allison Hargreeves would come down swinging.
"Actually, I ended up in Statlder's first, getting my first introduction to their "White's Only" sign," and is that easier or harder in the dark. Is it weird to suddenly be reminded 'This Is Wrong,' just them laying like this, not even touching, but in the privacy of his bedroom, would be considered an offense to God and Creation in the eyes of the world they just left. Not because of her husband, or their not being married.
Simply, because of her. The color of her skin.
Even knowing it's not true, none of the bigotry of the time, she can't stop the tension that freezes her muscles.
"Then, I decked someone on the street for calling me honey, or baby, or darling, or whatever it was." She can't remember what the words were, only the height of her panic. With no ability to ask for help. None of her siblings anywhere. The sheer snap of denial in the face of his voice. The worse fear of realizing, as her punch connected with his face, that her body was nowhere near capable of a good fight yet.
"Got into a chase across the city to South Dallas, nearly bit it hard on a gravel driveway, between those heels and it still being mostly impossible to breathe still, and happened to miraculously run into the right place at the right time, where some hairdressers got in the way, and then, pretty much took me in."
He can't quite describe the cocktail of emotions that simmer inside him, hearing this. Pride, that of course she'd come tearing into this world like a pit viper, ready to fight even while still half-dead and recuperating? Anger, that that had happened at all (and that he hadn't been there to help her)? An aching twinge of sympathetic pain, that her entry had been so violent and perilous right from the start when it shouldn't have been. His own had been dull in comparison: dreary, rainy, no one for company except that hobo and her name in their mouths.
Luther might've hit rock-bottom for a second time in his life, but the 1960s South still handed him privilege on a platter. He'd never felt unsafe, never felt ostracised by the world as a whole; being a white man had been a shield far more than even his super-strength could offer, and he'd known it. Of course he had. You couldn't miss the literal signs everywhere, at every establishment, movie theatres and restaurants and buses.
Now it's his turn to reach out, his pinky finger nudging hers, their shoulders and arms splayed out side-by-side on the mattress. What little reassurance feels safe to give.
"All this, and you still couldn't talk? Even while dealing with that?"
His finger brushes hers, and in the dark, it's all texture. Warm and rough and larger than hers, and Allison briefly, without meaning, thought of his hand uncovered hand resting on hers on the picnic table. That moment, but without the words. That touch. The colors across the back of his hand. The way her skin tingles at the spot where his finger moves barely, just the smallest bit against hers.
And it's hard not to move her hand.
But she's sure it would be for every single wrong reason, too.
"For a year." It's not so much a reminder to what she said earlier, standing and laughing in the kitchen. There's so much more weight to it. Not the whirl of the year and half of freedom sense, but all those slow endless days before it. "It was a miracle that Vernetta took a chance on me. Strange girl, in even stranger clothing, with no ability to talk, and no references to speak for her, who needed medical attention regularly through that first week."
"It wasn't even like here." Allison tilted her head, looking straight above herself more at the headboard. "I'm not sure I ever liked the Mental Network. It's better than having that notebook, but sometimes only just. But it was something. And not having even that--"
There weren't even entirely words for it. She lived. She worked. She paid for a small place that only took eligible young black women of age. People's conversations swirled around her. The girls at the salon made it so no one mocked her for her inability to speak, but there was no real way to engage her if they wanted.
"I cleaned the salon for a few months, and once Vernetta realized I could do math far better than her, I took over the books, but even that was within the first three or four months. For a long time after that, it was just all there was. It became--" Who she was. What she was. What her world was. What it might always be. Until Five found her. "--normal."
At least the mental network, paltry as it is, could work as quickly as her thoughts could pin the words down in the text boxes. It's so much faster compared to the slow drudge of fingers on pencils, no matter how quick she could try to scribble a short message, always limited by the speed of ink or lead on paper.
And yet there was even a lag, a delay in those text messages. Even in this world, Allison was already a muted, suppressed version of herself — a percentage of herself — and he can't even imagine how much more pronounced it must've been in Dallas. She was, in some ways, the most existentially, terrifyingly powerful of the Academy... and there she'd been, cut horrendously down to size. No superpowers at all. Disabled, black, female. In the nineteen sixties.
She hated the beginning of this conversation, of hearing how Luther had been brought low. And he hates this. Hates it. This hurts. His heart aches in his chest, like a low and bruising pain, like he's been punched right in the ribcage.
