obediences | for numberthree.

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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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Saturdays, twelve o'clock.

The whole Academy inevitably counted down the time and the minutes, every week. Luther was the most strict and regimented and obedient out of all of them, but even he started getting restless by eleven thirty-five: his gaze starting to drift to the clock on the wall, watching its hands steadily carving out the remaining minutes until their only half-hour of freedom. His wingtip shoe starting to tap on the floor, fidgeting but surprisingly steady, almost measuring out the remaining seconds with each bounce of his foot.

Klaus' attention span was absolutely atrocious (making paper airplanes, carving doodles into the grain of the table), so keeping his focus on the study material was an utter lost cause. Diego's was a little better, but only because he wanted to do better than Luther on the next quiz. But in the end, they were all still sitting technically silent in one of the classrooms, heads bent over their books.

At twelve o'clock on the dot, Luther slams the cover of his textbook shut, a little harder than he ought to. And he reaches for the thin volume of poetry instead, which has been sitting discreetly and patiently hidden away beneath the stack of academic texts.

"Dismissed," the Monocle says crisply from the front of the room, like he always does, "for the next half hour."

And they scatter. Off to their bedrooms, or the back garden to enjoy some of the summer sunshine, or the basement rec room (or the dusty greenhouse upstairs—). Today, the others head for other corners of the sprawling house, while Luther and Allison are the only ones who return to the residential wing.

He'd been partway through this book of poetry, and he's desperate to hopefully finish it sometime this month, so he settles immediately on his bed and cracks it open.

He barely glances up when his door opens without a knock, Allison letting herself in peremptorily as always. He keeps his gaze riveted on the page, but she can see the smallest smile creep on the edges of his mouth. At the movement in the periphery of his vision, the creak of her weight on the floorboards. Sometimes they spend their leisure time apart. But more often than not, they do this; always gravitate towards each other in these few precious minutes they have to spare.

"You're not watching TV?" he asks. They hadn't always had a television; one had simply appeared without explanation in the basement one day, as if they'd always had one.

The end of Saturday morning classes, Allison thinks, is what hell must be made of. Book dust caught up in the sunbeams and seconds that refuse to budge. She's read the same passage four times now, but she doesn't look up. Not when Ben's shoes are starting to shuffle restlessly behind her. Not when Klaus' paper airplane lands on her desk, and she picks it up, only to crumple it in her fingers, before giving a delicate flip of her wrist and letting it fall to the floor. With only a slice of a glare before returning to her page.

A fifth time. She's sworn she'll ace the next test.
Maybe not as good as Luther, but at least better than Diego.

It really is no use, and she finds herself staring at the ink as shapes more than letters by the sixth time. The spaces between the words in the two columns like a pattern. Sneaking a look toward the clock, up through her lashes, while refusing to let it even tilt her head the smallest millimeter. Luther, of course, is still dutifully bent toward his book, all tall rounded shoulders and dipped head, like somehow this reading is the most important thing ever.

He's as exhausting as he is enviable when he's like this. And he's always like this. Never flagging. Never wavering. Never get caught up in the boredom or the tedium of the memorization of the material. Which Allison is thinking, her gaze having returned to her book, and her finger pressed the page, that she's refusing to let tap.

Wondering if she just whispered it, I heard a rumor, it was time now if any of them would even remember, or if it would just skip completely, like one of Luther's records after getting a scratch. It's tempting, and she's still thinking of it when Luther suddenly sits up straight in his chair, all force and the concussive sound of closing his book like he is throwing it into the desk. A second too early.

It made her mouth twitch at the corner even as their Father dismissed them.
(Maybe Luther wasn't completely impervious.)

Allison didn't miss the book Luther was carrying back to his room, nor any of the time before it, as he continued to choose even more reading in his free time. If it wasn't Luther, she'd think something was seriously wrong with him. She'd have mocked any of the others for it. Wanting to read even more after the sheer mountain of what they already did.

Luther slipped away with his book and the click of his door, and Allison turned around in her room. And around. She could leave him alone. She could come up with something else to do. But it was the only consideration for five seconds. Before she slipped back out her door, a magazine, a brush, and a bottle of nail polish in hand, as she pushed her way into his room breezily.

(As though there'd never been the second she'd stopped to look down the hallway, careful still and silent, listening for even the creak of the stairs. Or the other right between the one where her hand touches the door knob and the one where she turned it, some still-twisty thing in her stomach that crinkled unpleasantly, dripping doubt; about bothering him.)

