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.

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[numberthree]

If it were anyone else in the world, maybe Allison would have worried that it was an overstep, over-ambitious, regretted, a mind changed, when no other part of her was touched, that every move forward was unshared, but even for that, Luther hasn't pulled back.

Luther shifts with her, for her, a titanic tide stopped only by a wall, and this kiss doesn't break. Even when it stays tremulously soft and tentative, it still shifts, too, attentive even now. Following her lead, from only a second, a step behind, before it's a mirror, matched, attempting the same, against the soft, slow open of her lips, his, theirs. The brush of their tongues, smooth and soft. The feeling highlighted against the rough stubble of his cheek under her fingers again, somehow back to his jaw and side of his head.

If Allison Hargreeves had ever believed anything holy in her existence, it was trapped in this one kiss, as every behind it blew back and down, matchsticks and crepe paper and card castles, like the bodies of that whole army Vanya dismissed with a wave. Everything behind her fell before this kiss. Before him. Before the way her heart, her head, her chest, every cell in her body ached not to stop touching Luther, kissing Luther, even as it all slowed.

As it slipped to the faintest brushes of lips, and forehead pressed against his, not having a clue when she'd ended up with one leg under her, or herself more than half over his shoulder. Palm sliding down his neck, curled around the back, like a proof she couldn't stop reaffirming, as her eyes stayed closed and she couldn't bring herself to pull back more than these bare centimeters.

Her thumb brushed a line across the muscles on his neck, and she swallowed against the ache of all of this, like resetting a bone that had broken so long ago. That hurt in every part to snap into place, but everything shifted for it, the excruciating rightness of it. It'd always been this. Every day. Every moment. Since the beginning. And she'd made so many mistakes, hurt so many people getting here, whether she meant to or not.

It was gone. It wasn't. It didn't matter. It did.
All of it had happened, even on the bones of this.

Allison swallowed, the tip of her tongue brushing at the center of her lips, almost like somehow she needed even more proof, Luther Hargreeves had just kissed her. Real. That was still real even a second later. If she tipped her mouth again, she might be again. When she can't stop the tumble of words from her lips. The only confession she's wanted to make for at least half a decade, maybe the full length of it.

"You're the sweetest, kindest man I've ever known, and--" Maybe she thought she wouldn't, but she finds herself moving, not hiding from raising her gaze to find his face, his eyes, even in the dark. "-if it wasn't completely obvious, I've compared every man I've ever met to you."

Every single one. Not just Patrick and Ray and the long line of failed attempts to love anyone even a quarter as much as she'd always loved Luther. Everyone. Colleagues, and coworkers, and the other men in the community group. Bosses, and imPorts, and passing strangers. Luther was the benchmark beside which every man in her life was stood next to, and either earned her respect, her attention, or failed.

So often failed, even at their best. No matter how well.
Because even if they were good people, they still weren't Luther.

[obediences]

And he doesn't mind having her hands all over him; for once, he doesn't mind, he doesn't mind. It takes him out of his body and out of his overthinking over-worrying head, and just anchors him right here in this moment, with her, tangled up in Allison. Every little piece of him that was scared of this, that had tried to back out saying She's married or I can't or I don't deserve this— all of those words are smothered now, as the kiss asks the question and, just by leaning into him, Allison answers Yes and yes and yes.

Her thumb tracing against his neck is like a live-wire down his spine, Luther experiencing something of what he'd put her through earlier. The pins-and-needles marching its way across his skin, a fire lit with every touch, even as she pulls away just enough to catch a breath and their foreheads rest against each other, like they'd done in the snow.

And then when she speaks, the whole world stops. Again.

There's something tight-clenched in his chest, slamming open, like a bulldozer's made a wreckage of his ribcage as she says that. Luther feels that slow-dawning realisation sweep over him, and understanding clicks like puzzle-pieces falling into place, years and years' worth of it, and he can suddenly see it like a tapestry unfurling at his feet: the weeks and months and years wasted. All those moments when they'd been thigh-to-thigh on her bed, leaning perilously closer before Vanya came barging in. Them hunkered down in the greenhouse, before Sir Reginald tore through the door, huffing and puffing to blow it all down. Him pausing after a mission, the two of them alone in the stairwell together, his hand at a cut on her temple. Shy smiles exchanged over the breakfast table and her Mary Janes nudging his Oxfords beneath it. So many almosts. So many almosts and didn'ts.

