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.
Maybe the worst part as she worries at the disgusted rot of it all, curled black against the back of her ribs, is that she's still angrier with him -- the picture of that man, floating there, still pressed, in her mind -- than disgusted at herself. She hates herself all the more because some, not too small part of her, still doesn't feel like what she did was enough.
She left him standing. She left him breathing. (He'll do it all again.) So much for growth. So much for honor and dignity. (She broke that, too.)
"I wanted to hurt someone, so I did." It so different on her lips. The emphasis is on the first part. Not the second. No ergo, ipso. Not like cause and affect, not like she wanted it and chose it. It's always so much more direct for her. Too direct, if she's not controlling it. If she wants something too strong, it can already be happening before she thinks about making a choice to go for it.
And maybe. Maybe it'd gotten to that point. In the blur where her anger and her want wove into one blinding mark, one single word. But she'd chosen to walk in there. She'd chose to stand there, in her very nice dress, next to the same seat, her hand on the counter she'd been bodily slammed into, and to dare him first. Just by existing. Well aware of every line she was crossing.
"In Dallas proper. In broad light. With a lot of witnesses."
The funny thing is, once upon a time, that would've been nothing. Broad daylight with witnesses was how they were supposed to do everything (what was the point if the Academy weren't seen going about their so-very-good business, after all?). They'd been built and forged and honed for the limelight, for the public eye, for flashing bulbs and clicking camera shutters and their adventures plastered over headlines and front pages. The engagements partially calculated for visibility, because Sir Reginald Hargreeves was a ruthless trainer and, above all, a canny businessman with a flair for style and publicity. He knew how to market his children. Knew how to slam them into the public consciousness and make them suddenly vital, indispensable, and therefore likely to be called in to solve all sorts of problems, and Hargreeves Industries able to reap the benefits accordingly. Sponsorships and merchandising deals and interviews. All dedicated towards more and more resources and connections, which in turn gave the Academy more influence and power. The man himself like a spider sitting at the center of a worldwide sprawling web. Fame was all.
1960s Dallas was such a different beast. Hiding under the radar, sublimated into normal average banal society, pretending (for a time) that there was nothing special about them. They had all tried. All, to various degrees, failed.
But hearing this bit, Luther can feel an undefinable anxiety twisting within him, like a tightly-coiled spring in his stomach. Knowing that line she'd crossed, and which she wasn't supposed to have crossed.
At least not there. Not in that time. Not in that temporary limbo they'd all been stuck in, from a month to three years depending.
"And they didn't catch you?" he asks. "This— It was recent, right?"
Allison was silent a beat too long on that question. The white noise silence of the air conditioning only there to fill it. Because the answer gave away too much. Maybe began to paint the picture of how much had been going on in her life that no one else even knew about in this last week. Except for Klaus. As much as Klaus could be counted on to remember much of anything while he was drunk the whole time.
When it comes down to it, she can't lie. It's been years; it's been days. It isn't what they were doing here, in this strange, strange place. Trying, to be honest, feels like sheering her skin, especially when she almost says 'yes,' but stops herself from using the easy, momentary evasion of the flat, singular response.
She frowned at the ceiling, making herself say instead, "Three days ago."
That same day as the godawful dinner with their father, who it turned out was an asshole even without raising six superhero-kids to save the world to blame it on. The one before Luther came to her and said they could go home, and she let herself crack open That Door. Not knowing how much she still had to lose, would lose, would break and shatter perhaps irreparably, and how much she still wouldn't get in return.
Luther does the mental math, too. Three days: the night of that disastrous dinner, the one he'd tried warning them all off from, although he'd been big enough to not give Diego an I told you so afterwards.
But she'd had a runthrough with her powers that very day? And he hadn't even known. Like before, there was too much happening at once: all of them scattered to strange corners, Diego somehow winding up at the Commission, Luther off on his field trip with the Fives. He hadn't known.
"I'm sorry," he says. He moves his hand up, just enough to graze the back of his knuckles against her shoulder. The angle's off since they're both lying on their backs, but he manages that slight fleeting touch, an attempt at reassurance.
Sorry it always goes wrong. Sorry it blew up in your face.
Sorry that it was more proof for what he'd said: they weren't meant for normal lives, these seven. (Eight, really.)
He says I'm sorry, and his knuckles, uncovered in being ready to sleep, brushed the corner of her shoulder, awkwardly and she'd almost aggravated with him for not being angry with her, for not hating her. But it's the same heartbeat, selfish and sore, that she knows.
