maskormenacelogs | [open] And the nights, they last forever...

There's something so weirdly jarring about the words appearing in front of him suddenly. The silence had stretched on for so many minutes, thoughts burning the inside of his brain, words searing the end of his tongue but none of it ever made it passed his lips. He blinks, not quite in shock but its far duller cousin, and focuses on the words. Reading them doesn't make it less jarring, suddenly. It was so different than the swirl of everything running inside his head.

But still.
It's a topic, at least.
He can speak to it, if nothing else.

"I live-" He pauses and sighs roughly. "Lived. In a gym, so... mostly, I'd just go punch things until I couldn't move. It's pretty effective." He shrugs one shoulder easily. Pretty effective was not perfect by any stretch, but it was something, and usually it was good enough. He tilts his head a little as he throws it back in her direction, "What about you? Counting sheep?" He smirks slightly.

There's a small unexpected, unmissable flinch he gives and even in the dark, she knows what it is, because she can't not know. He's not the first brother inconvenienced and unsettled by her reliance on The Mental Network. Her lack of any other option. Makes her gaze sweep back to something in front of her before he finally starts talking, from wherever his thoughts had gotten him.

He only gets in a sentence or so before she looks back with a crinkle in her brow. Ignoring his ending into a flip of the question, turning it somehow into a joke even while she's not yet out of it and refuses to let him be either. You lived in a gym?

Somehow. That's not something Allison'd ever have dreamed up in his options. It's a surprise.
Not his practicing when he can't sleep. But living in a gym? How would Deigo end up living in a gym?

Edited 2019-06-04 04:56 (UTC)

There's a huff of a sound that's, for all it's almost nothing, still manages to almost feel awkward as he looks back over at his sister in the window. "Yeah... in the boiler room, technically. It wasn't perfect, but it worked." He pulls a face, something half-tilted toward sheepish or as close to it as Diego might ever get. "I kinda got kicked out of the apartment I was in before that for reasons relating to extensive property damage. I worked something out with the owner at the gym I was boxing at." He shrugs a little. The situation worked out fine and he didn't see the point in changing something that was working for him.

In the boiler room. Allison glad for the dark, because maybe it saves her the full effect of Diego watching her eyebrows creep even further up. She's not all that surprised about the whole extensive property damage entirely. That sounds absolutely like her brother. Especially given his temper and his penchant for violence. It even went well with that ~~dumb~~ outfit he was always running around in, and what he'd been doing in it. Never gave up doing.

And you box.

Do you still box here?

Maybe it's better than asking about the boiler room. Or how long. There's something almost too tenuous to push down on that part, given the huff Diego gave before it. Like he might not say. Like he might ignore her question, like any dozen others he did in a day. Some serious and some not. But he hadn't. And maybe she could at least not stab it either.

Edited 2019-06-05 02:12 (UTC)

"Me boxing is somehow surprising?" It's too dark for her to see the perk of his brow, but something tells him she can feel it across the room anyway.

At the question, though, he shakes his head and leans back in the chair. "No. I mean- I haven't. I'm not... trying to make too much of a routine here, you know? I don't like it, how easily everyone seems to just accept it. I think you're the only other person that I know that genuinely doesn't trust any of this."

Maybe it's the dark. Or the night. Or how late it is.

Or just the fact how he said it just isn't strong enough.

I hate this place.

He stares at the words in front of him for a long moment. He can hear it in his head, in her voice. The exact way those words would sound if she could make them sound at all. How sharp-edged and exhausted it would be at once.

But.
It brings back into sharp, perfectly clear focus, what he'd been thinking about earlier, too. Like a sack of bricks to the gut that threatens to steal all the breath from his lungs.

"I know." It's quiet, barely more than a whisper in the darkness, and for a moment, it seems like it may be all that he even says.

But it isn't. All of it. There's more, he just has to make sure his mouth remembers how to form the words. His jaw works wordlessly for the briefest second, and he's glad for how dark it is, that it gives him time. "She looked just like you." And as much as he hates it, he chooses the past-tense of that word on purpose. Not to hurt his sister, but to keep the reality and weight of it true. Because the truth is, as long as they're stuck, suspended in some other world, they aren't seeing what's truly on the other side of Five's jump. They aren't fixing the world they broke. And until they can leave here, they can't do any of it at all.

