luther "the big shy one" hargreeves | #00.01 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
obediences) wrote2019-03-08 12:15 am
obediences) wrote2019-03-08 12:15 amEntry tags:
for ltbrownnoser.
for
obediences) wrote2019-03-08 12:15 am
ltbrownnoser.
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Shockingly, Sarah doesn't actually look fazed at all by his comment of his brother having already done it. That's how time travel works, of course. How his brother did it is the question, not whether he could.
So when he shoots a look over to her as though he's waiting for her to call him — or the declaration — crazy, she just lifts her eyebrows to prod him to go on.
"Mmm, not past the fixed point. To it," she corrects him. "It's complicated with fixed points. Some last seconds, some can last for a century. Earth End started with the moon exploding — or so I heard — but it doesn't end until closer to 2300 when the planet implodes. They sell tickets to watch it happen. Sounds fucked, doesn't it? The future is shit," she says. "Not as shit as this, but still."
In any case, Luther's point stands. If his brother can have survived for thirty years in this hellscape, then she and Luther can make it at least half as long, given that now the supplies will have to be split where his brother was only, presumably, one person.
She shakes her head though. "He can't come back. Or move forward. He'll be stuck right wherever he is until the Vortex is fixed if it ever is. It's not technology, it's literally the fabric of space and time. It allows for little tears letting people with the tech to jump through time do so. With it out of commission, you can't. Maybe you'll have tech that'll permit spatial jumping by way of particle breakdown and accelerated reassembly but you can't do it through the Vortex which is the fastest, safest way. We're stuck, darling. We just are. So we make the best of it."
She sighs, not particularly liking that, either.
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But one detail does stand out.
"So what if it's... not tech?" he says slowly. "I mentioned superpowers earlier. His was spatial jumps. He could manipulate time and space, jump through it with a thought. He was in the middle of saving us, transporting us through time, getting us away from the moment the moon collides with the Earth. Which worked, just. Not the way any of us expected."
His faith in Five is still strong, even today. Luther had expected to open his eyes somewhere in the past, maybe back before their father's funeral, hand-in-hand with all the rest of the Academy— not breathing dust and ash on his own in a barren world. Five must have lost track of them somewhere, like what Sarah had warned him: You don't want to fall, mate, I'll never bloody find you if you do, so hold tight.
What he doesn't realise, though, is that he just handed Sarah a possible explanation for how and why the entire fabric of space-time just got put through a cosmic blender.
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She sighs a little bit. Luther's faith in his brother is something with which Sarah can't really identify anymore, but she can at least understand and appreciate it. As much as she hates to fault it, she—
Wait.
"Hang on," she says, holding up a hand. "What do you mean it worked but just not the way you expected? I was in the middle of a jump for a mission and I got dumped out here when the Vortex glitched."
Sarah's eyes narrow as she puts the pieces together. "Do you mean to tell me," she starts, moving a few steps closer to Luther and standing up straighter, "that this is your lot's fault? You broke the Vortex and trapped me on Earth End until probably bloody forever? That was you lot?! Because, what, your brother didn't know what the fuck he was doing, or what?!" Her voice isn't shrill, but the anger is pretty clear.
"There is a reason we train for years before we make a time jump and there is a reason we mostly only do it solo. Are you bloody telling me that you lot just...decided you wanted to change the future, so you just did it without a permit or any forethought of what kind of heinous domino effect you might cause by doing it?"
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He's got a foot and three inches on her, but Sarah's still storming right up to him, which means he has to tilt his head more to look down at the woman as she fumes. His hands settle awkwardly in his pockets for lack of anywhere else to put them, as he weathers her rising anger; like a rocky promontory in the sea, a storm lashing its sides.
"Who needs a permit to save the world?" Luther scoffs; not angry himself, his temper's too slow-boil for that, but he sounds incredulous. "We did what we had to do to get out of there. It was only his third time moving through time. He did his first jump at thirteen, untrained."
It's not quite clear whether this is an excuse for Number Five's lack of practice and fucking it up, or pride in what he'd accomplished to begin with — it might be a mix of both.
