for numberthree.

[obediences]

And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.

Comments

[numberthree]

Allison can't, for the life of her, check the delightedly, conspiratorial smile that grows as he falls into step with her deadpan humor-threat and thread, with his agreement about the logistical nightmare of annoying real-world facts, and how no ones got the time for that kind of nonsense or taking care of people having agast opinions and weak-willed trauma reactions.

There's a shrug of those very bare shoulders and blase sort of impatient-patience that touches her expression even as she doesn't stop herself from saying the first thing that comes to mind this time either. "The men of Hollywood. Utter sweethearts with no clue how to get up the ladder, or irredeemable shits who see no one on it but themselves."

It's absolute hyperbole, but there's a larger core of truth to it, too.

Blithely, she adds. "I guess you're stuck with me now."

"Unless you are headed out soon."
Given his comment about the Governor.

She's too good at this for her good, even as she asks it, without a question, in the same conversational tone. There's an unflinchingness in not hiding from juggernauting those words out right after the first ones. Not clinging like a child to some stupid, desperate hope (that he might be, might stay, might just play along for even longer than two minutes), and not looking at the light to be able just to be prepared for whatever's coming after this moment she stole. He doesn't owe her anything.

(Not that it stops her wanting it all the same.
From hoping despite the brutal realism.)

[obediences]

It's coquettish (flirtatious?), but her words still catch like they're trapped in his throat. Stuck with me, she says, as if being stuck with her is something awful. An inconvenience, a blight on his time, as if it's something he hasn't been wanting and craving and desperately missing for the past two years. An undefinable something flickers across Luther's face, too quick to catch, but also too quick for him to suppress it either — he has his moments, but he isn't anywhere near the actor that she is.

The pause goes on just a heartbeat too long before Luther's able to reassemble some semblance of the banter, steady out his voice when he says: "I could think of worse fates than being stuck with you."

A tilt of a shoulder, a half-shrug. "And I'm here all night, so I'm all yours." And then, because he can't help but tack on the relevant information and relay the stakes and tell her and maybe, in one small way, prevent the party from whisking her away from him again— Luther's eyes remain steady on hers, his voice now serious as he adds: "My flight's not until tomorrow morning."

It's more time than either of them thought or expected to have with each other today (which had been nil), but it's still a cold hard dose of reality. An expiration date. An awareness that, Cinderella-like, there will be a time when this ball eventually has to end—

But for now. He's hers.

[numberthree]

She catches it. Or more precisely, she catches the something in his expression that is almost something, and then just as quickly isn't anything at all. If she didn't know him better, she'd have written it off, in anyone else, as momentarily caught in thought, but Luther was more in control of himself than most people ever had to be. Which made it something. Dread tightens like a boulder suddenly took over the whole of her stomach like she had overstepped beyond the necessity of help after he already stepped up to the plate because he had no choice other than to be forced into it, when he still doesn't speak right after it.

But then his words, when they do come, belay it, making her smile a little lopsided. Even as that knot unknots itself only to knot up again, something sudden too aware of time. Of both having it, and the existence of a clock counting down, sand falling through an hourglass, to however long is left of this event.

"Me, too. Aside from basically needing to stay the duration, and all this--"

Allison let one hand raised to gesture generally at the crowd, that had kept her so long, that kept calling her name, pulling her away, to be teaming with more and more faces no matter how many you passed, or greeted, or stopped for. That might not stop even for this fluke in a million.

"--I'm probably pretty freed up from anymore work while here."

[obediences]

It's a sudden lightening of the load, like a deep and constant pressure on his chest has abruptly lessened, leaving him more able to breathe. Probably pretty freed up. "No glamorous afterparties to go to?" he asks, gently, perhaps with a touch of wistfulness, but there's still that small smile curling at the edge of his mouth. Suddenly they have the evening, the whole damn evening, and it's so much more than they've ever had before— even after spending close to two decades under the same roof, they'd never had free time like this, free to choose and do what they like with it—

And now that they have that freedom, Luther realises he doesn't know what to do with it. He clears his throat, glances over her to the large doorway leading to the exhibit.