Allison can't feel the breath that comes in. Sharp. Silent. Deadly.

It feels like it doesn't exist for more than to slice cold through her chest, as direct as any dagger. Like she might have missed it. Imagined it. No one. No one has ever. Not even Luther. Not once. Not in almost two months. There's no air. Allison isn't sure she can breathe suddenly. Remembers how. Could if she did. Or if there are any bones in her body. All she can see is Claire's face, and it feels like her whole rib cage is frozen in the middle of being crushed like it was only crepe paper and not bone.

Edited 2019-06-05 03:49 (UTC)

The silence in the wake of his words is sharp and jagged, crushing and claustrophobic. Deeper than any before it with a tension so thick it couldn't have been sliced-- it would have broken the blade that dared to try it in the first place.

He feels a vice squeeze in his chest as she sits, too quiet, too still, too frozen in the window seat. He isn't sure he can or should look over at her. He does anyway and it only makes a skip in his heartbeat to see it.

He blinks back stinging sharpness from his eyes and gets to his feet, goes over to the window and crouches down next to her. He doesn't say a single word, there aren't any-- he'd already said the ones that mattered, even if they weren't the best ones. He just kneels there and leaves a hand on her knee.

Diego tries to be made of iron and stone. He does. He tries so hard for it, and even easily fools people who don't know him. But the truth is it's a mask as sure as the one he wore for most of his life; one he tries never to take off, but it has so many cracks within its surface that sometimes the soft reality shines through it. And it burns so much brighter with his family, desperate in its need to push away some of the darkness he doesn't actually know how to escape.

Allison felt like she froze only, even more, when Diego suddenly stood up and walked toward her. A wariness in her bones that was all animal instinct, disastrously dangerous in the first three of them always, which made it even more confusing that her whole body gave a wholly noticeable shudder after Diego's hand landed on her knee, warmth permeating her silk pant leg immediately.

Her eyes started to sting even as she tried to push it away. Push it all away. They hadn't not even. She'd almost. That day. That night. Whatever it'd been. They'd seen everything, including Claire, and she'd almost. But she hadn't. And she hadn't even known he was real then. And he hadn't said anything after. For all of these weeks.

(Not that she said anything to Luther or Diego about what she'd seen either.)

(Why did she keep picking everything
that was everything except Claire?)

He's the wrong person. He's not supposed to be the person who did this first. Who gave a damn. Not him. Not him. With his razor willingness to use everything and anything that fell into his hands. Not when it felt like everything was exposed beyond her ability to conceal anything. To even control it when-not-if he did. Not when the only thing she can say, in some defense against it and the overwhelming threatening sting in her eyes, tightening of her throat, lips pressing hard, is:

Where are your jokes now?

Diego is not one to mind silences. But this one is killing him, trying to suffocate him from the inside out, the longer Allison sits, dangerous-still, and doesn't send a single word to him. He doesn't know what else to say, even if he wanted to say anything at all, and it's painted so plainly across his face.

He wasn't trying to hurt her. Even though he did. Even though he knew it would. It wasn't on purpose. Not in the way it's usually on purpose, words weaponized to cause more, and deeper-lasting, pain than anything he could ever do with with a blade. But he wasn't trying to hurt her. This time. And maybe that's what makes her reaction, and her stillness, and her silence, hurt so much more.

Diego's features fall at what she finally throws at him, a harsh wavering ripple across his face. He blinks too many times, too quickly. His mouth moves, but no sound comes out and it's a specific sort of thing to see this close, his sudden loss of all ability to make words. A few strangled noises manage to squeeze out of the vice gripping his throat, but they aren't even a little tilted toward noises making syllables, or syllables trying to become words. Just noises. Nonsensical and meaningless.

His face spells regret.
(He shouldn't have done this, he should have kept his mouth shut, he shouldn't have said anything).
And his eyes scream apologies
(Sorry. Sorry he said it, sorry they're stuck, sorry everything's broken, sorry they can't fix it. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry).

But he can't make his mouth work at all.

It's wholly uncharacteristic of her expectation. Diego's silence. Diego's refusal to take the bait. Diego's just staying there, with a hand on her knee. If anything, it doesn't make her less wary about the whole thing, but instead more. Diego acting like himself, was predictable and easy to handle. No matter how biting and brutal his barbs might get.

