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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Luther is flinging a matching hand toward her as the people applaud, laughing and smiling, and Allison wishes for all her worth that he wasn't and they weren't -- but she keeps smiling. She learned how to smile like sunshine seconds after glaring at her father for a camera before she was fifteen, and the last years have only been another, different kind of lesson in that.

(Even if it suddenly feels like she's learned nothing.

Like she's still the girl in that cab,
blinking tears at the closed doors.)

"Good enough for government work," Allison says airily, without looking sideways toward Luther, while the beat of her heart has suddenly slowed. The very instant of her words. Not because she'd naturally calmed from the dancing, but because it had refused to stop stumble-racing from the second she caught herself being stupid. Because she wants to control something, and she hates that she lost control of herself for even that moment. Like that.

No one has the right to take that from her anymore.
Not anyone. (Not even, or especially, him.)

Instead of looking at Luther, she lets the cool ease of her posture hold her, and her smile dazzles into something like personal as she settles her gaze back on the awestruck little girl who looks like she's been granted the wish of her dreams. "I hope you enjoy the rest of your night and your ice cream."

"I will, I will, I will," the girl is gushing, bobbing up and down on her feet, nearly buoyant with her joy. And peering down at that exchange between them, Luther still feels like he's watching it from outside himself, tongue-tied.

But he does know something about that joy, the way it fizzes and bubbles up inside your chest, like you've swallowed a whole mouthful of champagne. He hadn't felt it in years, so it's gone rusty, but that spark keeps catching fire with each little stolen glance at Allison, or another inside joke between them taken off the shelf and dusted off.

Ever since that drunken postcard, addressed and sent where she thought she shouldn't have.

The awareness curdles in the back of his throat: those shrinking minutes and hours, that countdown ticking until he has to leave. It feels like the sword of Damocles hanging over him, over them both — that ever-shrinking territory before he'll have to be on a plane heading east and back to that lonely house —

(that place he can't bear to think of, right about now)

so he extends another gentlemanly arm, ever the knight, still playing a role for their watching audience. But Luther's blue gaze softens when it lands on her again. This evening was supposed to be coffee, but then she'd surprised him with this, and now he doesn't know where they're headed next.

"Your chariot awaits," he says. "Unless there's somewhere in walking distance that you had in mind? I'm pretty much entirely yours, at this point. You're the local expert."

His gaze drifts over Allison's shoulder, to the small crowd which coalesced around their little scene. It'd be a good idea to move on to the next location on their whistlestop Los Angeles tour, anyway, before the paparazzi show up. It's a familiar song-and-dance that both of them know well: Allison navigating that balance of dangling just enough tabloid fodder to remain relevant; Number One swooping in on a mission, staying long enough for a photo op looking heroic in the rubble, then swooping back out before they can ask him too many questions.

There's a part of her that doesn't want to take it -- the arm offered to her. Hovering there in the air. Black jacketed and to the nines. That doesn't want to touch Luther again, not so quickly after rumoring herself. After what felt overemotionally necessary and feels sorely stupid only seconds later. Because it happened. Because she can't stop it from happening.

No. That's a lie. She could. She absolutely has the power to do that.

But same as any hundred times she might have contemplated it, she knows it couldn't be undone. And she doesn't know how much of the past would be unstitched and reknit entirely differently to make that lie a truth that all of Capital "R" reality acknowledges. It might be shattered fragments of a once complete picture, but they were her shattered fragments. The last of everything she has left.

Until suddenly he was here. Still here. Holding his handout.
Literal Super-Hero-Boy-America. And everyone is watching them.
Delighted by the entirety of the last few minutes.

Allison smiles, pretty as the picture she's learning to make of herself no matter her mood or role, but she's still young, and there's something that's so wholly still Rumor in the black glitter of her eyes that doesn't quite match her smile. Game and partner in this charade, but nothing else beyond it. Her hand lands and curls into his elbow, looking up at him dutifully like one would expect.

"Home, maybe." She is quiet enough not to carry as she watches him look at those watching them. "Before the natives think to ask for an encore?"

Edited 2021-12-04 21:22 (UTC)

"Oh, yeah, please. I've run out of dance moves. I'd have to start repeating myself." With her arm in his, they start walking down the street and away; gods who graced those civilian mortals with their presence, just for a little while, and then they're off again to be swallowed up into the night and the warm, hazy sodium-yellow streetlights.

