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—"
Quick to the defense of those who mattered to her, even if they were gone (most without goodbyes, and one without ... she didn't even know what to call all she'd taken from Ray right at the end). She'd had Ray. She'd had Vernetta and Jill, Deano and Owen. Even Miles, if he chaffed the most noticeably under how easily she gave her opinion or contradicted his without any apology to her rebuttals, once she could speak again.
She could tone down a lot, to survive, tried when and where she could, but she's earned all of her stripes in her childhood talking back to a pack of tall boys she did her damnedest to outrun, outlearn, outmaneuver, and if she couldn't "outdo" One or Two, she was damned well going to be at least as good as them if it killed her. Which was before Hollywood.
Needless to say she still didn't take well to anyone trying to put her in her place. But so many different things had kept trying through those years.
"Don't." This time her hand does land on his briefly, as apologies and words tumble confessionally fast suddenly in the dark from Luther's lips. The one that didn't mean you shouldn't have been alone but I should've been there. Letting her into the tumble of thoughts that have probably circled his mind since he looked up and his first word was 'shit' while his eyes went wide as saucer plates.
"I could say the same--" Had several screaming times in her head since seeing him in that BBQ stop. "That I shouldn't have stopped coming back to the alley six months in." At Christmas. The first Christmas. "Tried for the whole next year and beyond. Known. Somehow." There's a shake of her head, her hair making a slithering noise against the cover under it, as she pulled her hand back, weaving it back into her other fingers on her stomach.
"We can't change that." The time. Both of them stopping. Her marriage. Luther thinking --
Allison turned her head to look toward him for the first time in a bit. "But, next time, you better remember I'm a little harder to kill than all that."
Said the only way she can,
trite and cocky, like the world could try, but never win. (Not like ... it hurts to consider, Luther under that weight, too. Luther making decisions where she didn't exist. None of them did. He was stuck forever.
But selfishly, and most of all. Without her. Anywhere at all. In his present, future.
Luther tries to smile even though she can't see it, but even that twitch of muscles in his jaw and cheeks feels wrong, doesn't sit quite right on his face. This part, he can't even joke about.
It wasn't a world he'd ever wanted to be in. With the assumption of Allison's death and everyone else's death, the colours had dimmed from it, in some ways even worse than those years before. He'd gone about his days, sure, but it felt like chewing sawdust: bland, tasteless, pointless, a man on autopilot. Because at least when he'd been stuck on the base, he'd known they were there. Somewhere below. Somewhere in that scattering of lights beneath his feet, living the lives they'd left him for, and he could squint down at the Earth: mapping the coasts of the United States and imagining that he could see their cities, a pin in the map and a sprawl that meant Los Angeles, wondering what they were up to and filling in the blanks. Klaus and Diego and Vanya hadn't been public figures in the same way, so they'd been out-of-reach, but there had been the occasional VHS shipped up by Pogo with Allison's latest releases. He had, at least, had some version of her when they were apart before.
And so what terrible, weak person does it make him, that he did give up hope this time? That he hadn't had faith in all of them surviving? That he hadn't slugged it out and kept trying and torn whole worlds and dimensions apart in order to find them, like Number Five would've (and did)?
He tries to shrug a shoulder, but it mostly just shifts the weight of the mattress. "Duly noted," he says, and it's about all he can manage.
Maybe it's that, more than anything else. That heavy silence. The way it's only two words. It's all he can manage. Gruff and quiet, with whatever that movement was supposed to be. A shrug. A full-body twitch. An irritable shift. The way it lingers in the air, sucking all the lightness out of her words, out of the air, the room. She can't imagine Luther not alive. She can't even imagine imagining it.
There's something too deep there. Caught up in the moon every night, and Ray's gift she couldn't consider bringing with her, and the way she couldn't even let herself think there was another way except being found eventually. That there was ever another way than telling Luther instantly; her actions were not so much forgivable, as blackly inconceivable.
Because there was no world in which she could let go of him. Not in nearly three years, and not even each of those nights alone.
Maybe that is too soon to joke about. It's easy enough to brush off what happened in the farmyard, in the snow. Started, stopped, and forgotten in a brush of minutes. Like blinking. Like childhood. Playing at dealing death, but not at being dead. Especially not after Five vanished, and then Ben died. She can't help but picture the pieces collected and lost, and recollected here, too.
