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

[the_horror]

WHO: The Hargreeves + Guests
WHERE: Various Cities
WHEN: Month of May
WHAT: Mass log of idiots to keep from flooding others. A log for all things Hargreeves, their Adventures, and those trying to befriend them.
WARNINGS: Obligatory CW for: drugs, alcohol, mentions of death, and mentions of child abuse. You know, the normal things.

"Gerard Way - Baby You're A Haunted House [Official Lyric Video]" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[obediences]

The corner of his mouth curls downwards; to anyone watching, just the unhappiness of someone trapped in a waiting room and waiting on bad news, but it's at the thought of the gossip mags and paparazzi hounding Allison, nipping at her heels and trying to find any vulnerable flesh to sink their teeth into. His brother struggling out on the streets, and him with little knowledge of it. The Academy had all experienced their names and faces being plastered across the magazines as kids, but they'd been sheltered from it back then, standing in the lee of Sir Reginald's umbrella. (Say this for the man, but at least he carefully monitored the children's media intake.)

His overdoses? Dad... didn't think it was relevant. But Pogo bought the magazines for his own reading, sometimes, so I heard about you or him occasionally. I doubt I managed to catch all of them, though. How bad was it?

Luther had mulled over the right phrasing, for that, before finally settling on the word that best fit. Relevant. Grace was the automaton of the family, strictly speaking, but sometimes Reginald had been more robotic by far: stubbornly marching in line and ignoring everything else that didn't fit into his neat, tidy parameters. He treated the Academy's slow, steady dissolution with less bitterness than sheer ruthless practicality; just barking Number One out to missions with the same tone of voice he'd used when it was a team of six. The moment they'd left his home and abandoned the mission, it was as if the other soldiers didn't even exist anymore. Everything simply carried on as usual in their absence, as ever.

Until it didn't.

[numberthree]

Their father was an asshole who hadn't thought a lot was relevant, especially his kids once they refused to be perfect little soldiers following his orders. Allison would argue he didn't find them relevant, even when they were still under his roof, except when they were on a mission. That was their only relevance to that man.

They'd wanted so much from him, and he'd wanted only that from them,
and who cared if Klaus was trying to die on the streets slowly

(or Luther was left on the moon alone for years).

Bad enough. There was no pattern to it. No way to expect it. When news would come, who would have it first? Where it would come from. Where he'd be at the time. What he'd done. How bad it was. Whether he was getting better. How to be ready. She'd rumored several interviewers in her time, to try and control that, hadn't she?

I heard a rumor you weren't going to ask me anything surprising.
I heard a rumor that this is only about my movie or my new award.
I heard a rumor you'll only deviate to ask about my next job, my daughter.
Controlling it was a crapshoot, though. It'd all get quiet, except for the trashiest publications and radio shows, or the roulette wheel would spin to something else. One of the times Diego was in jail. Anything and everything about Vanya's book, for a good near two years after it came out. But she'd never had to worry about either of those, any of her other siblings, as much as the clear-cut trajectory Klaus was on years before any of them left.

Allison lets out a breath between her lips, heavy and slow and silent, before admitting what she hasn't ever. Not even to Patrick. He wouldn't have understood. Not really. Not even when it was at its best. She didn't lean into Luther, but she was wholly more aware of the faint pressure of his arm, warm and solid and two or three times larger than it had ever been, at rest against hers more than the coffee she lifted to drink.

I was always afraid the next time it came up, they'd be telling me they found him dead this time. In the street. Some back alley. Or scuzzy drug den apartment. That I'd be in the middle of something stupid and important, and they'd blurt it out suddenly. Ravenous irredeemable shits, only ever after blood in the water. I always thought it'd be like that when he died.

There's a strange small huff. Her own next thought unexpected. Instead it was Dad.