But it's only partially down the street that Luther's brain finally catches up to his mouth and this conversation and he realises: Home, maybe. And remembers that she doesn't know where his hotel is, so there's only one place they could be going.

Hers. Allison's home. Her new home. He's never had any other home himself. The knowledge kicks itself into place with a stranglehold panic-slash-anticipation. Wanting to know everything — picture everything — he finds himself wondering if this is the only apartment she's ever had in Los Angeles, or if she's flitted in and out of several ones by now, a rotating cast of roommates, a rotating assortment of sets to live in. All while he stood stationary guard in an empty mansion, waiting. Just waiting.

(For what? For this? This trip?)

"What's your apartment like?" Luther asks, and there's a strange plaintiveness to it, a wistful curiosity. He's never actually been inside a regular person's home— just a home, nothing more, nothing less. "And is it just Bea or is the new roommate, Jennifer, still living with you?"

It's like pressing your face against the window: a lonely matchstick child out in the cold, trying to catch a glimpse of something real.

There's the catch and follow of silence as they walk away, and Allison's a little sad that they've lost the rest of their ice cream and left the small mess of it on the table now abandoned, but there's no time now to turn around and rumor someone to clear it away. Someone will, anyway eventually. Plus, there's more in the freezer at home if she has to have it. They both know this part too well. You can't fold everything into the box and pretend to be normal after deciding to be anything but normal.

(And many ways does that fit Luther.

She tries not to glance to the side.)

The silence lingers, as does the cloud that's tugged itself around her shoulders, recriminating in her stupidity, ashamed for the way she almost wishes she could slip back into those moments. Into not thinking. In the girl who knew once where she belonged without question or doubt. Into the girl who had someone who was always there, a partner perfectly in step with her every move, every waking hour. It's weak, and she hates that a part of her burns more painfully to slip into forgetting, and having it back, than to stop herself for being overwhelming, idiotically swept up in what shattered all of that to begin with.

It makes her relieved when Luther breaks the spell of their silence.

"Just Bea," Allison said with a slight nod. "Jennifer was only there a few weeks. We'll probably have someone else in there in the next few months, whether passing through or sticking it out a few months or years." Or eventually, they'd find someone else who'd move in and stay. "And the place is--" She scrunched her nose up thinking finally, "--not exactly the best version of itself at this second."

Bea was probably a bit annoyed about that.
Distracting her from so many truths she can't ignore.

"I might have left a few things between the door and heading for my bed before I found the note about having to be here on my door. There wasn't really time to clean everything up while getting into all this and running right back out the door." Bea might've, or it could all be still left where it had fallen as a message to pick up her mess.

"A mess? You?" Luther echoes, and there's some real incredulity in his voice. Some of their family members had been far more chaotic in their interior design, and Space and Rumor's bedrooms could get somewhat cluttered, but it had always been relatively clean and orderly. They'd tidied up after themselves. (Good children put their toys away, and good soldiers put their weapons away.) And if they ever forgot to clear up on rare occasion, then Mom was inevitably there on her restless daily rounds, puttering around and folding their clothes and making their beds. The mansion was orderly because they had no alternative but to be.

"I promise not to judge," he adds a moment later although, yes, that had sounded very much like judging.

The next question is inevitable, too, as he picks his way through learning more about her. This little snapshot of a life that he hadn't had any firsthand glimpses into before, only what drips and drabs of information had bled into her letters. "And so what's Bea like? You must like her enough, if you're still living together while everyone else comes and goes."

Allison can't stop herself from eying him at the laugh and then the promise that followed quickly on its heels. It's pricklingly close to an unspoken commentary on the fact she'd never been messy, even for everything she'd been allowed to put in her room and on her walls over the years. Only Klaus had decided to ignore those rules the older they got.

It wasn't a disaster, perhaps, the way anyone else might consider a place to be. She just wouldn't have left things across the apartment if she knew she'd be bringing Luther to see it only hours later. Which she couldn't have. She thought she'd be sleeping. She thought she'd be in another country.

(She never thought this would happen even if the world were going to end.)

Thankfully, Luther goes on talking toward her, giving her more reason to consider something other than that. Because. She's not sure she'd call herself and Bea friends. They were friendly, and Bea would likely call her a friend. It was complicated. Convenient. Allison probably used her powers more than she should, but what was new?

