thefirststark | Mixed Muses: The Morning After

She turns from the door of the closet, where she's standing, and tilts her head at him; her weight shifting on the floor makes the tiniest of subtle skiffing sounds as she shifts her feet. "You might need to get more comfortable clothes first," she says, halfway between actually considering and amused.

She does blink back to visible as she pulls on a pair of jeans, though.

"I have something in my room." Pause. "No, it's more like the room has something for me. It's like my closet got copied."

He dresses carefully. He'll still need this outfit when he heads back home.

She smiles as she pulls on a shirt, a short shudder dying as she pulls it down and covers her bare torso. It might not have escaped Howard's notice that she's not wearing the usually requisite amount of layers, but what she does have is nicely warm.

"Should I come with you?"

"That only seems fair. I see your room, you see mine." A prelude, he thinks for a moment, to trying to find a way to show her his world, his time.

"I wish I could show you what it's like in the sixties. You'd like it," she says lightly. "You could see the school I got to."

A reminder, briefly, that Alisa is still in school. Howard isn't sure if he feels really old about now, or really young.

"The way you talk about your time, though, I don't know if you would feel comfortable in mine." Things will change. But not for a while.

He opens the door to a corridor where every so often he sees people who look relieved to have their regular clothes back. And yet no one is staring at his.

"I don't know. I...think I would be," she says. "But it would be different."

She reaches for his hand slowly, less shy than she expected to be.

"We've have to...behave a certain way." He holds Alisa's hand a bit tightly. She is not the first woman he's slept with, of course. But this is something so different and new and good but strange. "It might be a lot to ask."

"Meaning I'd have to act like we didn't sleep with each other," she says. The distinction isn't one she's unfamiliar with, because while it's not the forties, it still gets her stared at when she goes out with any of the other students or the Professor.

"I don't think it would be too much to ask."

"I would appreciate that." He doesn't say anything more for now on the topic as they reach his room.

As he indicated the previous night, it's on the spartan side. A bed, a bookcase, a dresser, not much else. "Give me a moment to find something to wear?"

"Okay," she acquiesces easily, letting his hand go. "I can wait out here."

It's not that she doesn't have problems with the concept of acting different--Alisa most certainly does, but it's only for a while. Or so she's telling herself.

You would think that a man who's just been naked with a woman wouldn't mind letting her see him dress. But even playboys have their quirks.

When he emerges, he's in khakis, a blue polo shirt, and a bomber jacket. This is the most casual he'll ever get.

"Shall we head out?"

She generally thinks most men do; Alisa sees a great deal more than people thinks he does, and she's very good at not being seen.

"Sure," she murmurs, tucking her hands in her pockets. "I like the jacket." She kind of digs it, truth be told.

"Came with the airplane," he says nonchalantly. And tries not to smile too broadly about either the company or the plane he left at home.

Alisa can't not giggle at that. "Really?" she asks. "You know I still haven't been on a plane."

"You are overdue. Flying is wonderful. Though you would just be a passenger.

"And no, I had to buy this. But every pilot worth his salt owns one."

She smiles. "I don't mind just being along for the ride, Howard," she says lightly, reaching up to drag her fingertips over the shoulder of the bomber jacket.

"Maybe if I go with you I can be."

"We'd have to visit my Long Island proving grounds, then. That's where I keep my planes. Three of them, though one is always an experimental model."

They pass through the main bar, rats scurrying back and forth.

"Where does your door open?" she asks, glancing down at the rats and doing her best not to step on their tails with her sneakers.

"Usually at my Manhattan apartment. Sometimes at my office, or even out at my California compound. And oddly, never at my house in LA." He has no idea why? "Where does yours come from?"

"It moves," she says. "It's almost always in the mansion, but it moves from my bedroom door to the solarium, or the door out to the garden sometimes. Once from the kitchen."

She wonders if she's ever mentioned that the school is actually housed in Charles Xavier's house. Which is a mansion. And a very large one at that. "It's only opened once for me away from there. At a movie theater."

"I hope it wasn't a good movie. Or did you just get back to it later?" Once in a while, time slides ahead a bit for him. When it's least convenient.

"The mansion is where the school is?"

The door to the lake and the woods awaits.

"I wasn't there to see the movie," she says, stepping around the obstacles between them and the door with relative ease. "It was hot and I thought I'd go inside."

She smiles at the notion of it, though. Even for her the idea of taking refuge in a dark, cool theater is kind of funny--if only because movies have been made about people who do what she does to one extent or another. "And yes, the mansion is the school. It used to be the Professor's house...1407 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Center, New York." Her tone is playful as she recites. It's not an address she ever thought she'd live at.

"I assume it's pretty quiet up that way?" The suburbs outside NYC tend to be, well, dull. "My Long Island compound is surrounded by potato farms."

It's nippy out, but sunny.

"Oh, it's boring," she says, half in agreement. "But it's far enough out of the way so people don't much bother us."

Alisa turns her face towards the sun for a moment, smiling through the wind. "How did you know you wanted to build airplanes and fly?"

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