But then he's smiling and pretending he isn't while she closes the door as soundlessly as she'd opened it. A skill they've all learned well enough in the utterly rare once or twice a year they can convince Luther to break nighttime curfew. But this is more than that; even she leans her weight and heels back on that reason like she isn't hooked on the edge of that not-smile.

Which is maybe why it's so easy for her to smile in an unfettered fashion and say with supremely smug ease, "I heard a rumor it's a rerun."

Sometimes you could practically see The Rumor's powers as they make their way into the world: the slight dazed pause as a villain hears her words and they sink in, anchoring inside their minds like a parasite, taking root and changing their behaviour as they fall under her sway. When her words change the fundamental foundation of the world, though, there's nothing to outwardly indicate that anything has shifted underfoot — but Luther is absolutely positively certain that if he went downstairs now and borrowed the newspaper from Pogo, he'd see the afternoon schedule full of reruns.

"Showoff," he says instead; one finger delicately turning the page of his book, even as he squirms a little closer towards the head of the bed, clearing space for Allison to come plant herself at the foot of it like she always does. His long legs are still sprawled out across the bed, but there ought to be enough room for both of them, even growth spurts considered.

They've become experts at this part, too: making room for each other, finding space between the cracks to fit each other, tiny minutes carved out between the regimented hours. Sometimes it's him sitting politely on the very edge of her bed in her room, other times it's Allison sprawling herself on her stomach on his plaid duvet while he hunkers over a model plane at the desk. They're comfortable and at home in each others' rooms in a way that the rest of the mansion doesn't invite. (The rest of the house seems to swallow up sound, and demands straight spines, perfect posture, quick brisk steps, polite words and well-trained behaviour, educational posters every few feet.)

Part of him caves, and his gaze darts up to catch a better look at her. Magazine. Nail polish. Applying it and then waiting for it to dry will take up most of the half hour.

"You could just rumour yourself a coat of nail polish," Luther points out, practical and pragmatic as ever; but then he pauses and reconsiders. "Unless the act of putting it on is the point?"

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."

Edited 2021-03-11 03:43 (UTC)

He nods, a little abstractedly and almost as if the gesture's just for himself, but he's agreeing. The rationale makes sense. Number Three was always neck-and-neck with the boys, adamant about proving herself and earning her spot alongside them (and sometimes outstripping them) rather than skipping the line; the victory wouldn't have meant as much otherwise.

He's competitive as hell with Number Two. So he understands well enough.

Once she glances over at his book — he lifts it up higher so she can see which one it is, in this case Penguin Classics, Sir Thomas Wyatt's The Complete Poems — he mulls over an idea.

"We can multitask," Luther says, and only after the words are out of his mouth does he realise exactly how that sounds; the way it skirts the lines of something they've been nosing up against but haven't crossed, this nebulous unspoken limbo they're living in. The edges of his ears start to turn red in a predictable blush. "I mean, I can read out loud to you or something. So I'm still reading but not ignoring you, and so you don't get bored. And I bet it's better than that magazine."

He ducks his head again, unable to meet her eye for a second, as he backtracks through the pages, already searching for a viable candidate. Something that won't be muffled in too much archaic Elizabethan language; something simpler and shorter where his tongue won't trip over all the words in self-consciousness over reading them aloud. Even as his heart already gives a stupid little lurch in his chest, his breath held, waiting to see if she'll shoot down the idea as something too silly. Dull. Boring.

This was why she'd come back over and over and over again at the beginning. This was what she sometimes thought, in the quiet, dark solitude of the night, that she imagined entirely. Especially in the comparison. She hoarded this more preciously than makeup or the minutes of interviews she managed to say her own words not already picked by The Monocle for her.

She way Luther -- vaunted Number One, leader of the Umbrella Academy, and every little girl outside this mansion's dream -- suddenly blurted something out, gave an owlishly large blue blink, and suddenly looked anywhere else but at her, and started all but stammering. A flush creeping up his neck, the tips of his ears, sometimes even his cheeks.

It was nothing anyone saw outside of this room. It was nothing anyone saw except her. And, Allison thought with something both vicious as it was possessive (...as it was protective?), she'd mercilessly tear apart every single sentence that came out of Diego's mouth if she had to if that was the price of keeping it. Luther.

(This.)

It made her want to reach out and push back the perfectly cut blonde hair that fell over his forehead just enough when he'd duck his head and look down. To chide him that if he kept doing that, he would have to straighten it up even more than mussing the back of it on his pillow would. But all of it really just a problem and the ache in her chest is a crescendo she can't control, can't even predict how hard it will hit her out of nowhere.