"You wanna give me the tour?" he asks. Despite the fact that he has the blueprints memorised, the mental map of the museum sitting in his skull like an illuminated diorama. It's not the same. It's not the same as being able to stroll, leisurely, through these semi-darkened hallways (they're murky for this premiere, intimate, not the full blazing light once this place opens for real), with Allison's arm looped through his, and her pointing out whatever things they'd pointed out for her on her private walkthrough.

The curator he was speaking to earlier could probably give him a more knowledgeable, in-depth rundown of the place;

but that isn't, however, who he really wants to hear from right about now.

[numberthree]

Allison is half-tempted to roll her eyes at the light teasing at her expense, but dear god, she doesn't even want to invoke the devil by the chance of putting it on her lips. Because there are so very many all too real ways she could get invited to one, or more than one, by those it would be easy to turn down and by at least two people she still really shouldn't turn down asking for anything tonight.

Even as it collides with the thought that Allison viscerally doesn't want that, because she wants to sleep before she murders someone without stopping herself, Luther is asking that second question. And she's, suddenly equally sure, she doesn't want to sleep at all. Ever.

She doesn't want to lose a minute of this impossible thing to closing her eyes.
She doesn't want anyone to demand it from her suddenly, and to have to give into it.

"I'm surprised you haven't made it inside." There's a tilt of her head, turning the earlier painful irony of the surprise striking too deep in her chest, into something she can toss right back at him as a confided joke. "Or that they didn't make you pose for pictures under the main sign, since it might as well be named for you."

It's easier throwing it at him, light and trite, amused than it felt like the universe had needed to throw it at her like a brick. "Let's go, then, Space. I wouldn't want to be the next person to keep you from--" With a flourish of her raised free hand, as though the movement of her hand across the empty air in front of them was passing over the title floating there, or the idea inside of it. "--The Future."

There's a lilt on several of those words that leans into the title pieces, too, though it really does little more than making her pleased with herself and entirely amenable to just giving up all her circulating to see him through the room he'll understand and recognize more in one circuit than she will in both.

[obediences]

She's smiling and joking and waving her hand and he simply isn't sure how he's supposed to deal with that. Luther can placidly rebuff any end of flirtation from interviewers, reporters, those hyperventilating members of the fan club, the scheduled meet'n'greets, but he is wholly, vastly, unprepared and unarmed for Allison Hargreeves being so winsome and, frankly, cute. Something in his chest seizes, unclenches, at her playful lilt.

But in the end Luther laughs at her joke and the flourish. He takes it entirely seriously and earnestly when he responds: "I was talking to the curator earlier and he told me a bit about it, but then I got stuck out here. Was waiting for the right tour guide, I guess."

They're not touching on any of it: how precious these minutes have suddenly become, how long it's been, how wide that continent-sized space between them has become. Pretending that this is something they do all the time, because that carefully-practiced nonchalance is the only way to get out of this intact.

Let's go, Rumor; he almost echoes, except that isn't her name anymore, she left that behind, so he just starts walking instead. And they swan their way through the now-thinning crowd together, through the doorway into the new wing. And... Well. No wonder that other astronaut from the Canadian Space Agency was invited. Luther pauses in the doorway for a second, struck, before he starts moving again and they make their way further in.

It really is everything. Replicas of older shuttles, spacesuit designs past and present and speculative future, charting the path of mankind working and reworking those specs, iterating, learning, getting better. There is even one corner of a placard dedicated to Spaceboy, with a photo of a younger Luther grinning and giving a thumbsup from the training cockpit, and he stops in front of the poster. A photographer's clamouring and he has to politely excuse himself from Allison's side for a moment — those blue eyes locked on hers, a silent mouthing It'll just be a second — and then he has to go pose in front of himself. Luther's still wearing a winning smile, but only she can detect the faint embarrassment underneath it, like anyone gets when being compared to their childhood photos, except the whole world's seen theirs.

He's back quickly enough, not lingering for questions, and exhaling when he reaches her side again. "You know, Dad was originally the one invited to this?" Luther says, blurting it out suddenly before he can think any better of it. "I'm glad I came instead."

It's still not fully addressing it, everything, all of it, but it's the first hint. A barely-glancing blow.