His own words come spilling out in a rush, as if they've been caught in his lungs, behind his teeth, for fifteen years: "Oh, we should have done that a long time ago," Luther says, breathless, marveling. Then, a second later, marveling at how much he had missed: "I'm an idiot."

[numberthree]

Allison can't stop the winded chuckle that escapes her mouth, even when she thinks there might be something more of a wince that she can't keep out of her expression, even here in the dark, like she can't entirely hide it behind amusement. The understatement and the ownership of it that is so very on the nose of being so very Luther and can't belong to only one of them. "No, you aren't."

Except maybe he was.
She was. They were.

So many times, they could have avoided all of this.

If he'd just come with her. If she'd ever actually reached out after.
If she'd just held on and waited, let the faith they'd come for her be enough.

A million days and million mistakes, flickering in and out of her thoughts too fast, dissolving on the nearness of his voice, the flicker of breath she could feel brush her skin at those running, rushing, tripping on themselves, words. Away, and away, and away. Scraped sore on a relief that feels more violent than soothing. Ruthless, rather than forgiving. Turning every second inside out. Taking everything back, that wasn't this. Dissolving every mask, highlighting ever lie, the emptiness and longing under every time, where she settled for less and told herself it was fine.

Except. The one thing she couldn't take it back. Wouldn't. Even as everything else turned pale with and blew down, one didn't. The most important one. The one thing worth all the rubble and wreckage of all her wrong choices. The one she couldn't even consider folding the deck back on. Claire. Important and incomparable.

Forged in the path of those mistakes, one perfect thing: her daughter.

Claire. And Luther. The two halves of her heart.
That she couldn't be complete without either.

[obediences]

And hadn't they been slowly winding their way towards this after all? Over the past year? Their bedrooms beside each other again, hands clasped, late-night messages when neither of them can fall asleep, making each other laugh, this little house with its domestic routines, his lips pressed against her hand, a nighttime picnic under the stars. It still feels miraculous — and if he could shake himself now, try to be sure that he's actually still awake, he would. Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe he dozed off while they were messaging each other, and this is just some dreamstuff spun up out of nothing...

And because it's late, and they're both exhausted, and he can feel his body still twinging with the distant aches of blood vessels burst deep under the skin (broken wood and bricks and ricocheting bullets, all bouncing harmlessly off but they still leave their mark), then the whole night feels surreal. Painted in blurry lines, the room black-and-blue like a bruise. Luther's thumb traces the line of her cheekbone again, and he feels his heart pounding hollowly in his chest and he can see Allison's face, upturned, so close to him and still within reach.

Within reach, for the first time in so long. After years with a continent separating them, then an entire atmosphere, then the divide of an entire timeline. Seeing her in so many dark-skinned women around town, his head snapping around like he could give himself whiplash.

(A version of her perched insouciant on the edge of a counter, in the moon base—)

"This is going to sound so stupid," he says, self-conscious, half-smiling because he couldn't suppress that smile even if he tried, "but can you pinch me? Hard. So I feel it."

It'd have to be hard, to even make a difference.

[numberthree]

Those words, self-conscious and soft, startle a laugh out of Allison that is truer than her last chuckle. She gets the feeling, except that for her, it is all so painfully, perfectly, solidly, real without question. Everything that was the Luther she'd been carrying with her since the moment she left the Academy and the man she found again two and a half (three, four, twelve) years ago all in one.

The empty space that has defined every one of her days since walking out of the Academy alone. The empty space that no matter how many people she touched, or let touch her, clung to her and in the silence, in the space, in the passing days and years, only grew stronger, stauncher, more steadfast. The empty space that punctured here and there, in confusing pinpricks since coming to this world. The empty space that had swallowed up her every late night in Dallas.

The empty space that had shattered against Luther's mouth, and made it feel like her heart was beating, not in her chest, but right under the place where his thumb traced over her cheekbone with the kind of delicate reverence he'd reserved for ancient books in his childhood and expensive telescopes and rare records in his teens. It was so real, so unbearably happening, that it couldn't be anything else.

