luther "the big shy one" hargreeves | #00.01 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
obediences) wrote2019-03-08 09:00 pm
obediences) wrote2019-03-08 09:00 pm
Entry tags:
for numberthree.
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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Despite the fact that he didn't personally send in the army of gun-toting assassins, he still feels personally responsible (that mantle on his shoulders, impossible to avoid: if it hadn't been for the Hargreeves, this idyllic little farmhouse wouldn't be a ruin). Plus, he was the one who flew through their wall. Every time he catches a glimpse of that particular gaping void in the living room wall, with the chilly night air gusting through it, he winces.
But it's time to go.
The kitchen is dark. He hasn't even turned on the light, since it would only illuminate more of the damage: bullet holes through all the walls, cabinet glass shattered, cracked porcelain and mugs scattered all over the floor. He'd righted the fallen kitchen table, but has to keep pulling in his hands and resisting the urge to grab a broom and sweep everything up.
His back's to her, his shoulders tight and hunched, the receiver miniscule and toy-like in his hand. Luther is practically bowed around it, and Allison can see the exact moment when he sags in disappointment and delicately replaces the phone in its cradle. He'd thought for a second that Jack had picked up, but in the end it had just been the operator and then that low buzz of the phone ringing and ringing and not being answered.
When Luther finally turns around, he looks a little surprised to see her. Maybe a little abashed at being caught in such a moment of vulnerability, all of him craned and waiting for that call. The call which hadn't happened.
(Maybe it shouldn't matter. Maybe the man isn't even worth saying a personal goodbye to, and their relationship was never actually on that level. But Luther has a habit of caring for older men who don't give a damn about him in return.)
"Hey," he says softly. Tilts a shoulder, almost in a shrug. "Couldn't get through. Oh well."
Luther is so very bad about sounding nonchalant, even when he's trying.
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Allison stays leaning against the wall, keeps her expression calm. The sympathy bleeding through threaded quiet and thin, like its own veil worked not to turn transparent. Her answer to his bluffed answer (to the question-or-comment she never even said) is simple and soft, "Sorry."
She doesn't know Jack Ruby other than the last year's news and the information poured into them by their childhood studies of American Political-Science History. Still, she doesn't have to judge or care about that man, to care about the droop to Luther's shoulders. The way the unanswered call casts a pall on Luther's posture, making him try to play it off as though it weren't consequential.
Even though his voice only a minute ago made it incredibly so.
She doesn't have to know Jack himself to know what Jack somehow meant to Luther.
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And then when Jack had been the only person to accept him, to put him back on his feet, to hand him a job and a home and a purpose— who was he to turn it down? (He didn't stand a chance.)
"It's fine," Luther says; his standard go-to whenever things aren't fine, but so be it. It doesn't matter. They're leaving soon anyway. "I don't even know what I was gonna say to him. Just that I was leaving town, I guess."
His shoulders are still sloped, but his vision's clearing and he's looking a little closer at Allison now, as he suddenly realises. This is the first time they've been alone together since that moment, outside in the snow.
He'd turned it off like flipping a switch, compartmentalising and setting it aside for later, having to turn back to the fight, Lila, the Handler, even the Swede, then the briefcase, strategising, planning. Everything a quick and relentless train that just kept howling down the trains and dragging them with it, with no time to sit and breathe—
Until now. 'Until later' has become now. There's an uncustomary self-consciousness prickling in all his extremities, digging in sharply between his shoulderblades.
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"To say goodbye." There's no insult in her tone or judgment. "Maybe even thank you."
It prickles a thorn in her throat—the thought of calling Vernetta. Even just leaving a message. But she banishes it in the second of its birth, pushes it under her fingertips and down into the dark, quiet, numb place in the dark of her head. The one she's gotten so good at pushing everything. Near everything. Her last two words still just off her lips when the shape of her lips flickers.