[numberthree]

He's there, in these quick glimmers. The boy she remembers, the one that it felt like was hers. Stolen from everyone else. Special and singular for so long. Until it wasn't, he wasn't, she wasn't. But there are sudden glimmers that catch her unexpectedly like he should be some other form of person. Someone who isn't that boy. Isn't the boy hidden beyond the white domino mask on the camera's. Isn't the one in those letters, still a mistake turned more hazy dream than reality.

She doesn't quite know who this is.

Except that they keep happening. Those glimmers.

The ease of his laugh and the curl of his smile, right before he answers her with that trained solemn seriousness. That slip of wide-eyed wonder and excitement, all but creating a static around him when he's looking at certain pieces. The embarrassed flicker of fluster, after he's played The Perfect Golden Boy, all suave smile and practiced pose of near a decade now.

Even this. Maybe this most of all. When he suddenly blurts out a confession, and it feels too familiar. Crests an ache in her chest, that makes her pulls her ribs in toward her spine just a little. Too many memories of waiting until they were alone. In the attic. In the living room. In one of their bedrooms. That wall crashing down eventually, where Luther just started expelling words like he'd been holding them in too long and only had seconds to finally admit them before he couldn't again.

It turns her expression soft, unguarded, aching with surprise she tries, and probably fails, to subdue. It tucks her mouth in at a corner impossibly drawing out of her, like a mirror unable to stop a reflection, with a shake of her head, like it's all that much more impossible in the face of that (and the winding relief she's not staring down her father): "I wasn't even in the country eleven hours ago."

It's a strange admission. More real than she likes, as it happens.
Like someone's pulled her strings to orchestra this accident.

[obediences]

Luther's chin snaps to the side at those words, suddenly processing that admission. Understanding clicks and settles over him; another sharp little twinge of relief. "I'd wondered. You said you weren't going to be in town. I thought maybe—"

He's looking vulnerable, equally unguarded, but he still shears off those words, not able to say the rest of that or finish his sentence, that train of thought (even obvious as it is). I thought maybe you didn't want to see me. It's probably revealing too much of his hand.

Which is, in and of itself, such a strange instinct to fall back on when she knew (knows) him by heart, can read most every flicker of expression and shift of mood in him. He's always shown all his cards anyway. And perhaps the more jarring thing is how even two years apart doesn't change that; can't change that, and hasn't. He is still so ceaselessly predictable, steady as the tides. You could set your clock by Luther Hargreeves.

His hands are back in his trouser pockets, trying for nonchalance but revealing bashfulness instead, as they stand between those massive wall panels of lunar photography and true-to-size models. He's not even noticing the rest of the crowd anymore, the other names and faces and people passing by and reading the plaques. Most of them just skim the captions, their eyes just sliding over each piece of paraphernalia and history; Luther, when he goes to museums, reads each placard from start-to-finish.

[numberthree]

Except that he isn't.

He's looking at her with surprised relief, and then.

Then, something Allison doesn't know how to translate. (That's a lie, such a lie, she doesn't want to know if she's right; she does know, as it lingers on his face, making no effort this time to hide it instantly away.) Why does he have to be so much like himself? Everything so starkly familiar, like a page turned back to glance over. Why can't everything about him be different, if that one fundamental thing was?

It would be fairer than her trading sentence ends with his jagged cut-off, and letting the first one roll off her tongue faster than she should let herself, with a slightly pointed raise of eyebrows: "--that I lied?"

The rest is still rolling around in her head, the other, perhaps, half-dozen things she could extricate the immediate cease-fire of words into being. She doesn't want to think it, question, question why she knows, why she knows that she knows (that she knows him, better than breathing, better than leaving).

Even if she looks a little piqued at the almost backward accusation founded by all that space and all that time (two different lives diverged in the woods, and), she can't stop the dice shaking out in her head still.

I thought maybe--

-- you were avoiding me.
-- you didn't want to see me.

-- you haven't forgiven me for what I did.

-- you were only writing back out of guilt or to be polite.
-- you're only standing here because you needed me to solve a problem.

[obediences]

— all of the above.

