obediences | for ltbrownnoser.

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for ltbrownnoser.

lost in time.

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The tension's finally cleared between them, like how the air clears after a storm, an onslaught of rain finally dissipating the oppressive heat and making it easier to breathe again. It's given way to them being less on edge around each other, with pleasantly sated evenings and objectively more interesting mornings. It's certainly one way to kill time. And Luther's normally so unbearably high-strung (Diego complained about the stick up his ass for years), but the Luther she's now getting to know is— almost— relaxed?

Plus, there's the simple fact that the world already ended. It's over. The impossible weight of averting the apocalypse is no longer sitting on those broad shoulders, sitting heavy as Luther's responsibility, the entire job and reason for the Academy's existence. There is something inutterably freeing about being past that particular event horizon. And he's used to whiling away the long monotonous days and weeks; this time, there's just the difference that he has someone to weather it with.

Once he picks his way across the street and joins her at the doorway, Luther peers over Sarah's shoulder and into the tumbledown ruins of the shop. A lot of the businesses they've combed through have been burnt-out wrecks, but this one seems to have semi-miraculously escaped the fires.

"I think we've been doing a pretty job of keeping ourselves entertained, actually," he remarks, lightly (was that another joke?). But then he cocks his head, considers the interior ahead of them. "I like reading. Let's check it out."

I like reading. A vast understatement, for a man who normally lives with teetering stacks of books piling on every available surface. He just hasn't really had the opportunity to do so here yet.

Sarah laughs. "Oh, he's got jokes today, yeah?" she asks playfully, giving him a half-hearted shove, one tiny hand against his massive bicep. It's funny, she'd never have taken Luther as the type to sneak in jokes now and again because he'd been so...well, rigid when they'd first met. She finds that he does it more and more often now and Sarah reckons that must be because he's gotten used to her. Shyness looks really strange on someone Luther's size, but she's fairly certain that's what she'd been seeing until after the first time they'd slept together. Now, he's a bit more relaxed.

"I can't remember the last time I read a book for leisure," she comments off-handedly as she follows him inside, taking careful steps over and around debris as she goes. "Mostly because I hadn't the time, but still. Wonder if they've got anything in here still in one piece worth reading," she murmurs mostly to herself as she winds away from Luther to check out another part of the store once they've established that the store is, in fact, empty, thanks to her Vortex Manipulator's heat sensors. After ticking that box, she powers it back down. It's drained down to half a charge. She's not sure it'll last a whole lot longer; once it hits the halfway mark, she'd noticed in the past that the battery drains much more quickly.

"Cool, they had comic books back then…" she says with a little smirk when she notices the shambles of a display, half-burned and some untouched but rather dusty comic books and graphic novels strewn around the room.

Sarah crouches and picks up a book that looks to be in fairly good shape, blowing the dust off its back cover and turning it over to do the same for the front. Her eyebrows lift and she tilts her head, looking down at the six adolescents in domino masks in a mid-action scene. The bottom half of the cover is torn so if there was a title to this particular comic, it's been lost. The series, though, is still clear at the top.

"Luther, my darling, you said your team was the Umbrella Academy, yeah?" she calls out, leafing through the book. She doesn't see his name anywhere; they're all using code names, but not numbers. Maybe it's just a coincidence. There aren't any especially large children, anyway. "Only there's an old comic book over here from a series with that same name. I dunno that it's the same thing, though. These are children and they're all runty looking in the drawings," she adds, not quite as loudly. The art isn't really her style at all, but it does remind her a little of when she'd been a child and she used to steal Jacob's comic books when he'd finished with them, mostly in an attempt to be like him less than finding actual enjoyment in the things of their own accord.

He's poking through the collapsed shelves, sweeping dust off the covers, delicately lifting the occasional volume from the wreckage. He'd have preferred proper full-sized fiction, but this is better than nothing, he supposes.

And then Sarah asks that question from behind him, and he feels the floor drop out from beneath his feet. "Oh," Luther says, and turns to look back at her and the treasure she's found. He hasn't actually been in a normal shop for years. The last time was a signing maybe about... fifteen years ago, a press tour for the latest issues. Somehow, he'd half-assumed that they must be out of print by now, recycled, not gracing the shelves anymore. Who in their right mind had still been reading The Umbrella Academy in 2019, when the team's been defunct for years?

Guess some things never changed, though. Maybe the comics are considered vintage now.