"She's nice." Allison tries to think. Racking her brain for sentences that yesterday, to anyone else, would have been so easy. They've lived together for over a year. But most of the trite things feel precisely that on her tongue, as she considers saying them to Luther of all people. Trite. But it's what she has. "Working some coffee shop role in a movie right now." Beat. "She basically owns a whole closet of just magazines and shoes."

"That fits, though, right? You always liked magazines. And magazines with shoes." He doesn't sound disparaging; it's just another thing about her that he'd found charming. The magazines had been regular little glimpses of the outside world dropped into their mailbox, her window into fashion and society, while Luther glued himself to the newspaper and articles about the latest spaceflights and aeronautics. Whenever another teen mag showed up with his face or Diego's plastered on the cover, he'd wrinkled his nose; only cared about it insofar as Number One got quoted in the interview more than Number Two did. And the shoes—

Had always been the same pairs of sensible patent leather shoes, the girls' practically indistinguishable from the boys', an unchanging uniform even as they all grew older. No such thing as Casual Fridays at the Academy: Allison could accessorise and drape a colourful scarf over her shoulders when she was in her rooms, and Luther could shuck his blazer, but the bones stayed the same.

"Are you a clothes horse now? I always figured you would be." Allison looked lovely in all the photos he'd happened to see of her after she left. (She always looked lovely.)

"I definitely don't dislike clothes," Allison says enigmatically, with almost a note of confessed challenge in it. As if the thought she's having right at that moment isn't that the dress she's wearing she picked up simply because she liked how it looked, without even having somewhere to wear it yet, and simply told someone to give it to her.

"Wearing whatever you want, whenever you want?"

"Still hasn't gotten old."

She didn't miss a lot of things, but she definitely didn't miss the rote and repetition of the uniforms. Skirts and sweaters and blazer. Mary Janes. Always the same cut. Always the same color. Always the uniform row of little children in identical clothes. That image touches the brittle crack still there down her center, merges somehow with six of them fading to one.

One boy. Still perfectly suited. As the day he was last.
There's even the brief wonder if he had it with him.

Had anything non-uniform aside from this suit.

The pause before his next remark goes on a little too long, as Luther considers whether or not to touch that particular button. In the end, he settles for honesty — it's always been the easiest action with her, instinctive like breathing.

"I still don't really know what that's like," he admits. "Wearing whatever you want. We've relaxed on the dress code a little, since..."

Since all the others had left. A school wasn't a school when it only consisted of one pupil.

"Well, recently. I don't have to have the blazer or tie on all the time. But it's still all dress shirts and slacks and Oxfords. My growth spurt was a headache. Mom had to tailor so many clothes."

There's some self-consciousness twisting in his gut at that admission. And after a strangled second, as if he's trying to skip on ahead and not linger on precisely how sad that truth was, the boundaries of his surprisingly small life, he adds: "How far are we from your place?"

It's not hard to picture. If anything, it's this tux that keeps throwing her. Luther looks like a normal person in it, and normal is not something Number One is. He chose not to be. He decided to stay Number One. Spaceboy. To run away from any confessions about wanting to get out, have a real life, be real people.

It's easy to picture him still there. Trapped still in amber.
A grown man still haunts that house in his child self's clothes.

Allison has thought that so many times. Angry. Hurt. Bitter. But this time, it's sad. She was glancing at him as he kept talking, entirely out of any context but that god-awful trap of a house. Other people would buy bigger clothes. Making her skip his question altogether, with a completely different one of her own, underwritten by a sudden fierce want to shake the goddamn bars of that cage until they break even if it isn't her place anymore.

"You know this city never sleeps, right?"

"I could find you somewhere to take you shopping right now."

It's more threat and promise than offer, but she can't stop it rolling out.

Ambling along beside Allison with hands-in-pockets and looking more relaxed than he has in a long, long while, Luther shoots her a startled look. It's always that surprise with him, of seeing someone else daring to colour outside the lines and then he's always scrambling after them, thinking, We can do that?

"And come back with... what, Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts?" He struggles to picture anything outside of the uniform or his formal dresscode for events like this, and so his brain goes to the most ludicrous thing he can picture. What do people wear outside of identical slacks and button-down shirts?

