Log // Backdated // Alison & Lorna // Cookies and Singles

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

Backdated. Earlier in the week. Lorna wanders off to taunt Alison (with cookies, of all things and how unfair is that?) and finds out about something she hadn't been told about. This means Alison is in trouble. Big trouble. Oops?

It had been a hectic week and in it all, Miles's bit of news had slipped her mind.  It was only the Christmas music that began to play incessantly in the mansion that reminded her again.  Grabbing a plate of triple chocolate death cookies--bribery as a long and honoured tradition--Lorna went out in search of her best friend, determined to get the real scoop on the charity record.

Alison was, for once, behaving. Totally. She was in the rooms she shared with Haroun, with her guitar. Behaving. Not up to any trouble and not working, but simply working out various arrangements on the guitar and taking down notes on the music sheets before her now and then. It wasn't her regular practice, not quite, but it was close enough to substitute for it, she felt, and besides, it needed doing.

Her oversensitive mutation told her that Alison was in and Haroun wasn't so Lorna's knock was more of a perfunctory warning than it was a true knock and she breezed through the door a moment later, carolling her best friend's name.  "All in, all in, all's in free."

"Oooh?" Alison blinked, caught between two notes, a pen in her mouth and a guitar in her hands. But she wasn't composing and boy oh boy did she know what that particular set of words meant. "Mrfl!" The pen went flying to the ground, the guitar was gently set aside and then Alison bounded out of her chair, hands reaching forward. "Cookies! You have cookies! For me!" Gleerfully, she bounded towards Lorna. "Whaddaya want?"

Lorna held the plate out of reach, laughing, "Gossip, chica.  You've got good stuff and you're holding out on me.  I know because a little bird told me."  She grinned, amused by Alison's grabby hands.

"Cooookies!" Alison bounced on her feet, an unknowing imitation of Miles, and gave Lorna a pleading look. "Waaah! Coooookies!" It was easy to pretend losing all higher cognitive abilities in the face of such cookieness, really.

"Promise me my gossip first.  I ask questions, you answer them with everything you know."  She skipped back out of reach, still giggling and made a show of picking up one of the still slightly warm cookies. "Mmm, cookies."

"But I know a lot of gossip. You have to be more specific!" Leaning forward a bit, tip of her nose wiggling as she sniffed the enticing aroma of freshly baked cookies, Alison followed Lorna around the room. "Coooookies..."

"Sing for your supper, songbird.  Promise me that you'll dish and I'll hand over the tasty, tasty cookies." It was really entirely too much fun to tease Alison.  The older girl was quite easy to bribe if you knew what leverage to use, nearly as much as her son.

"Well, a certain blonde with nasty silver streaks is planning on dyeing her hair soon to get rid of the silver because the dignified look is best left to the old people in the mansion," Alison crooned out in a sing song, taking sidesteps towards the cookies (and Lorna). "And sure, I'll tell you whatever else you want to know, just let me have the cookies!" The sentence ended in a pleading wail, Alison holding both hands under her chin while making the best set of googly eyes she could manage at Lorna.

"Eeeeeeeeeexcellent." Lorna handed over the cookies, then grabbed Alison and dragged her on the sofa with her. "Tell me about the charity record and how you're absolutely going to record something for it."

One cookie was swiftly dealt with while Lorna dragged her somewhere (Alison wasn't checking). Being tugged down mean 'sit' and Alison did, snagging a second cookie and taking a slower, blissful bite. "Mmrff?" Swallowing, she allowed her brain to devote a small portion of itself to something other than cookie savoring. "Oh. That. Er... it's kinda too late?"

"Why is it too late?"  Lorna snatched a cookie for herself and broke off a piece to nibble on, settling in like a child waiting for a story. 

"Because the tracks are already laid down and the CDs are being prepped for sales?" Alison nibbled on a third cookie and tried to look convincing. She had a feeling that the charity CD already being near ready in terms of packaging wouldn't stop Lorna in her quest to have Alison record something anyway.

Indeed it wouldn't.  "You could record a single." Lorna pointed out easily, smiling like this was the most obvious thing in the world.  "Offer it as a free download to everyone who buys the CD.  Would be super simple, just put a promo code inside the case.  Let people donate money if they like it."

"We could do that," Alison admitted, as an additional insert to the CD would hardly be a problem. "But... I'd kinda like to let the guys fly on their own for this one, y'know?" She squirmed around while carefully holding the plate, so she could look directly at Lorna while doing away with another cookie. "I guess..." she paused and give Lorna a shifty look, remembering that she hadn't told her about the last track she'd released on the internet. "Er..."

Lorna raised her eyebrow, recognizing the signs of Alison in a state of indecision and hiding something.  "Hmm?  I gave you cookies, you have to tell me what you're thinking right now."