That yawning hallway of empty days, with her inextricably caught up in the worst regret of his life. The younger version of herself, vainglorious and beleaguered, on the counter of his small space station.
But this was a year and more when they'd never before had to think it, even in the decade before. Not dead. Somewhere far, far away. Beyond reach. But alive. Always alive somewhere. Doing what they felt they had to be. Maybe it was too much even to touch it lightly.
Maybe she meant to say Sorry, but she's always been tragically bad at that word (until it was too late, until she was saying it only as she walking out the door while people things broke irrevocably behind her), and she twists, turns on her side facing him, the arm under her bending, sliding under her head, creating the crook of a triangle to pillow the side of her head and face on. Her free hand hovering for a second, like she had to think about whether to set it safely between them and then decided to risk the choice of it being conscious.
Placing a hand on his arm, and what comes out, is quieter, "Hey. I'm real, and I'm not going anywhere."
If she knows, that knowing something isn't the same as feeling it, she still means it, as far as this place, and the time jump let her, she's not leaving him by any choice of her own. Especially now.
She feels the faint ripple of his bare arm beneath her fingers; not jerking away, but the slight tremor at being touched, the unaccustomed weight of contact. When Luther turns his head to the side to look at her, his eyes are too-wide and too-blue and too-startled and too, too painfully relieved. Drinking up the sight of her, as if he can commit her to memory, then maybe she won't vanish this time.
Even this. Just having her here and within reach is more than he ever could have asked for.
The silence stretches out too long and too far and his heart is lodged in his throat, making breathing, speaking, truly impossible. Eventually, though, Luther manages to swallow past it, pressing down past that catch. The moment, if it is a moment, passes.
She's good at this part. Whenever it's like he's about to scuttle off and slam those metaphorical shutters back down, Allison can usually reel him back in, stop him from going cold and remote and closed-off from her.
(Promise me.)
This own promise of hers is technically empty — if the Porter decides in its whims to whisk her off, there's absolutely nothing she can do about it. Might as well cross your heart and make a wish on the moon, for all the agency you have. Others have broken those pointless promises before, because they can't not.
(But Luther. Seriously. History doesn't have to repeat. I hope to hell the rest of your siblings don't get pulled with you still here. But you're not gonna get stuck alone in this place. For one thing, I'm way too annoying as a friend to let you have that much peace and quiet.)
And yet. There is something strangely comforting about it regardless, Allison's eyes dark and watchful right beside him and the weight of her on the mattress and hearing those words from her lips: a talisman against the loneliness and the emptiness. An intention, even if it's not a guarantee.
"I won't give up. Ever again," Luther says, firmly, and there is something almost childishly simple about that promise, too. Licking his wounds. Picking himself up. Deciding to do better next time. And then, because something about this moment still feels too raw and vulnerable with her so close, the walls of personal space tumbling down like they never existed, he course-corrects. Quickly makes it plural again: "I mean, we got Diego and Klaus back, right? So. That just proves it. The others will be back, eventually. And for now— at least you're here. And I'm not leaving you, either."
And how much that matters. It matters so, so much.
It's not like all those years ago, overreacting to the thought of him dying.
It's a choice, but it's not an automatic assumption or an impulsive over roll that she didn't catch until it was already over. There's a network of uncertainty, of knowingly overstepping, when the bare muscles beneath her fingers suddenly flutter. Not wanting to, but ready to let go, if the next second his whole body lurched away. Or her wrist was caught in the same snakebite iron vice of a grip, hand lifted meaninglessly back away.
But it doesn't. Luther doesn't.
But she does, a few seconds later, she does. For him. Like every part of her doesn't want to leave her hand there. But she knows better than to press her luck. To be grateful that it was allowed to stand even after trying to hide every parts of himself currently uncovered for sleeping further under the blanket when she absconded with half of his bed. Her fingers curling into her palm, still warm with his higher body temperature, and pulled back against her own body.
There's a small huff, a little amused, at the bare simplicity at his declaration. Light over unexpected glass shards. Too broad, too light. But she knows him. She knows what he's doing. It doesn't mean she'll stop him, but she knows. Doesn't even disagree, when her first words are, "Maybe so."
