After that first disorienting day, rounding up Diego and Klaus, then the long hours of insomnia, talking to Allison into the night and struggling to fall asleep— After all that, he's been trying to settle back into a routine.
It doesn't feel as familiar as it once did. This, either. Having Allison around has become a rare precious thing again, something not to take for granted anymore (as if he ever did); now, when that aching grieving loss of her feels more immediate and close-to-hand than a year-plus living together. It's taking some time to reconcile those two sets of memories, lining them up next to each other and trying to figure out where the pieces align, because they don't.
And he's settling into it. Calling up Joe again (or Jack?), getting back onto the shift rotation. Showing up at work. Running into Brandon there, unexpectedly. Checking his messages and seeing the ones he'd missed and which have piled up for him: a coffee invitation from Kaneki, he'll arrange that later.
Luther's sitting in the living room still checking the communicator when he hears the front door, his head turning, practically like a dog's ears pricking up at the sound of its owner returning. "Welcome back," he calls out. He can't even pretend to busy himself with the communicator or be distracted from her; he looks up instead, watches Allison bustle in with a handful of mail, slipping out of her high heels.
"As crazy as expected," is an easy enough response, leaving her shoes by the door, but not her bag. She knew it would be. The whole world here thinking they'd only maybe been gone a handful of days, if it even noticed any time had passed at all. Just a normal week in this place. With years and years suddenly poured into the unsuspecting line between calendar days.
"It might as well have been like everyone out there was making sure it wasn't just a magical fluke, or that it was, they were getting their prime two-to-five minutes in like it was running out of time. If I didn't know any better, I'd say I haven't talked that much in years."
Except she has. Just not here. Definitely not here. At least not with anyone who isn't him in the last few days. There were hundreds of people and days in the in-between until it no longer even stood out. She wants to believe it'll work itself out, but it keeps catching like a papercut and not wanting to link together yet.
"There's some tea in the kitchen if you need to rest your throat after all that. Chamomile, mint." Luther says it lightly enough, half-joking maybe, except it's also the truth: she isn't used to talking that much back here in this world, so who knows, maybe it does wear her out more. Like breaking in a new pair of shoes, a small piece of discomfort that just rubs raw the longer you let it sit, until it causes blisters. Throat hoarse from all this sudden new usage of a voice that had been dead to her just days ago.
He sets the communicator down, then picks it up again, can't quite seem to make up his mind or what to do with himself. "My readjustment was easier. Just go to an address, pick stuff up, move it, repeat."
"It's fine. Nothing big." Allison gave a blase enough shrug, already shifting her focus to beginning to go through the mail in her hands. Nothing about either of the three sides of her life or her single hardline beginning made the minor inconvenience of talking for a protracted time to overly exuberant people something worth focusing on except as a congenial half-hearted complaint in passing.
"It's been a bit, too. I decided to spend some time walking on the beach before coming back."
It wasn't a lie, even if it didn't touch on the endless, dominoing why, that took up so much of the air around her since getting back to this world. But it does though, lend to adding, with easy ludicrousness, and no more attention or importance than she's paying to flicking through the envelopes in her hands (so, so so modern looking, and not like what she expects):
"I met your 'rather good friend' Jane out there, too."
He hears those quotation marks in Allison's voice, the rising lilt of a specific phrase being quoted back at him, and so Luther looks up again sharply at her, startled. Rather good friend. Part of him is still caught off-guard, surprised and disbelieving that someone would or could actually use that description for him, or even want to. Friends. He's not used to having them. He always doubts whether or not he's merited the category.
And what are the odds?
"Just walking on the beach?" Luther says. "Huh. Small world."
The continent and its porter cities seems like it should be too big for this sort of thing, but then again, he supposes it is a small world among imPorts too. Like passing Kaneki's notes around the family, then meeting the actual guy himself a year later.
At first, it's just her gaze that shoots up, single word, more correcting alacrity: "Painting."
Before the rest of her shifts. Weight recentering back slightly, into her heels and her shoulders. Eyebrows furrowing slightly as the mail is momentarily forgotten entirely for looking at Luther, and only Luther -- who is already looking at her, serious and steady -- for the first time since walking in the door.
"You actually do know her?" The surprise knocks out of her voice, briefly, the clear and dismissive absurdity ripe in her first statement about Jane. But even without the answer, even just with the way he's looking at her, even without the time to reframe the list of what exactly, it tilts the tiles, seizing some part of her spine.
That sounds like her, he thinks, with a touch of fondness, but manages to bite it back (not shoving his foot in his mouth for once, at least not yet) in the wake of Allison's immediate question. Luther's answer is characteristically mild and understated: "Well, yeah. She was at our birthday party last year, too. Although there were so many people there, I guess it's not surprising you didn't meet every single person— It's funny that it'd be now and on the beach, though."
Vanya had tried to invite her to the party, too, which had perhaps obscured things.
He doesn't even realise that there's anything odd about this. The blinders are on, and Luther doesn't even recognise the strange blind spot he's been carrying around for an entire year-plus, his whole time here, his complete unfamiliarity with how to juggle a social circle.
It's as baffling as Luther choosing a follow-up reference point so random and so far ago removed from now it's as much a year ago as it is three. Like that made some amount of sense to him that absolutely skipped over her. Like any part of his words, that all just came out did anything more than making her stare even harder at him.
"Why is that funny now?" is easier to beat back at a fast clip. When nothing about this feels or even cants funny. The less so as each second passes suddenly.
When it makes no sense. When what she remembers most of that forever ago night is. Vanya, looking back at her before blowing out an energy burst that would destroy a large portion of the suburb, in the specific opposite direction of her. Luther, in the kitchen (giving her the locket). Luther, on the landing, getting caught up in the silly music number (dancing with her). Warm, private, personal things.
That are suddenly at a stone-cold, still-life, relief of themselves. Pricked on the razor edge of this only continuing to sharpen bemusement.