They had all done what they had to, to get by. Blending into the world as much they could, in the best ways they knew how, and biding their time. Waiting.
"You shouldn't have been alone." He hadn't even known he was going to say it until he's saying it; there's a catch in his throat and he's still staring at the ceiling because now he can't stand to glance to the side. Like a fire burning in the bed beside him; it hurts to look at her.
"I'm sorry. I should've looked for you harder, for longer. I didn't even think of asking Jack for a favour and having him look for you until Five came by and said everyone was alive— if I'd just done it sooner—"
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obediences) wrote2019-03-28 10:51 am
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Jack. Not me. I learned to roll with it.
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If anything, somehow, even in the pocket of a mobster, Luther had honestly managed the quietest number of days of all of them really. Still. As he never showed up or seemed to have touched any of that last week of theirs. And if that wasn't a skill. ]
Mmmhhhmm.
You just tell us if you're going to keep the change here, too.
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What, like a codename change???
Dear god. No. I'm still listed as 'Space' in the registration documents here, and I'm sticking to it.
Jesus. No.
[ He could suck it up and deal with the name King Kong printed on the flyers, like The Kraken blazoned across Diego's boxing posters — in part because none of the audience seemed to mind, they'd all seemed to celebrate his body, somehow, and its brutish capabilities — but the idea of hanging onto the name now, after they're all back, like a vestigial limb after it's served its purpose... No. ]
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It's wholly possible that what comes next isn't a message,
but the sound of laughter dimly through the jack-and-jill bathroom.]
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I think I'm being bullied. Really unfair, for the record.
[ Even after everything, after this past week, there is something so inexpressibly easy about falling into this with her. The comfortable (and comforting) back-and-forth as if it never ended. ]
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That *is* a shame.
Then, you're really going to hate being reminded, mathematically,
I can't ever be the bigger person in this equation.
[ Physically, at least, that has never been possibility in her entire life. ]
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It makes him want to slide out of bed already, pad over to the bathroom in bare feet, move through it and tentatively knock at her door. Why keep using the mental network when they don't have to anymore? When he could actually be hearing her voice again, the quickfire volley of her words out loud?
But old habits die hard; those doors were always unbroachable, for so many years; so he keeps typing. ]
How's the view up there from the high road, miss 'never became a bare-knuckle boxer'? (Even Diego did it.)
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Was killing one assassin by myself not enough for this week?
[ Plus, potentially maiming that other guy, but she wasn't going there. She wasn't perturbed by the existence or memory of either at the moment. It was just another in a very long line of things she hadn't been able to joke about. In a year. In nearly three. In four combine.
There's something heady as hell to just being able to do it.
Say it. Own it. Not feel ashamed of those same things she had.]
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[ They can joke about murder like this, can joke about multiple killings because, well. That's who they are. That's the kind of people they are, who bear it unflinching, who don't shy away from the ugly or bloody. We're different than everyone else. We're special. And good or bad, that means we don't get to live normal lives. Here or anywhere. ]
And I'd like to see you try, Rumor.
[ She's thrown an unexpected gauntlet down between them, and for whatever unanticipated unexpected reason, he can't resist picking it up. Calling her out. It's not like she's actually going to come and box him — if ever there were pairs who would literally wrestle each other in squabbling competitive pique, it was always Klaus and Ben, or Luther and Diego rough-housing — and he's still not quite sure what he expects her to do with that impossible dare, but— ]
→ action.
"This is pretty pathetic if this is what I'm supposed to be afraid of facing." It's all sass, but there's no waver to the arrogance, disdain, and the current of almost laughter right under both of those. Considering him, still in a blanketed mound in the dark, on his bed. Even if he could, she has no real doubt of him. That he could. If he needed to. If someone came in guns, or fists, blazing.
But they won't. It's the middle of the night. In the middle of Nonah.
And he's not going to punch her in the dark. (At least she's about 98% sure.)
Sure enough that all she does is pad toward his bed, stopping about a foot away from it, and without waiting, give a wave her hands for him to move further back, with all the serious imperiousness of someone who has a right to their directives being unquestioned. "Scoot already."
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"What did I say about being bullied?" he says, but there's amusement laced in his words and he obligingly slides closer to the wall, making room for her to take the other half.
(They had done this as kids. Sneaking into each others' rooms on the nights they weren't being monitored, usually her into his, exactly like this, because it was no surprise which of them was actually the more daring and the more willing to step outside the rules. She'd always slipped away before she fell asleep, though.)