Before a small wrinkle of her brows, bring back, too. "And home, waiting, after so long. After whenever this stop ends."
Something infinitely easier -- even at infinitely more impatient, because: "It's better than having the apocalypse looming over our heads while we wait this time. The things we couldn't fix. People we couldn't save."
Luther feels the tight-knotted muscles in his shoulders loosen, relaxing further into the pillows, and it's only then that he realises he'd tensed up at all. Holding his breath as if steeling himself for a punch, waiting for something to happen— and when it doesn't, he finds it's easier to breathe. To slide back into the safer territory of this conversation, a topic that feels less like someone's gouged open his ribcage and messily dismembered him.
"Yeah." A beat, a thoughtful pause, and then she can hear Luther's smile in his voice more than see it through the darkness of the bedroom after midnight:
"It... actually feels kinda nice? Getting a win, for once. We're not really used to that anymore."
Even for backward phrasing, it's more than Allison had given this place for nearly the first year after they got here. When it was clear to everyone who gave her even the split chance of an expression, no less a stream of written words, that, honest to god, she hated everything about being stuck here. She had no time to smell any of the flowers as long as it was keeping her from where she belonged, what she needed to do, who she needed to get back to.
If she's being honest with herself -- and somehow it's never easier to that than with Luther nearby, with the feeling of it being safe to actually look at, no matter how terrible, it is or she is -- she's not even sure, herself. If that heat or hate downgraded to something like vague irritation only is the cause of what she just said. Because of finally having a win. Finally saving a world destined to end. Supposedly, righting the future.
Or if it's another side-effect of all those years. Of settling for so many years longer there than she was ever here, incapable of doing anything but accepting that her family was out of reach, the future was out of reach, Claire was out of reach. With no ability to do anything about them, or even talk about them for a year, and when she could talk again, not even having a way to try to, without sounding crazy.
Another of the million things swallowed by the silence,
and then by her not even giving people the chance to believe her sans proof. But yesterday was all the proof she needed to know how that would have gone, isn't it?
The last few days. As all those doors and all those lies peeled back with the return of each of her family members, with another apocalypse. Until that earnest unwavering you only make me better of Ray's love became that last shaking, shattering ramble that began with No, I'm not okay edged so far into the splintering panic of being pushed too far, knowing too much, seeing too much.
Knowing he couldn't take any more. Of all of it. Of all of her. At three days in.
They're the king and queen of understatement sometimes, these two.
It doesn't suck and Could be worse, they say, as if it isn't earth-shattering having Allison healthy and alive and talking beside him. These half-whispered conversations after midnight like there's still someone to catch them and tell them they can't. How many times can he find different ways of saying I'm glad you're here?
When Luther exhales this time, it feels more like that intolerable vise is loosening around his chest and making it more able to breathe, some of that wired jumpy energy from the battle and the timejump finally lessening. He has no idea what's storming and brewing in her head, on the other half of his bed, but the silence is starting to settle like a heavy layer of snow wreathed over everything, easing into the nooks and crannies of the room, turning to a companionable quiet. This is, almost, starting to feel normal. (He doesn't think he could ever get used to this. But it's a start.)
He could probably just let them drift off into that silence, but there's still that unexpected urge to grasp at the conversation and keep it going if he can. Making up for lost time, for all those months and years that they couldn't talk. To hear every last thing on her mind now, trade every passing whim he can. For all those times he'd read an interesting book or watched a movie or tried a new flavour of pie, and wanted someone to talk to about it, wanted to tell Allison about it, but she wasn't there.
So he suddenly blurts out, still looking at the ceiling: "I don't sleep well. The first night in a new place. And this house feels like a new place again. I guess that happens to most people? But— I mean, I only ever lived in two places. And then the rooming house was my third." He hadn't undergone the apartment-hopping and crashing at friends' places that the others had, picking up and moving on and readjusting and finding their footing.
The silence swirls around them, after their few words, and Allison lets the silence hover. Let's the specter of those worst moments linger in her head. Tucked away in a closed box to get to Vanya. To Harlan. To the briefcase. Five days ago she had a whole different life. As a person so far out of reach now.
Allison lies to herself, Klaus said, and she had hadn't she.
That she could be happy, they could be happy. That it could all be fine. She could. He could.
