Log [Alison, Haroun] Step by step...

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

Despite the surprise visit of the previous night, some things still go according to schedule. Haroun's implant gets the software upload it needs, and as a result, Alison finds a moment or two to catch a few winks while waiting for him to wake up.



Haroun struggled back to consciousness - it was easier to just put him under to do the hormone work than keep him conscious and calm for the entire procedure. For some reason, having people poke around inside the mechanisms - he couldn't really think of it as him, not when it was like that - made him testy. His first sight was a sleeping Alison, with a really cute little rope of drool hanging off her lower lip and nestling itself into her cleavage.

While it had hardly been the most comfortable of things, to be leaning on the side of the bed as quietly as possible so as to not disturb him, Alison still hadn't really wanted to be elsewhere. And she hadn't exactly intended to fall asleep - just lean her head in her arms for a little while and close her eyes, really. After the early morning excitement had calmed down which had been early even for a morning person like Alison at that, never mind being chased around by a furious magnekinetic with a knife, fatigue had hit. Hard. But she hadn't had the chance to stop until now, which explained the light snoring that escaped her, now and then, as well.

Haroun did a quick systems check - everything appeared to be OK ... wait. His feet were missing. Now that was just embarrassing. "Hoooney?" he asked Alison, rasping just a bit from an extreme case of drymouth. "Where are my new feet?"

Eyes popping wide open, Alison stared at him - going from sleeping the sleep of the exhausted to the awake of the moderately confused. "Wuh…" Unmoving, she processed what had woken her up. A question. OH! Words in it too! She blinked once. "What?"

Haroun sat up slowly, dangling his legs over the side of the bed. Legs without feet, even. "Where are my new feet?" he asked her again, waggling the stubs of his legs at her. "I kind of need them."

Blink. Ooh, thinking hurt. Moving wasn't too bad though. "Feet..." She groaned, leaning her head on the side of the bed, and started to giggle, the oddness of the sight counter-acted by Haroun's antics. As odd as the sight was, she'd just caught up to what he was saying. "Why do you want to know?" she quoted at him, between the snickers.

"You tell me where my feet are, woman!" he mock-barked at her, and then laughed. "Seriously, though, it was my understanding that when I woke up I'd have feet and the new implant. Implant seems to be online, but I am missing my feet. And I, err, kinda have to go." he said sheepishly.

Problem solving. She was good at that, right? "Wheelchair?" she asked in all seriousness, having not a clue why the feet hadn't been re-installed yet. Oh. "And Forge sort of had a look in his eyes when he wandered off with your feet." Maybe he'd wanted to tweak something since the invasion the previous night.

"Great. I'm sitting here with an urge to go, and Forge is off doing unspeakable things to parts of my anatomy. My day is, officially, made." he groaned. "And yeah, wheelchair. Unless you want to watch me try to fly over..." he said hopefully. He'd been grounded for a few weeks now, and he had the itch to grab sky bad.

"Wheelchair," she repeated firmly, with the hint of a laugh to her voice. Implant. Better soon. Something was looking up, at last! She rose to her feet and resisted the urge to drop a kiss on his cheek, instead winking at him before retrieving a wheelchair for him. A few minutes later she wheeled one in, parking it next to the bed. "Need help or you good?" she asked, eyeing his arms with a faint smile. He'd had a filtering while under. She could look a little not, right?

Haroun caught her peeking, and decided to make a show of it. "No, I'm good." he said, lifting himself out of bed using solely his arms, then flipping himself around to land squarely in the wheelchair. "OK, now I really have to go. Lay on, MacDuff!" he said, making whip-cracking motions with one of his hands.

She laughed at that, leaning into the chair though careful not to go too fast - but still indulging a little, for the sake of the moment and because they'd found something to help him at least and it was a good thing, even with the rest looming in the background - Hank's illness, the fact that it was only a temporary fix for Haroun... "Voila!" she purred, parking the wheelchair in the bathroom itself. "And now would be when I flee and leave you to it, hrm?" Which she did, closing the door behind her.

Haroun grinned through the door. "What, you don't want to come in here and hold it for me?" he taunted through the door, and then quickly took care of business. "Much better." he said as he re-emerged from the bathroom and wheeled himself over to bedside. "How are you doing?" he asked, noting her exhausted look. "You look terrible."

She'd been busy rolling her eyes at his comment, before following him back towards the bed. "Ooh. Just a bit tired, is all. Had to spend a lot of light while blowing up Lorna's kitchen and I haven't stopped for a good sound boost yet." She flopped back in her chair, stretching out her legs slowly, while eyeing the neatly stitched scalp would on his head. While it had looked disastrous earlier, it was barely visible now with the stitch work. "Be fine." She started to say something else, but was interrupted by a yawn.

"You need to take some downtime." he said sternly. "Don't make me give you a good shot of, oh, I don't, know, Golgotha or Bolt-Thrower to get you that sonic perk you need." he said with a laugh. "130 decibels should put the bounce back in your step, don't you think? Besides, I saw your schedule. I'm surprised you actually sleep."

"Either are just noise really. Wouldn't mind right now, really. And... I sleep!" She winced a bit. That had been a jaw-cracking sort of yawn. And she'd been drooling earlier she knew, though she'd made a point not to draw attention to that. Hopefully she hadn't snored. Gah. "Some. Okay, the last week maybe there was a touch of insomnia but there was just so much-" she paused, and shrugged a little helplessly. "My schedule hasn't changed that much..." she trailed off, trying to go over it in her head and not exactly managing it too well.

"You're not dazzling me here." he said pointedly. "Take. Some. Time. Off. By yourself. Go recharge, play with your son in something other than scheduled blocks of time. Take a breather."