"No one gets to judge us." It's not quite a smile, with the quiet parrot of his words from that first conversation over the BBQ table. It's something else. Understanding. About the utterly complicated network of messes they all made here, and how tangled they all found themselves in them. How much it all somehow both mattered and still couldn't matter enough to change anything in the end, too. "Remember?"
Certainly not her. Hypocrite in a thousand ways if she tried. Judging him.
But she's not even trying; she doesn't know how with Luther. She never has.
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Because he had been self-conscious about it. It wasn't like he was leaving behind a spouse, what was supposed to be a lifelong commitment, or even Diego's budding whatever-it-is with Lila. Luther's connections here had been ephemeral, surface-level, barely-there in comparison. It was stupid, really, and he'd been ready to be self-deprecating over it, but Allison had already headed that off at the pass. No one gets to judge how they deal with this.
Luther leans his weight backwards; tall enough that he's half-sitting on the edge of the kitchen table now, while Allison still stands sentry by the doorway. Everything's dark and quiet — he's not sure where the others are, except that they're scattered through the house, the stairs outside, maybe the fields.
She's had her share of farewells, too. After convincing her of the necessity of going back home, he'd given Allison that extra time and left her behind with Raymond, to say whatever goodbyes she could. He doesn't know how that went. Doesn't want to ask.
(Especially doesn't want to ask now, considering—)
"I guess it's a moot point, anyway. He's getting arrested in a couple days or so." His gaze drifts downward, to the tips of his shoes; he can't fully bring himself to look at Allison, or it feels like he's going to start blushing again. So when he mumbles out his next question, it's directed to his feet:
"How are you, uh, doing?"
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He relaxes into the table, and maybe that's a plus, too. That instead of decided to push himself toward being fine, he relaxes into the quiet shadows. Stops trying to defend what he was doing. And for a moment, she thinks she got something right again. The question, though, drives her face into a wrinkle of thoughtfulness and a something of a sigh out her nose.
"I don't know." She says it less as a complaint, or first off the cuff answer, and more like supposition -- and maybe in that, it's more honest than any answer she would have simply flashed out for anyone else asking. "How are we supposed to be?"
Allison's not sure she's ever been whatever she's supposed to be.
Daughter. Hero. Star. Wife. Mother. Sister. Civil Rights Leader.
A million titles that she never fit the way she was supposed to.
That she broke between being them and being everything else she was.
She adds simply, like somehow it's all the answers, "Homeward bound."
The only thing that feels entirely true. The hope she's still trying to tie down.
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Case in point. Some of the ceramic crunches underfoot as Luther shifts his weight; hands propped against the edge of the table, and he finally looks back up at her. Feeling that heat at the back of his neck and the edges of his ears (oh, god, do his ears blush? that hasn't happened since he was a teen). When they all get together for the jump, it's going to be all six of them hand-in-hand again, travelling as a group. And who knows what they're going to find on the other side, homeward bound?
So who knows when they're going to have a breather like this again, a private moment to discuss?
"So, um," Luther says carefully, delicately, each word hesitant. He has no idea how to broach this or if he even wants to broach this, but when else can he safely broach this?
"About earlier."
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It's not the first time she's thought about it since, but it hadn't fit neatly where and when it had happened, and it hadn't really belonged to any of the rest of what happened, with the Handler, and Lila, and Harlan. (Somewhere Vanya is only just on the other side of her goodbye, too, and Allison's heart aches for her, too.
They don't get normal lives.
They ruin the normal lives they touch.
And in the end, that makes a ruin of them, as well.)
She wasn't sure this was going to be touched. That it wouldn't be a strange, seering, flash-burned moment in her memory, trapped in the ice and snow. As forgotten as pushing herself into Luther's chest in her kitchen. Or throwing her arms around him as soon as she saw him. It's an escalating scale of her own making, looking at it in that direction, isn't it?
It's not so much careful, or evasive, even though, she chooses only one word.
Uncertain if, even touching it, won't mean it's going to be forgotten.