(She never deserved this ring. But she can't take it off either.)
How many times can she prove she's better at selling the world on the fraudulent versions of herself than at being herself. That being herself, the real her, only ends in ruin, devastated; empty houses, and seething shame. It doesn't even make sense that Luther is okay with any of it, with her, but she leans, weak as ever to the idea of even the barest shreds of acceptance, on that silence, quiet, thick, heavy descended around them. Becoming only the steady in and out, in and out, of breathing, in the still house.
Until suddenly Luther is throwing out words like the silence is the threat, and Allison finds herself blinking against the blotting night-black, her eyes unadjusted suddenly. Not sure if she'd been stuck in her thoughts, or she'd momentarily drifted off in the haze of matching her breathing to the slow, steadiness of his. The words splinter the silence, the stillness, the brief, blissful, now-confusing, emptiness of her head.
She hates that the first thought she thinks is that Luther lists those truths about places like it's something to be ashamed of, and all that comes up in her mind is she's been too many places. Too many houses, apartments, people. Blown through them like they were made of cards, tried them on like Goldilocks, and lighting them on fire as soon as her fingers brushed them, nothing fitting for long, not even if she wanted it to, not even if years had gone on and on passing before the bottom dropped out.
"It's weird, isn't it." Is nebulous, shifting her arm, so her ear can rest against a softer part of her upper arm. "I know we've been here for months, but it doesn't feel like it. It doesn't feel like--" She has to swallow, and it feels profanely like a word she has no right to now. "--home."
"The stairs won't creak when I get up in the morning to make coffee."
"The power won't fritz for a day or two, or half a week, after a heavy rain."
"Yeah. It was once, though, so— it'll come back. Some things just take time." He's unintentionally echoing his words to her back in the original Hargreeves mansion, without even realising it; those words of reassurance are too far back for him to remember, divided by a year in Dallas and a year here.
Time is oddly, incomprehensibly relative to their lives now. Twenty-four hours ago, this place was home. Now it isn't; now it's dulled by all those other months rearing up in its place, new and fresh and immediate in their memory.
Luther's fingers are interlaced across his stomach, his heavy shoulders pressing into the mattress, and what strikes him is how surprisingly comfortable he is. Feeling like some missing puzzle pieces have finally clicked into place, after missing a crucial part of himself for so long. And so as a result, the adrenaline is finally starting to ebb, leaving him scoured empty, tired, a blank slate and empty wasteland.
"I put up a couple decorations, but the rented room was still kind of a piece of shit. I didn't put much effort into it." After a pause, he clears his throat. "But I, um. Your house. Looked nice."
It's like a piece of practiced politesse to a skilled hostess, but it's also the truth. All warm buttery yellow light and east-facing windows, carefully-chosen furniture, carefully-appointed decorations (and those photographs, all those happy framed pictures of the happy couple, grinning out at the camera; Luther had never had a family photo that wasn't artificially posed for the press or grimly-arranged by the Monocle).
It had felt domestic in a way he'd never experienced in that other world, as much as he'd wanted to.
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obediences) wrote2019-03-28 10:51 am
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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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Quick to the defense of those who mattered to her, even if they were gone (most without goodbyes, and one without ... she didn't even know what to call all she'd taken from Ray right at the end). She'd had Ray. She'd had Vernetta and Jill, Deano and Owen. Even Miles, if he chaffed the most noticeably under how easily she gave her opinion or contradicted his without any apology to her rebuttals, once she could speak again.
She could tone down a lot, to survive, tried when and where she could, but she's earned all of her stripes in her childhood talking back to a pack of tall boys she did her damnedest to outrun, outlearn, outmaneuver, and if she couldn't "outdo" One or Two, she was damned well going to be at least as good as them if it killed her. Which was before Hollywood.
Needless to say she still didn't take well to anyone trying to put her in her place.
But so many different things had kept trying through those years.
"Don't." This time her hand does land on his briefly, as apologies and words tumble confessionally fast suddenly in the dark from Luther's lips. The one that didn't mean you shouldn't have been alone but I should've been there. Letting her into the tumble of thoughts that have probably circled his mind since he looked up and his first word was 'shit' while his eyes went wide as saucer plates.
