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.
It's hard to imagine Luther somewhere he calls 'shit,' when the only comparisons she has are the meticulous little room next to hers, and the Big House, and this one. With all his books and the record player in his room. Pieces here or there left throughout the house. A coffee mug. A book he was still reading.
It's not that she doesn't believe him, just that it's hard to picture at all. Luther letting anything slide that long. The question of just what could. What was his year like thinking they were all dead?
"It did." The strangest part is there's no note of arrogance in her tone. No selfishness. No ownership. She knows it should be there. She's thinking about the blankets given as gifts, and the series of times picking out furniture. It's her. She did those things. But it doesn't feel like it anymore. It feels like someone else did those things—someone with her face, and her smile, and her voice, but not her.
Her thumb slips under the knit of her fingers, and the tip of it worries the back of her ring, moving it back and forth the smallest bits on her finger. All of it hurts. Like there's a crater right under her breast bone, charred edges, and smoking pit. But it doesn't hurt like it should. It doesn't hurt like losing Claire hurt. It doesn't hurt like it's going to kill her. Which only makes her feel worse. A hypocrite. Heartless.
It should, shouldn't it? Hurt like the world is ending without him. Hurt like the world is ending, because it isn't, and he won't be here.
"Design was always hard. There's so much the '60s didn't yet have for houses." There's a frown at the ceiling because it's not even that simple. "Or did, but they weren't about to sell it, deliver it, or install it for colored folks." The flip of the last two words is easily mimicked bitter.
"No thousands or millions of dollars to work with, either."
They hadn't had access to their inheritance back home, but the life had still been rich: filled with expensive well-made furniture and Reginald's lavish tastes, even if the former tenement building was shabby and rundown in its bones. Its guts exposed wherever the walls had been ripped out to turn it into their massive school slash playground slash training center. Splinters on the banisters where it hadn't been maintained well, because that wasn't top of their father's priority list. And then, whatever riches she'd eventually had to work with in Hollywood. Similar to the higher paychecks she'd raked in here, compared to Luther's job as a mover.
And how funny that is, compared to him as driver and body man. That he, Number One, could have felt so comfortable in both worlds performing such menial tasks. Pared down to simplicity until it wasn't even him anymore.
There's a long pause, before Luther finally says, quietly: "I don't know how you had the strength, to not just rumour everyone into making it easier on yourself."
The self-control that would take. To not just try to fix everything, all those injustices, with a word. Likely an even stronger temptation than what she'd gone through back home, where at least she had her name and her reputation to protect her. To give her an edge.
Allison's first reaction is scoff that basically comes out her nose, more than mouth, like that whole idea is both insane and one that has nearly beaten her to death in another alley to run off without whatever of her good sense was left. She'd been so far into the belly of that beast by the time she could speak some of it had already become a horror story version of normal. Unchangeable. Being faced by everyone everywhere around her.
Still what she does, at the edge of that suppressed scoff noise is turn her head to look at Luther's shadow in the dark again. "And what, gone off like Diego, all Kamakazi for Kennedy, except on even every asshole who sneered or spat at me as I walked down on the street?"
Even if she never meant it to, there's a steel that pierces in those words. Something angrier than she means to let loose from another very dark box.
Allison turns a frown at the ceiling, molars pressing too hard, all the way into her jaw, briefly thinking that sometimes she did hate it, that what rolled out of her mouth for Luther was so far into honest it became profane. "Believe me. I thought about it."
She thought about it so much sometimes. As her husband preached non-violence.
(She can see him again. Lips pressed and unable to part. Body rigid with all autonomy taken from him. Hands trying to shake, even as they were denied. Eyes wide and bright with pain and terror and no outlet to express either or retreat. As she sank into that one word.
Again and again. Poured everything she wanted into two syllables. Not naming them into the air. Simply willing them into existence.)
It's somehow oddly comforting to hear that affirmation and that anger from her, even as it's dripping rage at what she'd had to go through. Live through. Powerless in every way, compared to the power and privilege she'd once wielded as a Hargreeves and as the Rumor.