The day Luther decides to be as angry, as disgusted, as completely done with all her bullshit slips, with her as she is with herself, at so many turns, so many times, every time she does something like this again, something in her will break more permanently than the front doors of the Academy shutting behind her, leaving her alone, at 19 did.
The last toehold or foothold she truly has.
The one that kept taking her weight and somehow not crumbling. The only place she could ever admit that she knew what she was. Did.
"I should be." There's something as stern steel as it is almost plaintive in those few, suddenly much quieter words. They are almost penitent, even as they are penitent about the wrong thing. She's sorry that she's not sorry, which is maybe why Ray asked that question. She wasn't even sorry then. Not for the right reasons. For scaring him maybe, for making him doubt her, for losing control.
But not for using her powers to hurt that arrogant, racist asshole.
Her words are quiet enough that he's not even entirely sure he heard them right; it could be he imagined them, except there's an iron self-flagellating edge to them that he wouldn't ever have dreamt up himself for her. But still.
"That's okay too," Luther says, his voice just as soft, just barely on the edge of an exhale. His breathing is slowing down to a steady rise-and-fall now, hands back to being laced over his stomach, their conversation having ebbed back to confessional and then to surprisingly comfortable silence.
It had seemed impossible to sleep earlier, wired and jittery and practically clawing out of his own skin, but something's finally started to feel normal and familiar and reassuring about this moment. Like so many times they'd talked themselves to sleep through the bedroom windows, except with that small difference (massive difference, earthshaking difference) that she's lying right next to him this time. But there might as well be a brick wall of propriety between them for all the proper distance he maintains, and when he next blinks, he drifts under and loses some ten seconds of consciousness. Wakes up again, looks back up at the ceiling.
And then, he dozes off again.
Which, in the end, is how they wind up falling asleep: with the soothing presence and weight of someone else on the mattress beside them (a kind of weight that Allison had grown too accustomed to over the past year, and one that Luther's never known). Him under the covers and her on top, curled up on the other half of his bed, but they can both intrinsically sense the other one is there. That they haven't vanished in the night. Still haven't vanished. Still haven't.
By the time Luther wakes up again in the morning after the full knock-out unconsciousness of total exhaustion, bleary, his body stinging with little bruises everywhere, his covers are rumpled and there's an impression in the mattress that wasn't there before. But Allison's gone, and he actually can't remember if she left before or after he fell asleep. There's no way of knowing.
Luther's voice has that elastic quality of someone fighting sleep and losing, and if Luther hasn't any experience with that, Allison has it in spades, from more people than just both of her previous husbands and daughter. The words pulled apart into a loose, quiet string of sounds; half strained toward holding on and half already having let go altogether. Luther says it's okay, and she wants to lean into it. Even when she knows it's not.
It's who she is and who she keeps being, when she lets herself, when she loses her temper, herself. She had two good years with nothing like that in it, one here and one there. But was it a good year at all, if in both, the only reason it was good, and she was incapable of letting herself do something like that, was because she couldn't talk, because was only half herself, and sometimes it felt like even half was stretching it.
Allison hadn't entirely paid attention to when Luther's breathing evened. Her thoughts pulling her back and back and back in her head. But eventually, she realizes it's been quiet for too long that has to have long added up to minutes now, which is why she does realize. That Luther's breaths have gone, deep and long and heavy. Unguarded and uncontrollable the way it does when one has fallen all the way away.
She should go. It's the first thought. This wasn't a social visit or an invitation.
Luther's bed isn't where she belongs, for all that the thought twists a sharp, sour note in her stomach and chest, she means even like this. She means she should get up and go back to her bed to sleep. Maybe she even truly means to, but she watches the slow rise and fall of his chest, listens to the sound the reminds her over and over and over alive, alive, alive.
Here, here, here.
The waiting is over now.
It's better than any promise the untouched, white glass, moon never made her.
Maybe she means to go, but instead, she rolls back on her side, facing him, watching him sleep, dabbled in the shadows of the dark, late room. When the urge becomes impossible, she doesn't even know how much longer, that somehow even this doesn't quite feel real, exhaustion dogging her steps, from helping save Vanya and losing Ray and the fight at the farm and being back here, continually trying to pull her under and her blinking stubbornly, widening her eyes against it, that she gives into moving the tiniest bit.
It's not his shoulder or his face, even though part of her considers it, maybe even more so because it's foolish and impossible. One of the newest scars at the edge of his eye. The round of his shoulder that rises higher on the bed, and the line of his arm, the way he's laying, looking up, that the top of her head, closest uncovered part of him.
What she settles for, with the softness she barely would touching Claire with once she'd fall asleep, for letting her hand creep until it settles, her fingers against the blanket, barely touching his side. Enough that she can feel the strain of the cloth rising to cover the broad expanse of his chest, the heat rolling off him already soaked into it.