Luther tilts his head, looking up at her from where he's seated on the sofa. Still not quite following, not quite reading that sharp bite to Allison's words properly yet.
"Not funny ha-ha, but, like. It's far more likely you'd have met Jane at the party—" That disastrous party. Jane had come out of it injured, even. "But then you run into her in a totally different city, on the beach, out of nowhere. What are the odds? But I guess that kind of happens with imPorts — we're easier to pick out of a crowd, we tend to run into each other while we're out and about, stuff like that."
He's definitely rambling a little now, words spilling off his tongue to try to make up for Allison's sudden brevity. Not to overplay the image, but: a loyal dog recognising the snap to its owner's voice, but not understanding the reason for it.
There were at least a dozen, maybe even two, maybe even more than that, of people she didn't meet that night. An endless sea of louder and louder voices, bouncing off the walls and filling all those bottom floor rooms, that hers forever was not one of, and never could have been. She doesn't think it's funny that she didn't meet any of them or that it would be if she just happened to pass them on the street in this place now randomly.
That isn't logic. None of this seems logical, and the more so it feels that way, the more she can't stop staring at him like his words are moving into one of the over six-thousand languages she doesn't know. Which feels weird to think of, too, because half their life, they'd never even needed words in even one, and sometimes, in the last year, before ... well, leaving, and Dallas, and all of ... it'd almost felt like they were back there. Like that.
"I think it's funnier--" In that way, where that word sounds nothing like the amusement of its definition, and more like she's stripped it of its skin and made it only sharpened steel. "--that somehow she was at our party forever ago, and apparently is a good friend of yours, and claims to know your family--" It's specific there. That word. That repeat of 'your,' that never becomes 'our.' "--but she had absolutely no clue who I was."
Even though, before the last three days, and a only a few months before it, she'd been the only one of everyone else here, for something like seven or eight months. Since the year started. Since only two months after that nearly a year ago, the outdated, party he's somehow decided is somehow still a reference point.
Allison hates the feeling coiling in her stomach: confused, cold, tight, defensive, suspicious, suddenly trying to turn over Jane's face in her mind, to remember any of her words that Allison had so quickly start dismissing as not being an exaggerated assumption, given somehow they weren't.
And Luther stares at her blankly; feeling all his muscles start to wire tighter as a result of Allison's tightened voice, each of her emphasised words like a stab. (Hyper-alert to it, this part of him that is so sensitive to tension, to someone's anger, to particularly her anger, and to his sheer mind-numbing terror of disappointing her or Reginald.)
And he looks a little baffled, still a little stutteringly slow on the uptake.
"I must've mentioned—" he starts, with a distant faraway look in his eye as he's trying to cast his mind back, mentally re-examining past conversations. He must've. Surely, right? He's mentioned his siblings to Jane before. 'My family'. In generalities, never specifics.
But he must've—
"Did she really not know who you were? I thought I must've. She knows I've got a bunch of family members. I'm sorry, I thought..." His brow is still furrowed, still trying to remember; suddenly, finally, tripping facefirst into this strange blank space that's existed for the past year. "I thought I had said something before. I guess I might've never said names."
It bites out of Allison's mouth with an unforgiving, fast force Allison wants to pull back. But she can't because it's already out. Unimpressed acidity turned accusation, handling the feeling of this bewildering impossibly-happening thing only digging deeper and deeper into her guts, tearing through them with barbed edges, the only way she's ever handled anything.
Allison can't tell if it's anger. Or jealousy. Or the question of whether she should be, and has no right to be, either. When somehow Luther has equated her to everyone else, while everyone else wasn't even here (and, if she's the same, what does that say about her?). Never mentioned her, never mentioned Jane (and there's no reason for either unless this is something else, has some other reason).
But for the moment, all of those things are so small beside the thing that only sucks them in like coals to feed an even deeper, far more relentless void.
She's spent the last two and half years being erased from the narrative of a life being lived by two-thirds of Dallas. Something to be ignored, belittled, reviled, categorized, homogenized, forgotten entirely as though she never existed as herself in the first place. She knows this feeling (the way it curdles in her stomach, making her feel so much smaller even as she'd rebelled from it) so well it feels normal.
She just never thought she'd ever feel it looking at Luther.
Luther's hands are laid flat against his knees, his spine now unnaturally straight, as if he's ready and waiting for inspection. (Luther's posture always gets better the more on edge he is. Standing at attention, waiting to be cut down to size.)
Allison occupies his every single day, the lion's share of his mind and heart, everything circling back to her.
And yet. There's been this eternal disjoint between his mind and his mouth; his family and his friends; Allison and the outside world.
He can't just keep repeating himself and the same excuse — I must've mentioned? — but he's realising, quickly and sharply now like a rolling snowball gaining traction, on the verge of becoming an avalanche collapsing into place, that he really hasn't, has he. He's mentioned Shaun, and the people from Aegis because they're Aegis, and maybe Shepard the once because he was going to be coming by their actual house, but...
In the frantic whirring gears of his mind, Luther's examining this as if it's a new discovery to him, too, which it is. Is it something about Jane in particular? Maybe a little. (In another time and another life, maybe he could've—) But it's the rest, too. Everyone else. Does Allison even know Brandon's name? Ruby's? And any of the others who have vanished on him: Alex, Bodhi, Barbara, Ryder?
"It wasn't intentional," he says quickly. A little desperately. "I just didn't— I don't know. I don't know why. I don't really... talk about my friends with you guys, I guess, or you guys with them. Not in specifics."
Friends, plural. There is a reason for it all and it's lurking just out-of-reach, but he's still reeling, trying to see it.
If Allison were anything, anyone other than herself, maybe she would reach out for the couch, a chair, the edge of a table. Something. Anything to steady herself from what feels like a wave that won't stop slamming her full in the face. A yawning chasm only opening wider with each of his words. But Allison Hargreve isn't anything, anyoneelse, and she doesn't do weakness.
