luther "the big shy one" hargreeves | #00.01 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
obediences) wrote2019-03-08 09:00 pm
obediences) wrote2019-03-08 09:00 pm
Entry tags:
for numberthree.
And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.
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Nothing is impossible for her.
Nothing at all. And they all know it.
A word—a single word, repeated without context, only righteous rage—and a man was burning himself with scalding coffee, unable to do as much as whimper a few days ago. It’s that, not the fight with the Sparrows she thinks of first.
The worsts she does with reckless carelessness.
(He doesn’t know about that; she’s no better.)
But it’s them.
The Sparrows are like them. Born the same day. Bought and paid for, and trained, by this newly-changed version of The Monocle. What do they even know about them? Why should they trust what they’ve been told?
How many secrets of their own have they kept from the Sparrows already?
Allison hadn’t even realized entirely she’s been walking toward him. Vague, canny, wariness in her muscles as a million impossible-possible manipulations gave birth in each of her newest thoughts. How she could, would she, turn someone else’s leader.
But her heart is starting sprint as Luther doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, a puppet holding. Like she was their father doing inspection; one he’d summarily fail in that tragic tux.
“Luther?” Her voice is half outside herself.
A stillness trying not to see already.
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And even then, they only knew whatever that rigid Hargreeves publicity machine had allowed the rest of the world to know. Even the Umbrellas had been trained to never tip their whole hands. They hadn’t even known all of their capabilities: Klaus and Viktor, even now in their thirties, are harnessing new levels of power.
So who’s to say one of them isn’t like her?
Allison’s walking closer, and Luther’s hackles aren’t up — why would they be up? — but he’s still frozen. “What?” he asks, and… well, his eyes aren’t that cloudy-white which accompany Allison’s powers. But there has been something so uncommonly strange about him these past few days. Too cheery, too bright, too empty: too buoyant and unbothered and untethered from reality,
as if
as if he’s floating, as if he’s been absorbed into someone else’s gravitational pull, a swallowing black sun.
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The thing sliding slivers of dagger sharpness between each rib with each thin breath her body is still taking in, as everything is set down for just looking at him. Ray. And Dallas. And Viktor. And the sit-in. And the riot. Almost suffocating. All the goddamn fucking everything that gets everywhere when any one of them so much as sneezes in any direction.
Her heart won't slow down, but it's a sound in her ears while everything else does. She takes in the strange, precarious easiness in his shoulders, in the hold of his weight, the cut of this suit, those ruffles, that still undone bowtie. She has to look up from it to his face—the untroubled cut of his face, the slack muscles in his neck, his jaw, the set of his forehead, the faint unfocused gaze of his eyes.
Not like. But ... not ...
Not him. Something in her chest is trying to crack. She is skittering toward that same dark swirling pit that was only survivable because of him and Viktor. She could have been overjoyed to find her sister-turned-brother again. But Luther was the only reason she could handle walking away, even as it tore out everything that kept her floating. Luther.
Luther—
Luther, who wasn't—
"Luther—" Even as her mouth moves, there's only one word slingshotting around her mind. Faster (no) and faster (no, no) and faster (no, no, n o) . Was desperation the only thing that ever came for her? Her mind tries for a last, too simple thing (when she already knows; she's smart, The Monocle's Number Three.), and even as she says it, unplanned, she knows it's more, too. "—what do you want?"
It's not just desperation. It's bigger and deeper. Cuts through every little space left in the tumult of her thoughts. There's. She knows it makes her the worst person—mother, wife—Luther could tell her to jump, she would. She's done it too many times now, only seconds after seeing him again. But Luther isn't—and she can't handle if he isn't, because he has to be—because she can't even congenitally think about a way in which she could manage, that she can even take another breath if he—
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(you, you, you, it’s always been you, every minute of every week of every year that you were gone, always out of reach in any universe)
The answer clots up behind his tongue. He’s unable to answer. He wants to marry Sloane, he wants to set the apocalypse aside,
but none of that makes any sense. He glances raggedly over Allison’s shoulder towards the door, the one she had left cracked open, like a lost dog looking for its master to come home— but without repeated instruction to reinforce the story, he doesn’t have the right reply. And yet, his sheer stubborn willpower has always been one of his greatest strengths. It’s a fist battering against a brick wall now, skin and knuckle scraped raw and open and bleeding against the barrier that he can’t break through.
He can’t break through.
So in the end, Luther reaches for someone else’s words. It’s easier to recycle them when they’re already carved on his heart, memorised through the years and well-thumbed paper leaves, the beloved shape of them sitting ready on his tongue.