Tucking a few other graphic novels under his elbow (larger ones, dense with text and thus more likely to take more time to read, plus he'd always meant to read Maus), he steps closer and looks down at Sarah's find. There's a complicated expression crossing his face: some embarrassment, some fond nostalgia. Like someone suddenly being privy to your childhood photos.

(In another time and another life, Number Five had scavenged and collected things like this. Trinkets and souvenirs and a branded lunchbox. Gathering whatever scraps of the Academy still persisted, reminders of his family. Luther can't know it, but that same undefinable yearning is now lodged deep under his breastbone.)

"That, uh. That is us, actually. When we were kids."

He reaches out his free hand, brushes a thumb across that stylised version of himself on the cover — Spaceboy all blindingly bright grin and blond hair and the levitation belt — and then he pulls back, arm hanging loosely back at his side.

"Spaceboy's me."

As he looms over her, Sarah looks up at him over her shoulder, a little surprised by the sheepishness mingled with the fondness in his expression. He explains that, though, when he confirms that the comic book is actually about he and his siblings as children.

Her eyes move to follow his thumb brushing over one of the practically white-haired children on the cover. Sarah lifts her eyebrows thoughtfully when he announces that Spaceboy is him and she can only assume, having not actually read the thing yet, that the one he'd brushed his thumb over is, in fact, his own likeness.

"But he's so small, though," she counters dumbly; reflexively, shaking her head. "Sit down, you're making me nervous hovering like that," she adds. It isn't true, but she does prefer it when he brings himself back to her level when situations like this arise.

Flipping the cover open, Sarah looks down at the first pages and hums slightly. "Are these little adventures based on actual missions or just offshoots using your likenesses?" she wonders aloud, looking up at Luther again, curious.

It's perhaps still such a surprising sight, Luther obeying so gamely — he might be accustomed to giving out orders, but another more hardwired part of him is used to taking them, too — but he always listens. And so he just sits down on what once must have been a bookcase, but it's now mostly just a pile of wood that he can prop himself against somewhat comfortably. As she starts flipping through the comic, he sets the other books neatly in his lap.

"A mix of both," he says. The angle's right that he can still sort of peer around Sarah, see the flash of bright colours and sharp stylised angles that she's glancing at. Those domino masks, those luminous smiles. His heart twinges sharply. It's not as exact as if she'd come across a teen magazine, seen the actual photos of teenaged Luther and Diego muscling each other side-by-side to be in the shot, but it's still a remnant of the past. His childhood. The glory days.

"Is that the— oh, yeah, that's the Eiffel Tower. Does it still exist in your timeline? Ours turned out to be a hidden spaceship and flew away."

It was one of the more outlandish adventures they'd been on, and yet he delivers it straight-faced, entirely seriously.

"Anyway, it's like that. Sometimes it's actual missions we went through, other times it's, uh, filler. Made up to fill the issues." Sometimes because the real truth of the missions was too grim, too gory for their shining public images. He shifts one shoulder in something like a shrug.

"Close enough, though. All the codenames are right, too. And it was before..." He trails off. How to explain why Spaceboy is so small, and just as tiny as the others? In the end, he settles for a vague (and yet obvious): "I didn't look like this, back then."

Sarah gives a small facial shrug and a thoughtful look back at her companion. A mix of both. That seems...a little creepy? That there are fictionalized versions of Luther and his siblings to fill in the blanks between actual missions. The fact that there's a comic book about their missions in the first place is creepy, if you ask Sarah, seeing as how they're children, but she doesn't say as much. Luther's expression smacks of nostalgia and who the hell is she to make him feel bad about that?

Her eyebrows lift at his question and she shrugs. "Dunno, mate. Earth Death happened 3000 years before I was even born, remember? If it was a thing, it wasn't significant enough to be in my history books, so I wouldn't know. Maybe..." she says thoughtfully. "Timelines are tricky. I'm not even entirely sure whether I'm in my own timeline or if I got dropped into another by being here. It's hard to explain and even harder to control," she explains. Something tells her, though, that if some perceived Earth structure had actually been a spacecraft, that might've been in the history books, so she's guessing this must be a different version of the timeline. It seems superfluous to say so.