"It was either jump with six people in tow or let us all die in that fire. So he jumped. It worked, as in he got us away from it. But we were trying to go to the past, to have another shot at averting the apocalypse. We were supposed to all be together. I wasn't supposed to wind up here, in the future."
There's something pent-up in Luther's chest, a heaviness weighing him down. He's too-aware of their failures and deficiencies, how they'd set out to the world only to break it instead — like being handed a precious vase and dropping it on the floor. They'd had one job, as far as he was concerned, and they'd failed it.
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It's probably best that Sarah's not privy to the fact that Luther's brother worked for an organization not too terribly unlike the Time Agency because that would alert her to the fact that he'd have known that the apocalypse was always going to happen on this planet and this time and that nothing he could do was ever going to stop it, not really. Put it off, maybe, for a few days or a week, but not stop it.
In fact, the only thing that has her stepping away again and trying to regain her cool is the assumption that these self-proclaimed superheroes are little more than civilian aliens raised to think that they're humans and that they're just special rather than from other humanoid species entirely thus explaining their uncanny abilities. Trapped in a wasteland for their mistakes or not, it isn't Sarah's place to force an existential crisis on Luther and she won't. But she's thinking it, all the same. The arrogance of Americans will never cease to amaze her, though, that's for bloody sure.
"Well, fat lot of good that did, trying to jump seven people through a tear in the universe large enough to fit two, at most. Now we're all stuck wherever we are, so...great."
Sarcasm is still heavy on her lips but she shakes her head, closing her eyes and clenching her jaw to keep from saying anything else that would, at this point, be little more than intentionally hurtful just to even the score of the blow he's just landed on her with the news that this was no random glitch in the Vortex or an accident. This was he and his siblings deciding that they know better than the universe and actively trying to change the future, even though any idiot with even a passing interest in the idea of time travel knows that meddling with the past in an effort to change the future never ends well. This was Luther and his siblings intentionally breaking time because they were arrogant — or perhaps stupid enough — to think that they could play God with it.
Sarah takes a deep breath, opens her mouth to finally speak, thinks better of it and closes it once more, and finally shakes her head again, lifting a hand as if to stop either or both of them from saying anything beyond the, "forget it," that she utters more to herself than to him.
Then, she turns on her heel and starts to stalk off angrily. Right, she's just going to have to survive on her own because now she knows that this bloke is part of a team that fancies themselves somehow invincible to the laws of space and time, never mind common sense, and that makes him a liability. The idea of trying to survive on her own in this is anything but appealing, but she tells herself it'll be safer that way.
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(Because only the entire world could be worth it. Could be worth those decisions. Could be worth suffocating his own little sister and locking her in a cage.)
Eventually, though, he clamps down his jaw and tries not to say more, tries not to dig his grave any deeper just as Sarah tries to get her own anger under control. Luther exhales slowly, tries to press all that frustration down and bottle it up (as he's done for thirty years, as he's always done).
But it is, frankly, typical that the Umbrella Academy would be invincible to common sense. They were taught to see themselves as gods, above the common rabble — they were raised by a meddling manipulative egomaniac to think they're better than the average human civilian. An inflated sense of their own importance, weaned on flashing camera bulbs and an adoring public. Of course they thought they could change the course of an entire timeline, drag fate off its rails and redirect it.
"Hey," Luther says out loud as she starts marching silently away. Then, when Sarah doesn't answer him: "Hey. Where are you going?"
Before he's even fully thought about it, he's already stomping after, trailing Sarah not entirely unlike a lost puppy. (It's instinctive, automatic, and he hasn't even fully articulated the decision to himself before his feet are already moving: all he knows is that he can't be alone again.)
"We can't split up."
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Hearing him call after her, Sarah ignores him, rolling her eyes. But when he presses on, Sarah stops and rounds on him. "The fuck do you care?" she asks. "Your brother will be back to help you go on saving the world, right? You don't need me or my tech."
Her eyebrows lift, challenging him to try to tell her what to do and he doesn't disappoint.