Allison arched her brows, more amused at his offer, his rambling, and the sudden leafing of pages than she really cared about the offer itself. "How will it help you to finish if you're backtracking? Are you trying to imply that I can't keep up with a simple poetry book, Luther Hargreeves?"

Edited 2021-03-12 20:13 (UTC)

The corner of his mouth tugs again and he's shaking his head, though his eyes remain riveted on the page, bemused, as he tries to find his way back to... there. The Heart and Service. It had crept under his skin when he'd read it yesterday and he hadn't quite exorcised it yet — his thoughts had kept tiptoeing back to it over the course of the day, testing the words like he was weighing them in the palm of his hand, the lines hovering in his memory even while he'd been doing strength training and endurance drills. He'd been wanting a moment to look back at it anyway.

"I'm only implying that this is better reading material than some gossip about who wore what dress to the red carpet," Luther says, and there's that light warmth beneath his voice; the ghost of a sense of humour, the one that so rarely comes out, and usually just with her. He's always too stiff and severe and serious around everyone else, hanging onto that statuesque composure out of some belief that a sense of humour is undesirable in a leader. Maintaining that facade around Allison is a lost cause, though. He cracks. He always cracks around her, like she's dug her fingers into all his seams and pried him open.

"Anyway, I'm just trying to find the right one." He clears his throat; shoots a look at her over the top of the book with a question in his eyes, and she's teasing and amused but she hasn't shot him down yet, so Luther begins, and the stanza almost sounds like he's still asking for permission:

"The heart and service to you proffer'd
With right good will full honestly,
Refuse it not, since it is offer'd,
But take it to you gentlely."

The world would not believe her, but Luther looks best when he smiles in these small rooms and these squirreled away seconds. Not the grin plastered on magazine covers and billboards since they were twelve. All blinding teeth with peerless self-assurance, and more often than not, costume mask. This one. This less than perfect, almost slightly crooked, one, even though nothing about Luther is less than the perfection their Father order's them all to be.

Maybe not crooked. Maybe. Something almost like shy.
Another thing Luther wasn't. (Except.

Maybe here? With her?)

Poetry book in hand, he shoots her one last too-quick glance over the book, like she really might swat it out of his hand, before focusing almost too hard on the page she can't see, and Allison wonders if she's just signed up for a truly terrible way to lose her only thirty minutes. But even she can't quite believe her own disinterest in the objective when for a long second, she can't look away from Luther as he starts.

The way he swallows and clears his throat, not as he might before demonstrating something anywhere else, but like he's trying to gather his courage (and when did Luther ever have to?). The way his gaze softens on those unseen words even when his shoulders are still too tight, his voice some wavering grey beyond his normal gray regimental, uncertain, too.

Luther's recitation behind closed doors is such a difference from his public speaking. At press conferences and in front of the cameras, he's wielding the bombastic confidence that had been trained into him, loud and confident and with a winning grin like he's just stepped out of an all-American midcentury commercial. Don't hesitate. Don't trip over your words. Clear, brisk enunciation; never second-guessing.

Here, his voice is softer, lower, more careful. It had been such a small step from their memorising the Iliad, towards poetry then catching his interest later on, although Luther had been the only one that had really stuck with it. They all knew and gently teased him for it — o captain, my captain — but he never goes as far into it around the others as he does with her. It always feels so much like he's prying open a protective casing over his heart, and revealing too much.

While Allison opens her bottle of nail polish, he hyper-focuses on the words in front of him, concentrating on simply setting down one in front of another and then another and another, trying not to let himself think too much about what it means, what this exact selection might mean, what he's trying to convey:

"And though it be a small present,
Yet good, consider graciously
The thought, the mind, and the intent
Of him that loves you faithfully."

(The slightest self-conscious hesitation there before he suddenly hurries and presses on for the next stanza, almost like his foot caught on something and he tripped while walking, has to catch his balance again and scurry along, not letting them linger too-long on that. That particular line.

Even if there is, of course, a very particular reason he chose this specific poem. Luther Hargreeves is deliberate; he never does anything by unthinking halves. He clears his throat again, and continues.)

"It were a thing of small effect
To work my woe thus cruelly,
For my good will to be abject:
Therefore accept it lovingly."

He glances up, then. Still looking hopelessly sheepish, nervous, his heart in his mouth. "It's good, right?"