Her brow creases slightly with confusion as she looks down at the pages again. "How do you mean you didn't look like this back then? Obviously, you didn't, I just said that, but how do you change that much from when you were a kid?" she asks, shaking her head slightly and looking back up at him. "Maybe I'm being dumb here," she suggests, lifting her eyebrows. "I don't understand." It's not like it would ever occur to her that his body was a completely different entity up to a certain point in his life. The only time she's ever heard of something like that, it's been extreme changes and, to Sarah, his size isn't all that extreme. Not compared to things like the Face of Boe and the legend that it might actually have been human once.

Luther hadn't exactly wanted or been prepared to cross this particular bridge today. But as he's sitting there on the bookcase, looking at Sarah looking so confused, and him now facing the prospect of talking about it—

It's somehow easier, this time around. With his siblings, they all knew what he'd once looked like, and so they'd done the double-take upon seeing him again. He'd been crucially, painfully aware of the disjoint between past and present. With anyone else in the world, they had that preconceived notion of what humans were supposed to look like, and on top of that, what Spaceboy was supposed to look like, courtesy the footage and the interviews and the comics and the books. They weren't used to anything like what he'd become.

"You really do take everything in stride," Luther muses, shaking his head a little; not disbelieving, not rejecting her confusion, but finding himself oddly, ruefully fond about it. That complete lack of judgment from Sarah has been refreshing ever since the first day they met. It's been part of what had finally made him trust her enough to take off his jacket around her, and then... well, more than that.

"It was an accident. About four years ago. I almost died on a mission, and our father injected me with a serum to save my life. Had some inadvertent side-effects. Transformed me into..." He waves his hand vaguely, gestures to himself, his outsize proportions, the gorilla physique.

It's still a clipped, abbreviated version of the story. He still can't bring himself to go into it in detail, but at least it's more than he'd managed before with Allison, when each word had felt like it had been wrenched out with pliers, self-loathing, hating every second of it, ending the conversation as soon as he could. He's had some time now, to get readjusted to the idea of people knowing. Figuring out how to phrase it and set the details down in a neat line, how to re-tell it.

"You, on the other hand, internalize and overanalyze everything," she counters with a small smirk. It's hyperbole, but it's not baseless. She perceives him to be that type and he's definitely done that sort of thing once or twice at least, for sure, that she can recall since they met.

As Luther tells his story, Sarah can see that he's a little uncomfortable, but she listens without asking questions until he finishes. Granted, he trails off and the story isn't very detailed, but she does wait it out.

Setting down the comic book, Sarah pushes herself to her feet and moves closer to him, lowering herself to straddle his lap, circling her arms around his neck and giving him a little smile, half-meaning to distract him but also half-intended to comfort him, too, since he looks uncomfortable about the whole conversation.

"Transformed you into this gigantic hunk of yum I so enjoy ravaging every morning and most nights?" she supplies the end of the sentence he hadn't felt inclined to complete. Sarah's attracted to Luther for the person he is right now because this is all she knows. She can't even imagine him with a normally proportioned human body and, when she tries, she's not impressed. She likes how big Luther is. "I happen to like the inadvertent side-effects, darling."

Even after all this time and all the proof, there's still that ripple of surprise that skews through him, his awe reinforced every time Sarah reaffirms how much she very much doesn't mind, how much she even likes him like this. He's always pleasantly surprised. He barely manages to bite back his smile.

"I think 'gigantic hunk of yum' was pretty much verbatim how I was described in a teen magazine once," he says, lightly, his voice mock-thoughtful. There's another flicker of that confidence; it's been low-simmering like a tiny and shriveled flame, but his cockiness occasionally comes back to life, moments like this, as she drapes herself around his neck. Luther sets his books aside and settles his hands on Sarah's hips instead, where she's camped out comfortably in his lap. He's big enough that he really does work pretty well as a human chair (or mattress, those mornings).

"We were, uh, kinda celebrities. If you spot any more merch while we're scavenging, let me know." The twins are alike; Luther's already half-decided he'd like to gather those little souvenirs and reminders for posterity. If anything else of theirs survived the apocalypse, it'd be precious for its rarity.

"Unless it's an action figure of me. That might be a little weird."

There's something satisfying about the way that the simplest reassurance that she's attracted to Luther just the way he is seems to make him smile, however reserved he tries to keep it. She might not ever see it on his face, but she always catches it in his eyes.