"Bad pun. Bad. And - there are things to do," she protested, softly. "Classes and the team stuff and the leader thing just added more and-" Pausing, Alison groaned faintly. "I overcharged my schedule instead of balancing it out, didn't I?" She'd been purposefully burying herself in work for the past week, but the realization was there - it hadn't been hard to do, really.

"To put it mildly. Do I need to show it to Scott, or will you agree to delegate a little and cut back on your workload?" he said pointedly. He was playing dirty pool, and he knew it. "I'm back online now. Let me take the team lead stuff. Most of that is XO crap that you should never see anyway."

"I like seeing it," she pointed out, though she wasn't arguing with him. Talk about getting a insight into why Scott had been overdoing it for so long. "Okay. Not going to argue - you're right and it'd be really really silly of me to do so since I've nagged about people about doing this sort of stuff." She slumped a bit more in the chair, stretching her legs out. "We'll go over it and I just get the short version of whatever I hand over to you every now and then?" She made puppy-dog eyes at him, trying to be good about the whole thing.

"I'll keep you informed." he said, rolling his eyes in the manner of XOs throughout time. "That's my job." he said, leaning back in the wheelchair to admire her legs as she stretched them out. She really did have perfect legs. Her most sterling part, really.

He was checking out her legs, unmistakably so - Alison liked it when he did that. And it wasn't taunting or pushing. And it was fine for now, she added to herself. "Never done this before," she pointed out, another yawn catching up with her. Maybe she should try napping again later. "I over-compensate just a bit, sometimes. In case you hadn't noticed," she added, deadpan.

Haroun made a noncommittal noise. "Talked to Hank the other day." he said carefully. "Told me that since he was likely going to die from whatever it is that has him down for the count that I was supposed to take care of you - since he couldn't. Want to tell me what he meant by that?"

All the emotion bled from Alison's face in a heartbeat, and she shook her head, just a bit. "He's not going to die. Madelyn and Moira will figure it out." If it weren't for things still being dicey with the implant, until he had time to get used to the new settings, she'd likely be crawling into his lap to be held just now. "He's a good friend. One of my best. When the whole thing with the stalker blew up and I lost my recording contract - he's the one who called me up. I didn't know where to go, or what to do to try and keep those around me from getting hurt and out of the blue he called and suggested I come here," her lips quirked at the expression, though the reminder of his condition had stolen some of the calm she'd found with Haroun's reprieve - not all, but some. "Hank has a protective streak a mile wide..."

Haroun nodded. There was volumes she wasn't telling him, but that's OK. He'd never demanded an accounting from her, no she him. Although, with all the implant trouble, and the not-a-real-man thing ... no. That was just being paranoid. Had to be. There was no way. Stupid to even consider it. She wasn't like that. Besides, she was loud enough in proclaiming what she wanted - even if she was glacially slow to act on it. Wonder if she was that way with him? NO! Stop thinking about it!

"Haroun?" she might have bee tired, but there was still nothing wrong with her eyes. And Haroun was radiating an odd sort of tension, all of a sudden. "Is everything all right?" She tilted her head to the side, looking at him carefully.

"Yeah. Everything's fine." he said as cheerfully as he could, staring at her legs again. This was insane. She would never! But there was that small treasonous voice in the back of his mind that wouldn't let it go. "Well, I don't have my feet, but other than that everything's fine." he insisted. "Really."

Not everything was fine, she decided, after looking at him for a while longer. But it might still be the aftereffects of the testosterone overdose he'd been dealing with for too long, now, still affecting something or other. Or something. "Well. Keeps you from running off when I wouldn't mind leaning my head on that nice shoulder of yours, mm?" She made a vague attempt at nudging her chair closer - and found it quite impossible to do, clearly. 

Haroun nodded. More mixed signals from the queen of mixed signals. "Sure. That'd be nice." he said, hopping back up onto the bed to make things easy for her. He daydreamed for a few moments what his wall would look like with a large blue throw rug on it, then discarded the thought as unworthy of him. And what frightened him the most - or should have, if he could muster the energy to feel much of anything - was that that extremely depressing thought only made him a bit sad. It didn't crush him, it didn't enrage him, and he was resentful of the fact that it didn't. It was almost like the implant change had scooped out his emotions entirely, left him with a pale shadow of the real thing.

Wasting no time in nudging the chair closer to the bed, previous difficulties apparently entirely forgotten, Alison smiled a bit at him, before draping her upper body against the bed so she could rest her head on his shoulder. The something was still bothering him, she could tell. "Think I could get away with sneaking up on the bed instead of giving myself a crick in the neck like this? Be a better way to sleep, that." The implant had been fixed. And Madelyn had explained there would be ups and downs, but that nothing as drastic as before should happen.

Haroun nodded. "Be my guest." he said, then scooted over to give her some room. "As far as I know, I'm safe now. And this isn't a changing room." he said with a slight twist to his lips. Sure, now that he was defanged and harmless she wanted to be his cuddlebuddy. But when he was intense, when he felt the most alive, that's when she got scared. Just his luck.

Since she was already half on the bed, it was mostly a matter of shifting weight and not too ungracefully relocate the rest of her body from the chair to the bed, really - cautiously so, but still not without some measure of haste. As she settled against him, Alison reflected that it was probably a good thing she was so exhausted. Her eyes were already drifting shut as she smiled contently, the familiar body heat feeling like a return home. "Mmr ths." She'd missed this - so very much.

Haroun smiled at Alison as she settled in and almost immediately dropped off to sleep. Well, that was one way to guarantee he'd be awake for whenever Forge arrived with his new feet. She felt good leaned up against him, as much as anything felt good right then, and Haroun sighed as he felt the acute pang of his passions being drained away, filtered to nothingness, stifled before they could bloom.