Log [Alison, Haroun] The return home...

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

There's a change to the usual mission routine for Alison and Haroun. Having kept the home fires burning, so to say, Alison is there to greet him as he returns from the mission in Brazil. And good for her, she manages to mostly hide how badly she took his absence.

Haroun sat on the bench of the locker room, tediously unlacing his boots to be put away. His uniform jacket was already spread out on the bench next to him, and his headwrap and goggles lay on top of that. He got the boot off, stowing it neatly in the locker with the name JETSTREAM laser-etched into the steel of the door. He was tired, almost bone-tired, but he still had duties to discharge before he was dismissed.

The second boot followed the first, and then the uniform pants. Naked, he took up the discarded bits of his uniform and put the headwrap and goggles into the Laundry pile, and the jacket and pants got placed onto a dummy designed for the purpose. Once on the dummy, he plugged in the coolant feed lines and tapped in a command on the keypad next to the dummy to begin the coolant recharging process.

He glanced at the shower, but he decided to take it in his suite and not stink up the communal showers with his sulfurous reek. He found a pair of Institute sweats, which he pulled on carelessly, and then walked over to the central terminal. Tapping in his ID, he blearily looked at the output display. "Jetstream, XO of X-Men Black, is off-duty as of right now." he announced to the computer, who dutifully logged it and spit back a confirmation at him.

His duty done, he permitted a wave of anxiety and concern to wash over him.

Alison!

~*~

Looking up from her book, Alison glanced at the time. It was ungodly late for most (read wee hours of the morning) but she knew that the team had been headed back for the mansion and should be arriving any second. What with the baby in the process of being born and Nathan being oh so very dead by Infuriated Moira if he didn't make it in time.

To say that she was not taking well to being left behind while Haroun had left on a mission was an understatement, to say the least, she thought to herself derisively.

She sighed and tried to concentrate on the book again, one of Haroun's no less, the scribbled notes and time schedules she'd tried to work on earlier and had ended up hating on the spot left haphazardly on the desk in the far corner of the bedroom. And seconds later set it down, straightening up a bit in the bed as the sound she'd been hoping to hear for a while now finally seemed to not be a figment of her imagination as the door of the living room, visible from the bedroom, swung open.

Haroun, in an attempt at humor fueled by exhaustion and too many hours spent behind the stick, grinned. "Hi, honey, I'm home!" he called out cheerfully before slumping his way towards the shower. "Need a shower. Bad." he said, leaving little sulfurous vapor-trails behind him as he moved. He'd been using his power quite a bit, and apparently not all of the smell had faded yet.

It wasn't the smell as much as the worn look on his face (did she look like that after a mission, she wondered?) which indicated exactly how tired out he was. The smell did hit next though, acrid enough to convince Al to hold her breath while she gestured him towards the bathroom, book forgotten as she slid off the bed to trail after him. "Go! Shower" There would be no team reports in the database, yet, she reminded herself, trying to ignore the sting of something ugly and irrational at the thought of not having been there for this.

Haroun grunted at Alison and stumbled into the shower. A twist of the knob and a half-step, half-stumble into the stall, and he just let the water wash over him. After a bracing few minutes of that, he reached for his chemical-retardant bodywash and began to scrub all over himself to rid him of the stench. It turned the stuff dripping from an evil shade of reddish-yellow, but better down the drain than all over him. "We got them all out. Zero casualties, zero injuries. Went like clockwork." he said as he scrubbed.

"That's good." Shedding the shirt she'd been wearing, one of his of course, Alison murmured assent, hearing the satisfaction in his voice as he spoke, the pride taken in a successful mission. No injuries on the team side, or at least nothing serious, she knew on the spot. He'd have said so, otherwise, in the same breath as the one where he'd told her about the mission's success. Sliding the door to the recently replaced shower stall open, she stepped inside, wrinkling her nose at the lingering smell of sulfur even as she reached for the bottle as well, generous in the quantity she spread on his back the moment he turned. Fingers digging in, as much a massage as washing his back, Alison blinked cautiously as water rebounded off his shoulders and into her face each time he moved. 