"Yes." Maybe it's a question. Or maybe it's an acknowledgment.
That she knows what he's referencing. That she hasn't forgotten that it did.
(That there are parts of her skin that still feel the singe from his hands. On her shoulders. On the back of her neck. Pushed up into her hair. On the side of her face. That she can't forget being caught up in the dizzied-elation of Luther kissing her back, of the hard scramble of hands, mouths, or the unchecked, unrepentant, desperate hunger that whole kiss tasted of.)
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And yet. And yet. He couldn't just let it fade away forgotten; couldn't accept either of them simply pretending it hadn't happened. Because the kiss is all bright vivid technicolour in his memory, and now that they have a brief moment free of fighting for their lives, his thoughts can't stop dragging back to it. It had been just a minute long, and yet a lifetime long.
"I," Luther starts, and then stops again. Where was he going with that sentence? He has no idea. How does he give Allison an escape route, a way to gracefully dip out of if she'd rather just forget it all happened, while also properly conveying that he doesn't want to forget it, but while also not pressuring her into acknowledging anything that had happened?
All of a sudden, he's sixteen years old and tongue-tied again, fingers pressing hard into the soft wood of the dining table.
"I just, um. Wanted to make sure. That you weren't, uh. Regretting. Anything. Because the last thing I want is to mess with—" He raises one of his hands, gestures vaguely to the empty air between them. "This. What we have. And if it's, uh, made you uncomfortable, I'm really sorry, and I just wanted to make sure that we're... okay. That you're okay. With that."
(Somehow he's wound up here again, apologising for it. Luther.)
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That this could, for all it might have been, too, be the same.
That, even if she never goes quiet, if he said it?
It would stick. It would somehow be true.
She could have avoided him. Any chance of this. Left him while and wherever he'd gone breaking off from the group, or slipped off before he realized she'd found him alone. But that wasn't who they were either. Even if 'who they were' was so far out of date all over again. Realistically it didn't add up right if you put ten years beside eight days, beside two and a half years, beside the last five days.
It's less than two weeks in an ocean of years.
But it's the oldest, deepest truth in her life, too.
Present under all the ones during those days, months, years.
The way 'who they are' was a feeling staring at him that was timeless.
All of this is. This quiet, awkward, stumbling, inability to say it -- place his finger, the words -- on precisely what it was again, and somewhere in that swirl of nerves is that same irrepressible fondness of staring up at him as he tried to apologize for the first requirement of CPR: touching her mouth, with his. It's not the same blistering crescendo entering an almost blacked out world, but that doesn't make it any lesser. It curls up warm in her chest and she thinks, with bruised amusement, from somewhere all too clear, that she's going to love this man every day until she dies.
And maybe she's always known that. But it's so clear all over again. Even as he tries to take any of the responsibility for her own actions from her hands, to protect her or give her some easy way to slip back from it, like it never happened, or like it's fine it did, if it just happened, but it can't, too, because it'll ruin everything else.
And maybe it will. Allison's not sure she's good for much more than ruining things -- she just broke the third life she swore to stand by for all of time only yesterday -- but she's told too many lies in the last few years, and she left too many still unsaid in the last week, even as she broke most of them open. For Luther, and for Ray. And this isn't one she wants to carry covered over with a convenient lie. She made that choice.
"Luther Hargreeves." Allison's eyes narrow just a little speculatively, giving her head a tilt. Her expression neutrally serious by way of something that isn't somehow. Even as those eyebrows raise and she says, with almost the exact opposite too casual, too cool, barely smallest whispered-hint of something that might become (but isn't yet) teasing, ease his words lacked entirely:
"Are you implying that I may have kissed you by accident?"
The faintest beat. "Because of? Adrenalyn? Hypoxia? Etcetera?"
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And he ploughs on: "Like, if you just meant to say thank you, I don't want to make a bigger deal out of this than it should be. Or if you were trying to kiss my cheek and just... missed..."