Luther's still half-buried under the covers, but in the darkness she can see the massive edge of those shoulders, a white tank top barely containing it all. He drags the covers a bit higher, a little primly.
But he makes room.
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Like she had no time for whining if he was going to call her bluff and fold, all in the same go. It would all be perfect, if it weren't for the smile trying to tug apart her cool disdain. Making the top of her lip shift refuse to stop shifting insistently, pulling at the muscles in her cheek.
She can't miss that he tugs the blanket up a little more up his shoulder, and that's unchanged, but she doesn't expect it to be. Doesn't really have a need to take it from him. There really wasn't entirely a plan aside from showing up and proving she had always been just a little quicker and wickeder on the updraw for a dare. Even one she accidentally put into play with her own mouth.
No, she doesn't pick up or move his blanket at all, does nothing except to sit on it. One leg curling on the bed, and one hanging off, hands pressed into the blanket itself by her ankle. Feeling absolutely too old to let herself get away with the slight bit of childish this feels like, a little too dangerous to be innocent, but absolutely not wanting to go back to being an adult, in her own, empty, room, just yet either.
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Luther's wedged himself a little higher into a half-seated position, back propped against the pillows and the headboard; staying lying down would feel too vulnerable right now, and he already feels vulnerable as hell having someone in his space, where no one ever is. Not at this hour, not with the lights dimmed, not alone. (Part of him still instinctively wants to glance to the door, look for movement down the hallway. The crisp and precise tread of wingtip shoes on hardwood. Reginald's cane rapping the floor. Even now, years after the man's death, always waiting to be caught and reprimanded for finding joy in a little thing.)
But even this, it all feels so soothingly familiar even as he wants to climb out of his own skin at her proximity. Because in answering the dare, Allison's proven again that it's still her. The one who would fist-fight Swedish assassins and power mimics, who would jump to a punch even after years in hibernation, her abilities and capabilities smothered. She doesn't turn down a challenge.
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If she breezes through it like it's nothing, maybe she can keep it nothing. Like it's not Luther's bedroom, and Luther's bed, and not her bed, or her bedroom, or her other bed, and her other bedroom. Like none of this is strange or weird or awkward. Instead, she just goes for an all in that she can't let herself think about in the slightest as she does.
She turns backwards, and pulls her legs up on the bed, before just dropping the few feet to be laying down on her back. More parallel beside him, if still lower than the pillows, but catching her hands on her stomach and looking at the ceiling, telling herself to breathe. To calm. If for nothing else, so Luther didn't suddenly find a way to merge into the wall itself or tear his blanket in half.
Deciding against anything in the same vein as the earlier words, like a request or command to follow her example. Instead, she gave the darkness and ceiling, and Luther up and off her side, a different question. "That was why your face was all beaten up that first day, wasn't it?"
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So her gaze slides away and that burning self-consciousness recedes too, until Luther's able to sink back down into the pillows, shoulder-to-shoulder with her and his face also turned to the ceiling. (It feels a bit like it's missing something. Plane models. Glow-in-the-dark stars. Childish ephemera.)
He exhales, and she can hear him breathe out beside her, his shoulder shifting. "Yeah. I lost a fight," he says, despite the fact that it is, plainly, physically impossible for Luther Hargreeves to lose a fistfight with an unpowered civilian.
There's a beat, a sudden realisation and a pause where he wonders if she can hear the suddenly-rabbity panicky patter of his heart if he has to explain how in the hell that happened, and so he quickly adds, "The matches were usually rigged. I threw that one."
He lets the connotations stand by themselves, let it seem like he was supposed to lose this one. Saying it outright would have been a lie, and she'd be able to pick that up immediately in that nauseating churn of her abilities. But this part and the way he phrased it, well. It's technically the truth.
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She really is exhausted under all of it.
She just doesn't know how to sleep either.
Allison let her head roll back a little, flat on the bed as it was, without a pillow, not liking the taste of that idea even as he said it. No part of her could like the idea of Luther simply deciding to take a beating. For a job. For another person. For anyone. That wasn't what Luther was for. About. "That--"
She wants to say that doesn't sound like you, but what does she know. Between the newsreel, and his face, and these smallest, plainest details, it is, too. Or at least it had been. For a short time. Like Vanya being happy on a farm. And Klaus' cult, as insane as that was. Her. All of them where they weren't supposed to be, doing anything but laying low.
