Showoff, he says, but it's not the voice of Number One admonishing her. The voice that stills her spine the same way the hand that too quickly finds her arm or her shoulder stops her from taking those always too fast steps, those first too sharp retorted words, most often at their father, but not only at him. The first one he does with everyone who steps out of line, and the second almost only with her.

(A fact that the others don't miss, any more than the fact it works on her,
when there's every likelihood nothing else might, except him, just as well.)

No. This is lightly chiding, maybe even just barely amused under being distracted. Allison sat down as Luther moved to make her space without being asked or lightly swatted with the magazine first. She curled one leg under her and left hanging, a foot on the floor. She's looking at the nail polish, even as she says the word as easily as though she were reciting facts, "I could tell myself just to know how to perfectly crack a man's jaw, too."

Her gaze raises with a calculated flick and a smirk at him over the top of his pages. "But where would the fun in that be."

If Allison flouted whatever rules Allison decided to before her father snapped her hand in the cage of whatever harder punishment each time, but she hadn't missed those lessons any more than One or Two. Rumor, witch, cheater. She could have changed a lot more things than the ones she let herself. All of them knew that. But she wouldn't have earned them in the same sense. There was a difference between winning and finishing the game by remaking the board.

There was a different feeling knowing she'd done something with her hands and not just her powers.
Allison started shaking the tube, though distractedly, her head tilting to read the title on the spine of his book. "Unless you have a better idea."