Because The Night

Luther isn’t fast enough to evade the punch. He’s still not looking at Diego and he’s never been smooth on his feet, even before he started looking like a rogue bigfoot.

It hurts, because Diego’s never been half bad with his fists, but it has to have hurt his brother more and isn’t that always how it goes?

Whether Luther stands still or goes forward he’ll always be another cause of Diego’s pain.

Luther starts to reach, frowning at the hand tucked protectively to his brother’s chest, but then he stops. Retreats again. Diego’s already moved back and away and what’s he going to do? Break it again? Cripple his sibling because he’s too weak to keep his hands to himself? Luther’s talent has never been in putting things back together after he’s broken them, much less for being gentle to start with, he’s no use for this.

You are not to endanger your team because you’re too weak to control yourself, Number One.

“I don’t know how to live with this, Diego. You know I’ve asked her? To undo it, to rumor me again, whatever she can to make it stop– fucking with me? The only thing we could come up with–” he swallows a ragged noise, breathes in, out.

“It wouldn’t be real. I need you to be real.” And in the real world, what Luther really feels never comes out on top. Not with their father, not with missions, not with Allison, nothing. He shoves it down and makes decisions that aren’t ever what he wants and Diego’s lived in second place his whole goddamn life. He doesn’t need more of that from Luther. He can’t want that.

“You’ve seen what I do with what I care about. You can’t tell me that’s okay for you. I know it’s not.”

Not for the first, or the last or the hundredth time, Diego misses being a kid. Yeah, things were shitty then. They were science experiments masquerading as children, but it was easier. He knew where he needed to be, knew what he needed to do. 

He knew that coffee cake would make Vanya unfurl and smile at you, and that Allison would forgive pretty much any transgression for earrings that dangled. Ben could be bought off with books, and Klaus, honestly all Klaus wanted was for someone to listen to him. (Five’s been gone for so long that he feels like a stranger, even in memory.)

But Luther…even big, strong Number One could be coerced when they were kids. With sweets, with model airplanes, with any kind of touch that lasted more than a second or two.

Diego misses being able to hug his brother without feeling guilty for it. 

“What about our lives has ever been okay?” Going bowling on Saturdays. Sneaking out for donuts. Loving each other. Diego would kill to have that back. Any of it. 

He takes a step forward, shoulders ratcheted up to his ears even as he has to tip his chin back to make eye contact. Diego has always been good at playing at being in control. He’s not. 

“I’m not going to stop.” It’s not decided until the words have left his mouth, but then there’s no turning back. 

“And you know what? I’m going to beat off in your bed and in your clothes and I’m going to hold eye contact while I drink a beer, and you’re not going to be able to stop me.”

Diego doesn’t know what the hell Luther sees in these visits, but he keeps coming back. Tonight, they’re standing in the entryway to the building, traffic a distant rise and fall of sound out on the street. 

He can still see his breath even when Luther takes the cigarette, and Diego’s hands are cupped around his mouth, catching the warm air against his fingers when the big guy starts speaking. 

(It had taken him awhile to get this. To equate that far away look in Luther’s eyes with that feeling of being untethered. That he was looking for someone to hold the string to his balloon, so he didn’t float away.)

He doesn’t say ‘anybody with eyes can see how special you are’ because that’s the kind of shit he can’t deal with right now. Especially since he’s lost his nicotine and that was the only thing taking the edge off. 

“I guess it takes a certain kind of person.” Distantly, there’s screeching tires. Diego falls silent to listen, and sure enough like thunder following lightning, there’s the crash of metal on metal. The wreck has to be a couple of blocks away, as muffled as it is. 

“To be able to put up with all the cat bullshit and still be able to appreciate them.” 

Luther’s cats were kind of assholes, but they were the fun kind of assholes. They perched on top of shit and swatted at your head when you walked by. And the big one would shadow box with Diego if he took a couple big, open palmed swings at him. But that took some work in the closed in spaces of Luther’s overflowing apartment. 

He takes the cigarette back and tries not to think of it like intimacy, his mouth where Luther’s had been. Diego runs his tongue along his lips when he offers it back after a drag, like he might be able to taste him beneath tar and addiction.

“You need a punching bag.” 

He waits long enough to say it to make it sound like an afterthought, the brick digging in against his shoulder where he’s propped himself up against the wall. “It helps with feeling like you don’t fit in your skin.”

Maybe Luther doesn’t feel like that. Maybe he doesn’t swing wildly between a soul too small for his body and being so stuffed full of everything that he’s bursting at the seams. 

“I.. No,” Luther manages, haltingly, inflection utterly confused, “Please don’t.”