"Oh no?" she asks, huffing an incredulous laugh. "They've thanked me for my service; that's a send-off, darling, so that means I'm no longer military so I'm no longer obligated to protect civilians. I'm going to look out for number one and I don't mean you," she says flatly before adding, "so watch me."
And with that, she turns from him again to start off again. Pride has gotten the best of her; Sarah has no idea where she's going or what the plan might be. Honestly, as much of a liability as he will probably be, he would also admittedly be an asset, she just isn't willing to concede to that anymore. If he persists, she'll eventually wear down when she cools off, but for now, her temper flare has left reason on somewhat shaky ground. She stumbles slightly on debris, swears, and makes her way to the road she sees up ahead. If nothing else, that'll lead somewhere. Where is anyone's guess, but at least she knows that it's meant to transport people from one place to another, so if she follows it long enough, she's liable to find something of use.
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As she keeps going, he keeps following: stepping easily over rubble, occasionally clambering a little, but easily keeping pace with his long legs. He realises in a distant sort of way that it's almost darkly funny, that they'd go from being complete strangers, to arguing, to him helplessly following her like there's a leash running taut between Sarah Sanders and Luther Hargreeves and it keeps dragging him after.
But he simply can't be alone again.
He doesn't say anything more for now, though, just keeps walking after that blonde figure (her shoulders set, swearing). Luther's starting to sift through the tools in his toolkit and deciding, in a roundabout way, to deal with her like he does Diego. Let that whiplash anger burn itself out if it can.
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Frankly, it's infuriating that she can hear him just following her and if she weren't a better person, she'd have pulled her gun on him just to get the fucking point across. She's had that level of reaction trained out of her by the military years ago.
Almost an hour later, she's got to give it to the guy, he's a persistent little bugger. When Sarah has to stop and sit down because her legs feel a bit like jelly — she's a bit more out of shape than she'd realized, evidently — he's still trailing after her like a stray dog waiting for her to drop a scrap or something particularly tasty. She's too tired to keep shouting at him. Instead, she just looks up at him with her expression flat with the expression of her eyebrows both lifted.
"What." It isn't a question.
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When Sarah looks up at him, he doesn't miss a beat in answering: "We can't split up."
Stolid as a boulder and just as implacable, as if the past hour hasn't happened at all. As if nothing's changed at all. Before that aggravating repetition might risk annoying her, though, Luther adds wearily, "Or, well, we can. But speaking from experience, I can tell you that solitude gets to you after a while. It's not fun and it's not healthy. And besides, two sets of eyes are better than one."
He's spent the past hour considering what angle to take with her, and in the end, he leans on the practicality of it, the pragmatic considerations, in the hopes that that'll break through and convince her. And that mention of solitude was carefully-phrased, as vague as he could make it, so it could mostly sound like he was just referring to the last few weeks and not anything longer.
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He doesn't disappoint. Sarah frowns and heaves a long-suffering sigh. He's right, of course, but that doesn't make it any less appealing in her state of frustration.
For a long moment, Sarah just looks back at him. When she finally speaks, she sounds too tired to be angry. "I'm still angry," she warns him, even though she doesn't sound it at all. Emotionally, she's a little too drained to have any bite left. That could change, but for now, he's got that in his favor.
"There's bound to be something on this road sooner or later, but if you already know the road, I'm open to suggestions on whether to keep going in this direction or turn around," she offers almost grudgingly.
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"I don't know what's ahead, but there isn't much behind, either. There should be a big warehouse store a couple miles over that way, though." He jerks a thumb in the direction of north. "Do you know how to hotwire cars? Some of them are still running. If we can get one running, we can head out there, pick up what food we can, then start looking for well-situated shelter."
Talking logistics, making plans, all of it is just so comfortingly familiar that Luther realises a moment later that it's something of a comfort blanket. Falling back into strategising, building an approach for the mission they've found themselves in (even if it's not a mission at all). Just having someone to bounce those thoughts off is a relief, too. It's already an improvement over the last few weeks.
He shifts his weight from foot-to-foot, a little restlessly. There's an apology on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn't even know where to begin—
So he doesn't. Instead: "Ready to go?"