None of them can really miss what each other do, and so every one of them knows Luther likes to read poetry, and classics, and anything on space. But she doubts any of them figure him for reading romantic poetry. Which it is. They've all been made to read enough of it, and she may not have a great fondness for poetry, but she's not stupid either.

If anything, she wants to shake herself for the swell of that feeling that comes not from the poetry. The words she can't let herself look too closely at (tries not to wonder if he's only picked it 'because she's a girl and this is what she's supposed to like'), but for the way it all slips when he looks up suddenly, all bright, quiet hope. She doesn't care as much for anything the way everything flip-flops suddenly inside her chest, almost making her start when their eyes met.

Making her first look away too fast, like she'd been caught staring when she wasn't supposed to be. Which might as well be everywhere outside one of these rooms. She made herself look right back, just the smallest bit amused, maybe like she was humoring him this small indulgence as a personal favor. "It's not terrible."

Allison can't look at both simultaneously, so she has to give up looking at Luther to look at her hand. Which somehow impossibly seems to make her even more aware of him. Her gaze drifting just a little off her hand to the perfectly pressed slacks in the same color blue all of them wear. She doesn't know why it's different. She does. Too. She decides it before letting herself think about it.

Turning finally to face inward toward the bed and setting the heel of her hand -- and only the heel of her hand -- on his closest knee for a prop as she starts on her thumbnail. Her heart emulating a staccato it only reaches usually in a good fight. That she tries to distract with the faint frown at her hand and the color she's chosen showing up in its first swipe.

Her siblings wouldn't believe her, but she does pick and choose which battles are worth it. Most of the time. When she isn't just losing her temper. She'd rather a deep red, or a vibrant pink, maybe a bright emerald. Something with a bit of glitter in it. This color is neutral enough it'll look almost invisible whether in her uniform or her costume. It'll be nothing. Just nothing. All of this. Nothing.

Even if her heart in her ears, along with Luther's voice, isn't helping her believe it right now. Not even if she makes both her hands steady as she puts on quick strokes of first coat color.

She's cross-legged, her hand balanced against his knee for leverage; their legs near-brushing against each other, and merely that light touch has Luther pausing in his words as his whole brain glitches over it. All of his awareness narrowing down to the weight of her hand, the delicate shift of the fine muscles in her fingers as she starts applying the nail polish. It's the same careful delicacy when Luther paints his miniature figurines, and yet he's never been able to persuade her to the hobby; it hasn't caught her interest, moreso just watching him when he's at it. But still. Her hands remain steady like she's conducting heart surgery.

Luther shifts, leaning forward to prop the book against his other knee as he reads.

"Pain or travel, to run or ride,
I undertake it pleasantly;
Bid ye me go, and straight I glide
At your commandement humbly."

You could apply those particular words to her or the Monocle alike. Heart and service. Luther's always been about service and duty.

His mouth feels dry. His pulse still hammering in his throat, a dull pounding in his head, his chest, a heat radiating from his knee. When they were old enough to choose rooms in the mansion, they wound up with the largest bedrooms of all the kids (Luther by virtue of being leader, Allison by easily rumouring her way into the one beside his). And yet this room doesn't feel large enough to breathe anymore. She's too close. They rarely ever get to be this close when they're not sparring. And no wonder; with Allison so near, it's like Luther literally loses the ability to think properly. Everything else is drowned out by how much he wants to look at her, to lean closer, but he doesn't know how.

So it's all he can do to just keep reading, leaning on someone else's words:

"Pain or pleasure, now may you plant
Even which it please you steadfastly;
Do which you list, I shall not want
To be your servant secretly."

Luther pauses with not so much as an indrawn breath, and Allison has enough time only to question if she was too bold, before his voice returns to the next line. Except. Except it's not only that. Luther shifts and Allison's not sure quite if she can allow herself to return to breathing at all. Because he's suddenly leaning more in toward the space she'd just taken without asking. Making it hard to focus on the finish of her next nail.

His book being placed on his other knee now, enough she can glimpse the open pages, could stretch her fingers wide enough, and brush the edge of the cover, but it doesn't stay because her gaze almost refuses to stay on her hand. Because his voice is so much closer, too. Words that aren't whispered but are still quiet enough they'd hope not to garner the attention of anyone else who came down the hallway.

Her heart feels like it's shivering her bones, making it harder to keep her hand from trembling, suddenly trapped on the thought that makes her lift her gaze, that he might suddenly only be inches from her. That he is. Pale peach skin and golden-blonde hair, the flush that has crept up part of his neck. She wonders, despite anything rational, if he actually thinks anything of these words he's saying or just picked it for some other reasons—the straightforward simplicity.

