Logs - [Alison & Nathan], [Alison & Haroun]

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

Wednesday, very late. Alison wanders off for a late night jog and stumbles upon one of the mansion's chronic insomniacs on the back porch.

Your mutiny didn't go quite as planned, did it?

She shivered as she pulled on a sweater, hair still damp from the shower. The nightmare still teased at the edge of her mind, the screams of her dying team mates ringing in her ears. There were so many ways to die. God, I hate those files. She wasn't going to try and go back to sleep just yet. Not a chance in hell. So instead she slipped on her running shoes, considering a night time jog to help soothe her nerves.

Getting downstairs was done easily enough, for once not a single one of the mansion's insomniacs being up and about. Pausing in the kitchen only to grab a bottle of water, she headed towards the door leading to the back porch.

Nathan had been sitting on the back porch, listening to the Askani murmur in agitation at the back of his mind. He wasn't sure what they were on about tonight, but they were definitely keeping him from sleeping. Didn't really matter, he supposed; this was the first time in a while, and the least he could do was to not drug himself into insensibility, so they could have the chance to resolve whatever the current issue of contention was.

He frowned a bit as the back door open and Alison emerged, clearly dressed for jogging. "A  little late for a run, isn't it?" he asked quietly from his chair, only realizing once the words were out of his mouth that he would probably startle her, speaking up out of the shadows like that.

Her reaction wasn't exactly calm, to say the least. His voice breaking the otherwise quiet surroundings drew a faint strangled sound from her and she whirled to face him, the bottle of water clattering on the porch, light actually sparking to life at the end of her fingertips before she realized who was there.

"Don't do that," she gasped out at him, heart pounding from the adrenaline surge, taking a few unsteady steps back to lean on the railing.

"Sorry," Nathan said, his voice still low but a note of real repentance in it as he watched her catch her breath. "I don't think sometimes about scaring people. Classic telepath's mistake."

"S'ok." She tried to calm her breathing, leaning heavily on the railing still. "Jumpy." Because was she ever and it was only fair to let him know that and good lord was her heart racing a mile a minute.

"Insufficient sleep and too much stress will do that to you," he said, a touch of wry humor in his voice. He shifted in the chair, ignoring the way the Askani's grumbling grew suddenly to a dull roar. "Any particular reason for your insomnia? I know mine is because the Clan is having another policy debate..."

"Madelyn put me out for a day but I was already way overdue for a sleeping fit anyway. She didn't even need to do anything to keep me under." She shrugged, trying to relax just a bit. "So now I'm on the awake more often than not phase." And having screaming nightmares but she particularly want to go there. She'd promised herself she wouldn't talk to anyone else about Scott's files. And she'd done enough messing up there anyway, which she truly didn't want to get into anyway. With anyone.

"Your mutiny didn't go quite as planned, did it?" Nathan asked casually, his gaze drifting back out to the grounds. She was letting more slip than she probably thought she was. Even a disciplined mind like Alison's could do that, under stress. "You found something you didn't expect."

Something twisted inside at those words, especially in light of Scott's behaviour since she'd woken up. "No. It didn't." The words were spoken with more stiffness than she'd have wanted normally, but she wasn't sure she cared at the moment. "And of course I found something I didn't expect. I don't think before I do. That's what I get for it." More than ever, she just wanted to go for her run and just. Not. Think.

"I suspected there'd be something. I knew there was more than we were seeing." Nathan looked back at Alison thoughtfully. "Real strategists are rare, you know," he said almost idly. "I'm certainly not one. Mistra didn't consider that a viable characteristic in any of their operatives, even their field commander. They dictated strategy; I handled tactics." He paused again, turning his attention back to the grounds. "Scott is a strategist," he said. "One hell of a strategist in one hell of a messy strategic situation. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't have a meltdown ages ago."

"He did, he just pretended it didn't happen because it didn't fit into things the way he wanted them to be." There were the first, unchecked words out of her mouth, and she winced once she realized what she'd said. "I didn't mean to say that." She closed her eyes and sighed, looking down.

"But you did," Nathan pointed out, then sighed. "I can be discreet, Alison. Don't worry."  She didn't look like she was going to elaborate, and he sighed again. "Then, you know, there's the stress of leading a small, irregular unit into unpredictable situation after unpredictable situation. That, I know a little about."

She longed to ask him about, torn between the need to somehow come to peace with all of this and the desire to avoid any more nightmares like the one she'd just had. For a long long time. Finally she gave in, shoulders slumping, and pushed away from the railing to claim a seat of her own next to him, curling up tightly.

"Tell me?"