Surprised by the humor in his comment, Sarah tilts her head back and laughs. "Well, see? We can't both be wrong," she points out playfully. "Oh my God, mate, I can't even picture you on the cover of a teen magazine. They still have those even in my timeline. 'Five Ways to Make Him Notice You' and an interview with Jericho Jonas," she says, her voice slipping into an impression of an excitable teenaged girl before she tacks on an excited squeal to punctuate it.

Sarah rocks herself in Luther's lap dramatically, bowing her back until she's practically hanging upside down from where she's perched upon him, trusting his hold on her hips and her fingers laced at the back of his neck to keep her from falling, and then rolling back upright again almost as quickly as she'd gone down. "Oh, Spaceboy, I'm your biggest fan!" she mewls playfully before laughing again and drawing him down to meet her halfway when she lifts herself to kiss him, just because she can. He's not the first celebrity she's ever met but to keep herself from thinking about the fact that he might very well be her last, she makes light of the situation to keep the levity in place.

"Oh no, if there's an action figure, I'm having that," she insists, still laughing. "How can I turn down having a tiny little you in my pocket?" she jokes. But then, she settles her laughter lest he think she's laughing at him and not just joking around. "What else might there be, though? I'll keep an eye out for you, my love," she promises, finally letting her hands fall away from him and climbing off him again. Sarah reaches for the comic book and picks it up, brushing some ash off the cover and flipping the pages as she blows at the paper, ridding the book of still more ash and dust. Finally, she holds it out to him. "Here's your Eiffel Tower adventure. I might knick that later to read it proper, though," she warns with a small smile.

"You might be joking, but I used to have a fan club, and I swear you sound exactly like what they sounded like." He's half-laughing, delighted by her delight, but even that mention of a fan club might go some way towards explaining Luther's hangups, his overbearing judgment of his own looks, his fixation on the skin-deep.

But Sarah is effervescent, unburdened by such concerns, and it's contagious: she leans in to kiss him and he meets her halfway, a hand bracketing her jaw as he pushes back with a firm kiss; then his hands slip away when she swings off and walks back across the room. He finds himself already missing the contact, and then being surprised all over again that he can miss it, rather than flee from the touch. (Funny, how things can change.)

He takes the comic book she offers him, adds it to his stack. "I'll need to reread it later, too." We can read it in bed, he almost suggests, but then that shyness manages to clamp its jaws shut again. Instead: "I can tell you the parts they got wrong, or exaggerated, and which were accurate. As for what else there is..."

Luther sweeps his gaze across the room — comic book shops tended to be big on merch — but this one doesn't seem to have anything else for the Academy. "Comic books, trading cards, lunchboxes, action figures. Magazines. Posters. Breakfast cereal, but those are probably all gone by now, they'd be stale."

He's ticking them off on his fingers contemplatively, and as he lists all the various products they'd been blazoned on, it becomes quite apparent just what a big deal the Umbrella Academy was, or at least used to be. They weren't just a superhero team; they were a brand.

"Oh, I believe it," Sarah says with a breathless laugh. "Giant hunk of yum that you are? Of course you had a fan club."

As he ticks off some of the different items of merchandise with the likenesses of he and his siblings, Sarah's eyebrows lift. "Cereal?" she balks and huffs out a laugh. "Mate." It sounds like playful reproach because it mostly is. Cereal is a bit much, if you ask her. She'd have drawn the line at food items. Still, if he'd been a child, she's betting it had been more exciting than off-putting.

Sarah starts to look through the rest of the rubble where she'd found the first comic and she finds another. "Oi," she calls, in case he's moved away when she's had him at her back. Sarah holds the book out to him. "Here's another," she announces as she does, continuing to try to pick through the debris. When, after a few minutes more, she comes up short, Sarah gives up. "Maybe that's all that's left...I don't see more."

Brushing her hands over her backside and then her front, Sarah straightens up again and looks over at him. "Shall we see if they've any bigger books that'll last us longer before we go?" she asks.

"Yeah, that's a good idea. The longer the better for killing time." She already knows that he likes poetry, so it's not that far a leap to imagine that he likes most reading. Another comic for the pile, and she adds it to his stack. Luther continues to add them together, and then he leans down, easily lifts an entire towering bookcase with one hand, like he's just picking up a plank and peering under it. He moves the rubble out of the way, which lets Sarah dip in to rummage some more.

"You said you were too busy to read. Too busy with recovering artefacts lost in time, or stripping, or both? Or just not interested enough?" Not that it's a dealbreaker; he'd been the bookworm of the family, had long-since accepted the fact that once Ben was gone, all the fiction tended to pile up in his own room.

