#and alvin mentioning jude needs to tell milla how he feels before someone else does and its like. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT ALVIN | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spinnerprincess · 7 years

Note

17 - Alvin/Ludger/Milla

I do not believe in love at first sight. But god damn. (Look at you.)

It’s awful with Ludger because he doesn’t notice it, like, even a little. Probably because he’s younger than Alvin. Not so much that he feels sketchy about it, just enough that there’s a gaping hole where the words “experienced enough to notice that Alvin’s in over his goddamn head again” should be.

Ludger is contradictory. He’s gentle and kind to Elle and generally soft-spoken, when and if he even speaks at all. Also, he fights viciously, with little hesitation or mercy, and when he’s angry it’s the kind of cold anger that can give a whole room chills, yet flip hot at a moment’s notice.

Alvin gravitates into his orbit and it takes him a solid ten minutes to realize he’s doing that.

“You’re pretty good,” Alvin blurts before he can tell his mouth to never do that.

“Thanks,” Ludger says, genuinely surprised. Genuinely. Like it’s a shock to him, or something, that someone might think he’s good at what he does.

Alvin takes a verbal shot at Elize before his mouth thinks of something else uniquely unintelligent to say about that.

By the end of day one he knows he would go to the end of the world to help Ludger find his way. What’s a little risk of life and death among pals? And it is so, so refreshing to finally have someone in his life who doesn’t know. Ludger has only ever seen him be Leia’s best friend, or a helpful if slightly awful businessman. Ludger learns, eventually, but it’s still something in the past. He can see it doesn’t fully connect.

Being around him, Ludger just sees him as a valued friend. He trusts him. He trusts him. It’s a gift Alvin can’t repay and desperately wants to live up to.

By the end of the week, Alvin’s not, urgh, in love or anything, but he knows he’s headed down a road that’s hard to come back from. He wishes that one day he could stop yearning for impossible people at the drop of a hat.

It’s awful with Milla because for the longest time, he doesn’t notice it. I mean, he notices some of it, of course. There’s that whole awkward “looks exactly like Milla, who stepped on me for my own good” issue getting in the way for a while. He feels out the attraction on day one, puts in in a box, labels that box “not Milla, different person, do not even think about it,” and sets it aside.

Putting the pieces together takes a while. In his head he keeps a mental tally of the ways she’s different. That she’s less emotionally stable he figures out immediately, that it’s part of why she’s somehow more real and human to him takes him much longer. He notices that she’s vibrant and clever and snappy. He notices that she wants to create good things in the world. He notices that she’s kind to Elle, cold to Jude, and never more alight than when she’s trading barbs with him to pass the time.

All of it goes in the box.

It’s not until right up at the end there when it hits him. She mutters something about how she never belonged here, and finds himself completely off guard when his first instinct is to reply, “Of course you belong here, you always have.” He manages to keep the lid on that one, reels in the panic.

Milla had always felt like a distant, unreachable ideal, something amazing to aspire towards. Milla? He wants to tell her it’s okay. He wants to tell her she doesn’t have to live up to that. He feels like he could stay at her side. Like that’s a place he could be. And she could stay by his.

And if he hadn’t been, I don’t know, his usual idiot self, he probably would have noticed it from the very start.

He probably could have noticed it in time to say goodbye.

They’re worse together. They’re the worst together.

He sees the light in Ludger’s eyes when Milla bends down a little to give Elle a bowl of soup. He sees Milla grin and brag when Ludger tells her she’s a good cook, and then wilt when somebody mentions Muzét, and then retreat into the awkward silence where her entire world used to be. And then she perks up again, just slightly, when Ludger reaches out a hand. And then she turns away. Ludger frowns.

He just wants to pick them up and shove them together. It’s so clear to him that it could be something good. They both have so many ways they need to heal. They could be sweet to each other. They could make each other feel better. They could kiss each other on each other’s faces and just be done with this stupid dance already. Maybe if they became happy enough, he could convince himself that it wasn’t also just kind of the thought that they’d be an embarrassingly, extremely attractive couple, though.

He is trying to be a good person. It’s not easy, but he thinks he’s succeeding. He’s working on it, at least. They’re helping, even if they don’t know it. When they talk he doesn’t feel the weight of guilt still pressing against his chest. They make him feel like he could climb mountains made of the shit he’s done and will do.

Ludger has moments of brutal honesty where he says “of course I can leave Elle with you, why wouldn’t I?” and means it and it stays with Alvin for weeks. Milla’s teasing covers the fact that she seems to hang out near him without realizing it, flinching away from the others when they talk about Milla - “the real Milla,” he hears Elize say, which is the first time he’s ever though she might be less mature than he is. It doesn’t escape his attention that she hardly ever flinches around him. If he didn’t know better, he might call the friendly banter they sometimes dip into a light form of “flirting.”

It’s excruciating when it ends.

By some kind of divine intervention, they come back to him. Their loss is still raw even if all he’d ever really lost was long-shot opportunity. He spends a week having heart attacks whenever he sees either of them, alive and shining.

It takes some work on his part, and theirs, but eventually, they finally do that thing where they talk out their problems. They ask him to watch Elle for a while as they work towards finally making out with each other. Elle seems to notice that he’s a little melancholy about something and decides the only solution is to leave and get ice cream and watch a princess movie.

“Precocious” is a word he would use to describe Elle, but so is “great.”

He’s used to not getting things he wants and he knows his heart well enough to know that someday, after he’s been kicked enough to realize he doesn’t belong there, he’ll find someone else to pine after within about an hour of meeting them.

This is why he’s so surprised when they ask Leia to watch Elle (Elle’s first sleepover, apparently), invite him over, and ask him to stay. He crumples into their arms when he lets himself believe that they mean it.

It surprises them all when he’s the first to say I love you, but then again, he’s probably known the longest of them all. It wasn’t love at first sight, but god damn. It might as well have been. It was pretty damn close. (And it’s better than he could have ever dreamed.)

#lunahearts #HERE COMES THE TRASH OT3 TRAIN CHOO CHOO #side note this will be less obvious to the casual viewer: we mean alt!milla #this is some SAPPY TRASHY BULLSHIT

3 notes · View notes