"I could say the same--" Had several screaming times in her head since seeing him in that BBQ stop. "That I shouldn't have stopped coming back to the alley six months in." At Christmas. The first Christmas. "Tried for the whole next year and beyond. Known. Somehow." There's a shake of her head, her hair making a slithering noise against the cover under it, as she pulled her hand back, weaving it back into her other fingers on her stomach.
"We can't change that." The time. Both of them stopping.
Her marriage. Luther thinking --
Allison turned her head to look toward him for the first time in a bit.
"But, next time, you better remember I'm a little harder to kill than all that."
Said the only way she can,
trite and cocky, like the world could try, but never win.
(Not like ... it hurts to consider, Luther under that weight, too.
Luther making decisions where she didn't exist.
None of them did. He was stuck forever.
But selfishly, and most of all.
Without her. Anywhere at all.
In his present, future.
Erased entirely.)
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It wasn't a world he'd ever wanted to be in. With the assumption of Allison's death and everyone else's death, the colours had dimmed from it, in some ways even worse than those years before. He'd gone about his days, sure, but it felt like chewing sawdust: bland, tasteless, pointless, a man on autopilot. Because at least when he'd been stuck on the base, he'd known they were there. Somewhere below. Somewhere in that scattering of lights beneath his feet, living the lives they'd left him for, and he could squint down at the Earth: mapping the coasts of the United States and imagining that he could see their cities, a pin in the map and a sprawl that meant Los Angeles, wondering what they were up to and filling in the blanks. Klaus and Diego and Vanya hadn't been public figures in the same way, so they'd been out-of-reach, but there had been the occasional VHS shipped up by Pogo with Allison's latest releases. He had, at least, had some version of her when they were apart before.
And so what terrible, weak person does it make him, that he did give up hope this time? That he hadn't had faith in all of them surviving? That he hadn't slugged it out and kept trying and torn whole worlds and dimensions apart in order to find them, like Number Five would've (and did)?
He tries to shrug a shoulder, but it mostly just shifts the weight of the mattress. "Duly noted," he says, and it's about all he can manage.
He can't joke about this.
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There's something too deep there. Caught up in the moon every night, and Ray's gift she couldn't consider bringing with her, and the way she couldn't even let herself think there was another way except being found eventually. That there was ever another way than telling Luther instantly; her actions were not so much forgivable, as blackly inconceivable.
Because there was no world in which she could let go of him.
Not in nearly three years, and not even each of those nights alone.
Maybe that is too soon to joke about. It's easy enough to brush off what happened in the farmyard, in the snow. Started, stopped, and forgotten in a brush of minutes. Like blinking. Like childhood. Playing at dealing death, but not at being dead. Especially not after Five vanished, and then Ben died. She can't help but picture the pieces collected and lost, and recollected here, too.
That yawning hallway of empty days, with her inextricably caught up in the worst regret of his life. The younger version of herself, vainglorious and beleaguered, on the counter of his small space station.
But this was a year and more when they'd never before had to think it, even in the decade before. Not dead. Somewhere far, far away. Beyond reach. But alive. Always alive somewhere. Doing what they felt they had to be. Maybe it was too much even to touch it lightly.
Maybe she meant to say Sorry, but she's always been tragically bad at that word (until it was too late, until she was saying it only as she walking out the door while
peoplethings broke irrevocably behind her), and she twists, turns on her side facing him, the arm under her bending, sliding under her head, creating the crook of a triangle to pillow the side of her head and face on. Her free hand hovering for a second, like she had to think about whether to set it safely between them and then decided to risk the choice of it being conscious.Placing a hand on his arm, and what comes out, is quieter,
"Hey. I'm real, and I'm not going anywhere."
If she knows, that knowing something isn't the same as feeling it,
she still means it, as far as this place, and the time jump let her,
she's not leaving him by any choice of her own. Especially now.
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Even this. Just having her here and within reach is more than he ever could have asked for.
The silence stretches out too long and too far and his heart is lodged in his throat, making breathing, speaking, truly impossible. Eventually, though, Luther manages to swallow past it, pressing down past that catch. The moment, if it is a moment, passes.
She's good at this part. Whenever it's like he's about to scuttle off and slam those metaphorical shutters back down, Allison can usually reel him back in, stop him from going cold and remote and closed-off from her.
