Log [Alison, Scott] Careful what you wish for...

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

Scott goes to find Alison to give her some news regarding her team status. They talk about things a bit, keeping a focus on more than just the moment at hand.



Pacing back and forth in the middle of the hallway, in fact, ridiculous.

But they hadn't sent in her test results yet and usually it was a same day thing. Of course, she reasoned, there was the dance to take into account. Why finish up a simple routine physical review when you had to get ready for the evening's dance, right? It wasn't as though sending Alison her results the same day or the next would have changed anything, she reminded herself. She was fine. She felt fine. With a sigh of frustration, she turned sharply and headed for the Music Room, rather than give in to the temptation to go check her email again. At least the talk with Charles earlier had taken her mind off the wait, for a while. That was something to be grateful for. And burying herself in music and confirming to herself (once more) that her guitar playing was back up to par would be wonderful. And get her mind off the wait for purely normal and boring medical tests as well.

Humming to himself, Scott headed down the hallway in that general direction, having gotten a heads-up from Charles as to where he could find Alison. He turned a little black box over and over in one hand, a motion that wasn't so much nervous as anticipatory. Hearing the sound of a guitar as he approached the music room, he smiled to himself, then schooled his expression to careful neutrality, sticking the little box in his pocket.

The strings thrummed under her fingers, as the door to the room cracked open, Alison smiling a bit to herself as she played. It was a slow, soothing tune - a lullaby, or so one might assume. Pausing at one point, she tilted her head to the side, eyes glazing over as she tried to remember exactly how the song had progressed. Trying to remember Askani music was a challenge most of the time, the memories neatly tucked in a corner of her mind either deluging her with information or remaining quiet and coy, as though trying not to overwhelm for once. Either way, it was always guaranteed to take up her entire attention.

Scott stood in the doorway, watching her for a few minutes, listening to the piece she was playing. It was Askani, he thought; there was something very distinctive about their music. He waited until she'd come to a pause before clearing his throat softly. "Mind if I interrupt for a few minutes?"

She looked up after plucking out three more notes, the mental switch from there to here far easier now as compared to how it had been at first, words and patterns resolving smoothly into place. "Not at all. Come on in and have a seat," she smiled at him, the faint accent to her words already fading as she waved him to one of the nearby chairs.

Giving her a thoughtful look, Scott did as indicated. "So," he said, watching her. "How was tea?" He managed to keep his expression almost level, although his lips might have twitched, just once.

She blinked at him, a touch nonplused at the question. "It was tea?" She'd had regular talks with the Professor, since her healing - and a few before, as well. She'd usually been the one to seek him out, though the invitation to tea hadn't been too unusual - the Professor liked to speak to all staff members on a regular basis, after all. "It was good tea," she added. "A good talk too." She'd been the one to bring up Magneto first, though they hadn't lingered on the topic, either.

"Mmm. It was your psych eval," Scott said simply.

"..." Alison stared at him, mouth open and not a word coming out. She shook her head a touch, eyes still a bit wide as comprehension settled in and eventually decided that imitating a landed fish wasn't exactly what she wanted to be doing.

"My psych eval? It was?"

"Yes indeed." Scott grinned. "Free piece of advice, Ali; if Charles  invites you for tea, it's never just tea. Never. Keep that in mind." He pulled the box out of his pocket, keeping it hidden from her still. "So. We have your psych eval done. You've been cleared by the medlab."

She was doing the landed fish impersonation again. She snapped her mouth shut and frowned at him. And then the implications of the medlab clearing her and Scott looking like the cat that got the canary hit, and the Landed Fish Impersonation returned full blast, along with more widening of the eyes and staring alternately at the box in his hands and Scott's face.

"I didn't get these in time to give them to you before what happened with Magneto," Scott said, the smile fading to something less purely amused but still very steady. "They're just a symbol, but... hell, I like symbols." He leaned over, extending the box.