Not unless she's choosing to share it. To trust someone with it.
She duped a whole world. Twice over. Once in the future; once in the past.
No one could ever tell.
It's tempting. So tempting.
There at the edge of the fingertips of her shuddering mind when he does it again. When he speaks, and it feels even more like somehow, she doesn't exist. Like he's looking at her, but she's not even there on the other side of his gaze. Lumped into the plurality of the family that hasn't even existed as the whole of themselves on this world for the length of whatever the hell it is they are talking about now. Obliterating out weeks and months she'd thought he'd felt -- thought? -- the same about everything, after everyone has had just been gone.
Because for some reason Luther is implying, Luther is saying -- "There are more people?"
When in the hell was there even time? How absolutely stupid had she been?
"I mean, yeah, I know people here. We're not... bosom buddies, or anything, I probably don't know them all that well, but there are people." Usually he's out of the house for work shifts; other times he's shopping or running errands or borrowing books from the library; but then sometimes, occasionally, he does meet someone. Luther's not a social butterfly — probably never will be — but they're out there, in some fledgling shape that might or might not qualify as friends. (He's still never sure about that, either.)
"A lot of them have Ported out over time, though." And there's a sliver in his voice there; an echo of the worse, raw pain they felt when almost their entire family vanished overnight.
"If they weren't going to be coming around the house, I guess it just didn't seem... relevant to mention. It's not like I'm hosting big brunches in the kitchen and bringing people over or anything."
And oddly, all of this rings true in his voice, not lighting up any alarms in Allison's powers. He believes this. He believes all of this.
None of this is becoming less real. And she wants to have not walked in here.
She wants to have never walked in here or opened her mouth.
"Can you even hear yourself?" She can't. She can't stop herself. She can't stop the way every single one of his words slides through her skin, slicing between her ribs, ludicrously and calmly civil, and lodging there like razors biting too deep, each one seeping blood slowly, slowly, slowly down.
"You have friends. You don't have friends. You don't talk to them about us, and you don't talk to us about them, in this 'us--'" Allison's free hand, not holding the mail, makes a gesture like a quotation mark. "-that hasn't even existed until the last few days. But that doesn't even matter. Because no one at all in this equation matters. We're all irrelevant. Apparently."
Including her. She's a goddamn fool. His face against his pillow, eye closed, breathing slowly, only two nights ago, flashes too clearly into her mind, stolen unknown, and she is. An idiot. She has no clue what is happening suddenly. Only that she's become aware, it's always been happening. It was only that she somehow never knew about any of it. Was never supposed to.
"You're not irrelevant." His response lashes out lightning-quick, without hesitation. "You're never irrelevant. I'm not..."
And there's that ever-familiar haunting feeling again: foot in mouth, not finding the right words at all, just making it fucking worse every time he opens his mouth. He idolises poets, but he's never felt particularly good with his words himself. Luther scrubs at his face, a hand swiping over his jaw, his stubble, as if he could press this whole conversation back in. Undo it all from ever happening.
"That's not what I meant. It just— If they weren't going to be here, it didn't seem like you needed to know about them. I didn't think you'd be interested."
The need-to-know basis, the What's the practical purpose of sharing this information? That iron-rigid compartmentalisation between all the neat corners of his life, like not letting the peas touch the potatoes on his plate. Number One was not Luther Hargreeves was not the Luther who carried furniture at Joe's Movers and who was not the Space who clocked in at Aegis for patrols and combat training.
He's still trying to wrap his mind around it. He can almost see the shape of it. Almost.
Those words should do something. Mean, change something. But they don't. Because he's already said the opposite. Once. Twice. A few times now. Her mind scrabbling for what the right words should be. Would be. The threads cutting even as they push, desperately, clutched too tight until now:
It's the truth, though, isn't it? You're the closest thing. Snip.
Are old. Older yet. Than his year ago birthday mention, and maybe just as flawed. Just as stupidly and stubbornly and childishly clung to despite passing time and clearer truths. Clutched as though maybe she could have used them as a shield, a blanket, a closed door, to keep herself from looking at what wasn't --
I might've never said (your) name(s). I don't talk about my friends with you.
We should probably start listening to each other.
Its all ripping itself up, like floorboards she hadn't even realized she was standing on.
Luther, himself, pulling things out of her hands that he'd put there, that she'd collected more slowly and more painstakingly important than could ever be said, be written, be explained. It hurts like everything is dissolving out from under her. And she's so angry at him. At herself. At the sudden absolution of how familiar this argument is, and how she's, just as suddenly, maybe even overly deservedly, on the opposite side of it, less than five days later.
"And why let me make up my own mind about any of that when you could just do it for me?" It slides faster than she can even predict the wrong direction. The absolutely worst direction. Derision and disgust that has coated her bones again for days, her newest, deepest shame weaponized and thrown back burning. "You want to know what happens when you keep an entire life from people?"
"Everything goes to shit. Everything." It falls through your fingers. All the good and all the bad, and you can't fix it or save it or pick it back up in the same condition anymore, no matter what you do. No matter what you meant. Or felt. Or apologized for.
Because, in some parts, it's not wrong. You chose for them. You chose against them. You never even gave them the chance to choose you.
Luther recognises some of the accidental slip he's done here, the lapse, the way she feels neglected. And yet— there's something else here that he doesn't even recognise either, some deeper significance to the conversation that keeps flying right over his head. The way Allison declares it so firmly, asking him if he knows what happens.
But he can't just turn and redirect the subject onto her; it'd be transparently evasive.
"I'm sorry," Luther says, and he sounds miserable rather than angry. Luther choosing for other people is a pattern, isn't it. Even if he'd tried and tried to nip that bad habit in the bud (since the last time I destroyed the world by overestimating my own importance).
