obediences | for numberthree.

Oh no, no, everything's fine. I know we said this was just in case, and so we could reach other quicker, and in case there's an emergency or if I was going to be on the west coast again, or—

[ A nervous outpouring of words. He really should've stopped and written down some notes and cues and practiced beforehand, but he hadn't expected this to be as suddenly difficult as it is. Luther's capable of improvising across a dozen different interviews or press conferences, but hearing Allison's voice over this clunky handset just unravels him. ]

I was reading the newspaper, and I just wanted to say hi, and: congratulations on that Emmy nomination. For your show.

[ He lists them all: the reasons he has to be calling. Striking them down one by one, as clear as any other memorization he performed at the front of one of their classrooms. Feet slightly apart, hands behind his back, chin up. But not like that now. Or it's more that the rush of his words are nothing like the metered step of that boy, of any of a million memorized poems and speeches and rules.

Which doesn't make sense —

until that word; and she can't even stop the words from leaving her own.
Feeling more baffled even as he gives the reason. ]

You heard about that?

[ Maybe he'd be a little more relaxed if he was a little more comfortable, too. Sitting down, even. But he's standing in the middle of one of those long crooked hallways in the mansion, back straight and rigid next to that payphone, with half an ear listening for the front door in case the Monocle gets home again in the middle of this conversation. Ready to blurt out an apology and slam the receiver down and then scurry back to one of his rooms.

(He really needs to get a landline for his bedroom. Maybe he'll talk to Pogo about it.) ]

Yeah, it was in the papers. I read the entertainment section sometimes.

[ Translation: All the time, ever since her career started taking off and there was a chance of finding a glimpse of her in there. ]

[ "I'm your biggest fan, remember?"

Or whatever those words were exactly when he took them from the joke on one of his letters, wrapped them in the weight of a voice she somehow still knew maybe even better than she knew her own, and carved into her bones having to hear it out loud, too. A topic she still wasn't sure if it was more joke or not. But, then. There was this, too.

Luther calling her. To congratulate her. Which she can handle, right? ]

Oh. Uh — thanks. There's no definite knowing how it'll go until that night, but thank you.

How does it go? [ A beat, a curiosity; reaching out to learn more about her new life, without him, without them. ] The Emmy nights, I mean. The, um, party.

[ Allison looked up at the ceiling before finally looking back at her hands. She put the applicator back into the polish bottle and sealed it as she spoke. It's strange but a little nice.

Easier than talking about it with people not going. Well, people here, not going, who weren't similarly nominated. ]

A lot of really famous, and not so famous yet, people, all dressed to the nines, saying a lot of really nice things to each other. Tension is pretty high, as people are waiting to see what work paid off the best from the last year and where it might direct where things are going in the next few by that, too.

[ Luther's settled his weight against the wall now: leaning against it with his long legs stretched out until the toes of his boots touch the opposite wall. Looking at least a little less like he's standing at attention and ready for inspection. ]

Do you think the worst thing is trying to keep a straight face during the actual award announcements? When the cameras are on you and you have to try to look gracious and happy for the other people winning. The red carpet looks so much easier by comparison.

[ Maybe he says that because he's so, so terrible at keeping his poker face, though. He wouldn't last a minute under that white-hot scrutiny, the cameras picking through every micro-expression and waiting for that flicker of disappointment, the sour loss. ]

Second worst.

[ Allison tossed the nail polish tube into a basket of them on the living room table, looking at her toes. A strange feeling of whatever the reverse of déjà vu was. ]

The worst is still losing.

Being graceful about it is next.

[ Luther's mouth curls into a warm, knowing smile, even as he's staring absentmindedly straight ahead at the peeling, tattered wallpaper of the hallway. (He can hear her on the other end, the rustling, her breath, and so he latches onto that mental image instead. He knows what her apartment looks like now; he can picture her there.) ]

Sounds like the Number Three I know.

[ —know and love, is the easy end to that aphorism, but he bites off those words and leaves it at that. The first three of them had always been so brutal and competitive compared to the rest. It's familiar. Endearing. ]

You'll get there and win everything someday, I know it. Maybe even an EGOT.

[ His tone is somewhere between light and teasing, and also genuinely, idealistically supportive. He really believes she could, someday. ]

[ A confused knot snaps into place behind the center of her ribs. A nye-on instinctual wave of being praised by Number One (by Luther) collides face-first into war torn den of the fight with getting the world out here to see her as Allison first and not The Rumor.