She reached over to take the box, the guitar still cradled in her lap - it wasn't awkward at all to keep it there, Alison using the back of one arm to easily set it in place, even as she looked at the small black box in her hand. "Oh." She gazed at him for a moment, the surprise still there and hard to beat down after all that time waiting for this to happen, no less. "Thank you." The smile started to show, and she focused on the box once more, opening it slowly to reveal the two silver tabs, the Xs inset in a circle gleaming up at her against a backdrop of black.

"You can do this, you know," Scott said after a moment, almost wistfully. "Don't listen to any of the voices that tell you that you can't, wherever they're coming from. You're here, you're strong, and you believe in what we're doing. That's all that matters."

Her fingertips brushed against the tabs briefly and after a moment she offered him a small smile. "This - is what everyone is telling me. But it's not..." She sighed, trying to find a way to explain. "The music? I knew. Always did. Wasn't about anyone telling me - I knew." And there weren't lives depending on her, at that. Still, the box was closed carefully and Alison wrapped both her hands around it, and nodded at Scott. His words were heard, and not brushed aside. "Okay." And she smiled, hesitantly but honestly nonetheless.

"At least you're not telling me I'm insane. I did that to Charles when we had our moment like this, did I ever tell you that?" Scott smiled back at her. "Of course, I was also just shy of my twenty-second birthday when we had that moment. So I think I was more or less justified in questioning his sanity." Scott fell silent, his expression going distant for a moment. "He just smiled and told me that he had faith in me. Which was utterly terrifying, mind you."

"I thought you were all bonkers," she replied, drawing the box closer to her without realizing it as she hugged the guitar and grinned impishly. "Sometimes I still think you are too. I just don't say it out loud much." Wrinkling her nose, she glanced down at the box, still held rather possessively close. "We talked about Miles and then about Magneto, and a little bit about Moroccan mint tea." A shallow breath, and she focused on him again. "And we talked about how I scare myself silly sometimes with the Might Have Beens."

"It's the extreme," Scott said, remembering some of his own talks with Charles over the last few months. "The might-have-beens, the what-ifs... we have to consider them, Alison, learn from them, but it's when we let them scare us silly, or drive us into a nervous breakdown - " He gave her a quick, self-deprecating smile. " - that it turns into a problem. Not that I'm telling you anything you don't already know."

"Knowing and doing aren't the same thing." The reply was instant, and without a second thought. "It's not as easy to keep some things in sight when you're right in the thick of something." It was a bit easier to understand, now - and she hadn't even led a mission out yet, at that. "I'm... I'll just have to give it my best." She smiled a bit tightly, taking a deep breath.

"I wouldn't expect anything less," Scott said firmly. "Now. I would say it's traditional for some sort of celebration, but we don't have enough precedent for this to say that anything's traditional." He grinned again. "So I'm open to suggestions."

Alison grinned suddenly. "I was thinking of asking Haroun to teach me how to fly the blackbird as a 'go me' type reward." Both of the other team leaders knew how to. Two of the XOs did as well. It only made sense. Her lips quirked and she tried to think up something appropriately celebratory for the moment at hand. "Hrm. Loud guitar playing? I can do loud." She glanced at the speakers Forge had tweaked out of the corner of her eyes.

Scott laughed softly. "Can you think of anything Askani that's appropriate?" he asked. "Do they have an equivalent to the Ode to Joy?" His grin grew. "And by the way... I thought you might like to be the one to give Nathan his news when he gets back. Unless you'd rather leave it to Ororo or I, that is..."

"Oh, I can think of a thing or two." Or ten. If nothing else, the Askani had a trove of celebratory inclined pieces, several of which decided to flood her mind. The already present smile widened at his offer and she nodded firmly, having already suspected Nathan had already been cleared for active duty. "I think I'll pounce on that one. Which you knew very well I'd do, the both of you."

"I may not be a mind reader myself, but all these years around telepaths has to have taught me a thing or two, you know," Scott said, slouching a little in the chair and rubbing at the back of his neck. "So. You and Haroun ready to be the on-call pair starting on Monday?"

She grinned at that, the expression without reserve or guard. "Yes. And now I have to go tell him!" she wasn't doing that over the coms or by email, no way. The one thing better than getting good news (regardless of any reservation) was sharing it.