[obediences]

That revelation makes him shift in his seat and finally look to the left, a little startled (and inadvertently revealing that there was an unseen conversation going on here, beneath the surface). He'd always thought of the paparazzi as, well, leeches: always taking and taking and taking, draining, drinking up her stories and anecdotes and personal information. Not handing information back. Let alone something of that magnitude, where it was absurd that the reporters had gotten a hold of that information before she had.

But then again, the Hargreeves weren't exactly known for staying in touch.

Luther's about to blurt out, "What?", but he pulls it back at the last second. Resorts to typing it out, carefully, for confirmation: That was how you found out about Dad?

[numberthree]

Allison isn't expecting him to move suddenly, and her gaze goes up and her arm to protect her cup, in ase. But if she wasn't expecting him to move, even more, she's not expecting the expression of alarm edged with a blade-shape defense and bafflement in one, and her eyebrows went up -- some combination of the fact he could just calm down and really what was he expecting -- before it caught up with her again, after his words appeared. Emphasis included.

Like the first day. In the office. Luther just ... doesn't know.

He has no real clue about that. About the media and her, anyone really.


Yeah. Red carpet premier for Love on Loan 3. I'd only just walked out. Paused for the one, two, three dozen camera flashes. I'd been about to walk away when suddenly all of them started shouting out questions about you all, dad, what I was wearing to the funeral.

It's strange to reference, even.
A whole other life in a whole other world,

when she was someone else, who was, also, whole.
(If she was ever truly that. A better facsimile of it.)

[obediences]

Huh. I thought they would just ask you things, not be able to tell you stuff. I'm sorry that's how you found out.

If they'd had communicators like they have here, they all could've stayed in touch. Sent messages here and there; if not chatting to each other daily, at least informing each other of the important things. Diego needing bail. Dad's death.

Klaus.

He doesn't know enough about the bloodthirsty media to call them what they are, to tear them a new one for being such hungry wolves, but there's still a sharp, sympathetic sentiment that goes into his writing out the next: It should've come from one of us.

[numberthree]

There's such a disparity to looking at those words. Sure, there'd been several things Allison'd pointed out he should have told her in the last few months. But that wasn't one of them. That was so far outside of the box then. The idea of Luther telling her. Or one of the others. There was a strange shake of her head, I can't even imagine what that would've looked like.

Not that she hadn't imagined Luther showing up there, in LA, for a good half decade, maybe the full ten years. The whole first few years. Nearly every day of the first and second. Then, in chunks, like it might be a big enough reason to finally appear. Her first real part. Her first award. Her first debut as the main star of a piece. Her first box office record smash. Until she didn't expect it at all.

Which wasn't even that she didn't think about it, or him, but she knew better than to more than errantly wonder and put it away like a photograph that just happened to slip out of a book. Especially once she got engaged, and married, and had Claire, all without her family being any part of anything. Pieces of the news, of stories for Claire. But nothing else. Faded photographs and silence and so much space it seemed too impossible to cross.

The moon, small and bright, impossible not to miss, in the ink velvet of the night sky, and so far out of reach you couldn't even try, couldn't even dream of how, couldn't more than watch it cross the sky, had seemed too right in a way.

Trying to picture anything else, at that point in her life, her movie's still banking at a mad unstoppable height and long dark nights and no Claire and no Patrick, nothing except her work and her therapist appointments left, it drew up a complete blank. The idea that anyone would try. How they'd even reach her. Why. That it wouldn't come like that. She'd never even been surprised they knew first.

[obediences]

Meanwhile, Luther can't conceive of it coming from anyone but, because his whole world is tunnel-vision shrunk and narrowed down to the Hargreeves. The people living and orbiting within that mansion -- and Patrick and Claire, by related extension -- but no one else. Living and interacting and speaking with so many strangers now, these days, has him constantly wrong-footed; retreating to his bedroom at nights, exhausted by the mere effort of socialisation and conversation. He recharges in dead silence, cloistering himself away from the world, maybe with some music.

So. Of course the news would have come from a Hargreeves.

Pogo was the one who messaged me. Got a transmission on the moon telling me about Dad. Even despite everything, I'm glad it was him. (Not that there had been any alternatives, but.)