Luther swallows hard, through a mouth gone dry and woolly, as those three simple words hit their mark like a bullseye. That I lied. That quickfire volley, before she can even rethink and spool them back. There was, after all, a reason that Allison and Diego had always had the quickest tongues, the fastest to their verbal jabs, while Luther just watched their near-squabbling while bemused and exasperated. Even Klaus had run his mouth off far too much, too swift for his own good either. (Perhaps there was a reason, then, that Luther and Vanya had wound up the most quiet and methodical of the lot. Balance in all things.)

But she calls him out on it, and that's part of what he meant, isn't it? I thought maybe you didn't want to see me would mean, ipso facto, that she had lied. Even wallowing in his own self-doubt, Luther would never have directly accused her of it, they'd always been honest to each other, and yet—

"I wasn't sure what to think," he admits, quietly. Accidentally circling closer to this thing, this unspoken yawning gulf between them, the black hole that would swallow them both. The years gone by. The wondering if they even had any claim to each other anymore.

"I wasn't expecting to see you here, or even in the country at all— and then I glanced across the room and there you were, looking..." The corner of his mouth twitches, rueful. "Well. Looking like you do. I wasn't prepared."

He could never be prepared.

[numberthree]

She's always been the one with the sharpest temper. The most exacting words. Only Diego kept up with her in that way, but even Diego kept his mouth in check around their father, instead of the way Allison honed herself on not holding back there. Which makes it a miracle that Allison manages not to point out immediately that if one of them was lying, it'd never been her. Her mouth presses a little too hard, and maybe there it is—the first sanded edge of Number Three.

A world that finally managed to teach her to hold her tongue. Sometimes.
That her insubordination and insolence would cost more in this world.
That she didn't have the time to rumor everyone she lost it at.

Or. And. That she knows. Deeper down than she wants to admit when it'd be easy to take that flare of annoyance and keep it pure. White-hot. Even as it's already fleeing her, dissipating back, and she knows what she's always known. Luther never lied to her. He changed his mind at the last minute, but he hadn't lied before then, and he hadn't lied then either. He just chose something else instead of her. Long enough ago, it's embarrassing to feel stung on it suddenly.

The compliment doesn't entirely go amiss, even if it's not Hollywood smooth.
Maybe that makes it harder to ignore what she can on every other mouth.

(Has been since the magazines started showcasing her at thirteen.
The only girl. Have a gold star and a big spotlight, darling.)

There's something doubtful and yet forcing patience, when she turns to look at the strange planet crawler robot with its large wheels that's next as the group in front of them ambled on finally. She can't remove the stain of feeling like she's having to defend herself, even as she's offering it because it wasn't like it wasn't a surprise for both of them. She never thought she'd be headed home today when she went to bed yesterday.

"I was supposed to be gone another three days. Maybe longer. They said to clear a week and a half at the outset. But we got done early with all the secondary tier scenes, and the retakes, so they sent a good number of us home this morning."

Beat. Just letting her mouth make sound and sense of something else.
"Probably better for the budget than putting us up until everyone finished."

[obediences]

It is, in the end, a defense from her after all, even if he hadn't meant for it to come out that way, like the world's gentlest interrogation. But Luther's exactly where he said he was going to be (even if he didn't, precisely, tell her what was pulling him to LA or where the itinerary was putting him). At least Allison's comment is couched in wry aside, though, wreathed in softer edges by the end of it, the explanation, the mild joke.

"Makes sense," he says, even as his own claim sounds and feels inane to his ears. Luther has no idea what a secondary tier scene is, so he has no way of knowing or confirming. Does it make sense? Sure. Probably.

(But she doesn't lie to him. And so. He buys it as the truth.)

And then Luther starts to flounder, grasping for what to follow that up with and how to get further away from that black hole; searching for something to hang onto and climb and get them out of this quicksand. "Was it TV again or a movie? Should I be looking out for you on the big screen or small, next year?"

Even as he says it, part of him already hates it. Small-talk was never their thing. They'd never had to lapse into these quotidian catchup conversations before, and had mostly managed to avoid it even in their letters, but now that they're looking each other in the eye he's suddenly grasping at straws, trying to cover that stutter-stop.

And it feels stupid. Stupid and unnecessary and like the very last thing he'd ever needed to do with her — they could talk for hours, were never at a loss for what to say — but it's there nonetheless, a metaphorical hiccup like a scratch in the record.