Letting herself close her eyes and giving into what she shouldn't—allowing herself to feel it again. Real, real, real. Alive, alive, alive. You were right, always right. You don't have to wait, pretending you aren't counting, anymore.
He's better than the moon ever could have been tonight, even if a foot, an inch, the divide of the blanket feels just as far away as it.
Allison slips off without realizing it. Having fought it so long, it's less like it takes her hand and tugs her away, and more like it comes for her from behind. Drop kicking her between one moment of closed eyes and weary exhaustion and oblivion the next. But she's still so tightly strung, the adrenaline refusing to leave her entirely, merging with that even dead asleep too-on-key readiness to spring up that parenting left wired in, and she wakes up a handful of times.
When he shifts in the bed, or his breathing changes. When she gets too cold without her own blanket.
Enough to realize he's there. Still real.
Enough to take note of it and selfishly curl in on herself, on sleep, like she's stolen this more than its stolen her, covered her head and blotted her eyes, keeps dragging her back, like she's the rebellious child not listening to the logic she should go, or she should let go. The last time it's early. She knows before she even looks at the clock. She was somehow more exhausted with the light sleep.
The room was just marginally brighter than it had been for most of the night. Morning is coming, and she should have left so long ago, the first moments she realized he'd fallen asleep. But she couldn't. But she's selfish. She's always been selfish of Luther, even just in her head, after he was gone both times, and she was married, and she was supposedly moved on, and she never was. It was never a possibility, he wasn't, and she still never was.
(The hazy memory of fading black spots and hypoxia, of his mouth under her fingers, of his mouth against hers, desperate words and even more desperate breaths, being pushed into her, her gratitude and something too big and too old to ever truly just be gratitude, no matter what hat and mask she gave it, laughing and kissing his cheek, pulling his face into hers. Another stolen moment.
Impulsive and accepted at the edge of the dead drop from terror to relief.)
She slips off the bed with the careful ease of someone who has done this before. Had to leave beds and sleeping people in them for several different reasons, most of them pertaining once upon a time to work, even though she doesn't want to, and she watches him for another too-long moment at the bathroom door.
Face coming into more precise focus as morning lightens the world and the shadows of his space. Slack with ease. The strain in the muscles of his shoulders gone boneless loose in unconsciousness. He's beautiful like this. Unencumbered. Without the reticence that makes him pull away from people, from even her. Hunching in on himself. Too conscious of the space he takes up, of the way he looks, how he thinks he stands out.
She wishes too exhausted to care about her hypocrisy that this was hers, more than it is, more than it already was in ways no one else got. That she could tell him how much none of it matters to her. She still thinks he's beautiful. He stills stops her heart on an all too regular occurrence. With a smile, a laugh, his fearless determination, the way he sees the world, still hopes and wills the best from it, no matter what it does to him, how it's never managed to break him in ways it has her. That he still makes every corner of her ache in the same way it did starting almost fifteen years ago when she didn't know how to name it at all.
She's too tired to fight it, to admonish herself, as her thumb toys, even more hypocritically, with the back of her wedding band against her finger, reminding her, again, what she should be thinking of, who, that damage she does when she's allowed to love anyone, and she wants nothing more than to go back to sleep. To not being able to think. Feel. Hear herself. Have to deal with all the broken pieces smashed into the one space of her.
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obediences) wrote2019-03-28 10:51 am
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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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She left him standing. She left him breathing. (He'll do it all again.)
So much for growth. So much for honor and dignity. (She broke that, too.)
"I wanted to hurt someone, so I did." It so different on her lips. The emphasis is on the first part. Not the second. No ergo, ipso. Not like cause and affect, not like she wanted it and chose it. It's always so much more direct for her. Too direct, if she's not controlling it. If she wants something too strong, it can already be happening before she thinks about making a choice to go for it.
And maybe. Maybe it'd gotten to that point. In the blur where her anger and her want wove into one blinding mark, one single word. But she'd chosen to walk in there. She'd chose to stand there, in her very nice dress, next to the same seat, her hand on the counter she'd been bodily slammed into, and to dare him first. Just by existing. Well aware of every line she was crossing.
"In Dallas proper. In broad light. With a lot of witnesses."
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1960s Dallas was such a different beast. Hiding under the radar, sublimated into normal average banal society, pretending (for a time) that there was nothing special about them. They had all tried. All, to various degrees, failed.
But hearing this bit, Luther can feel an undefinable anxiety twisting within him, like a tightly-coiled spring in his stomach. Knowing that line she'd crossed, and which she wasn't supposed to have crossed.