"Erm. Well..." Alison carefully tucked her feet underneath her, finishing the cookie while she could, giving Lorna a careful look. Odds were high she was going to be made to pay for withholding that bit of information. "Remember that anonymous single that caused a fuss last summer?" If Lorna didn't, that might mean Alison could milk it in return for leniency...

Lorna thought back, searching for a memory of the summer before August and managing to come up with a fuzzy recollection of a mystery single and all the press that surrounded it.  "Wonder.  Yeah.  Pretty song, I used to listen to it when I washed dishes."  Music, for Lorna, was something that was an along with kind of thing, not an end itself.

Rats. No respite there. She'd have to fess up and take her lumps. "Yeah.. that song." And with that, Alison hummed a few bars, then sang the beginning lyrics, before breaking off at Lorna's expression to eat a last cookie while she still could.

Lorna was making choking noises, her eyes enormous.  She flailed her hands for a moment then grabbed Alison's shoulder and shook her, "You didn't tell me!  ALISON!"

"The cookies!!!" Alison's protest was in vain, though she somehow managed to drop the plate on the table, a few cookies skittering onto the wooden surface as Lorna kept shaking her. "It was a secret! I didn't tell anyone!" Oh god, Lorna was going to kill her. "Wah! I don't wanna die!"

"I'm not anyone!  I'm me!" Lorna released her best friend and flopped backwards, dramatically, "I can't even believe you DID this to me!  Your very best friend!  Your future maid of HONOR!"  Lorna sat back up and pointed a finger at Alison, shaking it vigorously.  "You have no excuse now.  None.  You have to record something because obviously people want to hear you."

Alison whimpered and wished Lorna were still shaking her, so that she could plead dizziness as an excuse to run for it. Or something. "It was a secret?" She picked up a cushion and hugged it to herself like a shield. "And, well... people didn't know it was me!" Well, most everyone, though a few die hard fans had been very vocal about it being her. "So I can't just put out a record like that, right? Right?"

Lorna just glared, letting that speak for her.  It spoke loudly as did the quirk of her eyebrow and the stern set of her mouth.  It was exactly the same look she gave particularly slow and frustrating students.

It was the glare, of course. Almost anyone else could be brushed off, or at least placated, but Lorna And The Glare were an entirely different story. And well, the lingering taste of cookies which might be the last she'd see in forever if she didn't agree might have factored in as well. "I could do another anonymous download type thing?" she offered feebly. Utterly defeated.

The Glare shifted to a Look.  A Look of 'Just guess exactly how much I'm going to let you weasel your way out of this one."  It was a Look that had been known to send the toughest of student back to their desks, excuses in hand.  "You're getting warmer."

"For Christmas! I can do that for Christmas! That way it'll still be relatively possible to send off soon," and she could just record the track after Terry did hers, at that, and maybe let Terry in on the secret, "and it'll still be a secret only you know. And well... the studio staff?" Which Terry was logically part of which meant it was all kosher and oh god, she was going to die.

Lorna folded her arms, "Which will get more publicity and raise more money for your charity?  Another mystery single or a mystery singer unmasked as a pop icon returned as a bona fide music goddess?"  The time for secrets and hiding--of any kind--was so long past for them that she could hardly believe that Alison had done it in the first place.

"Mystery single." The reply was firm and steady, a departure from the previous (not entirely mock) cowering. "I don't want hoopla right now, and it's not what I'd want to do a comeback with. And I still don't want to detract from the charity album that the guys have worked so hard on at the studio." She smiled, a bit wryly. "Maybe egotistical of me to assume it would, but there you go." She tilted her head to the side as she said this, eyes glazing over as she considered her options - remake of a traditional or an original... quite the challenge either way considering the time left....

"You're telling me that your PR guys are that pathetic that they can't make both of you look really fantastic?" Lorna asked but she had what she wanted, Alison recording something.  She'd get to the part where Alison did it openly soon enough.

"Nope. I'm saying now's not the time and when I'll be ready, it'll be a full album and not a single," Alison replied serenely. "I figure sometime after I screw up the guts to ask Haroun to marry me and then I stop hyperventilating about having asked him to marry me." And she'd said it twice in a row too. She should be proud, right?

Lorna grinned and leaned over to poke Alison.  "Speaking of that, oh you who have promised me gossip, when are you going to ask him?  Nate and I have to get cracking on that ring design you know."  Of course, these days, Nate didn't seem like he had all that much patience.

A very silly grin nearly took over, though Alison managed to repress it. The other bit of girl talk she'd been thinking of cornering Lorna for would have to wait until an appropriate time. Preferably when making Lorna squawk would involve Alison nabbing food that hadn't already been paid for by gossip. "Well..." Curling up on the corner of the couch, Alison started to describe what she'd had in mind, trusting in Lorna to let her know whether it was a good idea or not.