[numberthree]

"The show." Easy enough.

Before, she adds, with a small wave of fingers. "All of this is, too."

The 'this' gesture isn't expansive like before they got in here, when she was painting the clear air all across the front of them with 'The Future.' It's just the raise of hand, waved fingers between them, indicating the whole of this space, this place, the night. Whichever he decided to latch on to it as, they'd all be correct.

It takes her a second's consideration, where her hand pauses in midair, and Allison makes a discreet glance of the arc around them. Though not one that attempted being a secret. Just one that was subtly checking for how distant or not they were from any other groups, stragglers, anyone jockeying with a camera or mic, for what had populated behind that thought. It would not do to cause any of the numbers of kinds of stir's she could by not being aware of that either while deciding to speak in a crowded location.

She leans, what looks like easily and conversationally into his arm, for all the world another patron of the tour, sharing a private delighted moment. Her voice clips quieter so as not to carry, as she glances up through her lashes, only nearly not leaning her cheek against his arm in doing so. "I got home just in time to be told I'm being added to the leads for it, next season, and that I needed to be here to seal the deal."

Allison doesn't know how to stop the fond, all too secretive next-octave drop to her voice, when she leans even closer to him, like, perhaps, this is the greater of the two reveals: "I'm supposed to be dead to the world passed out right now."

[obediences]

She sidles so much closer, eradicating every last inch of personal bubble between them as she leans in for a confidential, confessional whisper (there had been so many moments like that when they were younger: Luther passing a note and folding a tidily-folded piece of paper into the palm of her hand, Allison's mouth against his ear and a honed whisper sans the actual rumour). He feels the electricity of her against his arm like the whole limb's gone numb, a too-sharp awareness rippling its way up all his nerves; his fist clenches unconsciously, then loosens, trying to banish some of that pent-up energy.

And even after everything, even after her abandonment of the Academy and his abandonment of her... he's realising, with a ripple of surprise, that he's proud of her. Of this news. Number Three had been his red right hand, where Number Two had been his bruising left. Allison Hargreeves isn't supposed to be second string to anyone; he'd always known that she was leading material. Right from the start.

"Oh, man. Congratulations," Luther says softly, his lips barely moving, pitching his voice just as low to mirror hers, even as his mouth is wreathed in a smile. "It's about time. I always thought the savvy lab tech should've been on-screen more."

Does he conscientiously, assiduously make time for her show every single week? Maybe.

[numberthree]

Luther's surprise, the way he goes just that much stiller when she leans in, without once looking away from her face, isn't surprising. There's something too familiar about all of that. Where the surprise isn't that it happens, but that it's still happening, right now, in this second, like somehow six hundred something days just keep not drowning out the things she never can forget no matter how hard she tries.

Isn't sure she's anywhere near ready for him to be still doing.

The way she isn't ready for how much it somehow matters. Luther congratulating her. Luther referencing her character like he actually has the smallest clue about what she's referencing, more than just some self-aggrandized step on the ladder she was referencing earlier. Her eyebrows knit gentle, only getting halfway there, expression too open for the quietly uncertain surprise, like she didn't quite understand or couldn't quite let herself believe.

"You've watched it?" is quieter than her earlier converted whispers, not in her volume so much as that it's almost like it tumbles out too quickly, too fast, too straight from the confused stumble and catch of her heart.

[obediences]

The look she gets back is pure Spaceboy attitude at his cockiest and most playful, the raised hitch of his eyebrows, shoulders sloped nonchalantly. A man with a secret. (Normally she's the one carrying around all of hers.)

"Of course," Luther says, as if the answer is duh, as if it isn't actually a startling surprise that he's even able to follow her show. Only thirty minutes of recreation per week isn't even enough to watch the full forty-five of an episode.

(Some things have actually changed, at home. With less students to train, the schedule's fallen apart and left him shiftless, his itinerary less scrupulously monitored by the Monocle. As a result, Luther is often hopelessly bored. In contrast to those carefully-metered-out half-hours before, nowadays there just aren't that many distractions to fill up the time.)

"Didn't I say I was your biggest fan?"

That letter, buried in her stack at home, that signoff that had accidentally bruised her heart in his signing of it.