But the anger is a reassuringly familiar touchstone, and serves as a small echoing reminder that this is still Allison. She's still here. Despite the way she contorted herself into housewifely life in the wrong era, she hasn't changed beyond recognition; she's still that furious violent spitfire that he knew, grew up with. (Fell in love with.)
Not changed. Just been dormant, maybe.
"I snapped a guy's limbs for pulling a knife behind my back in the ring," Luther says after another pause. Head tilting in the darkness to look back at her, having felt the shift that meant she was looking at him. He doesn't have the same temper as any of the others, but there's still a ruthless, zero tolerance for bullshit that had been driven into all the Hargreeves. If you come at them trying to hurt them, they'll instinctively fight back.
(Even Allison had fought back, picked fights she shouldn't have. Even when the rest of the 1960s world would've told her she shouldn't have.)
"So... I get it."
It's not you're right or you're wrong. But it's me, too.
She doesn't move. But there's something bitter in her chest. Something that in its first snap doesn't try to be kind or forgiving. And she knows she's not mad at Luther, but she's mad at the blanket assumption of the statement of it, too. The implied understanding of a whole subsection subjugation as it fought for the right just to fucking live.
"You're white--" Why does she feel slightly ashamed just to put that word out there, like it's not as normal and known as it's always been? "--and male, and no one thought about taking you outside and beating you, or killing you, or anyone in your family, torching a house, or a business, or several, for your daring to retaliate against someone who deserved it."
Even if what he was doing was illegal, it had its rules, and he hadn't been punished for hurting someone who broke them. The laws were all on the sides of the people who wanted to keep South Dallas under their boot heels, desperate for scraps, and too busy struggling to get by to stand up and say no.
It feels like something's splintered inside him, a desperate ache at having stepped in it so fully. Luther always puts his foot in his mouth, and he's used to weathering Allison's temper, but this— is different. The apology slips out immediately, abashed, mortified:
"Shit. I'm sorry, that's not what I— I mean, obviously, I don't really understand. I can't. I couldn't." His words are tripping over themselves. "I just meant— the wanting to use your powers. In general."
But she's right, isn't she. Even if he'd slipped and revealed the broader scale of his abilities sometimes, and people would raise an eye at it, they'd never come down on him like a tonne of bricks for it. His abilities are just this side of normal and banal that someone could, maybe, perhaps, believe he's just that damned strong, and they'd automatically give him the benefit of the doubt besides. Meanwhile, she was under so much more scrutiny, and her powers don't have the same disguise.
(One slip, one single use, and her husband had already caught on.)
Luther starts falling all over himself in the dark, apologizing, and Allison keeps her gaze on the ceiling, listening almost too hard to the hard thump of her pulse and angry wine of her bones, from just how hard she clenching her jaw, right through all of those spilling words.
She's relatively glad she can't see his face, because she knows it would gut part of the rage that's slipped her fingers, and she doesn't want to let go it yet. Of course, she knows he didn't mean it like that. The same as how he really has no clue what like that is to even assume of it. Or any of her siblings. All of whom went through nothing like it while they were in the '60s. Because, why would they.
If Allison could change the world, then obviously, why wouldn't she? That was the whole damn point underlying his attempt at understanding, wasn't it?
The same way his first response to hearing about Claire, all those years ago, was that she could just rumor herself back into the possession of her daughter, like there weren't whole branches of the government devoted to the health and safety of children between them now.
She doesn't want to calm down. She's spent three years being too calm, when all she wanted to do was what she'd done in her last days. When she'd finally taken those shackles off, and the more fool she'd been to let that happen even once.
"Ray thought that way, too." Her eyes are narrow, gaze shifting, somewhere in the middle feet between her and the ceiling. Look through time more than the dark air. Her voice tilts sideways, and it's not an acted imitation, but it's obvious, just by the lilt in her tone, it's not her own words she's repeating. "Why don't we use it for The Cause? Think of all the good it could do, babe."