"My Mistra team... probably the closest I had to family," Nathan said quietly, after a long moment. "The Pack became more or less the same. So I understand what it's like to lead people into potentially lethal situations when you care deeply about the welfare of each and every individual. I know what it's like to lose them, too."

There was so much she wanted to say. Protest that she wasn't a soldier, that this wasn't what she'd wanted out of life, not what she wanted to experience. But it had been her decision to do this. And the consequences that came with it were something she had to learn to deal
with, one way or another. So she nodded and stayed quiet, letting Nathan go on as he wished.

"Your sense of responsibility grows all out of proportion. In a sense, at least at Mistra I had it easier; I know I didn't make the really significant decisions, the strategic ones, so I couldn't hold myself at fault when they went wrong." Nathan stopped for a moment, his eyes going distant and bleak. "Couldn't logically, I mean. I did anyway, especially when they went very wrong." He grimaced a bit, rubbing his jaw. "It should be simpler here, with the X-Men, because the motivation is always good. Logically, again. But it's not. It can ever be. Not when the lives of the people you're leading are as or more important than you than the reason you're fighting. There's a built-in conflict there, with no way to resolve it."

"Road to hell is paved with good intentions?" she offered a touch wryly. And looked regretful about saying so the instant after - this wasn't about how she was feeling, not when Nathan was talking about this particular topic. "I'm sorry," she said contritely, hugging her legs to herself. "Let me try that again. It's never as simple as black and white, no matter how much you'd like it to be?"

"No," Nathan said thoughtfully, after another long pause. "More like, it all becomes black in the end. There's no way to win, not really, because the goal requires risk at the best, sacrifice at the worst. And you have two choices - let it eat away at you, or let it make you hard."

"What, no other options?" she asked with a slight hint of desperation, although she was attempting to cover it up with humor. Trying that with a telepath was nothing short of insanely stupid, she reminded herself. "I - neither option appeals to me, really. And I'm not even near where Scott must be with all of this."

"Well, hypothetically, you could make your peace with it," Nathan responded dryly. "If you ever manage how to do that, let me know, because I'd like to take notes." He shook his head. "I always had choices, with the Pack. If a job was going to be too risky, I didn't have to take them into it. If it went south, I could pull them out. With Mistra, I had no choices at all, which made it even easier.
Here..." He waved a hand around. "Scott, all of us, we go into things with our eyes wide open, of our own free will. Makes it harder right from the get-go. Scott doesn't have anyone to blame but himself, and since he believes so strongly in what he's doing, he's always going to be torn. I don't think there's a way out of that for him."

She didn't even have the heart to be frustrated with any of this - just resigned. Beating your head on a wall would wear anyone down after a while, was the tired thought. And then pointed out the Obvious Flaw. "What you're saying doesn't work. You're saying Scott blames himself for the choices we make."

"He considers himself responsible for everything, yes," Nathan said without hesitation. He might not know Scott all that well, but he was enough of a telepath to grasp that, even if he didn't recognize it based on personal experience. "Like I said, sense of responsibility that's all out of proportion. In some ways it's a good thing. In other ways, it's a damned destructive thing."

"If it weren't for the fact that we're talking 'damned destructive thing' here I wouldn't be so-" she stopped, because she wasn't sure how she felt about the situation anymore. Except that it wasn't good and she'd probably not helped that much either when you got down to it. "God. My timing sucked."

"You can hardly be blamed for incidental demon invasions," Nathan said dryly. "He'll get over it. This might be the best thing for him, actually - boot him back out into his life, rather than his job. Might help with the tunnel vision." Now the Askani were shrieking. Loudly. He sighed, one hand going to his temple. #Could we mute it back to the dull roar, please?#

She nodded at his words, hoping he was right - she wasn't holding her breath after watching Scott determinedly stick to the tunnel vision for so long, but she tried to keep hope at least.

"What are they going on about now?" she asked, noting the none too subtle pause and remembering his comment about there being a discussion among the Askani earlier. "Wait - do I even want to know?" No, she didn't. "~Hey! You lot in there! Take a flonquing recess until tomorrow and let the man sleep already.~"

There was a sudden, almost shocked silence inside his skull, and Nathan laughed wryly. "Temporal geometry," he told her. "And I'm stopping with the explanation right there. Why don't you go for your run?"

"They were keeping you up for temporal geometry?" The words were muttered in vague disbelief, even as she rose to her feet. "Going for my run. You go to bed, mmm?" She gave him a stern look, before heading down the steps and towards the jogging paths at a slow run.