Does that mean you always first heard about Klaus from them back then, too?

[numberthree]

Allison's as glad for that, that it was Pogo, as she can't help hating the image it pulls up with it altogether, too. Allison had people around her. Maybe they hadn't understood. But certain ones who tried. Luther was alone. On the moon. It's still hard to even picture what precisely a day looked like, what he'd been stopped from doing when something like that happened. Where exactly he'd been standing, what exactly he'd been doing.

The endless expanse of the moon from Swear-In superimposed against the idea of Luther being told up there.
The need to know slashed through with the idea of him being all alone when he heard. And for how long after, too?

She wants to feel more than she does, when she glances over her shoulder at seeing Klaus' name in his words, checking the door that no one's walked out of in what feels like too long, and surely someone has to tell them something soon again. When she can't tell at all if it's that it feels like she can't feel enough, or that she's feeling too much and the whole of it is becoming a deafening ringing. She took a long drink of her coffee, even as she answered.

And Diego's skirmishes with the cops. Anything Vanya added to the book buzz in her tour appearances. The places and people you saved, and even when you went to the moon. Because it's not a pinpoint, so much as a wash of words, and she thinks she gets it still. That surprise and horror on his face. The commonplace expected for her. It was normal. It comes with the job. The more famous you get, the more covers you end up with on both sides. The more people want to try and get anything they can, by any means they can, and to be the first person who did.

[obediences]

I guess it just feels like there should've been someone to catch it for you before they could. An assistant or something.

But then again, maybe that was just an unintended byproduct of their childhoods, too. All of their information and news and culture had come filtered through Reginald, redacted and deemed Academy-appropriate. So news unfettered and running loose by itself was unusual; not a tightly-controlled, clinical intake, in drips and drabs.

Even to this day, he was still finding these small consequences buried under his skin, crumbs scattered in their father's wake.

At least here we have these communicators. Portable phones.

[numberthree]

He means well. The protectiveness, and the reticence. Even the practical silver lining.

And each other?

When she wrote it she meant all of them. All of them had each other. They were all together; so long as new news remained good news. But when she read it, written in front of her, she knew that probably wasn't how it would read. And she could change it. Maybe even should. But the unsettled everything in her is certain she means that, too. Not originally.

But that, too. Complicated as that is.

While Luther's words, and the arm resting against hers, actually kept her something like steady.

[obediences]

Luther pauses, and reads and rereads that one for a while. Picking through those three words and trying to imagine which version of it she means. It could be either. It could be both.

In the end, all he has to settle on is his own decision about how to interpret it -- both -- and he just nods. Reaches out and pats the back of her hand, briefly, just the smallest touch before he retreats back to his side of the chair.

And each other.

[numberthree]

The words are straightforward enough. A repeat in agreement,
that lets her breathe out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.

Until she all but chokes on it. The fingers that curl around that breathe, clench hard and jerk it right back into the center of her chest, with every single muscle and bone around it, when the warmth of a hand cover hers, just briefly, larger, heavier, warm fingers and worn cloth. That is gone almost as fast as it starts.

That's only real, because her eyes actually follow Luther's hand back to rest on the armrest of his chair, even as the ache in her chest blossoms like a bruise. Like she'd suddenly dived too far down in water; the pressure of the air outside of her exerting far more force than gravity had any right to. Breathing left unavailable as she blinked a few times trying to gather her thoughts back.

& done!

[obediences]

He's too painfully aware of what he just did, his body practically buzzing all over with pins and needles at it, at having done it, of offering touch (even one so small and simple as that), that Luther is practically relieved when a doctor walks through that doorway, scans the room, and then heads over towards the group of Hargreeves.

And then, just as suddenly, he is relieved, because at least this means the wait is over, they're out of that interminable limbo and leaping up out of their chairs. For an update. For information. On how Klaus is doing. On whether they can see him yet.

And at least it's something.