At least not there. Not in that time. Not in that temporary limbo they'd all been stuck in, from a month to three years depending.
"And they didn't catch you?" he asks. "This— It was recent, right?"
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When it comes down to it, she can't lie. It's been years; it's been days. It isn't what they were doing here, in this strange, strange place. Trying, to be honest, feels like sheering her skin, especially when she almost says 'yes,' but stops herself from using the easy, momentary evasion of the flat, singular response.
She frowned at the ceiling,
making herself say instead,
"Three days ago."
That same day as the godawful dinner with their father, who it turned out was an asshole even without raising six superhero-kids to save the world to blame it on. The one before Luther came to her and said they could go home, and she let herself crack open That Door. Not knowing how much she still had to lose, would lose, would break and shatter perhaps irreparably, and how much she still wouldn't get in return.
Another universe, but not Claire.
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But she'd had a runthrough with her powers that very day? And he hadn't even known. Like before, there was too much happening at once: all of them scattered to strange corners, Diego somehow winding up at the Commission, Luther off on his field trip with the Fives. He hadn't known.
"I'm sorry," he says. He moves his hand up, just enough to graze the back of his knuckles against her shoulder. The angle's off since they're both lying on their backs, but he manages that slight fleeting touch, an attempt at reassurance.
Sorry it always goes wrong.
Sorry it blew up in your face.
Sorry that it was more proof for what he'd said: they weren't meant for normal lives, these seven. (Eight, really.)
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The day Luther decides to be as angry, as disgusted, as completely done with all her bullshit slips, with her as she is with herself, at so many turns, so many times, every time she does something like this again, something in her will break more permanently than the front doors of the Academy shutting behind her, leaving her alone, at 19 did.
The last toehold or foothold she truly has.
The one that kept taking her weight and somehow not crumbling.
The only place she could ever admit that she knew what she was. Did.
"I should be." There's something as stern steel as it is almost plaintive in those few, suddenly much quieter words. They are almost penitent, even as they are penitent about the wrong thing. She's sorry that she's not sorry, which is maybe why Ray asked that question. She wasn't even sorry then. Not for the right reasons. For scaring him maybe, for making him doubt her, for losing control.
But not for using her powers to hurt that arrogant, racist asshole.
wrap or yours to close?
"That's okay too," Luther says, his voice just as soft, just barely on the edge of an exhale. His breathing is slowing down to a steady rise-and-fall now, hands back to being laced over his stomach, their conversation having ebbed back to confessional and then to surprisingly comfortable silence.
It had seemed impossible to sleep earlier, wired and jittery and practically clawing out of his own skin, but something's finally started to feel normal and familiar and reassuring about this moment. Like so many times they'd talked themselves to sleep through the bedroom windows, except with that small difference (massive difference, earthshaking difference) that she's lying right next to him this time. But there might as well be a brick wall of propriety between them for all the proper distance he maintains, and when he next blinks, he drifts under and loses some ten seconds of consciousness. Wakes up again, looks back up at the ceiling.
And then, he dozes off again.
Which, in the end, is how they wind up falling asleep: with the soothing presence and weight of someone else on the mattress beside them (a kind of weight that Allison had grown too accustomed to over the past year, and one that Luther's never known). Him under the covers and her on top, curled up on the other half of his bed, but they can both intrinsically sense the other one is there. That they haven't vanished in the night. Still haven't vanished. Still haven't.
By the time Luther wakes up again in the morning after the full knock-out unconsciousness of total exhaustion, bleary, his body stinging with little bruises everywhere, his covers are rumpled and there's an impression in the mattress that wasn't there before. But Allison's gone, and he actually can't remember if she left before or after he fell asleep. There's no way of knowing.
But that's okay too.
fini. ❤
It's who she is and who she keeps being, when she lets herself, when she loses her temper, herself. She had two good years with nothing like that in it, one here and one there. But was it a good year at all, if in both, the only reason it was good, and she was incapable of letting herself do something like that, was because she couldn't talk, because was only half herself, and sometimes it felt like even half was stretching it.
Allison hadn't entirely paid attention to when Luther's breathing evened. Her thoughts pulling her back and back and back in her head. But eventually, she realizes it's been quiet for too long that has to have long added up to minutes now, which is why she does realize. That Luther's breaths have gone, deep and long and heavy. Unguarded and uncontrollable the way it does when one has fallen all the way away.
She should go. It's the first thought.
This wasn't a social visit or an invitation.