There's that scoff. For real this time, with a shake of her head against the bed. The anger is there, and disgust, but something else, too. Something she can't look at. Or away from. The thing that happened to everyone's face when they figure out what she was truly capable of.
"At least until he actually saw what that would look like."
Luther knows what it sounds like when Allison's holding something back, or standing on the verge of something that she's working herself up to talking about. He always has. Even back in the old childhood home, her bitterness hinting at something more than the usual married squabbles, some other gaping wound about motherhood— he'd finally picked it up, asked about Claire, and so he does the same thing now.
"Did something happen?" he asks, softly.
This whole unending day-and-night that just won't stop, it's filling in all the gaps, giving them a chance to catch up properly. But it's better than last time. Because they've learned better. Allison tearing into him for what he hadn't shared about their father committing suicide; Allison learning more about the rave in ways she shouldn't have, a dream and a memory spun up from Klaus' mind instead of Luther telling her about it.
So. This time, they're sharing. They're taking the time, now that they have the time to breathe, to get each other up to speed. To hear everything, with the one person they'd ever wanted to entrust with it.
"Of course, it did," snaps out before she can stop herself, think better of it, rolling back this unexpected rip through the calm, and she finally clenches her eyes, and her arms cross. Which she's aware probably looks overly childish, in his bed, and she hates how soft his voice is in that dark.
Already lacking any judgment, only a calm sort of even curiosity. Something so close to concern and understanding, Allison wants to just roll off the bed and get out of his bed and his room. It's not the thing she deserves. She deserved the question Ray asked in their hallway.
It's a hard slam between the two equally compelling urges.
Two and a half years since the last time she's confided the whole truth of anything in anyone. (Except that one time. When she first saw Luther.) And yet. At the same time. Only days ago, she was so certain of the fact they were, they had been telling each other everything that important, that she yelled at him, at least as much as she could yell, without having her voice, about not tell her before he involved the whole world in his newest plan.
Allison makes her fists open, hands curl over her arms. "He didn't believe me when I first told him, so I showed him."
It'd been so easy to think about how to start it well, to show someone the lighter side of it. The part that was happy. Silly. That might inconvenience some people, but that didn't do any harm. "It all started out well enough. Fun. Harmless. A shopping trip. No harm, no foul."
He winces in the darkness, though she can't see that shift of expression on his face. Because isn't that how Allison says it always goes wrong with her powers? She pushes too far; makes a wish she can't take back.
And he knows, intimately, how frightening Allison can be when she's angry. That viperous temper that she only shares with Diego, the way Two and Three go for the throat before they've had a chance to stop and think it over and rein themselves back in. (That's what One had always been there for. To temper them and blunt their sharp edges.)
"What happened?" Luther says.
He chooses his words carefully. What happened. It isn't What did you do?; he doesn't let himself frame it that way, tries not to let her misinterpret it into something accusatory.
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obediences) wrote2019-03-28 10:51 am
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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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It's not that she doesn't believe him, just that it's hard to picture at all.
Luther letting anything slide that long. The question of just what could.
What was his year like thinking they were all dead?
"It did." The strangest part is there's no note of arrogance in her tone. No selfishness. No ownership. She knows it should be there. She's thinking about the blankets given as gifts, and the series of times picking out furniture. It's her. She did those things. But it doesn't feel like it anymore. It feels like someone else did those things—someone with her face, and her smile, and her voice, but not her.
Her thumb slips under the knit of her fingers, and the tip of it worries the back of her ring, moving it back and forth the smallest bits on her finger. All of it hurts. Like there's a crater right under her breast bone, charred edges, and smoking pit. But it doesn't hurt like it should. It doesn't hurt like losing Claire hurt. It doesn't hurt like it's going to kill her. Which only makes her feel worse. A hypocrite. Heartless.
It should, shouldn't it? Hurt like the world is ending without him.