"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what happens when you keep a life from people, because I— haven't had a life to keep. I'm just..." He exhales roughly. He wants to stand up, hates that they're trapped here with him sitting on the sofa and her standing over there by the door, but he can't rocket up to his feet. He doesn't want to loom. And this is so familiar. This is the second time they're stuck in these positions: her barging into his bedroom, furious and concerned, him sitting at his desk.
Which had been, again, all about something he'd been hiding from her. Fuck, he's bad at this, isn't he.
"I'm just not used to having someone to tell about my day. Or even a day to tell about. Or even friends to talk about." His voice is rough and broken, as he finally hits on it. Realising it. Ten years. Ten years of nothing.
"I know how to talk to you, but I don't know how to talk to other people, or about other people. There never were any before. I've... never had friends before, Allison. Until this place. The only people I ever knew were you and the Academy, Mom and Dad, and Pogo. So I don't know— what it's like, or how to talk about them, or if you're even supposed to talk about them. I don't know how to do this. I'm sorry."
His fingers tighten into fists, then loosen, fingertips digging into the fabric of his jeans.
It's not that she doubts most of what he says. That she doesn't know. How alone he'd been in that house, on the moon. It's. It's just.
It's the kind of explanation and apology that would fit three or four months into that situation, maybe six, but at a full year and a half later, it comes off oblivious, careless, beyond unobservant, well into unconcerned. A doubled apology only after your hand is already caught in the cookie jar, and only because it is. (And how well does she know that one, too?) How much longer might it have been if she hadn't had this 'isn't it funny' random encounter with that young girl? When did it all start?
It takes her back. To Jane, childishly kicking her feet again the wall. It drags furrowing razor-sharp nails through the want to demand other names. But she did that last time, didn't she? (Promise Me.) Made demands. Like she had some right. One she obviously doesn't. And -- worse? -- she doesn't want to. That wasn't what this was supposed to be. What they were supposed to be.
It was the one true thing she'd never had to force. Demand. Control. Change the world to suit her. The one that chose her. As she was. Always.
Had.
Returning to the question at the end makes her realize a step too late, that even in the middle of this discussion about Luther not telling her things, she did it again. She blurts out everything without thinking to stop herself. Admitting the worst about her marriage in minutes. Saying Claire's name, like it hadn't been buried for over two years. Telling him about Stadler's, about not even being sorry. And even this. Even this in the middle of Luther not, things keep pouring out of her. Angry and too aware of the cost, of the culpability and the consequences.
Like she could never keep her mouth shut around him. She could mute out a whole life to endless faces. Friends. Even her husband. But not Luther.
"I mean, losing everything."
It's crueler than it needs to sound, and she knows it. But she doesn't stop it.
"I still don't follow." Because it doesn't really make sense to him (and he can't even begin to guess what really lies behind it). Does she mean Patrick, that wreckage she'd left behind? But she was a celebrity back home; Patrick knew from the start who Allison Hargreeves was, even if he hadn't fully grasped how much she was capable of.
He's shaking his head. His voice still desperate and frayed at the prospect of hurting her. Upsetting her. The one person (at least, in this universe) that he can't stand upsetting.
"I wasn't trying to do this. It wasn't on purpose. It wasn't like, hey, let me come home and whip off the masked disguise and hide a secret identity from Allison. Because it's not. Other people are just— all out there—" He gestures a hand toward the wall, the front door, the entire outside world, before he draws it inward, to their little two-storey house, this room, the kitchen. "And they don't belong in here. It's two different worlds. I don't know if that makes any sense."
"Oh, it does--" Except her voice is too high still. "--but that doesn't make it right."
None of it is right. He can believe it, and it still won't make it right. At least she'd always known what she was doing wasn't right, but she hadn't thought she had a choice. That had been her lie, and it had died on a table between her and Luther so quickly.
I needed something to hold onto.
She hadn't even said 'someone,' it wasn't even that humane.
"You don't have two different worlds, Luther." Allison's voice grinds slower, and her hands are up, even the one still holding the mail in it. "You have one life. One. It's still the same life out there and in here, and when you decided that wasn't true, you made both of them less."
"I know. Because, that's all I did for the last two years. Two boxes. Two worlds. Two lives. Two times. Two Allison's." And Luther saw through it so fast. Even when he never really saw all the walls of her life, and her lies, at all. And she hates him a little for her having to say it like this. This is not how she would've told him -- and she would've told him. She knows that.
She's been telling him everything slowly since the moment he showed up again. Giving him the things no one else got. No matter what vows or rings or days.
Even more since getting back; two years missing linked into never missing from her at all. Never feeling like the other half of her world was just gone again.
And instead of getting to give this to him, to put it down like something she's carried too long, made too many mistakes choosing, that broke her heart during it and after it in very different ways, it feels like she's ripping it out of her chest with her own fingernails and hurling it at his face. She made this choice in his absence, and he made it while she was right here, at his side. None of this feels safe or right or chosen or real or seen or her. She's just another parable of what no one else should do lest doom and destruction is all you're looking for, and in this one, she gets her just desserts.
It hurts like a deep bruising ache in his chest (which never hurts in battle, he's impervious to it, but this hurts), having her so angry at him when he can barely even follow the shape of it. Doesn't know what a normal relationship or friendship is supposed to look like; they had, after all, always been forbidden to him. Life after the Academy, in all its permutations, in De Chima or Nonah or Texas, had all felt like suddenly being thrown into a new game where Luther didn't know all the rules or what his role was. Being thrown in the river and teaching yourself how to swim.
And he's looking at her and looking at her, and trying to make it make sense. (When people get married, they're supposed to tell each other everything. Books and poetry taught him that much, at least.)
"Do you mean... like, because you didn't have your voice and nobody knew who you were? That you didn't feel like yourself? I mean, I did that too, life in Dallas wasn't anything like what I was used to, nobody in Dallas knew what the hell the Umbrella Academy was, so I couldn't fall back on that anymore—" Luther still sounds lost at sea, a man floundering and drowning and trying to find some solid ground underfoot. Searching for something in this suddenly baffling, confusing, out-of-nowhere, upsetting conversation that he even recognises. Following these threads as they spin out everywhere.