It catches in her throat, spikey, even as it's so careless and proudly put that Luther just rolls straight on, into an aggrandized belief in her work for someone who wasn't even talking to a year ago. But. Still. It catches. Right in there with that knot. A quiet, sharp, deep want when she's always had to recognize those right as they happened. That she chooses to ignore that twinge now more than note it, doesn't change that it happens.

She wants to believe it. Him. That he believes in her.
Allison crimps her toes down around the foam,
answering the ceiling. ]

You know there are less than 20 people in the world with that, right?

When did you even look up what an EGOT was?

Edited 2022-06-24 01:48 (UTC)

Hey, I read things. I know things. I can learn. [ Sheepish, ducking his head as if she's here in the room with him, and Luther's now eyeing the toes of his shoes. They're a little scuffed, probably from the last mission. He bends his leg and tries to rub the boot against the back of his calf to clean it. ]

I maybe, possibly, saw you in one of those little bubbles on the cover of People magazine, and one of the back stories had a little feature about it and the people who were getting closer to it. It was talking about how Whoopi Goldberg had gotten it the most recently. I didn't even know what it was until then, though, or that she'd gotten all four. I liked her in Star Trek.

[ People was absolutely not his usual reading material. It wasn't aeronautics handbooks or science textbooks or even poetry. But if he passed the magazine rack and he saw Allison's face— well. He bought the stupid magazine, and he read it cover-to-cover like it had been assigned to him for homework. ]

[ A small snort. Almost, but not quite, a laugh. She can almost picture what his expression must be. That duck of his head, even as the defense is nothing but paper-thin. Something she'd seen so many times during their years squirreled away in bedrooms and empty attics and rooftops. ]

You read People now?

[ Likely better than pointing out none of those awards were for Star Trek or that she'd spent a good deal of time looking at the woman's life for reasons that hadn't made themselves clear until she suddenly wasn't inside the walls of The Academy.

In The Academy, she'd been one among seven, six really, and always among the top three. Here, she was a black woman in Hollywood, one of so few who made it even this little way she had, and it meant so many things her childhood never once prepared her for. ]

I can read People. Consider it character growth. [ He's grinning into empty air, grinning into the mouthpiece of the phone, imagining her sitting beside him and getting to talk to his best friend again.

(Luther has been trapped in amber compared to all the rest of them; pressed to the Academy posters as a snapshot frozen in time, an ever-smiling static image of the picture-perfect superhero, just getting taller and his shoulders filling out. He hasn't changed much, he thinks.

That's the whole problem.)

But for now, in these precious minutes, at least he can talk to Allison and joke around and feel that frivolity lifting his heart. ]

How have you been, otherwise?

[ There's another possible question burning the back of his tongue, but he can't quite work up the nerve just yet. ]

[ There's a small laugh. ] I'm sure Dad loves that.

[ The man considered most of her interests subpar from where he thought they should be, but it was mutual. Because she hated most of what he said and did, the unceasingly casual insults and caustic opinions. Holding ever out of reach anything so much as a 'Good job.' ]Well enough. You're lucky you caught me on a day off. I'm not always home at anything like regular hours. Bea's out for pretty much the exact reason — which you should know —

[ Flips mid-sentence while she's still mostly watching her toes curl in and out, in and out, press on the foam, then released, trying to figure out if this should feel weird or good. ] She can't stop talking about you now.

I think she had decided I was a single act with no guest appearances, and now, who knows. I think it's down to her selling tickets for your autographs out the front door or getting me to try and set you up with her.

She what? [ Luther flat-out splutters, completely thrown for a loop, his train of thought collapsing and derailing utterly. In his brief run-in with the legendary Bea, she had been flippant, a little coy, arching her eyebrows at Allison whenever the man's back was turned. He'd noticed her being — in a word — weird, but had just as quickly discarded her from his mental landscape the moment she was out of his line of sight. He hadn't even noticed her. Had been polite and genteel and entirely, wholly uninterested (which to some people accustomed to turning heads, just sparks that challenge even brighter).

His balance wavers a little, and he lets his weight slide down against the wall until he's sitting on the floor of the hallway. One long knee drawn up, the other leg still sprawled out with his boot now resting against the opposite wall, his pose inadvertently mirroring Allison on the opposite side of the country, without even knowing. ]

That's not. I mean, she seemed very nice. But I'm not.... that's not even.