His voice trails off, falteringly, lost. But the more he looks at her and notes the way she looks at him, though, there's that slow-dawning realisation that maybe he doesn't need to be panicking just yet.
She hasn't exactly confirmed what that (that) may or may not have been between them, outside, in the snow, earlier.
But she hasn't disavowed it, either.
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As Luther rambles increasingly less plausible, and still yet striving to be strung together, possibilities, and she thinks only that she should have kissed him over a decade ago. Or found some excuse three years ago. Or. Or that she should have tried harder. Held on better. Whatever better is. Been less weak. Less needy. Less selfish, and willfully destructive, willing to destroy from her own survival or comfort. Less prone to finding other things to hold on to.
The question when it comes, and it barely pauses a full breath between hers and his, doesn't actually comment (on the growing list of less and less plausible excuses he's given her to hand back to him, that sits slowly even more amused-by-skeptical on her expression, at the tuck of her mouth and), it's simply:
"Was it a mistake when you kissed me back?"
It's an unfair question without answering first. She knows it even as she asks it without avoiding directness. (Just like she know what he means, even though none of his words have been questions.) But she's never been a very fair creature, has she? Not as a child, and maybe not, even more drastically, as whoever she is while masquerading as an adult. But somehow, he's always taken her as she is. Liked her. Accepted her. Even at her very worst.
And he had. Kissed her back. Hard and hot, heavy and hungry. Left her mouth and her jaw with it, softly throbbing for a good while against the force of that focus, of all other focus lost and forgotten, whether it was meant or not. Too.
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Without stopping to think about it, for once in his life. Not his slow ponderous careful consideration of most things, his patience and meticulousness as he weighs out his words. Instead it's that one syllable forcing itself out before he can even think about it, because he doesn't have to think about it. He knows it like the sharpest truth down into his marrow, the question Allison's never gotten to ask before but which he's been waiting his whole life to answer, been waiting to hand that promise back to her.
"No. It could never be a mistake."
Even if she's married. (And she is, still. Technically.) Even if there have been other men. Other lifetimes and lives between him and her. Years' worth, and the decade apart before then. None of it matters, and none of it makes Luther hesitate in his answer. He's just looking at her, his blue gaze slow and steady, even as he can feel his heartbeat hammering in his throat, a dull pounding in his fingertips.
And it's only after the fact that he finally starts to stutter, to stammer, to try to fill up his sentences more: "I mean. I don't want it to be one. If you don't."
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But even as he finally stumbles into words, other words. Caveats to clean up how bare and clear and clean the shot is. It feels like Allison can breathe in. Not for the first time since he stopped kissing her, or she stopped breathing, or she suddenly saw him, sitting there, on the picnic bench. She doesn't even know how long. Long enough, it creaks and aches, even as every part of her feels like it might start trembling if she doesn't hold perfectly still.
She wants to cross all the space left between them and grab the sides of his face fiercely and pull him down and kiss him again, until they can't breathe, again, until the world is only him and only his hesitationless no and his steady gaze, until whatever's left of this room isn't even that anymore. It's as flash brightly sudden as it is winding. At the same second, as some part of her, she can't even explain why starts the edges of her eyes prickling and why it's hard to swallow.
Why it huffs, under her breath, in a sore not quite laugh,
winded and amused and sad and wondering all at once,
"We have terrible timing."
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And it is bad timing, for all the reasons Luther doesn't feel like naming. She's married. She's still married. They're on their way out of this universe, to god knows what and god knows where. But in other ways, he can't imagine a better moment, a more desperate relief: he'd thought she was dead. Dead and entirely gone. For a year and a half. So if not now, when? Every piece of timing they ever could have chosen was going to be terrible, in some way or another. The world wasn't kind to the Hargreeves.
But it still isn't anything near agreement.
"Does that mean you don't—" Luther starts, then stops yet again. Clamming up, unable to fill in any of those words to finish his sentence.