"No, Luther." It keeps being his name, doesn't it. Punctuated statement. As gestured between them with the stupid envelopes. "I mean exactly like this."
She hates this. She hates this. She hates this. She's not even close to Klaus, and it hadn't been like this. They'd had drinks, and he'd been. Well. At least there hadn't been this.
"I mean, like Ray knowing absolutely nothing about my life before Dallas until after the first time we all met up at Elliot's." She hates herself. That's all she gets in this. There's no grace, and there's no softness, and she rips the whole thing between them with her own hands. Herself. Her sins. "I mean, that he never even had a single second to suspect anything else existed until he met Klaus in jail, and you at our house, and I rumored a cop to stop beating him to death in the street all on the same day."
She made these choices. She broke someone with them. It's ironic that it's not even seven days later and now it's her.
Somehow thinking she has the right to surprised, or angry, or hurt now.
And just like that. It puts some things into perspective.
Allison told me that she had family up north, but she never mentioned a brother. And she certainly never mentioned a brother that looked like you.
At the time, Luther's brain had been caterwauling and struggling to process and he hadn't even really caught on all the specifics of Ray's words, because everything else had been drowned out behind Allison Chestnut and Coming up on a year now. Her lack of mentioning him, he'd taken it for a kind of shame and an inconvenience, maybe, because how could you explain a white 'brother' who looked like he did? Who didn't even look human?
But the dominos are finally tumbling and Luther's brow is crinkling in thought. Luther not telling his origins to Jack or the bartender or the burlesque dancer who was kind to him; sure, that was to be expected. But somehow, he thought... That surely she'd have told Ray. If she was going to marry the guy (even if it was just something to hold onto), she would have told him something, some sanitised version of the truth. Not the time travel, but maybe the mixed family, the powers.
But then again, who the hell is Luther to talk? He's been keeping secrets, too, even if it had been less purposeful, more unthinkingly blundering.
And he doesn't know what to say. All the words are caught on his tongue, in the back of his throat. Apologies that the Hargreeves blundered right into that and blew up the fragile peace she'd garnered with Ray. Apologies that here Luther's gone and done the same damn thing, with the one person he shouldn't have. She can see the surprise ripping through his face, startled, finally realising part of it.
"It's not the same," he says, and even to him that sounds a little feeble. "You had— huge things, unexplainable things, that would've been hard to talk about in Dallas. Even dangerous to reveal. But this is just... the names of people you haven't met. Why does it matter?"
Even now, he can't censure Allison for what she's done. He never can.
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obediences) wrote2019-03-28 10:51 am
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It doesn't feel as familiar as it once did. This, either. Having Allison around has become a rare precious thing again, something not to take for granted anymore (as if he ever did); now, when that aching grieving loss of her feels more immediate and close-to-hand than a year-plus living together. It's taking some time to reconcile those two sets of memories, lining them up next to each other and trying to figure out where the pieces align, because they don't.
And he's settling into it. Calling up Joe again (or Jack?), getting back onto the shift rotation. Showing up at work. Running into Brandon there, unexpectedly. Checking his messages and seeing the ones he'd missed and which have piled up for him: a coffee invitation from Kaneki, he'll arrange that later.
Luther's sitting in the living room still checking the communicator when he hears the front door, his head turning, practically like a dog's ears pricking up at the sound of its owner returning. "Welcome back," he calls out. He can't even pretend to busy himself with the communicator or be distracted from her; he looks up instead, watches Allison bustle in with a handful of mail, slipping out of her high heels.
"How was the first day back at work?"
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"It might as well have been like everyone out there was making sure it wasn't just a magical fluke, or that it was, they were getting their prime two-to-five minutes in like it was running out of time. If I didn't know any better, I'd say I haven't talked that much in years."
Except she has. Just not here. Definitely not here. At least not with anyone who isn't him in the last few days. There were hundreds of people and days in the in-between until it no longer even stood out. She wants to believe it'll work itself out, but it keeps catching like a papercut and not wanting to link together yet.
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He sets the communicator down, then picks it up again, can't quite seem to make up his mind or what to do with himself. "My readjustment was easier. Just go to an address, pick stuff up, move it, repeat."
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"It's been a bit, too. I decided to spend some time walking on the beach before coming back."
It wasn't a lie, even if it didn't touch on the endless, dominoing why, that took up so much of the air around her since getting back to this world. But it does though, lend to adding, with easy ludicrousness, and no more attention or importance than she's paying to flicking through the envelopes in her hands (so, so so modern looking, and not like what she expects):
"I met your 'rather good friend' Jane out there, too."
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And what are the odds?
"Just walking on the beach?" Luther says. "Huh. Small world."
The continent and its porter cities seems like it should be too big for this sort of thing, but then again, he supposes it is a small world among imPorts too. Like passing Kaneki's notes around the family, then meeting the actual guy himself a year later.
"She doing okay?"
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single word, more correcting alacrity: "Painting."
Before the rest of her shifts. Weight recentering back slightly, into her heels and her shoulders. Eyebrows furrowing slightly as the mail is momentarily forgotten entirely for looking at Luther, and only Luther -- who is already looking at her, serious and steady -- for the first time since walking in the door.
"You actually do know her?" The surprise knocks out of her voice, briefly, the clear and dismissive absurdity ripe in her first statement about Jane. But even without the answer, even just with the way he's looking at her, even without the time to reframe the list of what exactly, it tilts the tiles, seizing some part of her spine.
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Vanya had tried to invite her to the party, too, which had perhaps obscured things.
He doesn't even realise that there's anything odd about this. The blinders are on, and Luther doesn't even recognise the strange blind spot he's been carrying around for an entire year-plus, his whole time here, his complete unfamiliarity with how to juggle a social circle.