[ He is not making very coherent sentences. ]

[ It's whatever déjà vu is in reverse. Luther's sudden yelp of outlandish surprise and — her well beyond those gates, and those cloistered high halls, understanding of it now as — primly horrified lack of his knowledge how to even process it except running the opposite direction. But she can see it. A hundred, a million times over. How when he was young, his neck used to go pink, and the tips of his ears, eyes wide, when some girl left a kiss print or a spray of perfume, or even more outlandishly, with only the boys ever had to deal with, someone sent a pair of their underthings.

She'd always hated that for the stupidest of obvious reasons.
But it'd only made her baited teasing that much sharper.
Her disdain. Her rejection of those idiot people.

There's a burr in it, but it's further away.

Isn't it?

(Except she'd never consider doing for Bea, would she? Not even now?
Not even just because they'd be the worst match on the planet.
Or that Luther's never coming out of that walled tower.

Which just made her an idiot still. Too.) ]

It's cute that you think you get a vote when Bea and her machinations are concerned.

[ It's all pretty much a joke and probably extremely unlikely, but part of his brain is already spinning the variables and crunching the likelihood of this (horrifying) option. With a lightning bolt of memory, Luther's rmeembering the organised, arranged dates which he had been forced on, courtesy The Monocle: barters and favours and appearances, a mayor's daughter here, a businessman mogul's niece there. Connections which needed fostering. PR wheels which needed greasing. The girls had mostly known what they'd been getting into — they knew it was all an act for the cameras — but they'd always been surprised, too, by how well-behaved he was and the liberties the superhero didn't take. He'd been polite and not handsy, to their startled relief.

The prospect of Allison setting him up with someone, though, is terrifying and wrong for so many other reasons. ]

Tell her I'll sign whatever she wants. But I'm not, um, the other thing.

[ She knows better than to find this cute, to let herself slip, slip, slip into these old shoes, but so much of her doesn't want to resist. Wants that nostalgic ease, the moment suspension of reality, to a time when she used to have a best friend, another person so close they might as well have been part of her. That's ached and been empty so very long.

It's s stupid game to play, but when has she ever done well at resisting what she wants.
It feels. Good. And she wants to let it be. At least until they hang up.

Which only makes her words cant more teasing.
Every option an exit to alarm him. ]

Maybe 'whatever she wants' is a little bolder than you want to sign on for, too.
The next thing you know you'll be signing very personal body parts she's getting tattooed over.

[ Luther's strangled noise is a little more restrained this time, because he's on the back foot defensive and a little more prepared for that goading nudge. She loves messing with him, shattering that composure like a wrecking ball going through the wall. Allison is one of the only people who can do it to him so reliably. ]

I still remember the very first time that happened at a media event. It used to be signing slips of paper, then it was print runs of the comics, then we got older and it was Sharpies and cleavage. I never said yes to those requests. It was just too awkward.

[ Like the Academy were pop stars with screaming fans, rather than soldiers. The Monocle had fostered the reputation, encouraged it, and a few of the children had hungered for it: the fame, the attention, the perceived power. (Although it wasn't real power, of course. They were commodities.) ]

Have you heard from any of the others lately? We could foist Diego on her, maybe. I've heard women are supposed to like the whole 'dark and brooding' thing he's going for.

"Please." Allison's scoff is a light thing compared to the poison-laced snap everyone growing up with her knows it could so easily be. "She deserves better than that."

Maybe not...Luther. But definitely not Diego.

"Maybe you should write her letters and let her down gently," is teasing, though Allison can feel the way even the joke makes her ribcage feel too tense, too tight. The idea of Luther squirreled away, privately engaged in closed conversations, having in-jokes with someone else. She's twelve, thirteen, fourteen; not even wanting to share him with Diego, with their Father. Greedy and wanting as only The Rumor could be, having gotten her way in so many things for so long. And this one was all the sweeter because she'd never forced him to pick her. Not once.

(Not even the one time he didn't pick her at all. Forever. The end.)

"But, who knows, maybe that would lead to handwriting analysis and shrine building."

"Maybe it's best to just never come back, and hope she finds a suitable replacement obsession. It'll probably only take 4-5 business—" She is snappy and fast, and it's light, even if a little more forced, while she tries to frown at her own emotions. But she snaps the end with a flick, too, making it more outlandish. "—months."

for numberthree.

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