Allison waits while he does no more than look at her, and then the words pop up in her vision. There's a tiny start to her shoulders, which marks her quirk her mouth a little self-consciously. Given its exactly what she's doing to him, and he's taking it absolutely in stride at this point. She reads the words and then looks back to him.

The poise of possibility. In Luther's face. In Luther's eyes. The switch.
Greater than the second that Jacob showed her how and said she got it right.

Because that was only words. All of it. Only words. Words that could be knocked down and picked up, and the offer in those words so much broader. But the uncertainty in Luther's eyes, even as he tries leaves her there. Leaves her right there, on that ledge, on the almost. Not a single word appearing. Not sure of how to take a breath. She knows the things she wants to ask about. She knows the sheer force of the desperate want to know behind it is harder than a punch.

But she knows that's not how it works either. She'll never get to any of those things by demanding them now. Everything she's learned. Every way she's learned it. He's been there. The foyer. The infirmary. The basement. The bowling alley. The concert hall. They aren't places to start. They are places to keep being stuck. Keep being hurt. Being angry. Shoving up walls, pinpointing the obvious in glaring words no one could handle, when what's said can't ever change the past, or the present.

It's definitely nothing at all that can help build any tenuous future possibility.
Not this expression waiting for her to decide. Demand. Dissect.

That's not what she wants it to come from. Not if, or when, it can.
Not from tension. Wariness. Weariness. Obligation. Fear.

And if anything in this place can convince Allison to consider anything like a long term plan,
it's the face she's staring up into. The one that she has to believe will still be with her,

here and home, again, if she makes one.

The one that she strains through it all for the last not-terrible moment, and maybe it is the one she'd only just remembered. The one that, yes, had ended with him standing in the foyer, staring at her through the darkness, with his face like a beacon of terror and horror and shame while she could even think. But before that. Before all of that. When they'd been sitting, and talking. And maybe things weren't exactly perfect. But they'd been. Okay. Trying.

Allison opened the box with her mind and started, trying not to care how long she'd taken, thinking on it, looking at him, and wrote the simplest thing, maybe, just as on the nose and about time as everything else.

Tell me about the moon.

Not about Dad. Or any of that.
Screw Dad, and all of it. He's dead.

Tell me more about your finally being on the moon.
You We never got to finish that conversation in the attic.