Log [Alison, Haroun] ~ Rough waters...

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

Friday afternoon. In which Haroun is having a Bad Day(tm), Alison announces who she has chosen to be the music TA and then things then proceed to go from Bad to Worse.

Today was a good day. She was hurting less than yesterday (which had all been her fault in the first place) and she'd just gained a major concession which would actually (she hoped) be doing a certain music student of hers a world of good and well... she hurt less. Opening doors was happening. Lifting things on her own was happening - very small things, but still! Moving like a little old lady wasn't happening too much anymore. Small things for the most part and which others might not notice at all, but for Alison it was a world of difference, really.

And the news deserved to be shared, Alison thought, although wandering about the hallways would probably get her scolded by Madelyn so she waited patiently - Haroun would be by soon. In the meantime, the curtains were drawn open and sunlight streamed inside the room and Alison actually got a few notes about the music class ready to prepare her new assistant for his work.

Haroun was in the middle of a Truly Crappy Day. Catseye had taken it upon herself to shed all over his clean clothes - again. Necessitating a quick flight into town to purchase a hamper that locked with no holes in it - not exactly something they sold at the corner Bed Bath and Beyond. His Arabic students were being little monsters. Even Flight, the best of all his classes, went unusually poorly with three, count them, THREE mid-air collisions. At least Medical didn't have to get involved this time.

She was positioned so that she'd know if one of the few people with instant access to the room walked in - not being able to hear made one fanatically picky about details like that, it seemed. Although that was supposed to change soon, with sound being allowed to her more and more in small increments, though how they were going to deal with that Alison had no clue although she had been trying to follow the talk on the technology involved with dealing with her power overload as best as possible without being able to hear anything. She supposed Forge would be taking care of it, though and asking him for more details later on was always a possibility.

Haroun tried to put his face into a more pleasant configuration. He really did. He had almost mastered it when a castoff piece of cat dander detached from his shirt, floated into his nostrils, and caused him to sneeze violently just as the door to Alison's new room opened. And, just his luck, his hands were full and he couldn't get to the handkerchief in his pocket. So there he stood, messy stack of papers under one arm, covering his nose with his other hand, and quite obviously irritated beyond any human level to Deal.

Alison blinked for a moment as she stared at him and then very carefully hid a wince. Moving slowly if at least not as ungraciously as before, she got to her feet and reached for the Kleenex box (lifting things!), making her way to him while studiously eyeing how the fabric of the Kleenex moved with each step she took. Once she reached the door she stopped just enough so that he could walk in and let the door close behind him, box held up a bit higher in a silent offering.

Haroun put down his incredibly messy papers, then used that hand to claim a handful of tissues. Turning his back on Alison, he quite messily blew his nose and cleaned himself up as best he could. "I am really beginning to dislike the latest addition to the zoo out there." he grumbled. "She's a nice enough girl, but I'm allergic to cats."

Wandering back to the normally very comfortable chair by the bed to afford Haroun some dignity reclaiming attempt seemed to be the thing to do, Alison smiling just a touch at the expression on his face. She caught the last of his words as she turned though and sat down, tugging the console closer to type out a message. "Very enthusiastic girl. Nearly bowled me over in the hallway. Kyle explained that was Not To Be Done and she's been tiptoeing around me since when she sees me."

Haroun flopped gracelessly into Alison's other guest chair, looking her over while keeping the box of tissues handy in case of any more sneezing attacks. "Moira's still looking for an anti-cat-dander medication I can take that does not interact badly with my power." He said with a shrug. "Until then, I suffer."

"Should get air purifiers installed. Here and your bedroom. Will make things easier either way." The smile wasn't going away, because she was in a Good Mood and he was awfully cute when he was all grumbly anyway. Alison deliberately reached out, patting his arm lightly - although not so lightly as any of the preceding days.

"I plan to. They're on order, should be arriving in a few days." He said with a smile. "I do think of these things, you know." He grumbled. For as good of a mood as Alison was in, his own mood was bad bordering on terrible. "I checked on Nathan. Idiot's still refusing to be Healed. Says he has to wait his concussion out the natural way."

"It wasn't easy for him." She'd defeated the 'curl up' instinct for the moment, and sat in the chair wit her back straight, feet firmly planted on the floor. "At least Jono knows he's not dying from the physical deterioration now. Poor kid was eating himself alive over that one." She winced at the unintentional pun and continued, smile slowly growing again. "Distracted now though. I have a new TA for music. Guess who?"