“Do I contradict myself?” he asks, slowly, haltingly, each syllable dragged out of his throat, meeting her gaze, wide-eyed and unblinking and intent. As if he could communicate.
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But it's not for her.
Even if it's not an answer.
But Luther, for all that he's good at orders and expectations, isn't always with words. But she'd spent two decades reading the book of Luther Hargreeves closer than anyone else. And there was a whole decade after where no one tried to. And the last year for him, she hardly knows anything else. But she feels that desperate, spinning, sinking thing as he looks away from her. Not looking for her. Looking for someone not here. For her.
When he chooses his following four words, she knows them only too well. Poetry, classic, and all-around American. And of the others might take it as a quoted rebuke, but all it feels like is a tape player. With the same answer, Allison can't move, can't look away from him, and her mouth presses—not like when he first saw her, a hard press of steal threatening to shatter glass, but as though, without the press of her lips they might tremble—and there's a slight shake of her head, and this, this is all weakness, but she can't stop.
"Don't make me do this." She can't take it back. She can never take it back. That's always been the worst part. But this? This—even the thought of this, of it being an option, of it potentially being the only option—is worse than every other wrong she's done. (Save Claire; always save Claire.) But on this cusp, the edges of her eyes pricking, breath staccato; it might be worse. It'll break whatever tenuous broken thing was still left.
The last time she said those words to someone in their family, she found herself drowning in her own blood less than half a minute later, but this isn't that. She'd rather be punched by Luther than do the only thing she thinks there isn't a way to escape from, and desperate, scrabbling for other options she can grab from anything, anyone here; no one has things for this. No one has done this. She can't do this.
How many things does she have to lose? She'd sworn over and over. Never him. Never. There was one person in the world who knew her, liked her for herself, who she never had to question. Even when he refused to come with her, she'd known it wasn't about her, who she was, even if it'd taken years to work through his choosing to stay within that.
Changing anything. Demanding anything. Forcing him.Her hand reached out for his arm, all slippery black fabric under her nails,
telling herself it was a plea and not— "Come back to me. Please."
When had she ever known where the line with want was?
When was she ever made of something that wasn't pure want?
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but she’s never actually needed it, has she? The prefix is a leash around a tiger’s neck, a dulling of her claws, a sheath for her sword, a way to purposefully hold her powers in check, to hold the rigid corners of the world in place and not have it melt like putty in The Rumor’s hands. Even she’s been excavating and testing new capabilities lately.
So instead it’s that pure sheer want roiling across the room between them, that cavernous gap between them. Come back to me.
His eyes go milky-white. A ripple across his face. But when it passes, there isn’t that jerky rickety blankness of one of her automatons; Luther’s expression clears and instead he’s blinking and blinking, scrubbing at his eyes for the moisture he lost when he’d been staring so intently. It’s like something sags in him, those broad shoulders suddenly sloping, and he takes a few stumbling steps forward. (He can’t not, and is that the compulsion or his own stupid aching heart?) He crosses that distance between them, and he never initiates but this time he wraps his arms around her. A little too rough and hard and heavy at first — memories of Viktor, suffocating — but then Luther readjusts, softens the touch, hauls her into a hug but not a strangling one. He breathes out a ragged breath against her hair.
Come back to me.
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She's a frozen rictus as it clears, and Luther lumbers to her, and the damning realization hits her too late—isn't it always that way? Isn't she always too late? Doesn't she always forget to be wiser? She might be smart, but she was never made to lead, to balance, to think enough before she speaks the current of her desire made manifold. A weapon from her first word, a child with the touch of a God. She can win, but only because she can take everything from everyone.
Luther lumbers toward her and her only feeling is terror still. Worse.
Because she catches it a second later. Lost. Too late.
to me
me
When has she ever been anything more than a foolish, selfish child, reaching for what she wants, using whatever it is only for herself? Why hadn't she said anything else? Something more true, something unencumbered?? Why hadn't she told him to come back to himself?? How was she so selfish to make it about her? Why couldn't she still outrun that claxon screaming in her head? Luther's arms are too rough, and Allison is drowning in her own air, and the feel of his arms back around her, and the disconnect from anything that feels real. She feels disgusting. Dirty. No word Diego called her once ever dark enough—she's a monster with a pretty face and only pettier and pettier choices.
She can see Ray's face again as she closes her eyes.
But if you had, would I even know?
The answer varies; her siblings often did, but not always, but the question had landed deeper than any violence in the riot during the sit-in. A clarion note about how well she could be trusted even by the man who loved her so much better than she'd loved him. How much even the one person she'd sworn never to rumor could trust her. Now. She'd had to, the argument makes itself. Because of what was done to him. Slick as oil, stained black and bloody and vile. And not even knowing if this thing—that might not be Luther anymore forever, too—is even safe.