For all that she was incredibly good at hurting, even if that wasn't the request, it wasn't pain that she wanted him to feel. Even a little. Not right now. With the echo of that laugh at his words still warm in her throat as she shook her head. "I can do better than that."

Or worse, she didn't know. If it was his dream (but it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't), she was surrendering to it all the same. Every stake and every mask, and every last shadow. For tipping her face in just those few centimeters and kissing him again. Like a mirror answer in her to the same problem -- same wonder; same disbelief -- but seeking the answer, both to have and to give back, in a different way.

Where Luther asked, Allison acted.

[obediences]

Luther's expecting that sharp but innocuous jab of pain to settle him back in his body, to remind him of the reality of this (and violence is a language he still speaks, a daily vocabulary: bruised knuckles and blackened eyes and cutting his knuckles on other men's teeth). But instead, just like that, Allison is kissing him again.

If he'd ever known it could be this easy, and that all he had to do was ask—

He freezes again for a moment, a deer in the headlights, taking the moment to let it wash over him like a wave and meticulously cataloguing every last detail of the sensation, as if memorising it for posterity, if he could press it into amber forever. The press of her nose against his; her mouth opening; the weight of her hand against the plane of his chest. The solidity of Allison's shoulder when his own hand settles there, fingers splaying almost timidly against the fabric of her shirt, as delicate as if he could burn himself on her skin. He very well might, still.

And then he gives back into the kiss; deep breaths, a pulse ratcheting higher in his throat, a hunger so long abated. That prim caution melting away more and more each second, as they simply collapse into each other, and he becomes increasingly painfully aware that they are in his bed. No one else has ever been here before. The only one who was, he'd kicked her out shortly after.

Luther's hands don't stray, however: the press of his lips and then the tentative exploratory shift of his tongue is increasingly eager, but there's just that fluttering barely-there touch against her shoulder, like this whole thing is fragile, like he might shatter her at a touch (or, more likely, he would shatter).

[numberthree]

Her lips press gently against his, and she's touching too much of him not to feel that he doesn't move. He doesn't. But. He doesn't jerk away either. Or press her back, as though all her strength to fight, it wouldn't even shift the air beside his smallest push. He's done it before. They both know he's capable of it. But Luther doesn't.

He's simply still and quiet. The race of his heart beneath her fingers not slowed in the slightest. She doesn't know what is going on in his head exactly, but she softens the surprise kiss, slows it, without stopping. Gentle, almost coaxing, a soundless request to come to her, come back to her, follow her; hand sliding up the back of his neck slowly, thumb running gently from in his hair down the back of his neck.

Allison doesn't need a race. She doesn't even need this to go anywhere. She just needs him with her. Whatever that looks like. Even if they need to stop kissing (even as insane and wholly impossible as that feels with her lips still against his). She considers pulling back, but then Luther's fingers raise, brushing the curve of her shoulder so soft that it feels almost uncertain. Shy. Barely braved.

But it's enough, and more than enough, when his hand is warm and heavy through the thin cloth covering her shoulder, choosing to touch her, and more than enough, when Luther's mouth finally moves, and he's kissing her back, again, letting her heart breathe out again. Let go of that momentary consideration (for a moment, but she knows, maybe not entirely).

She can take this incredibly slow, the way nothing else in her life has ever felt like it could be. But Luther has always been the eternal outlier. The place she was always supposed to have started. Tried everything. Learned everything. Where she'd felt safest. Happiest. It feels like that all over, again, in its own way. New and never touched, even though she knows she's nowhere near that. So very far from it, the fact curls cold guilt in her stomach.

But maybe she can tip that to her advantage.
Be the ground all of this rests on.

Luther can.

The race of his pulse under her thumb, a constant pounding that feels like it's running electricity up her wrist and into her arm, continually reminding her it's not just her. Especially as Luther slowly presses his mouth deeper, longer, slowly more and more open against hers; that slowly less and less cautious pass of his tongue, into her mouth, against her own. She can keep pace with him, pulling him slowly closer, slowly further out.