He knows this has to be one of those things Diego does, those things he says because. Diego’s never really gotten undivided attention except when it was someone lecturing him on being not Luther enough.

(He tells his resurfacing guilt it very much isn’t welcome, thanks.)

Knowing where that started is about as useful as realizing why he’d stopped being physically affectionate before ten. Which is to say not at all. It just hurts all over again.

“What good is strength and durability if you’re the one diving out windows?” What use is he if he’s not stepping up somehow? What’s the point of him if Diego’s just going to hurt himself instead of accepting his help?

Luther thought he was used to feeling uncomfortable in his own skin, only it’s not just his skin anymore, it’s everything. Someone came into his mind and shifted everything an inch over to the left and Luther just keeps bruising himself on it.

“I’m trying-” to do better, to tell you what you mean to me, how much it kills me to see you like this and always has

Diego takes a deep breath and shoves down that ‘against the grain’ feeling of wrongness that spreads underneath his skin. The one that makes him want to put his fist through the wall, or take a swing at Luther. Anything to make pain radiate down his arm and wash out the bullshit static in his head. 

This isn’t Luther’s fault and Diego can’t take it out on him just because he can’t deal with those eyes on him. 

He takes a halting step forward, reaching out with the hand half hidden in the sling until he can curl his fist against the curve of Luther’s hand. 

It’s the best compromise he has, being the one to reach out and touch, while still letting himself get that adrenaline dump from pain by doing it with his busted arm. 

Diego’s never going to be okay, but he’s got to try too. 

Emotional Starters: (Accepting)

How the fuck is he supposed to answer that?

It’s not like he can tell Luther that he’s been chasing the high of his approval, his pride since they were six years old. Since the first time Diego flung a knife blindfolded across the massive training room and landed it into the target three inches from Luther’s ear without nicking him. He’d been rewarded with a giddy little yeah! and a fist pump and he’s been doomed ever since. 

He’s seen the notes now. All the thinks Reggie did to keep them at odds with each other. Every time they drifted together like fucking planets in alignment, only to get ripped apart. 

Diego is trying. He’s really, really trying to be better. To not be the sum of every goddamn experiment he was put through as a kid. 

And that means doing things that still make his skin crawl, even though he knows they’re right. 

It’s been years. Years and years and all the things that have come between. But Luther knows what conversation is being rehashed in a second. He’s heard Diego’s heartbreak and fury in his head every day, how could he forget this conversation?

So he doesn’t say anything, never interrupts his brother’s tirade.

There was a time when this would have been a leap of progress for him and maybe Luther’s never forgotten the looks of hurt on his brother’s face when he was cut off or ignored.

He can’t deny that his time, his affection, all the softer moments they never had, all had been sucked under with that first rumor. But he’d never really given all of himself to Allison either. She hadn’t taken what he hadn’t given her.

“She didn’t steal anything from you, Diego.” He closes his eyes– he can’t do this. He can’t look at Diego’s face right now.

Allison said I heard a rumor that you loved me.

She never told him how he was supposed to.

Loving her the way he’d gone had to have been his choice, on some level. He knows it’s different than Diego, Allison is a pull, an itch he has to go after, where Diego is an orbiting planet, Luther falls into their patterns, unthinking. But he still kept following Allison around too and if he could decide which love to go after, maybe he could have picked Diego. He has to have been able to.

So it’s Luther’s fault, really, if he thinks about it.

“She didn’t… undo what was there. She just added more in. Made it hard. The way dad did.” Allison was the easier choice. Maybe not on purpose, maybe she hadn’t known all the ways he and Diego had been wound around each other, but Luther had and he’d never fought for it. Not against Reginald, not against Allison.

He’s always let Diego down. More than anyone.

“Whatever you think Allison took, Di, she didn’t.” I’m still yours, I’m just broken. “There’s just nothing left for you to want.”

Diego takes a swing before any sort of coherent thought can form in his head. A mean right hook because he’s fucking burning with anger and he’s going to scream if he doesn’t get it out. 

(Luther doesn’t deserve this. He doesn’t deserve to be Diego’s punching bag. But there’s nothing thought out about it. It’s feral reaction, and nothing more.)

“You don’t get to tell me what I want!” The words explode out of him, and Diego takes a halting step backwards, cradling his fist against his chest. Punching Luther was always harder on his hands than it was on his brother. 

But it’s good. The pain gives him something to focus on, to try and rein in some of the red coloring his vision.

And just like that, he can hear their father’s voice in the back of his head. (Klaus wasn’t the only one with ghosts. Diego’s been carrying one way longer than Reginald Hargreeves has been dead.) 