But the words that prick strike that aching thunder in her chest.

That refrain of a wish not to be a secret when everything already is.

Something already far too often riding right upon, or on the other side of the line, against the rules. The greenhouse and the attic. A thin line with cans attached on either side of two foggy windows. Secrets on secrets. That he lets her get away with. Follows her into. Slowly opens inside of. All of it against the rules. But none of them as forbidden as the way she feels looking at him now. Not knowing if she wants him to go on. Or to stop. Or.

Edited 2021-03-14 05:58 (UTC)

It's the unspoken, unexplored secret under the Hargreeves roof. The one that no one else dares touch on; even Klaus, with his mouth running ahead of himself and always treading where he shouldn't, even he knows when to leave well enough alone. Even if the others can't miss the looks that pass between Luther and Allison over the breakfast table; the way they instantaneously pair up for assignments, without even hesitation or consideration; the way all of them will be lined up and standing neatly at attention, Number One unwavering, but then she'll simply lean over and whisper something into his ear and you watch those fractures spread like a faultline, the smile and laugh that he struggles to keep from his face wherever she's involved.

Since Luther's gotten most of the way through the poem now — there's only one verse left — he's fallen into more of a rhythm, finding his stride, like a rolling boulder set into motion. Speaking these last words like a promise, an entreaty, the syllables rolling smoothly off his careful voice:

"And since so much I do desire
To be your own assuredly,
For all my service and my hire
Reward your servant liberally."

And it's done, and his long fingers splay across the page of the book, marking his spot so he doesn't lose it, and his gaze slides across the bed to Allison's hands. The even layers of colour on her nails, meticulously applied. The faint acidic smell of the polish in the air, oddly enjoyable despite that. The curly locks of Allison's hair falling across her cheek as she bends her head over her nails, looking for all the world like she's unbothered, unruffled, blasé and hardly even noticing the significance of the poem (unequivocally, quite obviously a love poem). If there are stormy waters churning below, her surface looks clear and still.

She's very good at that part.

Luther just sits there, head slightly tilted, watching her, the rest of those words lingering in the air (your servant). As far as invitations or messages go, it's both clear-cut and opaque as hell. He's always shielding himself behind someone else's words, allowing the benefit of the doubt, the vague nebulous ambiguity that's kept them skirting that knife's edge and occasionally jutting against it or stepping a toe over the line, but never crossing it fully. Not taking that leap.

But in the language of Luther Hargreeves, he may as well be setting his heart out on a platter for her. Where it's always been.

There's no one else there. No one to rattle the silverware accidentally against a plate while too hastily grabbing a napkin. No one to shuffle their shoes in a restless antsy shift. No one else to break the silence. To make them break the space between them. To stop the silence that pours into the space Luther's voice had been a second ago, thick and heavy.

Filling in desire and service and servant with something that should be empty, but only feels like it takes up even more space. Makes even more noise against the soft thundering of her pulse.

Allison doesn't need any of the skills she's honed in last decade to know Luther is staring at her: he will be, is; Luther always looks for approval after he's done something, but it's not even that; she knows he'll be looking at her. He does that, too. Even when he's not looking for her approval of something. Looks at her. Waiting for her. To say something. Anything.

She could look up. Her head is half-full of the question of if she should.
But the other half is fixated on the stretch of his fingers over the page so close by.

Deceptively long, thin fingers, that alone gave nothing away about their ability to lift an eighteen-wheeler like it a cardboard box. The delicate barely-there tracery of tendons across the back of his hand that had shown for the brush of bare seconds as he'd flattened the hand. Equally as deceptive in giving nothing about how carefully even a shift like that had to be, so as not to tear the page. The wrist they linked to, the palest flash before it had hidden under the sleeve of his uniform jacket again.

They both know they shouldn't. Allison's never sure that isn't at least half of why she does most of the things she does every day, especially if her temper is riled, but she knows Luther doesn't. Luther doesn't make choices out of spite. Luther follows all the rules. To the letter.

Except the ones he breaks for her.

He has more to lose. Number One who keeps them all in line.

Number One, who is currently staring at her, and reading her poetry that even if it isn't something that makes the clearest sense, leaves her feeling cut open, confused, aching, and it feels like she's watching it more than doing it herself. Her heartbeat too loud, too fast, as the hand on his knee she'd been painting finally flexes, fingers stretched wide, like she could just be looking at her finished product, but her pinky brushes gently against the side of his at the furthest edge of his page.