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Without him.
Not now.
Not after that kiss.
Not after those words.
Not even when everything in her body has become a compass waiting to move. For a brother, for a briefcase, for her daughter. Who she needs. Can never stop needing. Not even standing here, staring across at Luther. Like air, like blood, something compressed into the marrow of her bones, like if she never said it, then she could survive it, however many days she'd been sentenced to. Even if it was decades on decades like Five.
Not just Claire. Luther, too.
The both of them.
She can see the irony, even before it becomes sound, when the first and only sound is finally her steps coming closer and closer to him, across the debris-littered floor. The answer he wants, it's not the answer that comes. Because his question is too small. Like the ring on her finger, inside these gloves. That hadn't stopped her, when he tried to congratulate her, and the words had just tumbled out of her, impossible to stop, impossible to pretend mattered beside.
It doesn't stop her now. "It's always been you."
Simple and true, and every bridge burns in four words.
He doesn't even have to believe it, for her to know it's true.
For her to know just how close Ray almost came to knowing it, too.
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He's thunderstruck and caught off-guard and lagging a moment behind, in which two-and-two together doesn't actually equal four. His gaze darts down to the debris on the floor between them, the rapidly-shrinking feet of distance between Allison's boots and his own, as she closes in. He feels like a deer in the headlights, suddenly drowning with a different kind of panic — because this is rapidly swerving into uncharted territory where he's untrained, inexperienced, and he has no frame of reference for this. Doesn't know what to do with this particular subject. Life as Number One has not prepared him for this.
And Allison's words just don't seem to make any sense. Because surely not. It's been the better part of two decades since they've spent any significant amounts of time together. He abandoned her, betrayed her. She's been married. Twice. So how can that even—
(The woman that I love loves someone else.)
There's so much he could say, but he can't set any of it down in any particular intelligible order, so the only thing that comes out is a startled: "How?"
He could buy an impulsive, thoughtless kiss, riding high on adrenaline and hypoxia and relief. A mere show of gratitude, accidentally gone a little too far. But what Allison's just confessed goes far deeper than he was expecting; cuts right to the root of it.
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(The way Luther's face reminds her of the echo of Ray's. Body pressed to the wall, and the living room mantle, like they might be able to pull him into themselves and away from what was happening to him, ramping panic radiating from his every look, right after Diego and Herb appeared in their living room.)
"I don't know." It is the stupidest answer and yet the one that falls out. Too honest. The fault line of her entire existence. He is. Luther. And that every time she tries to build something on it, nothing can stand. Not for long. And this time, it hadn't even really been a year before she'd been made to see that again. "It's just always been that way. Since the beginning."
Whether the beginning is the beginning of being here, or coming home, or leaving home, or whatever the earliest beginning of everything even counts as. It's always been him, and the worst messes of her life she's made were in thinking that she actually had any power to outrun or outlive or out choose that truth.
That it would even allow itself to be delayed after the last time she'd finally seen him.
(I see you, every night, looking at the moon.)
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And even before then. How could he measure up to Hollywood, red carpets and galas, Allison's bright glittering life in the limelight, and with handsome charming co-stars on her arm? How could he ever compete with the entirety of the outside world, when all he had to offer in contrast was his shabby rundown self? (Especially now. How he looks.)
"I didn't know," he says dumbly, as if it weren't already the most apparent thing. That of course Luther had no clue. He never does, about this sort of thing. "I had no idea. I mean. I thought, possibly, maybe back when we were kids— but then I screwed that up completely when—"
When she left, and when he didn't come with.
Allison is so near now, just a few feet away from him, still outside his personal bubble but having crossed the room to get closer to him. Luther shifts away from the table, re-settling his weight onto his feet. He takes half a step closer, but then stops there, all his muscles coiled. Balanced lightly on his feet as if he's getting ready to fight or flee, but the real answer is none of the above.