Nathan watched her thoughtfully as she headed down the path. Some of the Askani were watching with him, too, distracted from the debate by something. He shrugged, sinking back into his chair and closing his eyes, waiting to see if the silence lasted.


~*~


Thursday evening. Alison goes down the Hangar to clear up what's left of Betty from the Black Bird, as promised. She is not impressed with Haroun's condition. As it turns out, Betty doesn't like anyone all that much but Scott, too.

And you listened to the man whose head blew up last week, because?

Haroun sat in the pilot's seat of the Blackbird - because it was comfortable, but mostly because standing hurt right now. Even with the painkillers a grumpy Hank McCoy had given him, Nathan had landed too many good shots for him to just shrug it off. On the plus side, it didn't seem that there was any ill-effect from Alison's prank. She was as good as her word.

"Ahoy, the 'bird," Alison called out, while climbing the ramp leading into the plane. She'd said she would make sure nothing had been missed and that's what she was here to do. The cameras had been removed she noticed, pausing to check that out, although she didn't know if he'd even spotted the chips that had been neatly camouflaged on various surfaces inside the plane to allow the remote to function. Still, better to check with him first and see what he'd yanked out.

Haroun spun the pilot's chair around. He looked like about a dozen miles of bad road - one eye was very nearly swollen closed, and he was bruised from head to toe. "I got the cameras already. What else did you install? I haven't had time to do a full sweep yet."

"Wha..." she gaped at him for a moment, stunned. "Did Betty reactivate and drop the plane on you?" She seriously wondered if the AI might not have gone rogue for a moment, and moved in closer, wincing as she took in the extent of the bruising. "You look like a mountain fell on your head!"

Haroun grinned and shook his head. "Mount Dayspring. He looks worse, if that makes you feel any better. Felt the need to work out a little class-related anxiety - and I think the Askani were pissy at me." he explained. "Not quite sure why, and he wouldn't explain it. "Bastard's changed his fighting style on me. Took me out, although I gave him a few bumps for his troubles."

She blinked once, slowly tilting her head to the side as she took in that oh so interesting bit of information. "Fought. With Nathan." She'd be having more words with the Askani soon if they'd been the ones to prompt that, she decided, unaware of the predatory gleam in her eyes at the thought. A mental note to ask about the fighting style was made too, and then Alison concentrated on the important part. "Let me get this right. Nathan's head goes boom, what... last week? And then you two just..." she gestured at him, his condition clearly illustrating what she meant - at least to her eyes.

"It was his idea. He asked me!" Haroun said with a grin. "Yeah, it hurts, but I feel _alive_." he admitted. "Even through all the aches and pains. I think he loosened a tooth. Bastard."

"It was his idea," she repeated pleasantly, her smile a bit fixed. If Moira didn't kill Nathan, Alison just very well might. Why were men so abysmally stupid sometimes? "And you listened to the man whose head blew up last week, because?" she asked sweetly, clasping her hands behind her back.

"Because I like fighting?" Haroun said with a wincing grin - he'd stretched out his arms and laced his fingers behind his head. "Because he needed it? Because - just because."

"Oooh," she nodded, idly cracking her shoulder. "Because. Well, that explains it all!" it did too, which was the scary part. So. Stupid. The smile faded and she eyed him with a decidedly unimpressed look, reaching forward to turn the chair so he'd be out of the way. "Under the control panel. Don't even think about getting up." She was proud of herself, really. Hadn't called him a single name yet. Rolling her eyes she crouched down, carefully working one of the panels loose. "Because. Gah."

"It worked for me, and it worked for him. Not too hard to understand. We both like it." Haroun offered by way of explanation, but he had a sinking feeling that this was going to turn into one of those Men Are From Mars things.

"You're both masochists," he was informed, Alison setting down the panel she'd just pried off carefully despite the brief urge to just chuck it at his head. "Men," she muttered in disgust, turning around to lay on her back and then pulling herself partially underneath the main control board, grumbling under her breath.

Haroun watched Alison contort and flex as she worked underneath the panel. Had to admit, the view was very nice. However, given the haze that had draped itself over his thoughts since his brawl this morning, he thought he was going to need to schedule a blood filtering date. Soon. The fur on his tongue was getting a little thicker than he normally liked it.

"Oh for crying out loud, you are duct tape, leggo of the damn metal panel," Alison grumbled, finally twisting the first of many microchips free. She flicked one out on the floor next to her, and then meticulously made sure to vaporize the remnants of the tape glue, light flashing briefly from inside the small space she was working in. "Because! Ha! One will probably sprain his brain again before we know it and if we get called on a mission tomorrow," she paused only long enough to peek out and glare at Haroun, "you are going to be in sorry shape for it. Pff." She reached back inside, carefully prying more microchips free, one by one. 