[numberthree]

Of course.

Of course, he says, like that makes any sense.

His words thrown out so nonchalantly, lodging in her chest, her throat, something she doesn't want to name rising in those same places. Filling her chest, trying to get to her throat, the trembling flicker of her lips that can't seem not to tremorous move against each other, but don't yet know how to open, what words to even reach for.

It was a joke. It was a lie. Wasn't it? But he's smiling broadly, unchecked, all bright, sparkling blue eyes and golden smile, like somehow he's proud of it, like he managed that no problem, like there's nothing in the world that could or would or had kept him from it, from seeing her, even all the way out here, not with him, and her fingers tighten a little where they had been laying so casually on his jacketed bicep, and she --

"Allison! Allison, over here!"

It's only that it's become a habit, that she's already pulling up a smile (she doesn't feel, with the network of buzzing in her stomach, that is something fiercer than anything so fragile as butterflies) right as there's a flash to blind her. Rock her a little back on the extremely tall heels hiding under this dress. Fingers sliding, habitually around part of Luther's upper arm.

She knows the person's face -- even through that arrogant, apology of a smile for the surprise, that isn't one and is the other, because none of them really care for more than their byline and their selling dollar -- but she can't place a name. He's still got the camera up, looking over it, and she doubts he'll go without at least one or two more, and something to put with it.

Which, of course, is why the first words out of his mouth are: "You aren't here with Robert's tonight?"

Allison's not surprised about that either, even though she lets her grip slip slightly down Luther's arm, more into the catch of elbow, saying with an enigmatical smile, "Apparently not."

Not a confirmation, not a denial. About either of them.
She really isn't helping the people she doesn't have to out.

[obediences]

His whole body feels like it's gone stiff and rigid, made of cement, turning into a statue after a single paralysing heartbeat. And just one word. A name.

Luther has had a few weeks now to get used to the realisation she'd planted in his head with that letter. (The people you're dating.) Some time to grow accustomed to it, and to somehow try to anticipate the blow when it comes, even if it still catches him off-guard as it always has and always will. But thankfully, this time it isn't like a sledgehammer to the jaw; although he doesn't smile dazzlingly for the camera, just looks a little serious and somber, perhaps appropriately dour for Sir Reginald Hargreeves' son. But he still feels it ricochet through him, pinging back and forth. He takes the moment to gather himself while Allison is posing, her mouth settling into the practiced smile he's seen her leverage hundreds of times at photo ops. (Dating.)

It's an echo of what she'd written, and yet that echo is still rippling here, now, so long after she wrote it. She was one of America's most eligible bachelorettes even when she was in the Academy. Why in the world would that have changed?

(Watching her kiss someone else on television was much, much easier when the sight was confined to that small blocky screen in the basement, and with the clear knowledge that it was all fake, an act, a character.)

Allison handles the photographer with ease, her expression enigmatic like the Mona Lisa, but with the side-effect that when Luther sneaks a glance out of the corner of his eye, down and to the side, trying to read her, he realises that he can't interpret it either.

He waits until they're gone. Until the after-images of the flash have faded behind his eyes, until he can see properly again, feel the weight of her hand on his elbow again rather than his whole body gone numb like his heart's forgotten how to pump blood. And in the end, he just tries for one single word:

"Robert?"

Just the one name, and affected nonchalance in Luther's voice, even as he's the exact opposite of careless and uncaring. He's not quite sure if he nailed the intonation, or if it came out too strained. He can't tell anymore. He's never had to do this before.

[numberthree]

Luther goes a bit wooden next to her, and she thinks she'll owe him an apology in a moment, even though it does seem to be the one normal thing about this. The only part of it like everything that once was. Posing for pictures and pretending to be grateful. It's stranger to be out here, in the real world, all dressed up side by side, that it is to picture them in their costumes, or school uniforms, as the Monocle stood by, with the eyes of a hawk, watch everything anyone near them did or asked them.

He goes eventually, and Allison pulled a breath in, but made it all her effort not to roll her eyes at it. It was one thing to let herself when getting rid of the most annoying leech at the party, and another when allowing oneself to have an overblown reaction because of, also publically invited, paparazzi. She was still learning how to make that look utterly unaffected.