There's a shudder in her breath and tears in her eyes because she has to do it now before another moment passes, and has to own the ruin that she always runs riot. Choose it. Fix. It. Knowing she can never fix it. How many millions of times had they tried that in her childhood? She knows it, and her mouth is still open. She has to try. To make it better and cleaner, choose him, choose Luther, protect Luther for himself. From them.
(From her.
For what always comes next.
In her messes. To the Umbrella Academy.
If it can get worse, and it always can, it will.)
"I heard a rumor—" Her voice cracks, and distantly, damningly, so does everything else in her, and as she feels the body around her freeze and slump, as strings stronger than she's ever had a right to have, make him meat and bone and passiveness that is no longer a person, she pushed back from him. Vision half-blurred but refused to let herself let a tear fall. Just his face, devoid of self. Just. Him.
Not herself. Not what it'll cost, even as it swallows her.
It has to be for him and only him. He has to be safe.
Once he knows. Once she's lost him.
If they come for him again.
She has to know she tried.
To do her best.
Protect him.
From all of them.
"—that no one could ever mess with your mind again."
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I heard a rumour that no one could ever mess with your mind again.
His eyes don’t change this time. Strictly speaking, it’s not altering him, it’s changing the entire rest of the world, the future, herself and everyone else with greedy grasping powers, into perpetuity. There’s a ripple in the air from her mouth, an invisible readjustment underfoot, a clean but all-encompassing edit to reality.
There’s no flash of blinding brilliant light, no magical girl transformation, no Luther spinning in a colourful tumult to indicate his freedom and those strings snipped. As cartoonish as their lives can be, it doesn’t work that way.
No, it’s this: Luther sagging even further and crumpling, landing on a knee on the hotel room floor, sinking even further into himself, a marionette with its strings cut. He’s breathing shakily, an over-large hand catching at his face as he feels himself come back to himself for the first time in days. And after a moment, he scrabbles. Throws the bowtie into the corner of the room, and then he’s fumbling for his hands, seizing that makeshift engagement ring and flinging it away—
His unthinking strength sends it flying too far too fast, like a bullet, rocketing right through the window in a crash of glass.
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It's not enough.
It'll never be enough.
She can never undo it.
She'll never be certain.
He won't. Can't.
All she can do is stare at the top of his bowed head, the vast expanse of those shiny black-clad shoulders. All she can hear are his ragged breaths. It's the momentary void of silence after the bomb explosion rolls out. The eye of the hurricane, resting not in peace but in belabored, unprepared knowledge of the subsequent unavoidable obliteration about to hit.
She'd rather die than look him in the eye now.
(She has to know if any part of him is okay,
if there is a chance this part worked,
before she's sent away.)
And then Luther moves again, raising his hands to wipe his face. Slow at first, and then that first is gone entirely. Luther becomes a manic movement at abject opposite with her frozen inability to breathe, move, run away, or step forward. Tearing at that bow tie, and maybe his shirt, before he suddenly fought with his own hands. And before she can entirely connect what he threw out, there's a window cracking, shattering, glass falling in a shower of shards on the far floor. Whatever it was thrown away without any of his vaunted restraint.
And Allison skitters back several steps in a way she hasn't since she was very small. If ever. The Rumor was never afraid of Space Boy. He could let an eighteen-wheeler crash into his outstretched hand and hold it off, tear through it if need be—he'd broken doors, music boxes, and even one of their arms—and she'd never once pulled away. Only pushed in closer. Remained arrogantly untouchable in his space when it could be gotten away with. Only smiled in vicious camaraderie at the ruinous results of his best and worst.
But she'd never deserved to be its focus before.
It'd never been a competition—not really—keeping up with him. There was no way she could—any of them could. He proved it every day. Unassailable in every way. But she'd never done it either. Not unless it was required of her. In training. Pitted against each other in preparation for all the world might throw at them. Never even in the field. The one thing she could do—and only she could do—that could make even perfect Number One have no power to fight against her softest whisper.
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Something aches at the sight of her own raw fear, the way she jolts backwards. Allison’s never been afraid of him; even in his heights of teenaged temper tantrums, raw and stinging after one of Diego’s insults, he’s always been too careful with his strength around her. She’s always known she was safe.
(He’s always known he was safe.)
Luther doesn’t look very different, physically. Except it’s all in his body language, his expression: no longer loose and carefree, now looking more worried and harried; as he usually does, as he’s done for years. The weight of the world settling back on those broad shoulders. Luther’s rarely ever looked carefree.