There's so much he wants to know about her, still, this wild creature with her wild adventures that are sometimes even more outlandish and strange than his own. Where Sarah might want to chip away and get under his skin, he wants to crawl inside her head, see how she ticks, learn who she is.

(What a pair they make.)

It's a bit of a shame, as far as Sarah's concerned, that this is a comic book shop and not a regular bookstore which just happened to also have comic books. That way, it would've scratched all the potential itches, she reckons. She's perusing the content of the shelves on the wall closest to her — content which is now all over the floor in completely chaotic disorder — when he reminds her what she'd said about reading and asks why?

Sarah pauses, chewing her bottom lip thoughtfully. She wonders whether he's asking because he's trying to get to know her or if he's trying to call her out for making a lame excuse as to why she hasn't read in a while. Her past experience would suggest the latter but Luther himself makes her lean toward the former.

"Honestly? A little bit of all of the above," she replies after a moment. "Mostly, you'd be surprised how much time travel takes out of you when you do it every day, or even on longer missions, you're still doing it at least monthly. It's a pretty big drain on one's energy, my love, but add that in with the mission work and then compound that with the side jobs because the Agency has brilliant benefits but the pay is shit...it makes it hard for me to focus on doing anything that requires sitting still for more than a few minutes at a time. Excluding, of course, sleeping. I'm a pro at that," she explains with a small smile.

Sarah takes a deep breath and picks up another comic book depicting a dark-haired woman in a pink dress and bright yellow gloves holding a mop. She can't tell whether the splatters on the cover are part of the art or if they're burn marks and the title of the thing is no help because the corner of the book is burned down enough that what's left over only reads dy ller. Giving a facial shrug, she holds onto it anyway; the woman on the cover is cute.

"I've got all the time in the world now, though, so there's no better time than the present to get back into it," she finishes, looking over her shoulder at him briefly before turning her focus back to pick up more comics with the cute woman on the cover. Lady Killer is the title, Sarah realizes when she finds another, less damaged copy. "May have to switch to non-fiction. When I was a kid, I read comics and fiction all the time, but now I've been on so many of my own brilliant adventures, I'm not sure if anything else would hold up very well, especially from this millennium..."

Sarah turns to face him, an armful of Lady Killer comics pressed to her chest. "Except yours, of course. I know one of the people in them, so that'll be more interesting anyway." She pauses. "What do you like to read, love? Besides poetry, since I already know that."

"Could be worse. My brother said the Commission had terrible pay and terrible benefits."

When Sarah pulls out the other comics and gathers her new find, he catches a glimpse of the cover and arches an eyebrow. The A-line dress, the pearls, the coiffed hair, the rubber gloves, like something out of the 1950s. It reminds him of Mom — just minus the gore.

As she talks about having all the time in the world, Luther huffs a small laugh. "There's a Twilight Zone episode— wait, have you ever heard of The Twilight Zone? I guess it'd be too old — anyway, the episode's called Time Enough at Last. It's about a bookworm who keeps getting interrupted and he never has the time to sit down and do all the reading he'd like. Until the world's destroyed with an H-bomb, and he's left entirely alone. He's about to lose hope completely, until he realises he finally has enough time to read every book. But then he accidentally breaks his glasses and he can't read anymore."

The corner of Luther's mouth twitches. "It's pretty much my worst nightmare."

For so many reasons. A wife who asks him to read poetry to her, but it turns out she's mocking him; she's inked over all the lines, she rips out the pages.
A man almost killing himself from the sheer empty solitude. A revolver to his head.
It's too close to home, now. A young Luther, first watching that episode in some of the precious time allowed for leisure at the Academy, had had no way of knowing how painfully close that premise would eventually become.

"—Anyway. I'll read anything I can get my hands on, honestly. I still always liked science fiction. Plus pulpy stuff, like ray guns and hardboiled noir and Westerns. I had to read a lot of nonfiction for the Academy, but the narrative nonfiction was my favourite because it read more like a story. Stuff about World War II. Anything."

Despite the fact that they're ostensibly in 2019, Luther's tastes sound oddly old-fashioned, his hobbies skewing decades older than he ought to be (like, in fact, he's modelling himself after a certain Reginald Hargreeves). And he's the most talkative whenever she can get him onto a topic like this; like when he talked about poetry, it seems like he just opens up, some of that more youthful enthusiasm breaking through the stoicism for once.