Hurt like the world is ending, because it isn't, and he won't be here.
"Design was always hard. There's so much the '60s didn't yet have for houses." There's a frown at the ceiling because it's not even that simple. "Or did, but they weren't about to sell it, deliver it, or install it for colored folks." The flip of the last two words is easily mimicked bitter.
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They hadn't had access to their inheritance back home, but the life had still been rich: filled with expensive well-made furniture and Reginald's lavish tastes, even if the former tenement building was shabby and rundown in its bones. Its guts exposed wherever the walls had been ripped out to turn it into their massive school slash playground slash training center. Splinters on the banisters where it hadn't been maintained well, because that wasn't top of their father's priority list. And then, whatever riches she'd eventually had to work with in Hollywood. Similar to the higher paychecks she'd raked in here, compared to Luther's job as a mover.
And how funny that is, compared to him as driver and body man. That he, Number One, could have felt so comfortable in both worlds performing such menial tasks. Pared down to simplicity until it wasn't even him anymore.
There's a long pause, before Luther finally says, quietly: "I don't know how you had the strength, to not just rumour everyone into making it easier on yourself."
The self-control that would take. To not just try to fix everything, all those injustices, with a word. Likely an even stronger temptation than what she'd gone through back home, where at least she had her name and her reputation to protect her. To give her an edge.
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Still what she does, at the edge of that suppressed scoff noise is turn her head to look at Luther's shadow in the dark again. "And what, gone off like Diego, all Kamakazi for Kennedy, except on even every asshole who sneered or spat at me as I walked down on the street?"
Even if she never meant it to, there's a steel that pierces in those words.
Something angrier than she means to let loose from another very dark box.
Allison turns a frown at the ceiling, molars pressing too hard, all the way into her jaw, briefly thinking that sometimes she did hate it, that what rolled out of her mouth for Luther was so far into honest it became profane. "Believe me. I thought about it."
She thought about it so much sometimes.
As her husband preached non-violence.
"A lot."
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But the anger is a reassuringly familiar touchstone, and serves as a small echoing reminder that this is still Allison. She's still here. Despite the way she contorted herself into housewifely life in the wrong era, she hasn't changed beyond recognition; she's still that furious violent spitfire that he knew, grew up with. (
Fell in love with.)Not changed. Just been dormant, maybe.
"I snapped a guy's limbs for pulling a knife behind my back in the ring," Luther says after another pause. Head tilting in the darkness to look back at her, having felt the shift that meant she was looking at him. He doesn't have the same temper as any of the others, but there's still a ruthless, zero tolerance for bullshit that had been driven into all the Hargreeves. If you come at them trying to hurt them, they'll instinctively fight back.
(Even Allison had fought back, picked fights she shouldn't have. Even when the rest of the 1960s world would've told her she shouldn't have.)
"So... I get it."
It's not you're right or you're wrong.
But it's me, too.
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It doesn't even try to be kind.
She doesn't move. But there's something bitter in her chest. Something that in its first snap doesn't try to be kind or forgiving. And she knows she's not mad at Luther, but she's mad at the blanket assumption of the statement of it, too. The implied understanding of a whole subsection subjugation as it fought for the right just to fucking live.
"You're white--" Why does she feel slightly ashamed just to put that word out there, like it's not as normal and known as it's always been? "--and male, and no one thought about taking you outside and beating you, or killing you, or anyone in your family, torching a house, or a business, or several, for your daring to retaliate against someone who deserved it."
Even if what he was doing was illegal, it had its rules, and he hadn't been punished for hurting someone who broke them. The laws were all on the sides of the people who wanted to keep South Dallas under their boot heels, desperate for scraps, and too busy struggling to get by to stand up and say no.
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"Shit. I'm sorry, that's not what I— I mean, obviously, I don't really understand. I can't. I couldn't." His words are tripping over themselves. "I just meant— the wanting to use your powers. In general."