Allison had half a lifetime, and another few months of that proof writ large.

The same way his face only became a strange, absolutely unfamiliar canvas of regret, open and screaming only seconds later. Too open. Too much threatening to turn her even closer toward the ease of anger. But regret she gets. No one wants to touch this. No one wants to talk about. No one gave a damn about the world behind them; it seemed likn they could settle and play happy house and superhero world, here.

One sentence, two now. That was what Allison had.

And the all too clear memory of her in that place, memory or fabrication.

Allison shook her head, looking back out the window, away from the all too foreign yawning chasm of regret and back peddling her brother's face had somehow made itself into. It's fine.

As soon as her short, two words are in front of him, he's shaking his head, but she isn't looking at him anymore and she won't see it, except maybe if she caught it for a second in her peripheral. He still can't quite make his words work, so he tries the new avenue they have available to them-- maybe if he doesn't have to physically form the words with his mouth, he can at least get something out.

It's not.

Which isn't enough, but for a moment, all he can manage. His chin dips toward his chest and he just wishes he had any real capacity for this conversation. But he doesn't. He's not good at this. He doesn't know how to do this, but God, he wants to. He wants to find something to say to... to, what? Help? He can't, he knows he can't, unless he can come up with a way to get them away from here, to get them home so there is at least a spark of a chance that they could fix what they broke. Save the world. Save Claire.

I'm sorry.
He isn't one for platitudes or useless words and he knows it doesn't matter how much he means it-- it won't help. It can't change or fix anything at all. But he still feels like he has to say it. Because he does mean it, no matter how useless it is.

I wish we could fix it. I know that doesn't mean anything, doesn't do any good. This isn't an easy conversation, and every word is slowly, painstakingly chosen. He hesitates before adding, Do you want me to leave you alone? before he manages to make all of this even worse than he already has?

It's not. The two words float in her vision, calling her on it, and she know why people pull back suddenly when the boxes pop up in their vision, except Allison is almost used to it sometimes. The fact it's almost always up in hers if she is anywhere near people. It's odd to ever see more than a few words sent back, and usually only the first time someone was introduced to the Mental Network.

The two words, a reprimanded judgment in absolute silence.
Two words, repeating in the pulse of her jaw where it was held tight.

Replaced by two others, and then a sentence, and then a question. Again, and again. Little dribs and drabs and she has advice for how to use it better than that, but no one needs it. No one else here is devoid of the ability to speak. No one knows the program exists in their heads until her, and she's not even using it the way it was designed to be used.

The last question hovers there, just as devoid of feeling, and emotions, and sounds, and volume, as every other set of words he sent. Removed from real words. There's a reason she told Luther no when he asked the first day. The question hovers there and she lets it. Lets it sit there. Mocking her.

Before she writes the thing that he might be the only person she'd say it at.

Isn't that what everyone's doing about it already?
Either that, or it just didn't matter until that night. Right now.

"I guess..." he admits in a sigh of muttered words, finally finding his footing within his own mouth, and he's just glad that they came out whole and in tact. "But do you want me to? I- do you wanna talk about it? Because we can. I mean, I started this and we're here now, even if nobody has been the rest of before now, okay? I didn't..." He shifts from the crouched position he's been in this entire time to slump and sit leaned against the base of the window seat she's sitting in, knees dragged to his chest, the hand that had been on her leg sliding to hang between his knees with his other hand.

He takes a moment before he starts again. And it's all so much, and so heavy, it's hard to get through. Diego's not a rambler really ever, but he's probably saying more words in this moment than he has in one go since he's been here-- but he finally got it started and now it's just one thought barreling into the next and he can't seem to stop any of it. "I know she's the only person on your mind, the only one that matters right now- ever-- always? But... I never even met her, Allison. And the only people I care about are already, definitely, no doubt about it, dead... or stuck here, with me. I... I don't have anything left there, Allison." Arguably, maybe, if they go back in time far enough, if they can rewrite the timeline in the right way, maybe the world doesn't explode. Claire is saved. Mom lives. Patch. But... Diego doesn't have it in him to hope like that. Even on a narrow chance it could happen. Could be true, in some version of whatever happens on the other end of the jump on that stage.