Edited 2020-08-12 22:30 (UTC)

"Gross," Sarah complains on his brother's behalf. "You reckon that's why he broke all of space and time?" she asks loftily, looking over at him with a ghost of a grin that suggests that, yes, she's still fucking bitter, but also...come on, that was a good joke, wasn't it? It was a little funny, at least.

To his question about the Twilight Zone, Sarah shakes her head. Whatever it is, it doesn't ring a bell. But then Luther goes on to explain it and when he finishes, Sarah grimaces. "Yikes, yeah if that's not bad luck, I dunno what is," she sympathizes with the character's plight.

In spite of herself, she laughs a little when he mentions liking pulpy things like ray guns. "You must've nearly shit yourself when you saw my laser gun go off," she says, grinning and stepping over to him after successfully navigating over the debris on the floor.

"What's World War II?" she asks, thoughtfully. If he tries to explain, she'll find she does, in fact, know it, but the fact that it was a war on Earth thousands of years ago means that it goes by another name in her time. Most of the war itself is just one of the Ancient Earth Wars, but the thing she'll recognize the most is the Holocaust. That's a fixed point in time, so she knows it well. Better than she'd like to, having been sent there to retrieve a lost history textbook from the 2110s. Sarah shivers at the memory. It's the only time a mission has ever made her cry.

Luther can't decide if that's reassuring or distressing, the fact that the world war hasn't ranked highly enough in the span of history to be remembered with the same chilling immediacy it has in his time. Then again, Sarah wasn't born on Earth, and comes from so many millennia distant; naturally it makes sense that time would've moved on by then. And she's only drifted in and out of the Earth that he knows, a fish dipping into the shoals, darting through the timeline rather than settling in it long-term.

So he bundles up the books under his arm, and he explains. Holds up the volume of Maus he'd picked up, as frame of reference. And once the recognition lights in her face, that ripple of a shudder down her spine, Luther nods a little grimly. Considers asking if she's ever gone there; doesn't, in the end. Changes the angle slightly instead:

"What's your favourite time period to visit? Out of all the ones you've been to." A beat, his gaze darting over her shoulder to the empty street outside. "Obviously this one ranks pretty low."

A part of Sarah is worried that Luther will follow up her recognition of the war with a question about whether she's ever been and, quite frankly, she doesn't want to discuss the horrible things she saw when she'd been there. She definitely doesn't want to admit to the fact that she'd been there on a mission to make sure that it didn't end early because she knows that it means to someone outside the Agency that she'd been there to ensure the suffering and death of millions of innocent people. Her loyalty has always been to the Agency and she likes to think that Luther would understand that if anyone ever could, but not having to risk it is better.

The question he does pose earns him a surprised look. "Oooh," she coos, looking thoughtful. To his addendum, Sarah laughs. "I dunno, it could be worse," she points out. "I could be alone. Or you could be hideous." Sarah smirks at him to let him know that's a joke. "It's not in my bottom five; I've been way worse times and places."

Sarah takes a deep breath and hums thoughtfully as she considers. "I dunno if I can pick a favourite, but I did like the 2000s when I visited. Actually, it's pretty brilliant being around on New Years Eve for the millennial changeover. I've been to three of those," she says proudly. "1999 to 2000, 4999 to 5000, and 5999 to 6000. Maybe those could be my top three. The energy is just incredible on those nights, yeah? Right, you were there for 1999 to 2000, yeah? You must know the feeling. There's an electricity in the air like something magic is about to happen."

Moving closer to him, Sarah looks outside. "It's getting dark...d'you reckon it's going to rain...?" she asks, frowning slightly. The idea of rain is actually appealing, just not so much when they've got a little bit of walking to do to get back to the car. She'd love to have an excuse for the two of them to stop scavenging early and lay in bed reading their respective comics together instead.

There's a small queasy turn in his stomach, realising the gap his answer is probably going to hint at. Luther's mostly been able to hide the true extent of his sheltered past — projecting the image (accurately enough) that he was a workaholic, like her, but maybe not as dysfunctionally isolated as he actually was.

"I haven't been to any new year's eve parties, actually. I was ten for the millennium. I can't remember what we did, but we probably just spent the night in training." It had been a day like any other, spent in endless training and hankering for the day that they could finally be unveiled as a team and sink their teeth into real villains. Nothing else particularly special about the night, despite the entire rest of the world holding their breath for it. Reginald hadn't cared, and so neither had his children.

