☂️ All you sinners stand up

[hellogoodhigh]

WHO: The Hargreeves + Guests
WHERE: Various Cities
WHEN: Month of September
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 child abuse.

Comments

[deadlycurves]

[He hates it because she's right. Because he wants her to not be right. He wants Chloe to be right-- that if he just wants it enough, it can work. If that's true, then he should be able to deal with it, manage it, make his way through the whole task of it all because he is nothing if not absolutely iron-enforced stubborn. It's a long, several minutes before he figures out what to say to any of it.] I don't know what else to do. [For a moment, that's all he manages, but eventually the dots blink and bounce as he starts typing again.] I can't stay in this job. I can't. The job itself sucks. The pay is shitty. I need something better. What else do I even have the skills to do, Allison? [He never really understood her passion for acting, or where it came from in the first place. Maybe because it was easy, and a better sort of limelight than they'd always had? He has no idea. But he doesn't have that. He's never had that sort of drive or determination to do anything else with his life. He picked up some skills, random and amalgam, from living the way he did those first few years after leaving home. But what did it matter? It wasn't anything he could meld into a career, not a real one, not something beyond general labor or menial bullshit. He had always leaned so hard into everything he was raised to do that honestly... he just doesn't know what else to do with his life. And this is the only thing that ever felt like it could work as a career that could align with what he already, and always, knew. It probably doesn't help that Diego's always been very, very tunnel-visioned.]

[numberthree]

[ The problem with Diego is he isn't the type of person where you just tell him what to do and he does it. It's not even that simple for Luther. And it's, hilariously and devastatingly, harder for anyone else under that. Especially anyone trying to tell him what to do, when Diego won't have that. Hadn't ever. Seemed entirely adverse to it even now. Right this second. Doing a job he didn't want to be doing simply because someone appointed it to him. Which the Academy would have dozens, if not hundreds, of. ]

Doesn't mean you choose the last thing you failed big at to replace the one you're failing at now.

What were you doing before the funeral? You weren't sleeping on the streets.
Even the cost of that getup you're so in love with never taking off could tell anyone that.

[deadlycurves]

[That first text digs under his skin and buries itself in his mind. The kind of words that will never really leave him, and instead will simply stick like glue to everything he does or says. A part of him is always so tied up and tangled by exactly those kinds of things, that it's all too easy for him to just take it in-- whether she really intended it as a dig or not, it's how it's taken-- and let it ruminate.] Yeah. I'm just one failure after another, right? Thanks, Allison. I was a fucking janitor, okay? At the gym I lived in. It wasn't any better than this. I fought for money for awhile. I've done a bunch of fucking bullshit labor jobs. I don't want to just have a job to have a fucking job, Allison, that isn't the point. I want it to matter. I want to help people. [His job back home is not exactly the kind of thing he likes admitting to the superstar sister, who probably couldn't dream what a shitty-ass minimum wage job was even like. He doesn't like thinking about it when it crosses his mind-- how much of that deep-rooted desire to help-- to save-- people is even really his own, and not just what he was raised for, just... Dad's directives? He was so quick to fall in line, for so long, in a misguided attempt to earn their father's attention, love. He eventually realized it was impossible, but by then, how much of what Reginald Hargreeves had drilled into him had buried down into his core was never really going to leave him, no matter how fast, or how far he ran from home.]

[numberthree]

[ Allison just rolls her eyes as his arrogant defensiveness goes straight to reading into her words how he interprets them, making messages of it she never put there. It's patently Diego and she ignores it the same way she has been since she was about twelve and he started spewing vitriol out of nowhere.

She doesn't feel any need to contradict him. She just lets her brother act like the child he often does once he's decided he's angry that the room or anyone near him isn't in automatic agreement with his ludicrousness. ]

There are a number of options in this place that aren't retracing your same steps. It's pretty much the mandate of this place, right? Everyone was stolen here so they can help this world's people, regardless of what they were doing before being kidnapped or their opinion on their marching orders.

[deadlycurves]

I don't want to just be on some random Team Justice. Jesus, Allison. You don't have to drill into me over it. Just say you don't think it'll work and drop it.

[It isn't that he wants empty platitudes, but... Allison has a way of always seeming more harsh than she is. Or maybe Diego brings it out in her-- he could see that. She certainly brings it out in him, at least as much and as often as Luther can.]

[numberthree]

I already did.


And they're called options. Just because you don't want to acknowledge them, doesn't mean they don't exist. You're the one acting like there's only one path in front of and behind you now.

[ She's had to think about this enough for the last six or seventh months with Luther's pretty much raging interest in Aegis. And its Moon Base. And its Leader. She's almost always amazed he hasn't worked up to doing something about it, and yet she remains relieved each new small day that passes that he hasn't. There's something about it that continues to feel every bit of wrong, even when she can't exactly lay it at the foot of all the better reasons she had when they arrived six months ago. ]

[deadlycurves]

If it's not something I'd choose, is it really an option? Existing doesn't automatically make it viable.

[numberthree]

Yeah. It does.

Just because you don't like it, doesn't make it not exist.
You're choosing not to choose it. That makes it an option.

[deadlycurves]

Whatever, Allison.

[numberthree]

[ Allison rolled her eyes at the two words that came back.

If he didn't want her opinion, she'd stop giving it to him. ]