Some people made it look so easy.

She mostly wanted to tell them to eat their cameras.

Which might be why, she's still a little stuck in pushing it down when Luther speaks.

"Roberts," Allison corrected with a drag on the 's,' even though the look she throws him is less enigmatic with the retreat of their guest. Cursory help that happens more than just this one time. "Last name, not first. It's British." But it's Luther's look of unconnected question that makes her realize she has to do it for him. That he might have said he was watching, but it's not like it meant he knew them by any other name.

"He's on the show, too. Derek. The cop."
The main star of the show, of course.

[obediences]

"Oh, right. Detective Graves." Luther doesn't exactly perk up — not at this insinuation — but there's that light of recognition sparking in his eyes and tilt of his head, at least. Because of course Luther only knows the character names; outside of her, he doesn't really give a damn about knowing the rest of the cast, doesn't put in any time or effort to memorising names or faces or learning about their careers. He's too busy assiduously committing supervillains and criminals to his mental rolodex instead, like the world's worst game of Guess Who. Hollywood is horrendously boring and inconsequential in comparison, except for the incredibly specific context of one (1) Allison Hargreeves.

"I guess you guys, uh, go to a lot of these events? Together? As coworkers?"

He's still trying to sound completely nonchalant and probably failing utterly, his Adam's apple bobbing in a nervous swallow. He never really has to lie about anything; he's out of practice, if he was ever in it to begin with. He isn't fully looking at Allison, either, just shooting her a sidelong glance whenever he's pretty sure there aren't any more cameras pointed in their direction. Like he's a hunting hound scenting the breeze, or a man checking for a turn in the wind and trying to read this change in the weather. Gauging her by how she responds, although she's one of the best in the world at keeping her cards close to her chest.

[numberthree]

Luther is still making the mockery of a statue, not quite looking at her, as he affects recognition and questions with that same strange tone. A little too clipped and too fast. Not enough that she thinks anyone else standing next to them would notice. But it hooks somewhere in the back of her mind—the shift to this from even seconds ago.

(She was always good at reading him once upon a time, but two years of learning to pay attention to everything about her own voice, about the voices of the people she's playing off on any stage or set, or those she goes to watch and learn from while they are performing: it's heightened that even more.)

But even there, she feels a little stymied by the inability to tell if the regimental soldiering of the questions is that he wants to know or doesn't care at all. That pepper of too-serious questions that makes her look up at him amused, smile lightly crooked, as she shakes the arm of his her fingers are still folded in the elbow. "Yes. But not that they know that."

"That man is a terror off-camera --" Though her tone makes it clear, the use of that word is nothing like the one they might have used only a few years ago—terror and horror and destruction. So much as something to be settled with. "--with an entourage of three almost at all times. I'm pretty sure he still has his personal facialist coming in to see to him daily between sets."

With practiced air of touching on something that is rather known around this world, but not the one she came from, she tugs him to follow her to the next exhibit piece, by that same hand on his elbow, even as she continues on. "But it's good press for keeping the show in conversations and publications, even if it is unconfirmed, when the tabloids pick up shots of us out rehearsing or getting coffee. It ends up being beneficial for both of us."

[obediences]

"Ah," he says, with the sound of dawning understanding, and there's a slight ebbing of that tension: some of the knots in Luther's shoulders loosening as he breaks into movement, lets her draw him further on to the next exhibit, although his concentration's shot and he's not doing his usual meticulous read of every single plaque anymore. He's still spinning; untethered, caught off-guard, processing that faint distant relief.

Of course Allison uses the tabloids, and cultivates a purposeful ambiguity around her co-star if it helps her. It's just another weapon in the arsenal.

(He is so relieved.)

"There's so much out here," Luther says after a pause, his voice quiet enough that only she can hear him, looking at the replica moon lander in front of them although he's not actually looking at it, "that I don't get. The hoops to jump through. The public image to craft. I mean, we did that too, but at least at the Academy we were known for our work more than, I don't know, relationships, fake or otherwise."

Because there wasn't supposed to be anything more to them than the work, really: the cocksure smiles, the bravery and derring-do, the training, the missions. That life had, in its way, been brutally simple. (But empty.)