And there’s another kind of slow-dawning horror, creeping in at the edges of his expression. When he looks to the window and that small perfect hole punched through it, he can see— the end of the goddamn world, swallowing everything, and there’s a wild panicky anxiety rising up in his chest at the very sight of it, and how could he have let it go for so long?
He’s never known what it felt like, being rumoured by Number Three, and so has nothing to compare it to. But she’s so meticulous with her phrasing. I heard a rumour that no one could ever mess with your mind again.
“Allison,” he says, starts, sputters out. “I don’t— I wouldn’t—” His hands make a helpless gesture: the window, the apocalypse, these stupid fucking ruffles. “I don’t know how that happened.”
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(Even if it's already tearing apart whatever fragile foundation she had left.)
There's a weight that settles cloyingly on him—his shoulders, his face, the very way he holds the bulk of his body. She's pinned in place, a roil of despair that's become her whole body, watching the horror that fills up his face. Realizations washing into place, driving away his manic ease and flighty glee entirely.
The need to do something, stop whatever's coming jackhammers Allison's heart, its own wordless horror hinged on. It almost feels like a blow, something tearing her in two as his gaze rips away from her. He looks toward the window, and she can watch the frisson that rocks his body, no matter how subtle—looking toward the light that's too bright to be a rising or setting sun. Is only destructive fire swallowing up everything, coming closer and closer by every minute.
When Luther looks back, he's sputtering, words finally starting to fall out, scattershot, and Allison can feel her head nodding more than she ever chose it. Nothing in the world feels attached anymore. It's all ending. All of it. Everything. But there's a desperate edge of a not-quite question in Luther's words, and nothing in her knows how not to answer.
"They did something. Sloane or one of the others—" But she's equivocating that small answer; it's bifurcating the actual responsibility, isn't she? That's not the greater problem. And even to look in the other direction, her words come too fast and fall out like a fountain too full. "I'm sorry."
It's not enough. Those two words are never enough, and Allison Hargreeves apologizes for nearly nothing—to no one, ever, even when she's wrong—but they won't stop. Not looking at him. At Luther. And they're as powerless to pull back what came before them as they were with Ray, Claire, and every misstep in her life. It's never enough. Two words, three—"I'm so sorry. I couldn't think of what else to do."
Isn't that always her sin?
She didn't even think to tell anyone first.
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“I’m— you stopped it, whatever it was,” he says, words tripping over his tongue, trying to banish that frightened shock in Allison’s face.
She rumoured him; this is a true fact of what happened. The one thing she silently promised she’d never do. In all their years together, and in the occasional off-hand wondering what it might be like, Luther figured there would probably be some sickening queasy sense of violation at having experienced it at the last. And yet…
He just feels clear-headed, for the first time in days. Himself, as terrible as that can be.
“Allison, if you hadn’t done it,” it, they know what it means, “I’d still be… god, that wasn’t me. I wouldn’t. You know I wouldn’t, right? You broke that. You ended it. You got me out. It worked.”
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But this.
This runs cracks through all of what kept that last room of her, her, from crumbling. Dissolving into only rage and grief. The woman who was just as much a creation of The Rumor thrown into the world narrowed down to an explosion of spiderweb cracks. But unlike those covered by a carpet, Allison has rarely been able to hide anything from Luther, and never when they were alone, with nothing else to distract them from each other.
(Fool, she still is—the world burns, unending, unchanged, throwing lighted shadows on the walls, and for the first time since arriving, there's something worse than her life going from a world dying with Claire in it, to a world dying without Claire in it.
And it's this.
It's crossing a Rubicon she can never uncross.
It's twisting the only true thing she's ever had.)
Everything feels precarious. Every iota of safety, of certainty—something one decade and then two years couldn't touch or take from between them—feels only a too-big breath pulled into her lungs from entirely shattering. His fingers—large and warm and so careful—curve her shoulder, and all Allison can do is shake her head, looking up at him. (So few words, and she feels so small in a way she so rarely ever has with Luther, of all people.)
"You don't know that. I could have gotten it wrong."
She started it wrong. She wasn't careful enough.
Hadn't she ruined enough that way before leaving Dallas?
"I didn't even mean it when it started." The words are tumbling out too fast, too bare, and that is the baldest lie—even if, also, true—and they all know it. Have for almost all of their lives. Whether petty or pissed, delighted or bored, Allison had to want, or will, or believe, in some shade of those greys, for it to work. Or it wouldn't.