If Haroun was, say, Catseye, he would have purred. But as he was Haroun and not Catseye, instead he groaned in sheer pleasure. His muscles were like bands of steel beneath his skin and any pressure on them hurt, but in a good way. "Would it be possible to bother you for a massage after this shower?" he grunted. "My organics are giving the 'ware a run for their money in the stiffness department."

She laughed a bit, low and soft. It was one way to feel useful in all of this, and it was just so good to have him back… "Of course I'll give you a massage." It would almost be like their usual routine, after all. "Promise to look at something first? I know," she paused to turn her head to the side from a stray splash of water, blinking rapidly to clear it from her face afterwards, "that you'll keel over like a rock midway through the massage…" She worked over patterns of muscles as she spoke, following lines that diverged in ways no human's normally did, in order to accommodate the 'ware.

"Sure." he said. "But I'm bone-tired, and hardly at my best. Can it wait until morning?" he asked, and then cooed as she hit a particularly tense muscle in his upper back. The jetpack gave him a degree of control that he could never match on his own, but all the rerouting and rearranging was occasionally - OK, fairly often - extremely painful. Just another pain on top of all the other ones he suffered on a daily basis.

The undertones in his voice made her answer automatically, even as a little voice in the back of her mind mockingly informed her she wasn't useful for much of anything else right now anyway, so what was the rush? "Sure thing. It can wait. Or I'll just babble about it to you once we get you in bed and you can nod and all and go to sleep…" The second run of wash seemed to have done the trick, the air and steam around them now also clear of the stink of sulfur. "Want to head there now?" She soaped herself down quickly, as she spoke, for formality's sake.

Haroun sighed as he toweled himself off and prepared for bed. No shortcuts, no easy ways out. No matter how tired he was, there were some things he had to take care of. "Tell me about it." he told Alison as he brushed his teeth and cleaned out his ears. "I can give you a first impression now, and then more details tomorrow."

She went through the same going to bed motions as he did, nabbing a bottle of massage oil at the last moment before stepping out of the bathroom, wandering over ahead of him to tug the covers of the bed open properly from the mess she'd left them in. Sitting down on the edge she offered him a smile as he padded over to lie down. It would be okay, she told herself, if he feel asleep while she spoke. It would be. "Come on then… let's get to work on that back. I didn't do much good there in the shower…"

Haroun stepped out of the bathroom, grabbing his old battered sleeping-sweats and shimmying into them absently. "OK, so tell me your idea." he said, as he flopped himself out on his stomach so she could try to work the knots out.

Pulling the covers over his legs, Alison then straddled his thighs - and tugged his sweats just a bit lower, to get at the threads of muscles which faded into 'ware below the hip line. "I guess… just small re-org, on the CO and XO level. It's already been done a few times, either Scott or I nabbing Kurt because his teleporting his so useful. And Scott doing that today because of your knowledge base being vital for the mission." It was said perfectly evenly, while Alison uncapped the bottle and poured a small dose of oil in the small of her hand, warming it carefully before rubbing both hands together, the pressing him to the hollow of Haroun's back.

Haroun groaned as she hit a particularly sensitive spot in his organics - one that had been screaming at him since they left Brazil. "More cross-pollination and cross-training is good." he agreed absently. "Be a shame to break up the command teams, but I can see the value."

"It's not that, exactly." The thought made very ugly thoughts rise in the back of her mind - it wasn't something she wanted to do, by any stretch of the imagination. "Just that when we're not on first line active duty as a team, then we're available as regular team on the backup duty week…" She glanced at the papers she'd sketched out, though kept inching her fingers along the curves of his back, following paths she knew by heart now. "I can show you the schedule tomorrow morning when you wake up…"

Haroun grunted in response to that, having to seriously fight to keep his eyes open at this point. "Mmmm. Love you." he said, and then let sleep finally claim him.

Alison smiled at that, a small crooked quirk of the lips, and paused in the massage only long enough to lean forward and kiss the side of his neck, even as he snored lightly in response.

"Love you too."