But unlike that possibility, she didn't suddenly apologize and pull away.

Edited 2021-03-25 04:44 (UTC)

It's the smallest concession, a purposeful nudge which has the benefit of looking accidental, and so being easy enough to hide if that door slams open and someone else storms in. And yet the touch sets every part of him on fire, as it always does: a creeping warmth that sparks at his pinky finger, settles in the palm of his hand, then somehow skips the long lines of his arms and burrows as a heated blush against his throat.

He's not even sure what he expected, aiming that poem and firing it at her— bravely sweeping her up in his arms? Diving into a kiss on his bedroom covers? But there is absolutely zero percent change that Luther would have been able to take that step right off the bat, like walking off a cliff and flinging himself out into the unknown.

(They've been too well-trained. Too much on the lookout for the telltale creak of a floorboard, for the shrill sound of the bell marking 12.30pm and the end of their brief window of freedom. For the sound of Reginald's voice, stern and disapproving. For someone to notice. To catch them. To rip this away from them.)

So it's Allison touching him, and then Luther moves his hand just enough to hook his pinky finger around hers: even more purposeful and with that faint echo of a pinky-promise to it. He's still leaning against his knees, the poetry book tucked into his other hand, as he looks at her. His gaze sinks, darts down to her hand. Now that he's finished running through that whole poem, his heart heavy and pounding in his chest, it's like his head is empty; he's run out of words, doesn't know how to follow Sir Thomas Wyatt.

What comes out, then, is the simplest compliment: "That's a nice colour. You must be sick of burgundy."

The decorations and fabrics in her bedroom were all bright popping colours; a far cry from the serious, somber, official colour scheme of their uniforms.

Luther's hand shifts, and his pinky loops into, around hers. Before she can even take a breath and wonder if she'd gone too far, it guts itself on surprise, heady and hard and fast, tripping up her thoughts and leaving her staring at their littlest fingers—the warm brown of her skin and the bright peach of his: perfectly trimmed nails and creme pages under most of the rest of his hand.

She shouldn't. She knows she shouldn't. This is already.

But Allison Hargreeves is so bad at listening to should and shouldn't. She knows she's her father's bane in ways that Klaus will never get close to because where Klaus rebels in his nasty habits, he still hides out of fear, whereas she strides forward all bold daring, ready to kiss her consequences. She moves her hand, not quite unlinking them, but enough they aren't tight. Enough that the tip of her pinky -- not quite the best or most graceful of choices, but that this is happening at all -- can be used to trace so very lightly down the inner skin of Luther's own pinky.

Her mouth pressed a rueful line, and she's not sure her head is quite attached when she answers Luther's choice of off-beat topic. "I hate it." Both of them. The matching colors and these paler acceptable ones. "I'd rather it was pink. Or neon green. Maybe bright red." The barest beat and her fingertip slid into the smallest corner of his palm, only the smallest whisper of her mind forever keeping in check that the pale shade on her nails doesn't wobble or change for the ferocity of pointless want. "Something he'd hate."

That one faint touch dragging down his finger and jotting into his palm is— disastrous, is a tidal wave, is a typhoon sweeping him up. Allison can hear how it rattles his breath: one shaky inhale, sharp, like he's trying to gather back together the shreds of his composure. Which is so easily undone to begin with. One touch. That's all it ever takes.

And he can't even give Allison the easy, trite promise of Someday, you'll be able to wear whatever colours you want. Normal teenagers have the milestone of eighteen to look forward to, and independence, and moving out from their parents' house. All they have is one long life and an endless career they never actually chose for themselves.

So Luther can't give her that promise, and so he stays quiet. What he does do, however, is reach out and gently take her hand in full, folding it into his— stealing the small, delicate brush— and, with her fingers now seized (an excuse, a reason to hold her hand more directly), Luther bows his head over her hand instead, and carefully sweeps the brush across her nail.

Not something he's ever done for her, or tried on himself. (Klaus had experimented with nail polish plenty, though, painting his fingernails black and which he'd had to scrub off with rubbing alcohol later the moment it was noticed at inspection, reported and written up just like the loose button in his blazer had been.)

But it turns out that painting model figurines is so very much like painting nails, and Luther's hands are steady and unwavering, his attention clean and crisp and precise. He doesn't wobble or shake or apply the polish unevenly. Tidy layers.