Haroun nodded. "Probably." he agreed. "That's why I've got a good long soak coming to me, lots of Tiger Balm, and an early bedtime. Have to get up early tomorrow - Ramadan starts, and I need to eat before sunup."

Alison frowned at that, the word familiar - oh yes. Muslim holiday. She was about to ask more when one of the chips blipped to life. Oh no. Please not that.

"Who are you?" the voice rang out, sounding rather peeved.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Alison stared up at the remote chip, torn between wanting to laugh or just squirm into the panel to hide from Haroun. "Your batteries are supposed to be dead by now, I'll have you know. It's the secondary remote," she explained hastily for Haroun's benefit. "Not connected to the plane's systems in any way."

Haroun looked unamused, but he didn't say anything. "Batteries are dead, eh?" he said with a smirk. "They don't sound very dead to me."

"Hands off," the voice squawked, even as Alison reached up with a faint groan. "Oh no you don't, you-" There was the slightest flash of light again and the voice stilled with an electronic bleep.

"Dead now." She pulled out of the panel, very carefully not looking at him, brushing some dust from her hand on her knee carefully. Well, at least the microchip was. "Ahem. Got a few more to pry off over there." She waved in the general direction of the main hold, looking a bit sheepish.

Haroun quirked an eyebrow. "Thorough, aren't you?" he said drolly. "All this work just to piss me off? I'm touched."

"Well, no." She didn't look up just yet, not until she could look very calm indeed. "The idea was that you'd find it amusing too, actually." Which was why she'd gone through all that trouble. "My bad." Ah, now she had the calm face, so she looked up at him, smiling a bit. And then frowned again at the bruises.

Haroun shook his head. "I've never liked pranks. Was the butt of too many of them when I was a boy to find them funny now." he admitted. "I'm not trying to give you a hard time now - I've already apologized once for flying off the handle."

Explanations were good - very good in fact. Alison nodded, tension she hadn't even noticed ebbing away. "I'll remember that, then. And yes, you did. I accepted the apology too, remember? S'ok." She reached for the panel and slipped it back into place, and then leaned on it, not getting up to her feet just yet to get the last of the microchips. "You said Nathan's fighting style had changed?" she asked casually enough.

Haroun nodded, then winced as muscles protested. "Sure has. Much more flowing now. It's balanced - hard, soft, all that mystical crap. He's moving a lot more fluidly than he ever used to."

There was no other way to describe the look on Alison's face in response to that - something between glee and a pure hunger to know so much more. The fact that it sounded familiar, something nagging at the edge of her mind even with that bare a description, only made it worse. "Mmm. And the Askani were peeved with you?" Oh. She was so speaking with them.

Haroun would have shrugged, but that hurt, so he didn't. "I got that impression. Apparently something I did got up their nose or something. He wouldn't tell me exactly, and I was too busy being weirded out. I will say this though - he may have a better fighting style, but he hits like a girl."

The girl leaning on the panel in the cockpit glared at him. "You say that like it's a bad thing," Alison said flatly, repressing the urge to pry out the panel again and put it to better use. Such as applying it to Haroun's head a few times.

Haroun smirked. "Well, some girls can hit." he wisely amended. "But most of them can't. Not really."

There were any number ways for him to die if word of this got out amongst the female population of the mansion, she knew. The thought brought an amused smile to her face. "Really?" She had been meaning to ask him for another sparring session, after all.

Haroun nodded, despite the pain. "Indeed. They can do lots of other nasty painful things, but in terms of raw power, only that little spoiled Australian brat can really hit."

"Mmm." She was not going to go into the whole male testosterone game. Nope sir. "If you say so," she answered mildly. "I'd been meaning to ask you for another spar, but I think that may have to wait a while now," she opined, starting to pick up the microchips strewn about the floor.

Haroun hrmmed as his eyes lit up. "Longer than you think - Ramadan starts tomorrow, and I don't really think throwing down during the holy month is a very good idea. But I'll take a raincheck on that one, if you don't mind."

"Masochist," she answered good-naturedly, lips quirking in a smile at his reaction. "It can wait until you don't look like someone stuffed you in a dryer and left you there for a few hours." She paused, eyeing him critically. "With rocks. Really. Big. Rocks."

Haroun laughed at that. "Yes, well, he still hits like a girl. A very little girl."

"Uh huh. Well, I'm going to go get the chips in the hold and then I have to go," she made a face at him, pushing herself up to her feet. "Miles' bedtime and all that." With a grin of farewell she left the cockpit, humming to herself.