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]

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."

[obediences]

"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.

[numberthree]

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."

[obediences]

"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.

[numberthree]

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.

[obediences]

"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.

[numberthree]

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.

[obediences]

“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.”

[numberthree]

Allison frowns at both the words and the turtled response. Mouth thinned, head bowed, gaze still focused on where he painted her nails. It's not because he won't bite back at it— if she were Diego, Luther would have crossed a whole room for the implication of half as much in twice as many words—he's choosing not to. There's tension in the line of his shoulders and jaw. She regrets saying it. She doesn't.

She hates their father. But Luther doesn't.
But he doesn't ask—or order—her to pretend the same.

That's where it should stop, right? With the spoiled, arrogant, selfish thought that she's just special. That she has a blank check to say whatever she wants and Luther, well, he just let her—and that's not entirely wrong (Luther is the one who hunkers down through her actual storms of fury, even follows her to that attic room if she storms away first, waits her out, without forcing her to stop before all the poison is outside of her, too). But it's not just that.

Allison's gaze is still chasing the edge of his brow, the press of his mouth. And something bigger than her just feels sad. Because she's not sure he does disagree. Hate would be a too strong word in Luther's mouth of classics, poetry, and long-dead warmongers. But he's not blind. And she thinks he sees more of it the older they get. The more he can't earn any more gratitude or pride for being unwavering than someone like Klaus for doing nothing.

The best he gets is not being insulted for ineptitude;
there are no laurel crowns for unwavering victory.
(Not inside the Academy doors, at least.)

"Right. And somehow, that translates to bigger bedrooms making us weak."