"And yet the model kits always bore you," he says out loud, clearly thinking about it, bemused. Allison had always tuned out whenever he started working on his tiny, complicated models with their million tiny pieces and the patience required to work on them.

It's impossible to miss, and yet still, Allison nearly swears she has to have imagined. Number One can take a punch, can take being slammed into brick walls and by moving getaway vehicles of any size, without so much as a shout. Especially if he sees them coming and is braced already to make them realize they are as insignificant as tissue paper in comparison. He is the steadfast, resolute column by which they are all supposed to take their example. Flawless. Ready. In control.

And yet. It was there. (Wasn't it?)

That sudden, surprised hiss of inward breath. That made her heart stutter like that one sounds had a line tied to it as sure as the can hiding at the very corner of her back window. When she can't guess, can't quite force herself to look up, and find out if it's that she's dared too far, or --

But he takes her hand and the small brush that next second. Her eyebrows furrowing, mouth opening to respond to being denied the due of her two choices for however very few minutes are left this Saturday morning. Until his hands are shifting, and both of them suddenly have her one. Twin pale walls around the rich brown of her skin. And he's turning it, so her palm is flat, and starts painting the nail she was.

It's vertigo she isn't expecting, and she's left staring at the careful, delicate hold of those long, thin fingers; the hold she knows still takes all of his concentration sometimes. However, the slips are fewer and far between now. The skin of her palm against his dutifully still fingers is like a live wire, like the contact has brought life in every cell of the skin he's touching.

Allison can't for the life of her understand how calm his voice is when he teases her, and it makes her roll her eyes at the artful wave of his golden hair, and smoothed skin of his forehead, and the tiny furrow right in the middle, so few inches away, as he focuses on only her hand, and she complains because there is no breath to do anything else. "Because they are boring to everyone else, Luther."

"I don't get why," he prods back, and for a second — just a second — that mask of the Very Serious Steely Leader collapses like a black hole and he's just a teenager like the rest of them, plaintive and teasing. "There's so many different colours and complex pieces. I think it's like the satisfaction of painting your nails but multiply it by, like, twenty."

There was never enough time to finish his projects in one go, either. There were so many models scattered in pieces around his bedroom: Saturn V half-painted on the table, a WWII airplane half-assembled on a shelf. Luther rotated projects in their sparing free time, letting the paint dry on some while he went back to jotting pieces together in another. It was slow, patient, careful work — initially granted by the Monocle as an excuse for dexterity training, not that Luther knew it — and it kept him busy.

"I keep asking the others to join me in tackling a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle down in the rec room, too, and nobody ever says yes."

Because it's boring, Luther.

He keeps talking, though, while his fingers curl around Allison's hand and the slightly bitter chemical scent of the paint fills his nostrils and he works his way from fingernail to fingernail. Talking about banalities is keeping him sane, and preventing his thoughts from just dissolving into a mess right here and now over the fact that they are so close; that his knee is bumping against hers; that he can hear the sound of her breath.

She can't stop staring at their hands, at the meticulous carefulness of Luther's fingers, so deftly trained to his miniature toy models. Both are equally as breakable as the other. Everything is fragile in Number One's hands. Which makes the carefulness, the gentle stillness with which he holds her hand, something she can't ignore. Or unsee.

Allison, like everyone else in the house, knows all the small things Luther has broken along the way to this vaunted control. One greater than any of theirs. They all lost things to his exuberance or unintentional thoughtlessness when they were all so much younger. When his strength was just as great, but his control was almost non-existent. Before all the training. Before the point of all the toys, she supposed he wasn't supposed to fall enraptured with but did anyway. Until he could demolish walls of steel without trying, but still not leave finger grooves on forks and pencils.

Which makes the whole moment queer, like a trainwreck, a freeze-frame. Her handheld within the bubble of both of these. The awareness of how little pressure he'd need to exert to break every one of the bones in her hand with only the hand beneath hers. The concurrent awareness of the reverent, ever-aware, gentleness of how he was holding it. Like it was gossamer. These hands that saw just as much blood on those knuckles and under those fingernails as his.

It's a vertigo she can't escape, an impossible yearning ache in her chest.
Proud. Aware. Wanting. But when had the Rumor ever stopped wanting.
Having the ability to grant yourself everything you want.

(Everything but ... whatever this was.
She wants this without name or clarity or idea.

Wants him to keep touching her so calmly, easily.
Just her. Alone. Special. Over that line.
Wants to be wanted back.)