Once they're standing shoulder-to-shoulder and looking back out through the empty doorway (the shop's door long-since-gone), Luther eyes the dark, stormy clouds overhead. He clicks his tongue thoughtfully, then moves away to duck into the back office. Goes rummaging around for something he'd spotted earlier—

And eventually emerges with a slightly crumpled umbrella. It's a faded blue, not Academy-branded, that'd be far too much of a coincidence to ask for, but: "Appropriate, right?" Luther says, with a small grin, unfolding the umbrella and chivalrously holding it open over her head. Feeling, for a moment, like a schoolboy walking a girl home in the rain, sheltering their books.

"It might be enough to get us back and protect the comics."

Sarah considers, nodding. She takes his point with no argument. Surely a ten-year-old wouldn't have been at a New Years Eve party, anyway, even if he hadn't been spending his time training to be a superhero. "Sometimes I forget that time was linear for you," she confesses, letting it go with little more conversation on that point.

Though, as she stands beside him, looking outside and wondering how far they can get before they end up soaked to the bone with nary a working clothes dryer to save them, Sarah finds herself thinking for probably the thousandth time just how badly she wishes she could get them out of here. She'd take him to see anything; everything. Sarah wants to take Luther to everywhere and everywhen, but here they stay stranded on Earth End.

Her head turns to watch him when Luther wanders away suddenly and she snorts out a laugh when he holds up the crumpled umbrella. "Brilliant," she agrees, grinning. There's no bloody way they'll both fit under the thing, even if it was in mint condition. She still thinks it's sweet of him, though, when he opens it and holds it over her head. "Here's hoping. We'd better get a move on, though, before the sky opens up and dumps all over us."

"Point. We've got enough for now, anyway."

And tucking the entirety of his finds back under his arm, politely holding the umbrella out over their heads (mostly hers) with his other hand, Luther starts walking alongside her as they start making their way back down the empty, abandoned roads and back to their car. It's just a small drizzle at first, a subtle mist in the air while they walk and talk — he asks for more information on the new years' eve parties, in interest, and she describes the 6000 millennia-change in lurid detail (he blushes a little at of what she got up to). The umbrella does its job, mostly, of keeping Sarah's head and clothes dry.

But then the rain starts coming down harder.

And harder.

The water's sloughing off the protective fabric now, rolling down his arm and soaking his sleeve. It's mostly just annoying, at first, because at least it's still protecting her and the comics. He has just enough time to wistfully miss Sir Reginald Hargreeves' iconic umbrella: this one's cheaply-made and with a plastic handle, rather than the water-resistant polyester bound with cotton twill he remembers, the heavy curved tulipwood. It had been a beast of a thing, exquisitely well-made and solid and expensive. It had weathered so many storms.

"I think the sky's about to—" Luther starts.

And then this umbrella crumples. Just collapses in on itself, dropping a bucketload of water on both of them as the skies open up, and Luther yelps in shock and immediately shoves the comics into the neck of his shirt, clutching them protectively to his chest as he just starts running, with Sarah breaking into a sprint beside him too, the both of them getting drenched.

At first, Sarah thinks they're actually going to make it with no problem. The drizzle isn't too bad and they're able to take their time, discussing the 6000 millennia-change party she'd attended and all of the salacious details that go with it. Sarah secretly makes it her goal to see how dark a shade of crimson she can make Luther blush and is a little pleased with herself at the result by the time she's done telling the story.

They're still a little way from the car when the rain starts coming down in earnest and she finds herself still more endeared by the way that he makes sure that umbrella fully covers her and he takes the hit. That, too, is not too bad, but then as Luther is pointing out that he thinks they may be just about to experience a real and true downpour, the umbrella gives way, surprising a scream out of Sarah when she's suddenly drenched in ice-cold rain that had been building up on the top of the crap umbrella he'd found.

Laughing when Luther yelps, too, Sarah takes off along with him, her head down and her own comics pressed to her chest in her best attempt to shield them from the rain.

When they make it back to the car, she's soaked to the bone and so are her comics, or at least the one on the outside is. Her hair hangs saturated and limp against her head, clothes soaked through and clinging to her skin and when she drops into the passenger seat of the car, closing the door, Sarah bursts out laughing again as Luther joins her. He looks like she feels; drowned rats, the both of them. They're already soaked, so what? Fuck it.