"So, I guess... what I'm saying is-- maybe this makes me an asshole, but hey at least we already knew I was one, right? But-- no... honestly? It didn't matter. Until then. Now... because-- because, Allison, until I was standing there in that courtroom watching all of that... until I saw her sitting there, right in front of me, close enough to touch..." He isn't looking at her. He can't. He doesn't think he could do this if he was looking at her, to see the reaction bloom across her face as he says it, so he keeps staring at one spot on the floor in front of him, refuses to twitch or blink and tilt his head or breathe or move at all. "She wasn't even a person. She was just a splash article in a magazine in the line at the grocery store."

Its irrational and flash bright, almost impossible to control even with her magnitude of it, when Allison has to keep herself from the urge to suddenly kick or smack her brother in the back of the head, away from her as soon as he's settled this close only to say that. The fury at the idea is staggering. So easy. So overwhelming. Her daughter not even a person. A biopic, not even forgotten, but who never once even existed to be forgotten, who was glanced over with no more relevance than like every junk article on aliens and Hollywood affairs. For all of her life. ~~And months past dying.~~

One who grew up with Diego’s names on her lips as much as every other sibling. Not her favorite. Not her personal superhero. But she knew him. She worshipped the stories of their childhood, holding all of them as important pieces of the full team of her favorite tales. Memorized every single one and still begged for them to be told a hundred times more.

And didn’t matter to any of them. Only Luther had even asked.

You are an asshole.

She knew exactly who you were.
Who all of you were.

Nothing about his decision to decide to drop down next to think, like they'd ever had a heart to heart, like he'd ever even displayed he was once this in touch with his own emotions and how they connected to his thoughts, changed that. If anything it only made it worse. Her whole life didn't matter, and not her death until the dreams. Like Vanya's life didn't matter until their world was already beyond saving and they were kidnapped to another one. Only remorseful after the fact, like that deserved pity.

"Good. I'm glad she knew." And he means that, he does. And he hopes that Allison can hear it, and understand he really does mean that, even when he says what he does next. Because this conversation is only just going to get harder the longer it continues, but they're here. They may as well keep going. "But did she know Uncle Diego, Allie? Or did she know her uncle, the Kraken, part of a superhero team? As true as every story I'm sure you told her was...can you tell me it wasn't any slightest bit stylized. Perfectly true down to every last, nasty detail." He's pretty sure he knows the answer.

Finally, he looks back up at his sister, hating how much this all hurts. Her, and him, both... in such similar and still wildly different ways. "But how could she be anything else to me, Allison? I didn't know her. I never saw her. I didn't see you... I found out you were married when the tabloids reported it. I found out you were pregnant when I caught some interview you did with one of those idiots on late-nite tv. You and Klaus... are the only ones I really ever knew anything about. I knew what Klaus was doing because we ended up in the same circles, for polar opposite reasons entirely... and every single thing I knew about your life, was on Entertainment Tonight or in People. How could she be anything but a story-doll when you never bothered bringing her around?"

He shakes his head and drops his gaze back to his hands hanging between his knees. "We all suck at this family thing... I wish... we could've figured it out sooner." His voice drops, impossibly quiet, his next words likely only heard because of the dead-quiet of the house at this hour. "I think I would've liked being an uncle."

Allison can't be surprised Diego's whole tirade from the floor shifts to making it all about himself, or that every word out of his mouth only turns it so clear that he has no clue what do with a child. Makes her wonder when the last time he was even near a child in any truly long term fashion. She's sure the answer is never. She knew, with all the thimble full of anything like a clue he had at the time she had Claire, that she'd never put Claire through any of what they went through too young.

(How wrong she was. Tragically, naively, arrogantly wrong.
She'd avoided the glaringly wrong pitfalls Diego flung in her direction,
but she made her own far worse ones.)

As much as she hears it, his voice, the ever familiar rapid harder and sharper sounds of it, throwing daggers at a wall, one and another and another and another, it blows in one side and out the other, easier and easier not to feel any of them as each new one hits and her gaze never once shifts toward him. He doesn't say a single thing she didn't already know or at least hadn't already guessed at time six, every month of Claire's life that involved constantly talking about The Umbrella Academy.

She doubts that any of them ever experienced that. Except Vanya, and even then, only on that book tour.

Yeah. Great. Allison shook her head and moved finally. Turning from where she was sitting, and slipping her feet, then legs down — moving to stand in a fluid, hesitation-free, motion. Her head shook, but she was walking away already. At least you all have a second planet of people to figure it out on, now that the rest of you actually realized that.