Luther's bed isn't where she belongs, for all that the thought twists a sharp, sour note in her stomach and chest, she means even like this. She means she should get up and go back to her bed to sleep. Maybe she even truly means to, but she watches the slow rise and fall of his chest, listens to the sound the reminds her over and over and over alive, alive, alive.
Here, here, here.
The waiting is over now.
It's better than any promise the untouched,
white glass, moon never made her.
Maybe she means to go, but instead, she rolls back on her side, facing him, watching him sleep, dabbled in the shadows of the dark, late room. When the urge becomes impossible, she doesn't even know how much longer, that somehow even this doesn't quite feel real, exhaustion dogging her steps, from helping save Vanya and losing Ray and the fight at the farm and being back here, continually trying to pull her under and her blinking stubbornly, widening her eyes against it, that she gives into moving the tiniest bit.
It's not his shoulder or his face, even though part of her considers it, maybe even more so because it's foolish and impossible. One of the newest scars at the edge of his eye. The round of his shoulder that rises higher on the bed, and the line of his arm, the way he's laying, looking up, that the top of her head, closest uncovered part of him.
What she settles for, with the softness she barely would touching Claire with once she'd fall asleep, for letting her hand creep until it settles, her fingers against the blanket, barely touching his side. Enough that she can feel the strain of the cloth rising to cover the broad expanse of his chest, the heat rolling off him already soaked into it.
Letting herself close her eyes and giving into what she shouldn't—allowing herself to feel it again. Real, real, real. Alive, alive, alive. You were right, always right. You don't have to wait, pretending you aren't counting, anymore.
He's better than the moon ever could have been tonight,
even if a foot, an inch, the divide of the blanket feels just as far away as it.
Allison slips off without realizing it. Having fought it so long, it's less like it takes her hand and tugs her away, and more like it comes for her from behind. Drop kicking her between one moment of closed eyes and weary exhaustion and oblivion the next. But she's still so tightly strung, the adrenaline refusing to leave her entirely, merging with that even dead asleep too-on-key readiness to spring up that parenting left wired in, and she wakes up a handful of times.
When he shifts in the bed, or his breathing changes.
When she gets too cold without her own blanket.
Enough to realize he's there. Still real.
Enough to take note of it and selfishly curl in on herself, on sleep, like she's stolen this more than its stolen her, covered her head and blotted her eyes, keeps dragging her back, like she's the rebellious child not listening to the logic she should go, or she should let go. The last time it's early. She knows before she even looks at the clock. She was somehow more exhausted with the light sleep.
The room was just marginally brighter than it had been for most of the night. Morning is coming, and she should have left so long ago, the first moments she realized he'd fallen asleep. But she couldn't. But she's selfish. She's always been selfish of Luther, even just in her head, after he was gone both times, and she was married, and she was supposedly moved on, and she never was. It was never a possibility, he wasn't, and she still never was.
(The hazy memory of fading black spots and hypoxia, of his mouth under her fingers, of his mouth against hers, desperate words and even more desperate breaths, being pushed into her, her gratitude and something too big and too old to ever truly just be gratitude, no matter what hat and mask she gave it, laughing and kissing his cheek, pulling his face into hers. Another stolen moment.
Impulsive and accepted at the edge of the dead drop from terror to relief.)
She slips off the bed with the careful ease of someone who has done this before. Had to leave beds and sleeping people in them for several different reasons, most of them pertaining once upon a time to work, even though she doesn't want to, and she watches him for another too-long moment at the bathroom door.
Face coming into more precise focus as morning lightens the world and the shadows of his space. Slack with ease. The strain in the muscles of his shoulders gone boneless loose in unconsciousness. He's beautiful like this. Unencumbered. Without the reticence that makes him pull away from people, from even her. Hunching in on himself. Too conscious of the space he takes up, of the way he looks, how he thinks he stands out.
She wishes too exhausted to care about her hypocrisy that this was hers, more than it is, more than it already was in ways no one else got. That she could tell him how much none of it matters to her. She still thinks he's beautiful. He stills stops her heart on an all too regular occurrence. With a smile, a laugh, his fearless determination, the way he sees the world, still hopes and wills the best from it, no matter what it does to him, how it's never managed to break him in ways it has her. That he still makes every corner of her ache in the same way it did starting almost fifteen years ago when she didn't know how to name it at all.
She's too tired to fight it, to admonish herself, as her thumb toys, even more hypocritically, with the back of her wedding band against her finger, reminding her, again, what she should be thinking of, who, that damage she does when she's allowed to love anyone, and she wants nothing more than to go back to sleep. To not being able to think. Feel. Hear herself. Have to deal with all the broken pieces smashed into the one space of her.
So it's what she does.