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It's as baffling as Luther choosing a follow-up reference point so random and so far ago removed from now it's as much a year ago as it is three. Like that made some amount of sense to him that absolutely skipped over her. Like any part of his words, that all just came out did anything more than making her stare even harder at him.
"Why is that funny now?" is easier to beat back at a fast clip.
When nothing about this feels or even cants funny.
The less so as each second passes suddenly.
When it makes no sense. When what she remembers most of that forever ago night is. Vanya, looking back at her before blowing out an energy burst that would destroy a large portion of the suburb, in the specific opposite direction of her. Luther, in the kitchen (giving her the locket). Luther, on the landing, getting caught up in the silly music number (dancing with her). Warm, private, personal things.
That are suddenly at a stone-cold, still-life, relief of themselves.
Pricked on the razor edge of this only continuing to sharpen bemusement.
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"Not funny ha-ha, but, like. It's far more likely you'd have met Jane at the party—" That disastrous party. Jane had come out of it injured, even. "But then you run into her in a totally different city, on the beach, out of nowhere. What are the odds? But I guess that kind of happens with imPorts — we're easier to pick out of a crowd, we tend to run into each other while we're out and about, stuff like that."
He's definitely rambling a little now, words spilling off his tongue to try to make up for Allison's sudden brevity. Not to overplay the image, but: a loyal dog recognising the snap to its owner's voice, but not understanding the reason for it.
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That isn't logic. None of this seems logical, and the more so it feels that way, the more she can't stop staring at him like his words are moving into one of the over six-thousand languages she doesn't know. Which feels weird to think of, too, because half their life, they'd never even needed words in even one, and sometimes, in the last year, before ... well, leaving, and Dallas, and all of ... it'd almost felt like they were back there. Like that.
"I think it's funnier--" In that way, where that word sounds nothing like the amusement of its definition, and more like she's stripped it of its skin and made it only sharpened steel. "--that somehow she was at our party forever ago, and apparently is a good friend of yours, and claims to know your family--" It's specific there. That word. That repeat of 'your,' that never becomes 'our.' "--but she had absolutely no clue who I was."
Even though, before the last three days, and a only a few months before it, she'd been the only one of everyone else here, for something like seven or eight months. Since the year started. Since only two months after that nearly a year ago, the outdated, party he's somehow decided is somehow still a reference point.
Allison hates the feeling coiling in her stomach: confused, cold, tight, defensive, suspicious, suddenly trying to turn over Jane's face in her mind, to remember any of her words that Allison had so quickly start dismissing as not being an exaggerated assumption, given somehow they weren't.
And somehow she was just wrong.
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And he looks a little baffled, still a little stutteringly slow on the uptake.
"I must've mentioned—" he starts, with a distant faraway look in his eye as he's trying to cast his mind back, mentally re-examining past conversations. He must've. Surely, right? He's mentioned his siblings to Jane before. 'My family'. In generalities, never specifics.
But he must've—
"Did she really not know who you were? I thought I must've. She knows I've got a bunch of family members. I'm sorry, I thought..." His brow is still furrowed, still trying to remember; suddenly, finally, tripping facefirst into this strange blank space that's existed for the past year. "I thought I had said something before. I guess I might've never said names."
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It bites out of Allison's mouth with an unforgiving, fast force Allison wants to pull back. But she can't because it's already out. Unimpressed acidity turned accusation, handling the feeling of this bewildering impossibly-happening thing only digging deeper and deeper into her guts, tearing through them with barbed edges, the only way she's ever handled anything.
Allison can't tell if it's anger. Or jealousy. Or the question of whether she should be, and has no right to be, either. When somehow Luther has equated her to everyone else, while everyone else wasn't even here (and, if she's the same, what does that say about her?). Never mentioned her, never mentioned Jane (and there's no reason for either unless this is something else, has some other reason).
But for the moment, all of those things are so small beside the thing that only sucks them in like coals to feed an even deeper, far more relentless void.
She's spent the last two and half years being erased from the narrative of a life being lived by two-thirds of Dallas. Something to be ignored, belittled, reviled, categorized, homogenized, forgotten entirely as though she never existed as herself in the first place. She knows this feeling (the way it curdles in her stomach, making her feel so much smaller even as she'd rebelled from it) so well it feels normal.
She just never thought she'd ever feel it looking at Luther.
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Allison occupies his every single day, the lion's share of his mind and heart, everything circling back to her.
And yet. There's been this eternal disjoint between his mind and his mouth; his family and his friends; Allison and the outside world.
He can't just keep repeating himself and the same excuse — I must've mentioned? — but he's realising, quickly and sharply now like a rolling snowball gaining traction, on the verge of becoming an avalanche collapsing into place, that he really hasn't, has he. He's mentioned Shaun, and the people from Aegis because they're Aegis, and maybe Shepard the once because he was going to be coming by their actual house, but...
In the frantic whirring gears of his mind, Luther's examining this as if it's a new discovery to him, too, which it is. Is it something about Jane in particular? Maybe a little. (In another time and another life, maybe he could've—) But it's the rest, too. Everyone else. Does Allison even know Brandon's name? Ruby's? And any of the others who have vanished on him: Alex, Bodhi, Barbara, Ryder?
"It wasn't intentional," he says quickly. A little desperately. "I just didn't— I don't know. I don't know why. I don't really... talk about my friends with you guys, I guess, or you guys with them. Not in specifics."
Friends, plural.
There is a reason for it all and it's lurking just out-of-reach, but he's still reeling, trying to see it.
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Not unless she's choosing to share it. To trust someone with it.
She duped a whole world. Twice over.
Once in the future; once in the past.
No one could ever tell.
It's tempting. So tempting.