But she's right, isn't she. Even if he'd slipped and revealed the broader scale of his abilities sometimes, and people would raise an eye at it, they'd never come down on him like a tonne of bricks for it. His abilities are just this side of normal and banal that someone could, maybe, perhaps, believe he's just that damned strong, and they'd automatically give him the benefit of the doubt besides. Meanwhile, she was under so much more scrutiny, and her powers don't have the same disguise.
(One slip, one single use, and her husband had already caught on.)
"I'm an idiot. Sorry."
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She's relatively glad she can't see his face, because she knows it would gut part of the rage that's slipped her fingers, and she doesn't want to let go it yet. Of course, she knows he didn't mean it like that. The same as how he really has no clue what like that is to even assume of it. Or any of her siblings. All of whom went through nothing like it while they were in the '60s. Because, why would they.
If Allison could change the world, then obviously, why wouldn't she?
That was the whole damn point underlying his attempt at understanding, wasn't it?
The same way his first response to hearing about Claire, all those years ago, was that she could just rumor herself back into the possession of her daughter, like there weren't whole branches of the government devoted to the health and safety of children between them now.
She doesn't want to calm down. She's spent three years being too calm, when all she wanted to do was what she'd done in her last days. When she'd finally taken those shackles off, and the more fool she'd been to let that happen even once.
"Ray thought that way, too." Her eyes are narrow, gaze shifting, somewhere in the middle feet between her and the ceiling. Look through time more than the dark air. Her voice tilts sideways, and it's not an acted imitation, but it's obvious, just by the lilt in her tone, it's not her own words she's repeating. "Why don't we use it for The Cause? Think of all the good it could do, babe."
There's that scoff. For real this time, with a shake of her head against the bed. The anger is there, and disgust, but something else, too. Something she can't look at. Or away from. The thing that happened to everyone's face when they figure out what she was truly capable of.
"At least until he actually saw what that would look like."
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"Did something happen?" he asks, softly.
This whole unending day-and-night that just won't stop, it's filling in all the gaps, giving them a chance to catch up properly. But it's better than last time. Because they've learned better. Allison tearing into him for what he hadn't shared about their father committing suicide; Allison learning more about the rave in ways she shouldn't have, a dream and a memory spun up from Klaus' mind instead of Luther telling her about it.
So. This time, they're sharing. They're taking the time, now that they have the time to breathe, to get each other up to speed. To hear everything, with the one person they'd ever wanted to entrust with it.
We used to tell each other everything.
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Already lacking any judgment, only a calm sort of even curiosity. Something so close to concern and understanding, Allison wants to just roll off the bed and get out of his bed and his room. It's not the thing she deserves. She deserved the question Ray asked in their hallway.
It's a hard slam between the two equally compelling urges.
Two and a half years since the last time she's confided the whole truth of anything in anyone. (Except that one time. When she first saw Luther.) And yet. At the same time. Only days ago, she was so certain of the fact they were, they had been telling each other everything that important, that she yelled at him, at least as much as she could yell, without having her voice, about not tell her before he involved the whole world in his newest plan.
Allison makes her fists open, hands curl over her arms.
"He didn't believe me when I first told him, so I showed him."
It'd been so easy to think about how to start it well, to show someone the lighter side of it. The part that was happy. Silly. That might inconvenience some people, but that didn't do any harm. "It all started out well enough. Fun. Harmless. A shopping trip. No harm, no foul."
But.
"And then I got angry."
Then she didn't think, and she didn't stop.
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And he knows, intimately, how frightening Allison can be when she's angry. That viperous temper that she only shares with Diego, the way Two and Three go for the throat before they've had a chance to stop and think it over and rein themselves back in. (That's what One had always been there for. To temper them and blunt their sharp edges.)
"What happened?" Luther says.
He chooses his words carefully. What happened. It isn't What did you do?; he doesn't let himself frame it that way, tries not to let her misinterpret it into something accusatory.
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wrap or yours to close?
fini. ❤