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Why can't she ever keep her mouth shut around him?
God. The irony of that thought. Now. Against all this. A kiss.
His words are reluctant, still confused. He moves, but only a small amount, like maybe he can't even decide which direction is the right direction -- and maybe that means she isn't. Not when there's something about how he's holding himself that makes it impossible to know. If he's about to bolt backward now, too. It takes all her willpower not to reach out and lay a hand on his arm and say don't where his words break off. It's so annoying that in some moments, she can without thinking about it, and in others, she can't forget.
"Maybe I should have kissed you then." But somehow, it's not entirely light—that joke. There's something a little pensive to her expression. Like she doesn't believe in her own pressed up humor. Because it's not humor. Because even then, it was an impossible want. But it'd been one without a decades' regrets to weigh it down. One that gave her something she couldn't give up. Not even in a joke. Not even for him.
She can lie to a million-million people, but not him. Not about any of it.
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But even that isn't something they can joke about, and Luther can't express that desperate wanting yearning, because of the repercussions it would've had. The knock-on effects of the roads Allison wouldn't have taken, the ones that would have left her without Claire. The one trade-off he could never ask for. Would never ask for.
"Part of me wishes you had. But now is okay, too." His hand half-flutters outwards, before the fingers fold in and clench in on themselves. (He can't really remember, anymore, how to be tender with these hands. Bloodied knuckles wrapped in bandages.) But then he finally forces his hand to loosen and he reaches forward slightly, grazes his fingers over her sleeve.
"I know this... isn't great timing. It was never going to be. I guess the one constant is that we always, always have shitty timing. But I just... I thought you were dead, Allison. So I'm just glad that you're here, back in my life like some kind of miracle, and I don't ever want to lose you again. You're the most important thing to me. The most important person."
He exhales. "And I guess maybe it was about time I stopped wasting time and just told you that. Just in case. Before we run out of any more time, or before anything else happens."
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Closing everything up in a box inside her chest labeled do not share, do not open, do not think about. (Even if she'd only ever truly managed the first.) But she's so close now. The skin of time feeling so thin with Five's promise, impatient with whatever is keeping him, them, from being ready yet.
Luther's hand flashes out, stutters into a fist, and then opens again, fingers touching her arm. The solid, body-warmed leather resting against her cape and a sliver of her skin and for a hazy moment, as she's breathing in or out or through, she wishes he didn't have gloves on and instantly wants to rebuke herself for wanting any more than this. Choice. Touch.
Except that's what they're talking about, is it?
Always having wanted more. Wanted this. All of this.
Luther's expression, as the words pour out of him, finally finding their footing. Her heart, this soft ache that only gets sharper and sharper. Heart starting to beat too fast in her ears at some kind of miracle and ever want to lose you and the most important person (and for just a second it echoes, out of joint, certain by never certain, about the words Luther had chosen, that night, so long ago, the first night she couldn't speak, couldn't say hello or goodbye, and instead, he'd said all of those words, for Claire ...
for her).
Allison finds herself with her lips pressed, still floored, still certain in more than half of her somehow this can't be real, or if it is, to so much as breathe or speak will break it, too. She doesn't know how not to break things, and yet Luther keeps holding on. Doesn't want to lose her. It's heady and terrifying two days later; not something Ray said either time.
But it brings up something else he did. Because she can't stop thinking about it. This whole time. Since before Luther appeared, and after, and she raises a hand (gloved, herself, still), from the opposite side of her chest, which she crosses to lay her hand over his over her arm.
"You can't lose me." It might be one of the truest things she's ever said, and she looks down between them, talking slightly more at his shoes and his chest more than Luther's face. "Someone pointed out recently--" And she doesn't say it was Ray, and she doesn't say it was said in the most romantically undeserved, and absolutely clueless of the truth, way possible.