There at the edge of the fingertips of her shuddering mind when he does it again. When he speaks, and it feels even more like somehow, she doesn't exist. Like he's looking at her, but she's not even there on the other side of his gaze. Lumped into the plurality of the family that hasn't even existed as the whole of themselves on this world for the length of whatever the hell it is they are talking about now. Obliterating out weeks and months she'd thought he'd felt -- thought? -- the same about everything, after everyone has had just been gone.
Because for some reason Luther is implying,
Luther is saying -- "There are more people?"
When in the hell was there even time? How absolutely stupid had she been?
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"A lot of them have Ported out over time, though." And there's a sliver in his voice there; an echo of the worse, raw pain they felt when almost their entire family vanished overnight.
"If they weren't going to be coming around the house, I guess it just didn't seem... relevant to mention. It's not like I'm hosting big brunches in the kitchen and bringing people over or anything."
And oddly, all of this rings true in his voice, not lighting up any alarms in Allison's powers. He believes this. He believes all of this.
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None of this is becoming less real.
And she wants to have not walked in here.
She wants to have never walked in here or opened her mouth.
"Can you even hear yourself?" She can't. She can't stop herself. She can't stop the way every single one of his words slides through her skin, slicing between her ribs, ludicrously and calmly civil, and lodging there like razors biting too deep, each one seeping blood slowly, slowly, slowly down.
"You have friends. You don't have friends. You don't talk to them about us, and you don't talk to us about them, in this 'us--'" Allison's free hand, not holding the mail, makes a gesture like a quotation mark. "-that hasn't even existed until the last few days. But that doesn't even matter. Because no one at all in this equation matters. We're all irrelevant. Apparently."
Including her. She's a goddamn fool. His face against his pillow, eye closed, breathing slowly, only two nights ago, flashes too clearly into her mind, stolen unknown, and she is. An idiot. She has no clue what is happening suddenly. Only that she's become aware, it's always been happening. It was only that she somehow never knew about any of it. Was never supposed to.
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And there's that ever-familiar haunting feeling again: foot in mouth, not finding the right words at all, just making it fucking worse every time he opens his mouth. He idolises poets, but he's never felt particularly good with his words himself. Luther scrubs at his face, a hand swiping over his jaw, his stubble, as if he could press this whole conversation back in. Undo it all from ever happening.
"That's not what I meant. It just— If they weren't going to be here, it didn't seem like you needed to know about them. I didn't think you'd be interested."
The need-to-know basis, the What's the practical purpose of sharing this information? That iron-rigid compartmentalisation between all the neat corners of his life, like not letting the peas touch the potatoes on his plate. Number One was not Luther Hargreeves was not the Luther who carried furniture at Joe's Movers and who was not the Space who clocked in at Aegis for patrols and combat training.
He's still trying to wrap his mind around it. He can almost see the shape of it. Almost.
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Luther, himself, pulling things out of her hands that he'd put there, that she'd collected more slowly and more painstakingly important than could ever be said, be written, be explained. It hurts like everything is dissolving out from under her. And she's so angry at him. At herself. At the sudden absolution of how familiar this argument is, and how she's, just as suddenly, maybe even overly deservedly, on the opposite side of it, less than five days later.
"And why let me make up my own mind about any of that when you could just do it for me?" It slides faster than she can even predict the wrong direction. The absolutely worst direction. Derision and disgust that has coated her bones again for days, her newest, deepest shame weaponized and thrown back burning. "You want to know what happens when you keep an entire life from people?"
"Everything goes to shit. Everything." It falls through your fingers. All the good and all the bad, and you can't fix it or save it or pick it back up in the same condition anymore, no matter what you do. No matter what you meant. Or felt. Or apologized for.
Because, in some parts, it's not wrong.
You chose for them. You chose against them.
You never even gave them the chance to choose you.
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But he can't just turn and redirect the subject onto her; it'd be transparently evasive.
"I'm sorry," Luther says, and he sounds miserable rather than angry. Luther choosing for other people is a pattern, isn't it. Even if he'd tried and tried to nip that bad habit in the bud (since the last time I destroyed the world by overestimating my own importance).
"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what happens when you keep a life from people, because I— haven't had a life to keep. I'm just..." He exhales roughly. He wants to stand up, hates that they're trapped here with him sitting on the sofa and her standing over there by the door, but he can't rocket up to his feet. He doesn't want to loom. And this is so familiar. This is the second time they're stuck in these positions: her barging into his bedroom, furious and concerned, him sitting at his desk.
Which had been, again, all about something he'd been hiding from her. Fuck, he's bad at this, isn't he.
"I'm just not used to having someone to tell about my day. Or even a day to tell about. Or even friends to talk about." His voice is rough and broken, as he finally hits on it. Realising it. Ten years. Ten years of nothing.
"I know how to talk to you, but I don't know how to talk to other people, or about other people. There never were any before. I've... never had friends before, Allison. Until this place. The only people I ever knew were you and the Academy, Mom and Dad, and Pogo. So I don't know— what it's like, or how to talk about them, or if you're even supposed to talk about them. I don't know how to do this. I'm sorry."
His fingers tighten into fists, then loosen, fingertips digging into the fabric of his jeans.
"What do you mean, about things going to shit?"
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How alone he'd been in that house, on the moon. It's. It's just.
It's the kind of explanation and apology that would fit three or four months into that situation, maybe six, but at a full year and a half later, it comes off oblivious, careless, beyond unobservant, well into unconcerned. A doubled apology only after your hand is already caught in the cookie jar, and only because it is. (And how well does she know that one, too?) How much longer might it have been if she hadn't had this 'isn't it funny' random encounter with that young girl? When did it all start?
It takes her back. To Jane, childishly kicking her feet again the wall. It drags furrowing razor-sharp nails through the want to demand other names. But she did that last time, didn't she? (Promise Me.) Made demands. Like she had some right. One she obviously doesn't. And -- worse? -- she doesn't want to. That wasn't what this was supposed to be. What they were supposed to be.
It was the one true thing she'd never had to force.