One that wasn't gone, just as much as her daughter was. This stupid, messed up, second chance of a joke place where all of the rest of them realized, only after trying to kill Vanya and just as much helping to decimate a planet, what Allison had realized before that happened. Had already said as much to Vanya, and was acting on changing, on trying to be better and transparent about.

Before it cost her a planet. Her daughter's life. Her powers. Her voice.
Every single part of her life beyond the 'being alive' part of it.

That's not fair.
Those are the first, knee-jerk words that run through his mind, but never make it as words, neither spoken or composed in a message on the mental network to his sister. Because it isn't, and it shouldn't be, because she's right.

But still.

"I don't wanna figure it out with the world." He doesn't move from where he's slumped against the window seat, though he does lift his head enough to stare after her. "I don't wanna be here any more than you do, Allison. I want to go home, too. I wanna find out what's really on the other side of Five's jump with us. I wanna fix the shit we broke just as much as you."

Allison freezes and the look she cuts back isn't as obvious more than half a room's darkness away, but in the daylight, it would have cut glass and fractured it back into sands. Fury presses up so fast and so hard that there are spots in her vision that have nothing to do with the darkness in the room.

No. You don't.

You wouldn't die, right now, right here, this moment, no goodbyes, no excuses, no take backs, no Five, to make it happen, to make time change back, to undo the damage we caused, just to make one person, who wasn't you, and never could be you, just have the right to live, to be happy, even if you could never see them and never have a life again, Diego.

Whatever you want. It's nothing like this.

You've never had a child. Don't compare yourself to me.

Allison doesn't usually throw so much at once in the Mental Network messages, generally tries to keep it to the easiest things that can still count as something akin to conversation, so when a sudden giant wall of words starts in a slow scroll in his vision, he blinks a few more times than usually necessary to focus.

He frowns carefully, and as he keeps reading his features twist into something soft and hurt and upset. "That's not fair." the words he refused to say only a moment ago bubble up without a third of the force he'd have thrown them the first time they crossed his mind, head shaking slightly. "Just because I'm not a Dad doesn't mean that what I feel is any less important."

And just as quickly as he'd been hurt, he's angry, getting to his feet, crossing the space she'd put between them to stop just in front of her, lean close and murmur, "Take your fucking high horse, holier-than-thou attitude and stay away from me for the next few days." He doesn't wait to let her respond before brushing the rest of the way past her, stomping quietly back up to his room; she could send whatever piece she might still want to say to him even if he wasn't in the room anyway.

It isn't that he thinks what she feels isn't its own yawning chasm of agony, but the way she wants to parade around and act like she's the only one hurting by being here is what gets under his skin. She's not the only one stuck in a waterfall of grief and guilt and pain for someone in the world they've been ripped away from, and he'll be damned if he lets her try to pretend his pain doesn't matter because hers is somehow bigger, deeper, means more, matters more than his own.

Edited 2019-07-17 00:55 (UTC)

There’s something about Diego being angry that makes it all neutered white noise. From childhood through to even now it’s the only language she and Diego have really spoken with painstaking clarity that wasn’t fighting in the field. They were always great at pissing each other off, and always great at not taking the knives and blows the way anyone else would. Somehow, as Diego gets up, gets mad, gets close, and sharp as Diego Hargreeves can make his voice, all Allison feels is …

… relief.

 Success.

 Especially once he stomps out and up the stairs, leaving her the living room back to herself. There’s a huff of breath but it only makes it the sound it can between her mouth and her lips, because Diego stomps out of the conversation and room before she can, even though she’s nearly in the doorway, reminding her even more of it being another of his childish antics. Like he needed to make some statement with leaving before she could, just like he tried to make to get her to turn around in the first place when she started to leave.

But it grants her the unexpected gift of the room being empty, and she’s not feeling any closer to sleeping now than she did before he decided to invite himself in. Decided to suddenly parade around his own feelings like they weren’t insults and like somehow that was a thing Diego ever did with her. Or anyone. In his life. Sat and talk about his feelings. In clear, organized, if still often oblivious, words. There’s a shake of her head, and Allison walked out the door, headed for the kitchen, to go make herself a drink and bring it back to the window seat.

[open] And the nights, they last forever...

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☂ And end!