There was that lurking paranoia with him, entirely incorrect for Number One but lurking beneath the surface nonetheless: what if he did start choosing for himself and he got it wrong. Something as little as looking unfashionable and out-of-season, which would reflect poorly on the Academy. His perpetual slight bafflement of how to fit in with the civilians, who he didn't know at all and only associated with briefly, fleetingly, at carefully-structured events, and when he'd never been raised to associate with them. So the Academy uniforms and the dress-codes made it easier. Gave him at least one less thing to think about and to occupy his mind.

But his nose is crinkling into a grin as he adds: "But, okay, I'd trust you to be my personal shopper though. Personal stylist. Whichever. You'd be in style and you wouldn't make me look stupid."

"Not unless you did something to deserve it," comes back quippy and immediate.

She knows neither of them is serious, but this feels a lot like one of those late-stage games. When The Plan™️ was already entirely made, but there was still some waiting, and it inevitably led to dreams of what might be and how would we and what would we—like one of their father's million mission puzzles to figure out how to survive. Except it was about the real world and none of their dusty history and military stratagem books to fall back on—only their imagination.

(Hers.)

"Hhhhmmmmm." Allison draws out the sound, making it comical more than the seriousness her face is affecting as she gives him a once over from head to toe. Once. Twice. Quick, clean, economical sweeps of her gaze, and still, what she thinks most is that he's too handsome, and too All-American Golden Boy clean cut. (It's unfair. It always has been.) There were fashion designers who would drop a year's worth of projects to be the name stitched on his collars. Right this second. In the middle of the night.

"The suit can stay. It's a good cut. But I'd definitely have two or three others for you to try." She ponders upward. "Jeans, definitely. Short-sleeve shirts, fitted but not too fitted. Black or a mix of different ones in earthy tones. For something softer, maybe sweaters. A grey or a washed-out blue to pick out the color of your eyes."

Sunglasses hanging off the bottom of a row of open buttons.
A nice, crisp silver watch. It paints itself too quickly.

And she thinks that she's always been thinking about it without trying to focus on it. Always been comparing anyone she was across a stage with, set or gala, with what Luther would look like in that place. In those shoes. With that smile for her. The way they all tried, and failed, to match up. To even come close. Of course, she has.

Of course. She always has.

Because all she had was settling for what she was allowed.

It’s such a banal, everyday picture for anyone else in the world to paint — jeans! — but for these two, for him, it has the tint of impossible fantasy to it. Luther’s never looked quite so casual or at-ease as that mental image depicts. Some interviewers occasionally asked about a more casual look for their broadcast, to make him more affable and approachable, and the Monocle had slammed the door shut on that possibility: the Academy was formal, the Academy was stiff and buttoned-up and almost Victorian, the Academy couldn’t reflect poorly on Hargreeves Enterprises. (And then there was Luther: Reginald’s most successful experiment, his biggest failure, obeying the rules to a tee.)

“If the acting thing ever falls through,” he says after a moment, “you could be a stylist.”

Beat, then, quickly, “Not that it’s gonna fall through. I mean it’s obviously going really well! It’s gonna be fine.”

Oh god.

It’s always so comfortable with Allison until it’s not: until he accidentally steps into something awkward, some breach of etiquette, gigantic foot stuffed in mouth. Luther sighs.

The universe could take pity on him and have them turn the corner and spot her apartment building any minute now—

The universe is, in fact, kind to Luther in this way.

Even as Allison half-rolls her eyes, Luther stumbles into sputtering about, implying she might not make it. It touches down, smarts a here-and-then-gone mark, errently wondering if he finds her choices as stupid as their father does. Beneath what she could be accomplishing day in and day out as The Rumor and not a real person with her own wants and dreams.

But Luther is tripping on himself,
and Luther wouldn't be subtle if he did believe it.

The only subtle bones in Number One's body exist behind the mask.
Luther, under ~~take off~~ the mask when you talk to me is floundering uncertainties.
Always trying to figure out what to make of anything not defined by their father's opinion.

It's endearing as it is a little too obviously still present, that still so very sheltered part of him, untouched, unchanged, unlearned, or broken by this beautiful, but also ruthless, real world outside the gates of the Academy. Allison fixes him with a raise of eyebrows and the slant of her mouth:

"Mmmh. You want to dig that hole any deeper before I let you into my place?"

Edited 2024-03-15 23:50 (UTC)

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for numberthree.

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