"Put the comics down, and come back out. I haven't played in the rain since I was a bloody kid. We're already wet, so what's the difference?" she asks, making the decision as suddenly as the words come from her mouth. Sarah exits the car again, laughing and smiling open-mouthed at the sky as she tilts her head back and closes her eyes. This is the first shower with any decent water pressure that she's had in...entirely too bloody long, and it feels brilliant, cutting the heat and humidity away and leaving a soft breeze and the comfortable chill of the rain on her skin.

Whistling a little tune to herself, Sarah suddenly prances away from the car into a slightly more open space, bopping around like an energetic child. She's dancing in the rain to a tune she can't even fully recall, and it's liberating in a way she never would've thought it might be. "Luther! Come dance with me!" she calls out, arms outstretched toward him, haltering her whistling only long enough to do exactly that.

He stays seated in the car for a few moments, leaning over to peer out incredulously through the open passenger door where he can see her whirling and prancing. His expression is skeptical at first, the man hunkered inside the car for measly shelter (as always, it looks too small for him, his head grazing the ceiling if he doesn't hunch a little).

But Sarah shouts at him, and seems to be having fun, and she's right, they are drenched already—

Luther peels the comics loose and sets them carefully in the dashboard, where they stand a slightly better chance of drying out, and then as an afterthought shrugs out of his damp coat as well; it'll take forever to dry, might as well not make it any worse. And then he climbs back out of the car, boots sinking into the rapidly-developing mud, as he walks over to join her. His walk is slow and steady compared to Sarah's energetic sort-of-dancing, but the rain's coming down hard, plastering his short blond hair to his skull and making it look darker, and his clothes are glued to his body, carving out a clearer impression of his body than he's ever allowed in daylight.

(And despite himself, his gaze sinks to where Sarah's shirt has become incredibly transparent: he can see the dip of her navel, the curve of her collarbone, the outline of her bra as if she isn't wearing a shirt at all.)

"I promise you, you don't want to see what counts as me dancing," he says, but he looks bemused, biting back amusement.

A part of her is certain that Luther's not actually going to join her at all and, well, she supposes that's his loss. But he surprises her by appearing outside the car, having shucked off his wet coat. That surprises her, too, actually, even though it's the practical thing to have done. In spite of the number of times that she's seen him naked by now, Luther is still incredibly protective of his body, especially in the light where he can actually be seen. That's a shame, she reckons, since she'd really love to see more of him more often. She understands the self-consciousness, though, even though she's grateful that she can't relate to it at all.

Spinning in the air as she leaps up, arms spread slightly and raised to the sky, Sarah makes sure she'll be facing him when she hits the ground again, mud splashing up beneath her feet which, if he looks, he'll notice are now bare; the sneakers she found in one of the houses they squatted in and she's been wearing since turned upside down so that the soles are facing the sky.

"Come on, my love," she laughs, holding her arms out to him again, opening and closing her hands in excitable beckoning gestures toward him. "No one's here. No one cares. It's fun, Luther, you know what that is, yeah? Fun?" The last word is punctuated when she jumps up and lands again, splashing more mud around like a gleeful child might in a puddle.

I think we're alone now, there doesn't seem to be anyone around, Luther thinks, an echo of a refrain and a memory humming through his head, and he considers the capering Englishwoman in front of him.

Because. Really. What she doesn't actually realise is that there is something like that, buried deep beneath the topsoil of that stoic facade: the childish, exuberant dancing that he can break into when the doors are closed and nobody else can see (or, when he's out of his mind inebriated and inhibitions dropped). So the corner of Luther's mouth twitches with a smile he can't quite repress.

"Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you," he says, and then—

It's not exactly the light carefree footloose jumping thing Sarah's doing; he's still too big for that, too slow, but after another ponderous pause where the rain just keeps trickling down his neck and into his shoes, Luther slowly breaks into the absolute dumbest dance to distract himself from his soggy boots. At first it's just fists clenched and pumping arms, and then the shoulders and kicking knees get in on it: just him bopping along to whatever imaginary music they're not hearing, while Sarah jumps and twirls.

And then, oh dear god, there's the the crab move.

for ltbrownnoser.

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there will be much samefacing til pay day, sorry bruh lol

at least it's a gorg face!!

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