She hadn't meant it. Or she'd meant it too much. (Come.) Both. Both at once. (Come back.) Stricken with the terror of losing him somewhere beyond her reach, even feet away. (Come back to me.) She couldn't lose him, too. Not after everyone else. Not again. Not forever.
Was she any better than whichever of them had done it?
Were his words now just the shades of grey hers had changed them to?
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Is it really love if you have to force someone into it? (No.)
But Luther is as physically careful and meticulous as his powers taught him to be. And Allison can be as careful and meticulous as hers trained her. And he knows the power of phrasing, and her phrasing in particular. And since those words awoke him, he’s been circling and circling the thought of them, the specificity.
So he repeats, words still gentle like he’s handling fragile-spun glass: “’That no one could ever mess with your mind again’. That… That counts for you, too, doesn’t it?”
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The person who best destroyed all she loved, when she touched it, herself.
"I don't know. I've never—" Done that before. Had a reason to. Thought about whether she could put a dome around someone that made them impervious to her. There's something marrow-deep and trained-dark that feels sub-human, even as it feels too familiar that throbs against the idea of making any potential enemy impervious to her attack or defense. Their father would scoff at the blunting of the weapon of themselves before anything else. Hadn't he so many times?
Except that Luther isn't.
Hasn't ever. She'd never.
(...Again?
It feels like stabbing herself.
Never was supposed to be never,
never-never stayed never, with her, did it?)
"I didn't want them to be able to do it again. If I wasn't there."
Except that's only half of it—maybe calling it half is too much—and it's tangled up clear as anything on her face—the shame of the unspoken part, the ownership, and the tangled, manic uncertainty. Maybe she'd wanted him to be as safely untouchable by her, too. If her desperation could get the better of even Luther. The way she couldn't burn out his face, eyes turned milky white. The way he'd come right at her and hugged her right after.
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He rarely ever uses his strength like this, but this is important: he needs her to look at him, blue eyes meeting dark, solemn, and needs her to listen. Pay attention.
“Allison, I don’t know what happened but I would never — never — have proposed to some stranger I’d just met. I’d never have… have bothered with a party when the world’s ending outside our goddamn window. I’d still be tying that stupid fucking bowtie if you hadn’t done… whatever you’ve done.”
Is he himself? If he did an inventory examining all his impulses from top to bottom, could he even tell if there was any lingering influence remaining? It’s impossible to say. But he needs to believe it; she needs to believe it.
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But his words aren't angry. She can hear a matching kind of desperation, but she can't feel it because all she can feel is his hand's warm, solid presence. All she can feel is how much Luther doesn't touch her, shouldn't be touching her, a kaleidoscope of too bare, too shameful things all lining up together, as his blue eyes blur in her vision. The way her fingers knot at her sides and touching him is the last thing she could let herself do now.
He's always been something she wanted too much.
Throwing her arms around Luther's neck and leaping into him. (And how his arms just floated around her.) The feel of his hand over hers. (When she admitted she'd married a man, not for love but to survive.) Pushing her way into his arms in the kitchen after he told her she had to leave her husband. (The feel of his hands on her back, the tilt of his head against hers.) The press of his mouth against hers. (The instant flustered apology after.)
It's always been more than nothing. They've both known that.
But attraction—even love—isn't always enough.
Never with their family. With them.
Not enough with Claire. (Had she rewritten whoever Claire was originally supposed to be?) Not enough with Ray. (Who chose the cause, the fight, the mission over her in the end, just like Luther. In their childhood, in the basement, in the concert hall.)
"I didn't m—I wouldn't—" But she had. She did. She'd said the words. She'd watched his eyes go empty and white the first time. Then, she'd said the actual words and felt him go limp around her. She made a mess and then did it again, trying to take it back. (I did what I always did. I made a wish, and then I couldn't take it back.). Half of the terror now is that her despair will make it worse. She's already slipped, and it never stops there. "I just wanted you to come back to me. I couldn't lose you."
"Not again. Not a third time." It's all useless, and selfish, and ashamed. What doesn't she ruin if she lets herself touch it? Didn't he understand? How important it was? He was? Himself and his whole existence in her world? "But I'd never. Not you. You know that." It's so weak, but it's all crawling out of her at speed. Maybe the only chance she'll get to tell him it all, as everything else becomes rust and stardust debris. "You're the only person who knows who I am and still likes me anyway."
Pretty and petty, vicious and vengeant, manipulative and ashamed, jaded and jagged, always aware she was more broken than she was ever whole; willing to survive at any cost—almost. And even with all her worst flaws, even when she turned herself on those closest to her, he'd never turned his back on her. He was the one thing she could trust in the three worlds and timelines.