This own promise of hers is technically empty — if the Porter decides in its whims to whisk her off, there's absolutely nothing she can do about it. Might as well cross your heart and make a wish on the moon, for all the agency you have. Others have broken those pointless promises before, because they can't not.
And yet. There is something strangely comforting about it regardless, Allison's eyes dark and watchful right beside him and the weight of her on the mattress and hearing those words from her lips: a talisman against the loneliness and the emptiness. An intention, even if it's not a guarantee.
"I won't give up. Ever again," Luther says, firmly, and there is something almost childishly simple about that promise, too. Licking his wounds. Picking himself up. Deciding to do better next time. And then, because something about this moment still feels too raw and vulnerable with her so close, the walls of personal space tumbling down like they never existed, he course-corrects. Quickly makes it plural again: "I mean, we got Diego and Klaus back, right? So. That just proves it. The others will be back, eventually. And for now— at least you're here. And I'm not leaving you, either."
And how much that matters.
It matters so, so much.
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It's a choice, but it's not an automatic assumption or an impulsive over roll that she didn't catch until it was already over. There's a network of uncertainty, of knowingly overstepping, when the bare muscles beneath her fingers suddenly flutter. Not wanting to, but ready to let go, if the next second his whole body lurched away. Or her wrist was caught in the same snakebite iron vice of a grip, hand lifted meaninglessly back away.
But it doesn't. Luther doesn't.
But she does, a few seconds later, she does. For him. Like every part of her doesn't want to leave her hand there. But she knows better than to press her luck. To be grateful that it was allowed to stand even after trying to hide every parts of himself currently uncovered for sleeping further under the blanket when she absconded with half of his bed. Her fingers curling into her palm, still warm with his higher body temperature, and pulled back against her own body.
There's a small huff, a little amused, at the bare simplicity at his declaration. Light over unexpected glass shards. Too broad, too light. But she knows him. She knows what he's doing. It doesn't mean she'll stop him, but she knows. Doesn't even disagree, when her first words are, "Maybe so."
Before a small wrinkle of her brows, bring back, too.
"And home, waiting, after so long. After whenever this stop ends."
Something infinitely easier -- even at infinitely more impatient, because: "It's better than having the apocalypse looming over our heads while we wait this time. The things we couldn't fix. People we couldn't save."
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"Yeah." A beat, a thoughtful pause, and then she can hear Luther's smile in his voice more than see it through the darkness of the bedroom after midnight:
"It... actually feels kinda nice? Getting a win, for once. We're not really used to that anymore."
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Even for backward phrasing, it's more than Allison had given this place for nearly the first year after they got here. When it was clear to everyone who gave her even the split chance of an expression, no less a stream of written words, that, honest to god, she hated everything about being stuck here. She had no time to smell any of the flowers as long as it was keeping her from where she belonged, what she needed to do, who she needed to get back to.
If she's being honest with herself -- and somehow it's never easier to that than with Luther nearby, with the feeling of it being safe to actually look at, no matter how terrible, it is or she is -- she's not even sure, herself. If that heat or hate downgraded to something like vague irritation only is the cause of what she just said. Because of finally having a win. Finally saving a world destined to end. Supposedly, righting the future.
Or if it's another side-effect of all those years. Of settling for so many years longer there than she was ever here, incapable of doing anything but accepting that her family was out of reach, the future was out of reach, Claire was out of reach. With no ability to do anything about them, or even talk about them for a year, and when she could talk again, not even having a way to try to, without sounding crazy.
Another of the million things swallowed by the silence,
and then by her not even giving people the chance to believe her sans proof.
But yesterday was all the proof she needed to know how that would have gone, isn't it?
The last few days. As all those doors and all those lies peeled back with the return of each of her family members, with another apocalypse. Until that earnest unwavering you only make me better of Ray's love became that last shaking, shattering ramble that began with No, I'm not okay edged so far into the splintering panic of being pushed too far, knowing too much, seeing too much.
Knowing he couldn't take any more. Of all of it. Of all of her. At three days in.
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They're the king and queen of understatement sometimes, these two.
It doesn't suck and Could be worse, they say, as if it isn't earth-shattering having Allison healthy and alive and talking beside him. These half-whispered conversations after midnight like there's still someone to catch them and tell them they can't. How many times can he find different ways of saying I'm glad you're here?