Demand. Control. Change the world to suit her.
The one that chose her. As she was. Always.
Had.
Returning to the question at the end makes her realize a step too late, that even in the middle of this discussion about Luther not telling her things, she did it again. She blurts out everything without thinking to stop herself. Admitting the worst about her marriage in minutes. Saying Claire's name, like it hadn't been buried for over two years. Telling him about Stadler's, about not even being sorry. And even this. Even this in the middle of Luther not, things keep pouring out of her. Angry and too aware of the cost, of the culpability and the consequences.
Like she could never keep her mouth shut around him.
She could mute out a whole life to endless faces.
Friends. Even her husband. But not Luther.
"I mean, losing everything."
It's crueler than it needs to sound,
and she knows it. But she doesn't stop it.
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He's shaking his head. His voice still desperate and frayed at the prospect of hurting her. Upsetting her. The one person (at least, in this universe) that he can't stand upsetting.
"I wasn't trying to do this. It wasn't on purpose. It wasn't like, hey, let me come home and whip off the masked disguise and hide a secret identity from Allison. Because it's not. Other people are just— all out there—" He gestures a hand toward the wall, the front door, the entire outside world, before he draws it inward, to their little two-storey house, this room, the kitchen. "And they don't belong in here. It's two different worlds. I don't know if that makes any sense."
Somehow: Truth, truth, truth.
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None of it is right. He can believe it, and it still won't make it right. At least she'd always known what she was doing wasn't right, but she hadn't thought she had a choice. That had been her lie, and it had died on a table between her and Luther so quickly.
I needed something to hold onto.
She hadn't even said 'someone,'
it wasn't even that humane.
"You don't have two different worlds, Luther." Allison's voice grinds slower, and her hands are up, even the one still holding the mail in it. "You have one life. One. It's still the same life out there and in here, and when you decided that wasn't true, you made both of them less."
"I know. Because, that's all I did for the last two years. Two boxes. Two worlds. Two lives. Two times. Two Allison's." And Luther saw through it so fast. Even when he never really saw all the walls of her life, and her lies, at all. And she hates him a little for her having to say it like this. This is not how she would've told him -- and she would've told him. She knows that.
She's been telling him everything slowly since the moment he showed up again.
Giving him the things no one else got. No matter what vows or rings or days.
Even more since getting back;
two years missing linked into never missing from her at all.
Never feeling like the other half of her world was just gone again.
And instead of getting to give this to him, to put it down like something she's carried too long, made too many mistakes choosing, that broke her heart during it and after it in very different ways, it feels like she's ripping it out of her chest with her own fingernails and hurling it at his face. She made this choice in his absence, and he made it while she was right here, at his side. None of this feels safe or right or chosen or real or seen or her. She's just another parable of what no one else should do lest doom and destruction is all you're looking for, and in this one, she gets her just desserts.
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And he's looking at her and looking at her, and trying to make it make sense. (When people get married, they're supposed to tell each other everything. Books and poetry taught him that much, at least.)
"Do you mean... like, because you didn't have your voice and nobody knew who you were? That you didn't feel like yourself? I mean, I did that too, life in Dallas wasn't anything like what I was used to, nobody in Dallas knew what the hell the Umbrella Academy was, so I couldn't fall back on that anymore—" Luther still sounds lost at sea, a man floundering and drowning and trying to find some solid ground underfoot. Searching for something in this suddenly baffling, confusing, out-of-nowhere, upsetting conversation that he even recognises. Following these threads as they spin out everywhere.
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As gestured between them with the stupid envelopes. "I mean exactly like this."
She hates this. She hates this. She hates this.
She's not even close to Klaus, and it hadn't been like this.
They'd had drinks, and he'd been. Well. At least there hadn't been this.
"I mean, like Ray knowing absolutely nothing about my life before Dallas until after the first time we all met up at Elliot's." She hates herself. That's all she gets in this. There's no grace, and there's no softness, and she rips the whole thing between them with her own hands. Herself. Her sins. "I mean, that he never even had a single second to suspect anything else existed until he met Klaus in jail, and you at our house, and I rumored a cop to stop beating him to death in the street all on the same day."
She made these choices. She broke someone with them.
It's ironic that it's not even seven days later and now it's her.
Somehow thinking she has the right to surprised, or angry, or hurt now.
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Allison told me that she had family up north, but she never mentioned a brother. And she certainly never mentioned a brother that looked like you.
At the time, Luther's brain had been caterwauling and struggling to process and he hadn't even really caught on all the specifics of Ray's words, because everything else had been drowned out behind Allison Chestnut and Coming up on a year now. Her lack of mentioning him, he'd taken it for a kind of shame and an inconvenience, maybe, because how could you explain a white 'brother' who looked like he did? Who didn't even look human?
But the dominos are finally tumbling and Luther's brow is crinkling in thought. Luther not telling his origins to Jack or the bartender or the burlesque dancer who was kind to him; sure, that was to be expected. But somehow, he thought... That surely she'd have told Ray. If she was going to marry the guy (even if it was just something to hold onto), she would have told him something, some sanitised version of the truth. Not the time travel, but maybe the mixed family, the powers.
But then again, who the hell is Luther to talk? He's been keeping secrets, too, even if it had been less purposeful, more unthinkingly blundering.
And he doesn't know what to say. All the words are caught on his tongue, in the back of his throat. Apologies that the Hargreeves blundered right into that and blew up the fragile peace she'd garnered with Ray. Apologies that here Luther's gone and done the same damn thing, with the one person he shouldn't have. She can see the surprise ripping through his face, startled, finally realising part of it.
"It's not the same," he says, and even to him that sounds a little feeble. "You had— huge things, unexplainable things, that would've been hard to talk about in Dallas. Even dangerous to reveal. But this is just... the names of people you haven't met. Why does it matter?"
Even now, he can't censure Allison for what she's done. He never can.
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