Her voice is a little too thick, semi-rusty, sticking to the insides of her throat when she retorts, even as she makes a face at him. "Except that you, then, leave all yours on shelves in here, just to grow dust, never changing, and I get to carry mine wherever I go, changing them whenever I feel like it."

Edited 2021-12-23 20:03 (UTC)

"I—" But then Luther stops, his head cocked like a curious dog, the brush going motionless in mid-movement. "Huh. Okay. You're right on that front."

He was going to run out of space eventually, the more he kept piling on more of those models and figurines scattered all over his shelves. He hadn't really thought about what he'd do when that happened, if he'd have to start surreptitiously moving them to other rooms if allowed or throwing them out completely. Some of his collecting instinct was likely just walking in the Monocle's footsteps: the older man gathered curios like he was operating a Victorian cabinet of curiosities, trophy cabinets holding dinosaur skulls and Olympic medals and Umbrella Academy merchandise and mementos from fallen enemies alike. Animal heads mounted on walls. You couldn't peek through the doorway of the man's study without catching a glimpse of endless proofs of his own capabilities and his scientific interests. Luther was the same.

"They'll probably change a bit when I run out of room, though," he says, as he starts painting again. "I'll have to rotate them out, add in new kits."

It was still so much stasis: the same hobbies, the same type of lifeless models, a life frozen in miniature.

There's always a delicious pride to these moments.
The ones where she contradicts something Luther says,
and he pauses, before deciding she's right.

The ones that are nothing like all of them together in a pack, during school, or practice, or a fight. Where Number One's word is law, and there is no countermanding his orders, takes, decisions, breakdown. It's heady even for something so superfluous. A tick in the marks that make her right. That she's to keep him on his toes.

"What are you going to do with them, then?" Allison looks around at the shelves and desk.
"Convince Dad you should get a larger room somewhere else? Or a secondary room to store them in?"

Some part of her already thinking that if their Dad didn't just say to trash them, she'd be surprised.

"He has so many studies and parlours and trophy rooms. I'd hope he could spare just one trophy room someday for Number One."

It's one of the few, rare glimmers of Luther hoping for more than he has, and he still sounds too naïve about the prospect. Overly-optimistic. There's no way in hell the Monocle's carving out more space in the mansion even for his favourite, and on some level Luther knows it, although he doesn't want to look at that truth head-on. He keeps looking at Allison's delicate hands instead: the even coats of lacquer, the blood and scabs neatly wiped out of existence from their last fight. In contrast, there's still a band-aid on one of his knuckles.

"Did you ever wonder why we didn't get bigger rooms?" Voicing this isn't technically treachery, isn't anywhere near the spitting vitriol that Klaus is capable of, but coming from Luther's careful lips it still sounds borderline. It's questioning, and he almost never questions. "I feel like we could've gotten bigger rooms, now that we're older."

But of course: there was a reason that the children were penned up in the servants' wing, never to be seen or stumbled across underfoot unless they were at their lessons or training. It kept them safely tucked away out of sight, and it didn't pamper them. One and Three had the large bedrooms compared to everyone else, and even then, they weren't all that large.

Allison doesn't consider it likely. Their father clearing out a whole room when he never considered letting them upgrade to any of the --

She nearly laughs, smiling amused but fast, here and gone, when Luther's words cut off her divisive, annoying thoughts at their father and the same subject. That was becoming more and more frequent during these last years. The moments they just slid into sync. They connected the same dots and wanted to hit upon the same question, even if from two very different opinions are their father.

Allison tosses her response shamelessly. "Because he hates us?"
The only reason she even had her room was that she took it.

“He doesn’t hate us,” is his automatic unthinking kneejerk response, as hardwired as Mom’s parroted words might have been. Luther’s been trained too well, has swallowed the party line too neatly, is too capable of reciting it when called upon.

This time, when he avoids looking at Allison’s derisive expression, it’s because he knows how much they diverge on this particular point. His mouth thins, however, struggling to think of the next words to fill in the gap. If Reginald Hargreeves doesn’t hate his children, then what does he feel for them? He certainly doesn’t love them. He’s likely only fleetingly proud of them, and never says so if he is. Like being only begrudgingly satisfied with a dog that performed an adequate (and merely adequate) trick. Luther’s been chasing his own tail for years for that very validation, and even he knows it.

So in the end, he finally settles for the carefully neutral: “He’s hard on us. There’s a difference.”

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numberthree - 2024-03-23 21:23 (UTC) - Expand

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for numberthree.

teen au: if you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

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