"Why?" This with a small roll of her head to glance a little in his direction. Even if her gaze doesn't entirely get there, especially given she'd need to either scoot up a bit more or prop herself a little to look over the all too noticeable, higher than normal, rise of his chest, ribs, shoulders. The vast shape of him in the darkness. "Why that? How did you end up in all that anyway?"
How did he go from Aegis to Jack Ruby?
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But she's asking him about his missing year. Which feels safer to talk about, even if it's still like prying open a box that comes too close to touching on an uncomfortable, recurring trend. (Because of course he can see it. He's not stupid. Reginald. Gabriel. Askeladd. Jacob. Jack.)
Luther's quiet with so many people, but with Allison, his words unfold in the space between them, his voice a low and steady sound in the darkness: "He owns a bunch of bars and night clubs in Dallas. I didn't know it was his at first, I just... wound up there. Drinking."
Having hit rock-bottom again. Rejected by Reginald and effectively thrown out on his ass, adrift, marooned. Alone. Searching for something to grasp onto.
"Drinking too much, kind of. I came back again and again. I was just killing time. But there was a bar brawl one night, it wasn't any of my business but I stopped it, easily. It could've gotten ugly, so the house manager got to talking how they could do with someone like that on staff, as security or a bouncer. And I— I mean, I was literally homeless, sleeping in alleyways. And they had a business connection at a boarding house, who could put me up.
"At first I just needed the money and a place to sleep. But I was good at what I did — overqualified, obviously — so I caught Jack's eye instead of just the manager. Could I drive a car. Could I watch his back, when he had to go to meetings. And that... I mean, it gave me something to do."
Gave him purpose.
Gave him someone to obey.
Gave him someone to validate him.
Good job, kid.
"I was better-trained than any of the goons he had. So he just started trusting me more and more, bringing me along to more jobs. Put me in the boxing ring once he saw how well I fought and when we figured how much money we could make off it.
"And, look, obviously I know, I know, he's a mobster. But— he wasn't the worst, y'know? He loves his dog. He always treated me well."
And coming hot off the heels of Sir Reginald Hargreeves, wouldn't any kindness be life-changing? Luther like a kicked dog himself, slinking in to whoever would pet his head and let him curl up at their feet.
"Through Jack Ruby, I got a job, an apartment, something to keep me busy, people to talk to, and people to fight. It could've been worse."
His voice falls away, back into silence.
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It's not all that different in the terms of how she found her feet, is it?
She was just lucky enough to have run into the right place that first night. Into the hands of people who didn't put her back out on the streets the same night. Who stepped in to help her, when she was still at the edges of barely being able to help herself, still only stumbling steps from nearly having been on death's door that same morning. Who gave her a bed and food, and then work when she proved able.
What wouldn't she have considered if it'd been days, or weeks, later instead?
There's no judgment, but Allison's head tilts a little,
like she can't actually keep herself from asking,
"And that's all you did for him?"
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"Are you asking if I ever killed anyone? Participated in crimes?" Luther's voice is carefully neutral, before he shakes his head. "No. Just protected him, and— maybe looked the other way, I guess. Whatever went on in the back rooms, that wasn't any of my business. I watched the door. And for some of it... I mean, who cares about illegal gambling? If we'd landed in Prohibition, alcohol would've been illegal. Mostly it was just trading in vice."
Then he huffs a small noise that might almost be a laugh. "It's ironic, I know. Spaceboy, getting involved with criminals and excusing them. But I didn't know what else to do."
And they'd all been a long, long way from home, and all shoved into boxes that weren't precisely them, in order to survive.
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Even saving the world, they'd cut a sea of bodies from childhood forward.
At least this part does sound more like Luther. That careful neutrality, polite abhorrence, professional justification, and maybe, it's both parts of the answer and part of his opinion about her feeling the need to ask to ask the question at all. To doubt or consider what more he would have been willing to do for three square meals and a roof. (To know, somewhere deeper than the marrow of her bones, she wouldn't have moved even if he said yes.)
It's the huff that drags her a little out of her thoughts, and she unhooked her knotted fingers. Her closest hand, curled, knuckles lightly knocking his arm, or side, whichever it managed to be, through the blanket, for a second. "You did what you had to. No one gets to judge you for that."
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"So did you," Luther says softly, and this, here, is a subject he hadn't wanted to cross again either or anytime soon (or maybe ever). But it's easier in the darkness, not looking at each other, just feeling the weight of her on his mattress and the slight pressure of her fingers against his arm. It's easier to talk about it into the shadows rather than the blinding daylight and public banality of a barbecue restaurant.