"--that for the whole time I've been here, before every day would end, I would always end up looking for the moon." There's a glance up, it's terrible, it's true. She's done graves wrongs by people while doing it. Holding on, making promises, but not giving herself in the same fashion. "Every night. No matter where I was. When it was."
She even, irrationally, hated the new moon sometimes.
When the sky was empty and dark of its bright reminder.
There was nothing new about a world wrapped in only darkness.
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It feels so much bigger than either of them, and those words don't make sense again. He can't make them fit somehow — although he's still hanging onto her arm with just the lightest touch, fingers curled against Allison's upper arm as if he can't bear to let her go, but can't bring himself to take her more firmly in hand, either. (He's the leader, the one who heaves himself into battle and throws himself between his family and anything threatening them, but this is not a battle. He doesn't know how to lead, here.)
"But I wasn't even up there," Luther says, dumbfounded as ever as he latches onto the cold hard logistics of it. As if logic or rationality has anything whatsoever to do with matters of the heart. He should know that, too: the way he'd spent years staring down at the glowing lights of the west coast, imagining that somewhere was a small pinpoint of light that would be Allison in Los Angeles, as if he could see it (and her) from all the way up there.
"I wouldn't be there for another, what, fifty-something years?"
Dummy.
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It feels foolish, and hopeless, and -- even anchored by his fingers -- insane—an adult admitting to the stupidest of childish things. A child reaching for something lost so, so, so long before when there was never even a single shred of hope anywhere, to begin with. Not a decade later, without a single word sewn between them after Goodbye.
"It wasn't like here." She can't tell if she rushes those words a little to make them sound saner, and yet somehow, they sound a little like an apology in her ears, too. "Not every night. The bad ones mostly. The worst of the worst after--" The ones were she stole away to windows and darkened back porches, to steal a cigarette or nurse countless scotch glasses, or she'd cried herself empty in that empty, empty, echoing littler house, and the moon just happened to be there already, too, and she couldn't help wondering.
About the boy up there, watching over all of them. Keeping them safe.
(Before it was when he was dicked over by their father in the last, greatest way he could.)
"And then after we all came home--" And she means, but the words don't force themselves: after I saw you, heard you, you were so real, so you, again. "--and you were there, and then I was here, and--" She's never been prosaic or poetic unless she memorized the lines to be that on a screen (and even that part of her life is so long ago it's half-dream). She's all emotion that only comes out cutting straight or couched in lies that never will.
"--I don't know." A beat. A frown. Because she can't make it make sense for him.
"I guess. It was the only echo I had left of you. That I could see. To hold on to."
That even Ray hadn't been enough to hold on to all those days.
He hadn't been the first thing she'd reach for getting here.
And she hadn't been able to stop even once he was there.
(She didn't deserve to be loved by any of them.)
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But what she says. What she's saying. It makes his chest warm from the inside out, a soaring dizzying heat like his heart is going to leap right out of his chest. Like it's going to palpitate and give him a heart attack.
"I wish I could've been there for you. On the worse nights," Luther murmurs. That's a safer thing to admit, because it comes after Claire. Because if a message could have made it up to the moon base, somehow, some way, he's certain he would have come down. He could have been there for there. He would have.
Even so, though, it's useless wanting and wishing for what hadn't happened. But Luther's well-accustomed to that longing regardless; it's taken up residence inside him like a persistent weed, gnarled roots curling into all the cracks and crevices of his heart, tightening like a noose. His hand slides down her arm, the line of her forearm, the turn of her wrist, then down to the curl of her fingers, where two of his fingers hook into hers.
"I didn't have anything to hold onto. Nothing that I recognised. I just— kept thinking I saw you, all around town, every time I saw a woman out of the corner of my eye who had even a passing resemblance to you, I'd do a double-take. I literally tripped over my own feet when I turned to look and faceplanted on the ground, because I wanted her to be you so badly."
Everything he hadn't ever actually wanted her to know, the things about him that had felt sad and foolish and pathetic, they're spilling off his tongue.
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