#00.02 Diego Hargreeves 🔪 The Kraken (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deadlycurves) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
f20202020-09-08 07:05 am
deadlycurves) wrote in f20202020-09-08 07:05 am
deadlycurves) wrote in f20202020-09-08 07:05 am
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She might as well have signed his death warrant for all she had done.
She chose their big operation as her pet project from barely a year in. She got David on her side. Jane. Everyone was behind her, except Josh. Who railed at all of them for years. About the coming cost. About what it would do to Krakoa. It wasn't even that they all didn't know he was right. That there was no way it could stay secret forever. It was just worth the risk. Every kid was worth the risk.
But no one had ever thought it would be Josh.
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"But that's still my point. You didn't cause this. Somebody else did it. And none of us caught it. None of us found him. If anyone's to blame, it's all of us."
(In another world, another diverging timeline, he'd be arguing this exact same thing about Vanya, a bomb, the world in flames. That collective burden. Given enough time to navel-gaze and examine and accept his own role in it, everyone's shared role and guilt and contribution to it.)
For now, though, Luther's hand on his free side rises, presses gently into that tight and rigid line of Allison's shoulder. Thumb circling the familiar knots and tension there, the ones that had started building up more and more after she'd found Claire and stopped sleeping; the stiff exhausted ache in her muscles that he was so good at pressing out. (Super-strength made for an excellent masseuse.)
Tonight, it's more just a nudge. A reminder. Remember to unclench your jaw, untighten your shoulders, breathe.
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Not even for Luther. Maybe not especially for Luther. Even as a breath comes out her mouth, more huff than sigh, as a thumb starts working into her muscles with the intimate knowledge of her body that only he has. There'd been flash in the pan other people to touch her years ago, maybe too many, though she rarely thought of it anymore, but no one who truly knew her (her mind, her feelings, her body) like Luther.
Because even if that puff of air doesn't shake (yet?), she knows she's losing, and she hates losing, even against herself. He digs in against the place her body tries to throw the bulk of her tension in her shoulders, and she can feel the warmth trying to grow at the inner corner of her eye. She doesn't want to cry. She didn't deserve that, and it was so much easier to fall back on the worst of their upbringing; that tears were only weakness, not action or improvement, the first choice of only spineless failures.
"What if he doesn't get better? What if he doesn't come back from this?"
What if somehow David and Laurie are wrong and the inability for anyone to actually do anything to help him because eventually, his own powers will bring him back, isn't true anymore? What if everything else, in him, has been fucked up and screwed over by a year of ceaseless torture, too?
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"It's useless to speculate with what ifs," Luther says. And just for a second, there's an odd imperious snap to his voice, a firm catechism that sounds almost like an echo of Sir Reginald Hargreeves. He winces into her shoulder a second later, hearing what that sounded like the second it was out of his mouth. Like all the truisms they'd been raised on, but he's mortified at that voice occurring here, in this bed, where it absolutely doesn't belong.
But the two of them are the product of their training. It's always there; it's always going to be there in some form, shadowing them both. He softens a second later, burying his chin in the crook of Allison's shoulder, lips against the nape of her neck.
"I'm just saying. All we can do is prepare for any possibilities, so we're ready if they happen — but worrying about them won't help. He will come back from this. But if on some chance he doesn't, the four of you have already been running the council fine in his absence. Krakoa will be okay."
Those calculations, that pragmatism he hasn't had to pull out in a while.
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Even if it hovers, fading slow from inside her skin like a small gout of fire, she reaches up, reached back, over her shoulder, to curl her hand around his head. Another sort of silent apology, or acceptance of the earlier one, or maybe not either, maybe just that they've never entirely needed words to have a conversation in their lives. Not since they were young. Long before any of this became the never perfect, but better than she ever thought she had coming for her, life they have now.
She can't imagine losing him. Claire. This life.
(What she'd let herself do if she ever was facing the someone trying.)
Allison let go of his head and starts twisting to turn the other direction. She's not hiding from him. She's never had a reason to hide from Luther. Even the greatest secret she ever had from him, it only turned out she could have never kept from him at all. She scoots up close, nearly putting her forehead against his. Hand finding the side of his face, and she considered it, her own more pensively vulnerable than ever allowed elsewhere.
This face. The pad of her thumb barely shifting against his cheekbone.
This face and everything under it made up more than half of who she was.
And so much of her belief in herself, who she was, and could be, came from him.
"You don't know that." They've been holding on is what they've been doing.
Triage at its best, while bleeding concern and pulling the reigns tighter.
(But they've both face worse than this before.
Just never with so much to lose.)