Pull yourself together, Number Two. This is pathetic. Why can’t you be more like Number One?

“You do whatever you have to, to live with this.” Because there’s no cure for a rumor. Diego’s voice is soft as silk. 

Klaus: If you think about it.. you could already be dead and we wouldn’t even know

Song of Achilles Meme: (Accepting)

“You don’t have to.”

But he sees it now. Hindsight and the Apocalypse can fuck a guy up, but Diego thinks he sees a little clearer now. He just had to gut himself on loss and misery and crawl out of the wreckage to see it. 

To see the way Klaus always volunteers. The way he steps forward, he speaks, the need to be seen outweighing being made fun of for whatever ends up leaving his mouth. 

It’s always been the same. Klaus at eight, licking batteries to make him laugh. Klaus at ten, hanging from his knees on the stair railing until Diego rushed up the stairs to make sure he wouldn’t fall. Klaus at thirteen, gangly and awkward and always willing to stand in front of the mirror with his chin on Diego’s shoulder, telling him what a looker he was. 

Klaus at fifteen, glassy eyed and numb. Klaus at twenty, standing beside Ben’s open grave. Klaus at thirty, worn and exhausted, choking on death at every fucking turn and still following Diego up the stairs and into gunfire. 

Sinday on a Tuesday: (Accepting)

He takes one big, strong hand and plants it across his sternum. Makes Luther really lean into it, enough that it makes it hard to breathe and he knows he’s going to have a constellation of broken blood vessel bruises across his chest in the morning. 

When Luther goes to pull away, Diego’s ready. He catches him at the back of the knees, the top of the wrist. He digs in at the heels and grinds upwards until they’re connected everywhere they can be, even with the layers of clothes between them. 

Diego isn’t afraid of Luther being different. (He’s afraid of Luther being away.) He doesn’t care how wide he is, doesn’t care if he ends up with a cracked sternum from this. He wants to feel more than just the sharp edge of Luther’s hard on where it digs in against his thigh. 

He wants him down in his fucking marrow, where nothing can wash him out, where no amount of running will be able to get away. No escape. 

“Fuck me, Luther.”

There’s something to be said about how fast Diego is to reach back when Luther reaches out.

He pretends he doesn’t care, watches from the corner of his eyes, puts his back up and hisses like he’s hell incarnate. But dangle a ribbon of thought in front of the guy and he’ll pounce on it and hold it down for you.

Luther is such a fucking cat person, god help him.

He stays quiet, half at attention, waiting until he hears sirens before he flicks the ashes loose and he returns the cigarette. He tries not to memorise the color of Diego’s tongue or the way his throat works when he inhales.

It’s hard when Diego’s the only thing that doesn’t feel muffled and grey.

“If you think they only bring trouble, you need to pay more attention.” He glances sideways with a half smile, takes back Diego’s bad habit with a brush of their hands to tell him he’s teasing.

“Something tells me the rest of the building will start avoiding me again if they catch me hitting shit.” It’s not a no. He probably could use something, somewhere to send his energy so maybe it stops building and building until he snaps and blankets everything in ash.

And maybe Luther’s a little bit too interested in seeing Diego flushed and sweating more often.

He should go get laid or something but the effort sounds exhausting and the results less satisfying than standing with Diego in the cold talking abstractly about cats.

One day he’s going to have to face that crisis, too.

“I’ve never actually been in a proper fight, you know that?” Secondary school shoving matches don’t count, not up against Diego’s life experience. “I show up and people figure they’ve got something better to do. It’s sort of nice when you want to get plastered in peace, actually.” 

It’s the way Luther holds himself. Like violence isn’t a part of him. He’s big and always trying to make himself look small. Round shoulders, dropped chin, loose hands. Soft voice. Everything about Luther screams please don’t be afraid of me. 

Where Diego is all sharp edges and practice. He’s been throwing punches since he was a kid, getting teeth knocked out by his mom’s shitty boyfriend and swearing he’d never let another son of a bitch hit her. 

He couldn’t keep his promise, she had a self hatred deep in her belly just like he did, but Diego did his best to be there when she loved herself enough to want to be free. 

“But what I’m saying is…you gotta get your blood up, brother.” He lifts his hands into a lazy shadowboxing stance, the same one he takes with Luther’s cats. He swats at his sides, blowing out breath through his teeth just like he would if he was in the gym and working on the speed bag. 

“Run or hit something, or fuck something.” Diego gives him a long look that’s supposed to read like he doesn’t care what you like to fuck, because he tries not to think about it too much.

But he does. In the shower, fist around his dick, his mind always finds it’s way back to Luther when he blows his load, no matter how much he tries to think about tits or perky little asses.