"You're joking. Please tell me you're joking." Haroun said, then looked more closely at Alison. "You're not joking." he said, cradling his head in his hands - which led to another thunderous sneeze and a scramble for more tissues. "How long until he explodes again?" he wondered aloud. "Before someone who isn't Captain Sprains-His-Brain gets seriously hurt or killed?"

Frowning a bit, Alison shook her head, forgetting to be pleased with how quickly she was typing things out compared to the previous day. "I'm not joking. There are several students who would do just as well but Jono needs this far more than any of the others. The worst he feared might happen has in fact happened. He needs something to keep him from lingering on that all the time."

"The boy has detonated three times. Do you really want to risk taking another pull at that lottery, never knowing if this time will be the time that he kills someone?" Haroun asked with real worry written across his features. "You're not strong enough to contain him."

"I think he's done all the blowing up he could do," Alison pointed out, looking very calm as she typed out the words. "He's been my student since he arrived here and I like him. Overdeveloped sense of woe and all. Besides, I did just fine the first time he blew up." And they weren't going to start keeping every single student locked away just in case they blew up.

"I don't like it. I don't like it one bit. Did you know that the power feeds to the white noise generators you were using passed very near to that boiler room where Jono blew up? It was sheer blind luck that your isolation chamber didn't lose power when the balloon went up. Think about that for a while. Think about the lives you're risking. I hope the boy gets control, and I hope he does it soon. But it is RECKLESS to allow him to practice where other people could pay for his loss of control!" Haroun ranted.

It was, Alison though a bit dimly, a good thing she hadn't been allowed sound yet, though she itched to pull the cap from the synthsilk over her head anyway from pure reflex. "The medlab has backup power generators, no?" Knowing Hank as she did, everything probably had at least three redundancy systems - although Haroun had no way of knowing that so easily. "This is a school. The students are here to learn. All of them. And Jono will be my TA - he'll be taking care of the music class for me while I can't. He can't even practice anything but floating around right now anyway."

Haroun nodded irritably. "That's not the point. The point is that there was a window of time where you would have had no sonic baffling whatsoever." he pointed out. "I came close to losing you once, I'm not prepared to risk it again so needlessly."

"But it didn't happen. And it wasn't Nathan's fault Jono blew up." Just like it hadn't been the time it had happened in her class, for that matter. She was still embarrassed about the wall being destroyed, though. She pushed herself up carefully, starting to feel restless, her earlier good mood having quickly faded by now despite the implications of his words. "Hazard of what we do," she reminded him, sketching a quick X in the air, leaving a faint golden aftertrail of light to it. "Might happen." Sooner or later, and it might be him dying rather than her, and the thought was a chilling one. She'd been confronted with her own mortality far too clearly, but contemplating his own was another matter entirely.

"Yes, I know it's a hazard of what we do." replied Haroun irritably. "But we take precautions - we train, we plan, we have the equipment we need. None of that matters when it's an unstable student who is prone to property damage at the very least! I am prepared to die as an X-Man. I am NOT prepared to die because some kid can't pull it together!"

"You know better than that - it's not that simple, it never is. We've all had power slips while learning!" Or because of avoiding one's power, as Alison herself had done. This was so very frustrating and she hissed in impatience at being unable to talk to him, having to resort to typing and making sure to look at him carefully afterwards each time so as to not lose anything he might be saying. "We've all been through a phase like that at one time or another before achieving control!"

"Yes, and when you've got someone in the throes of trying to get control, you isolate them or you take precautions as necessary to limit the possibility of collateral damage!" he said passionately. "When I was learning, the worst that could have happened to me is that I flamed out or cratered myself. When someone like Jono is learning, with a power that lethal and that out-of-control..." he left the rest of that statement unsaid.

"He blows himself up." The words blinked to life on the screen flatly. "And is now a floating ball of energy. It's not Nathan's fault that it happened that way and neither of them knew about the power feeds." Alison kept reminding herself that he'd been upset because she might have been endangered, but it was starting to get a bit difficult. "It's like me helping Manuel train. No one is happy about it but it has to be done somehow anyway." They were just going in circles and this wasn't helping anything. She walked a few steps from the console, flexing her hands because she couldn't give in to any of her other usual nervous habits.

Haroun sighed and then tried to relax as best he could. "You're going to do whatever you think is best. Which is fine. But I don't have to like this - not one bit. I think it's an unnecessary risk and I think it's too dangerous. But you're a big girl now." he said tiredly.