[numberthree]

That first word is so small and punctuated Allison thinks maybe just to let it lie there between them. That she could focus on the moon lander, a sizable replica of something she's certain Luther had a tiny version of a million years ago on one of his shelves, with all the little planes and other space models.

She still doesn't care much for space really, more than that it exists (more than that, everything about it only reminds her of him; too many memories of his excitable, thrown up face babbling about whatever new thing he'd found like if he didn't get it out, he might pop). She is still staring at it when he starts talking again, quietly, making her leaning a little in toward him.

"Because we didn't have any." Allison winces just a brief flicker when her words come too fast. Too pointed even for not being an attack. For that fact, she doesn't entirely believe that either. Diego and Vanya's little band, before Vanya was shipped away. Klaus and Ben, before Ben died. Her and Luther, before.

They all came to harsh ends. Nothing grew in that place.
Nothing lived long enough to thrive. No one chose those things.

"It is complicated," Allison stresses the second word more than the third; there's very little about being challenged Allison has ever found offputting. Going back to his point rather than apologizing for her slip. "I do still feel like I'm constantly learning a litany of unwritten rules, in a world made of doors and windows and ceilings and floors you can only see once you bump into them and not before."

And if she happened to rumor her way through most, well, she didn't regret it either.

[obediences]

"I mean, and that makes complete sense. I'm only out here doing this sort of stuff for a few days at a time, and I never really know how it's supposed to go, whenever the itinerary isn't planned for me in advance. I just know how to do the one thing."

They had been raised as weapons, not as people.

It's a bit of honesty that he had never offered to the rest of the Academy, and that he'll only give to Allison. And yet Luther stops just short of saying how thin and paltry and unsatisfying the one thing has become. He's never gotten far enough to admitting it outright, even when the others were rebelling and chewing through their bridles, bucking their father's authority.

Although he's had some time now to start gaining a slow-growing sense of it. To look around at what he'd been left with after everyone else was gone, and to find it lacking.

Her hand is still on his elbow; after a moment Luther glances down, as if verifying it's real, he's not imagining things, and that slight weight and pressure really is Allison. Touching him. More contact than they've had in over two years. He clears his throat.

"You look like you've been figuring it out well, though. Doing well for yourself out here."

[numberthree]

Allison can't quite help that there's a small bit of pity for Luther, as much as she doesn't want it to be there, for the words he says just as quietly. It might not be easy. Some of it might even feel like being punched in the face, unexpectedly, at times. But she was out here. Learning more. Seeing more.

Maybe it showed her how much she'd never known, how much their father had kept from them, but at least she knew it now. Had the chance to know. To change it. To control what she knew, and to never let anyone have that kind of control over her anymore.

She blinked back from the thought as Luther cleared his throat eyes, raising from where her fingers were still wrapped around his elbow loosely. There was the reflexive tear between tightening and relaxing her grip happening, even as she looked back at his face. Her cheeks suddenly feel warm, feeling uncertainly like she'd overstepped.

Except that he didn't pull away, which made it a little harder to breathe, to look away, as he spoke. Studying his face above hers. The careful, solemn honesty that looked like it could have stepped out of any of a million other memories. That looked like the day before she left, except not, too. There was something there, wasn't there.

For all that, it was the same, and his face was still the face that staring too long like this made her pulse do everything it shouldn't, there was something else there, now, wasn't there? A shadow at the edge of the blue in his. In his tone. Something that wasn't quite apologetic or regretful, but was ... something.

"Maybe," Allison said, finally convincing her body to breathe in again. "I'm trying, at least."

Then, her head tilted, overly considering him and the people near him, before she said, "You know what? I know what you should really see in here." And that if anyone didn't need to see the same things they'd seen a million times, it was Luther. Especially if she could give him something, he might never have. Her hand slid, down his arm, more toward his wrist, his hand, impulsively, "Come with me."

Without waiting for an agreement, she bustled them out of the line, dragging him with her, and headed them in a different direction between the partitions of the big area, between the sectioned off areas of walls, toward the only thing that had stopped her heart when she first came in here, too. It'll only take past the second portion after all, given once they pass it, the reason for their destination fills up the entirety of the wall they're facing, long before they'll be right in front of it.