"So did any of us, I guess."
A beat.
"How about you? What happened to you, when you landed?"
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There's a snort for the question. "I decked someone?"
There's a wry twist to that, like of all people, of course,
Allison Hargreeves would come down swinging.
"Actually, I ended up in Statlder's first, getting my first introduction to their "White's Only" sign," and is that easier or harder in the dark. Is it weird to suddenly be reminded 'This Is Wrong,' just them laying like this, not even touching, but in the privacy of his bedroom, would be considered an offense to God and Creation in the eyes of the world they just left. Not because of her husband, or their not being married.
Simply, because of her. The color of her skin.
Even knowing it's not true, none of the bigotry of the time,
she can't stop the tension that freezes her muscles.
"Then, I decked someone on the street for calling me honey, or baby, or darling, or whatever it was." She can't remember what the words were, only the height of her panic. With no ability to ask for help. None of her siblings anywhere. The sheer snap of denial in the face of his voice. The worse fear of realizing, as her punch connected with his face, that her body was nowhere near capable of a good fight yet.
"Got into a chase across the city to South Dallas, nearly bit it hard on a gravel driveway, between those heels and it still being mostly impossible to breathe still, and happened to miraculously run into the right place at the right time, where some hairdressers got in the way, and then, pretty much took me in."
Vernetta. She owed Vernetta so much.
And she'd never even said goodbye. Or thank you.
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Luther might've hit rock-bottom for a second time in his life, but the 1960s South still handed him privilege on a platter. He'd never felt unsafe, never felt ostracised by the world as a whole; being a white man had been a shield far more than even his super-strength could offer, and he'd known it. Of course he had. You couldn't miss the literal signs everywhere, at every establishment, movie theatres and restaurants and buses.
Now it's his turn to reach out, his pinky finger nudging hers, their shoulders and arms splayed out side-by-side on the mattress. What little reassurance feels safe to give.
"All this, and you still couldn't talk? Even while dealing with that?"
He can't even imagine.
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And it's hard not to move her hand.
But she's sure it would be for every single wrong reason, too.
"For a year." It's not so much a reminder to what she said earlier, standing and laughing in the kitchen. There's so much more weight to it. Not the whirl of the year and half of freedom sense, but all those slow endless days before it. "It was a miracle that Vernetta took a chance on me. Strange girl, in even stranger clothing, with no ability to talk, and no references to speak for her, who needed medical attention regularly through that first week."
"It wasn't even like here." Allison tilted her head, looking straight above herself more at the headboard. "I'm not sure I ever liked the Mental Network. It's better than having that notebook, but sometimes only just. But it was something. And not having even that--"
There weren't even entirely words for it. She lived. She worked. She paid for a small place that only took eligible young black women of age. People's conversations swirled around her. The girls at the salon made it so no one mocked her for her inability to speak, but there was no real way to engage her if they wanted.
"I cleaned the salon for a few months, and once Vernetta realized I could do math far better than her, I took over the books, but even that was within the first three or four months. For a long time after that, it was just all there was. It became--" Who she was. What she was. What her world was. What it might always be. Until Five found her. "--normal."
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And yet there was even a lag, a delay in those text messages. Even in this world, Allison was already a muted, suppressed version of herself — a percentage of herself — and he can't even imagine how much more pronounced it must've been in Dallas. She was, in some ways, the most existentially, terrifyingly powerful of the Academy... and there she'd been, cut horrendously down to size. No superpowers at all. Disabled, black, female. In the nineteen sixties.
She hated the beginning of this conversation, of hearing how Luther had been brought low.
And he hates this. Hates it. This hurts. His heart aches in his chest, like a low and bruising pain, like he's been punched right in the ribcage.
They had all done what they had to, to get by. Blending into the world as much they could, in the best ways they knew how, and biding their time. Waiting.
"You shouldn't have been alone." He hadn't even known he was going to say it until he's saying it; there's a catch in his throat and he's still staring at the ceiling because now he can't stand to glance to the side. Like a fire burning in the bed beside him; it hurts to look at her.
"I'm sorry. I should've looked for you harder, for longer. I didn't even think of asking Jack for a favour and having him look for you until Five came by and said everyone was alive— if I'd just done it sooner—"
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wrap or yours to close?
fini. ❤