A big girl. Right. It explained why she was in a modified synthsilk suit and unable to hear or be heard and likely to stay that way for much too long still. She let out her breath slowly, looking down for a moment, hands briefly clenching into fists. ~I should be dead now. Don't know why I survived.~ Talking into the silence and at the floor wasn't going to help anything though. Sighing, she headed back towards her chair and the console.

Haroun clearly couldn't let it go - so he straightened back up again. "You know I trust you, right? And that I believe that you can do anything you set your mind to, right? I am asking you, as your friend, as your whatever-I-am, to not do this. Don't take the boy on as your TA - not until he learns some control. Until we can guarantee that he won't go nuclear in the middle of your class. Where children might get hurt. Do you think you can do that for me?"

As her whatever-he-was? What, did he think she'd have been doing everything they had been doing unless she was damn well serious about him and he was a great deal more than a 'whatever he was'? Everything else that he was saying slowly started to sink in as well and Alison found herself sitting slowly down on the chair, staring at him with a wide-eyed and more than a little disbelieving expression. "What?" She didn't even type the words, merely mouthing the question at him.

Haroun wasn't much of a lipreader, so he missed her mouthed protest. He gave her a few long minutes to contemplate the answer to his questions, trying very hard not to show his tension in his body language. For the most part, he failed miserably.

She wasn't even sure how to ask him what he'd meant by that, the words 'whatever-I-am' filling the silence surrounding Alison, the memory of his voice coloring them. "I can't do that. Jono's already been spoken to on the matter." A pause in the typing, and she continued. "I would not do this if I thought there was danger to my students." She hesitated a moment before focusing on him again, having nearly typed 'I'm sorry' only she wasn't - Jono needed this and it was a good thing to do.

Haroun sighed heavily. "I think you are making a mistake. A very big mistake. And I hope I'm wrong. I really do. I want you to look me in the eye ten years from now and say "You were wrong." And I'll look back and smile and say "You were right, and I was wrong." I'd love to be able to do that. But I don't think it's going to happen. Because a year from now, maybe two, that boy is going to go through another rough patch and he'll be teaching your students - maybe even your son - and then BOOM! And we'll have that conversation standing over the graves of children!"

Stunned at his words, Alison just sat there gaping at him for a few moments, Haroun having unknowingly reminded her of every nightmare she'd had about Miles dying in one horrible way or another since the Mistra mission. They had only worsened since she'd starting sleeping again after her release from the medlab, this time with Magneto or the others involved as opposed to faceless Mistra agents. The console was entirely forgotten as she rose to her feet, trembling with mingled fear and anger. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare!"

"Don't I dare what?" he said, rising to his own feet. "Remind you of unpleasant possibilities? Speak my mind? I'm not trying to terrify you, I'm trying to get you to THINK! Think about what you're doing! Think about what it could mean. Three eruptions in, what, under two years? That's not the most stellar record around."

"You made that point perfectly clear already!" A distant part of Alison's mind was telling her that using the console now to make sure he understood her would be a good idea but she was far too distraught to actually stop long enough to realize this. "Just leave Miles out of this! There's been enough involving Miles!" It was unnerving to know she was nearly screaming and yet that no one heard her.

Haroun only caught a few words out of that tirade, but the name Miles came through loud and clear. "No one will harm Miles if I can do anything to stop them." he said. "But I can't protect him if you insist on endangering him like this!"

Apparently, just being with her was endangering Miles, if the shopping trip and subsequent encounter with Magneto was anything to go by. That it was Miles' power in and of itself the man had wanted was forgotten under the impact of Haroun's words. "I can't protect him from everything. No one can, I know that. I know it. Just leave him out of this!" The sharp, slashing gesture she made hurt, but she couldn't help it, driven more by emotions than anything rational.

Haroun again didn't catch the words, but the gesture was unmistakable. "Fine." he said, voice suddenly arctic-cold. "When you're healthy and prepared to be rational, we'll discuss this again." he said, gathering up his papers and letting himself out of her room.

The tone of his voice wasn't audible to her but his expression was more than clear, the nuances she'd learned to look for during the past week easy to read. Alison watched him leave with a sinking sensation as the anger drained away entirely, calling out his name against the sound dampeners without effect before the door closed behind him.

Comments

[x-foliate.livejournal.com]

...oi.

One of these days, Paige is going to happen to be walking by that door and then we're all screwed. In short.

Until then, I'll just sit here and hiss at Haroun by myself. ;)

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

Lorna is right there with her, muttering about how he'd probably want to lock Alex up too.