It’s a pain. But it’s motivation. He works it out in the gym. 

“You look like the kind of dude who likes the girls in cat ears, who wear those butt plugs with the tails on them.”

Sorority Row: (Accepting)

Motherfucker. 

Laughing is the worst thing he can do. Because then Klaus knows he has an in, and Diego is fucked. But it’s just so…cheerful. And Klaus, for the first time in a long time, doesn’t look like he’s three sheets to the wind, or ready to throw himself out of a window. 

Diego is just going to chalk this up to being a good brother. He raises the metal flask into a little salute, the swallow of cheap vodka inside burning against his lips, lukewarm. 

“You’re the one who’s always telling me to get in touch with my kinky side and shit.” He offers over what little is left in the flask to his brother. And a look that should be warning enough. 

Sinday on a Tuesday: (Accepting)

Luther has a record player somewhere in the stacks of books that there might be a desk beneath. Diego doesn’t know what the hell he’s playing on it, but it sounds like the kind of music they play in bookstores, soft and jazzy, and comfortable enough in the background. 

The cats have fucked off to their improbably high bed, on top of a bookshelf, and Diego is really grateful he’s not getting cock blocked by a kitten right now, because he’s finally got his hand on Luther’s dick and he doesn’t want to stop now. 

Luther keeps making these low, breathy little noises, like he can’t help it, and Diego thinks he can live on those instead of food. 

Sorority Row: (Accepting) / featuring @feralmerit

“I don’t know, man…” He’s already fighting laughter, and it’s not made any easier by the fact that Klaus is pretty much lit up with it, and Luther is already glaring at them. 

They’re the last ones standing. Allison and Vanya are passed out on the couch, a makeshift blanket of all their blazers tucked over them. Ben is in the arm chair, cheek pressed against his copy of Metamorphosis. 

Diego’s tie is hanging from the antelope’s antlers, and his shirt is all the way open because Allison said ‘gross’ when he opened the top one to get some air, so he’s all in on it. 

They’ve got cheap beers and Pogo turning a blind eye while Dad is away for business, the record player quiet in the background. They’ve already worked through most of Luther’s collection, Diego is pretty sure this is one of Dad’s records, with a woman singing with a warbling voice and 1950s style horns in the background.

Klaus is pressed against his left side and Diego’s got a foot on Luther’s leg. He feels comfortable, all the way down to the bone, and he doesn’t want to go anywhere. 

“I bet he doesn’t even know what a clit is.”

@feralmerit

( (Returning) Smell of a place long abandoned )

“Look at you, playing the rebel. Does Dad know you’re up here?” 

Dad’s dead and Mom is a mess and Diego is grieving a friend so hard that he feels like his bones are going to collapse beneath the weight of it. But he’s up here, surrounded by old soda cans and Allison’s tent and he doesn’t belong.

But neither does Luther, with shoulders as wide as the door and a hurt in his eyes that goes so deep that Diego is afraid he won’t be able to cut it out of him, no matter how hard he tries. 

Not that it matters. They’re here and they’re not supposed to be, they were never supposed to be and Diego can’t think about rumors right now or he’ll put his fucking fist through the glass and nothing will save them from this. 

“I don’t want to be saved.” Luther’s got that puppy dog confusion written all over his face, but Diego has always been the type to carry out half of a conversation inside of his head. 

He steps forward, stalking, always a predator, even though Luther is twice his size and can snap him in half. But Luther still steps backwards, it reminds him fucking awful of the time Luther broke his arm. It was Diego’s fault, Diego’s bones. Luther was still carrying the hurt. 

Sad Fucking Death Meme: (Accepting)

The world ends not with a bang, or a whimper. It ends with his sister’s scream, a lifetime of abuse breaking around them, tearing their broken family into little pieces. 

Diego thinks once, briefly, that at least he gets to see Ben again. 

Klaus’ voice is there, a whimper building on a soft crescendo of no no Diego no and Diego has to pull himself out of the fog of pain to focus on his brother’s face. 

There’s blood seeping between Klaus’ splayed fingers, and he’s not going to last much longer either, skin the color of bone. But he’s dragged himself, a bloody red streak, to where Diego’s trapped, rebar jutting up in between his ribs. 

“Hey.” His hands are numb, pins and needles, but he gets one up to brush against Klaus’ cheek, leaving behind another smear of red there. His red on Klaus’ skin, Klaus’ red on his jaw. 

It’s always been right, even when it was wrong. 

Klaus puts his head on Diego’s chest. Listening to his heartbeat like he used to do when they were kids, to drown out the ghosts. 

“L-l-love y-y-”

Thoughts Meme: (Accepting)