When Luther exhales this time, it feels more like that intolerable vise is loosening around his chest and making it more able to breathe, some of that wired jumpy energy from the battle and the timejump finally lessening. He has no idea what's storming and brewing in her head, on the other half of his bed, but the silence is starting to settle like a heavy layer of snow wreathed over everything, easing into the nooks and crannies of the room, turning to a companionable quiet. This is, almost, starting to feel normal. (He doesn't think he could ever get used to this. But it's a start.)
He could probably just let them drift off into that silence, but there's still that unexpected urge to grasp at the conversation and keep it going if he can. Making up for lost time, for all those months and years that they couldn't talk. To hear every last thing on her mind now, trade every passing whim he can. For all those times he'd read an interesting book or watched a movie or tried a new flavour of pie, and wanted someone to talk to about it, wanted to tell Allison about it, but she wasn't there.
So he suddenly blurts out, still looking at the ceiling: "I don't sleep well. The first night in a new place. And this house feels like a new place again. I guess that happens to most people? But— I mean, I only ever lived in two places. And then the rooming house was my third." He hadn't undergone the apartment-hopping and crashing at friends' places that the others had, picking up and moving on and readjusting and finding their footing.
"It'll probably take a few days again."
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Allison lies to herself, Klaus said, and she had hadn't she.
That she could be happy, they could be happy.
That it could all be fine. She could. He could.
(She never deserved this ring.
But she can't take it off either.)
How many times can she prove she's better at selling the world on the fraudulent versions of herself than at being herself. That being herself, the real her, only ends in ruin, devastated; empty houses, and seething shame. It doesn't even make sense that Luther is okay with any of it, with her, but she leans, weak as ever to the idea of even the barest shreds of acceptance, on that silence, quiet, thick, heavy descended around them. Becoming only the steady in and out, in and out, of breathing, in the still house.
Until suddenly Luther is throwing out words like the silence is the threat, and Allison finds herself blinking against the blotting night-black, her eyes unadjusted suddenly. Not sure if she'd been stuck in her thoughts, or she'd momentarily drifted off in the haze of matching her breathing to the slow, steadiness of his. The words splinter the silence, the stillness, the brief, blissful, now-confusing, emptiness of her head.
She hates that the first thought she thinks is that Luther lists those truths about places like it's something to be ashamed of, and all that comes up in her mind is she's been too many places. Too many houses, apartments, people. Blown through them like they were made of cards, tried them on like Goldilocks, and lighting them on fire as soon as her fingers brushed them, nothing fitting for long, not even if she wanted it to, not even if years had gone on and on passing before the bottom dropped out.
"It's weird, isn't it." Is nebulous, shifting her arm, so her ear can rest against a softer part of her upper arm. "I know we've been here for months, but it doesn't feel like it. It doesn't feel like--" She has to swallow, and it feels profanely like a word she has no right to now. "--home."
"The stairs won't creak when I get up in the morning to make coffee."
"The power won't fritz for a day or two, or half a week, after a heavy rain."
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Time is oddly, incomprehensibly relative to their lives now. Twenty-four hours ago, this place was home. Now it isn't; now it's dulled by all those other months rearing up in its place, new and fresh and immediate in their memory.
Luther's fingers are interlaced across his stomach, his heavy shoulders pressing into the mattress, and what strikes him is how surprisingly comfortable he is. Feeling like some missing puzzle pieces have finally clicked into place, after missing a crucial part of himself for so long. And so as a result, the adrenaline is finally starting to ebb, leaving him scoured empty, tired, a blank slate and empty wasteland.
"I put up a couple decorations, but the rented room was still kind of a piece of shit. I didn't put much effort into it." After a pause, he clears his throat. "But I, um. Your house. Looked nice."
It's like a piece of practiced politesse to a skilled hostess, but it's also the truth. All warm buttery yellow light and east-facing windows, carefully-chosen furniture, carefully-appointed decorations (and those photographs, all those happy framed pictures of the happy couple, grinning out at the camera; Luther had never had a family photo that wasn't artificially posed for the press or grimly-arranged by the Monocle).
It had felt domestic in a way he'd never experienced in that other world, as much as he'd wanted to.
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wrap or yours to close?
fini. ❤