LOG: Nathan and Manuel - Breakthroughs

[x-empath.livejournal.com]

Manuel has his empathy training session with Nathan. Together, they make a major breakthrough into the whys of Manuel's empathic projection difficulties. Set for early this afternoon.

WARNING: LONG!



Same old seminar room, Nathan thought with a trace of amusement, sitting down and sipping at his coffee as he glanced at the clock. Manuel should be arriving shortly. This had a definite feeling of deja vu about it... yet not, at the same time. He actually rather liked the contrast.

Manuel arrived precisely on time, sipping at a cup of coffee. "Good afternoon." he said quietly. "What do you have planned for today?"

Nathan raised an eyebrow. "Well," he said reasonably, "what have you and Charles been talking about lately? What do you feel you need to practice?"

"Many things." he said, clearly uncomfortable. "Mostly, we've been discussing chains of sensation. How one alteration, no matter how seemingly trivial, may spiral into wide-ranging complications. It is a difficult concept, and one I am struggling with." he admitted.

"Give me an example?"

Manuel sighed. "Well, let's say that someone I care for is depressed. So I push upon her a good feeling, but that feeling spawns of inadequacy, fear, depression. And I am having a hard time understanding why."

Nathan's eyes narrowed. He could make a pretty good guess at who that someone might be, especially with the feminine pronoun. "Interestingly enough," he said thoughtfully, "I might actually be able to help you here." Funny how these things worked out. He unwound his empathic defense. "Just look, for now," he said, letting Manuel get a good look at the uncertainty and fear and all the other emotions simmering away inside him thanks to his decision to email his father.

Manuel looked, and saw the festering swarm. "Interesting." he said coldly. "You're quite upset."

"I imagine they're interacting in some fairly odd ways, too. The emotions, I mean. That would be because they're tied to all kinds of nasty childhood memories." Nathan tilted his head, his eyes moving away from Manuel as he focused on breathing for a moment. "Triggers don't have to be artificially created things, you realize. They can be entirely natural. What do you think would happen if you took away my uncertainty, but just that?"

Manuel shrugged. "You would be more certain?" he said.

He smoothly recreated the empathic defense on the small scale, walling off a portion of his mind. "Try it," he said very steadily, "and see."

Manuel did as requested, touching off his power to erase just the uncertainty from Nathan's mind. He did a fairly neat job of it, too. That part of his training had progressed considerably since the lessons began. "Done." he said as his eyeglow faded.

And it was gone. All of the uncertainty, the doubt that he was doing the right thing to be getting in touch with Saul, gone in an instant.

But in its place was a sudden, swelling terror. No more doubt, no more reasons not to do it, nowhere to hide from the reasons that he should do it. He'd be a coward if he didn't, a scared little boy... and that sparked off anger, resentment. Why was it down to him to make these decisions? Why did they have to keep coming, why did he have to face down all his fears one by one, with hardly a chance to breathe between them...

Manuel watched the chain with great puzzlement. "It doesn't make any _sense_." he grumbled. "All that anger and terror, there's no call for it!"
Breathing hard, struggling to get himself back under control, even as that walled-off part of him watched coolly, Nathan looked up at Manuel. "Do you want to see?" he asked unevenly. "The emotions don't function by themselves. They're symptom, not cause."

Manuel rolled his eyes. "Not from my point of view." he said dismissively. "They are their own objects, with their own existance."

"I thought you'd at the very least realized by now that your point of view is limited," Nathan grated out. "You can say you consider emotions separate objects, but they're provoked by stimuli, aren't they?"

"Emotions can provoke other emotions." he said after a long pause. "And everyone's point-of-view is limited."

"And you just saw an example of that, didn't you? Fear touching off anger... but that doesn't mean there wasn't a cause for the fear. A cause that came from outside my own head, initially. Refusing to admit that," he growled, "is pointless stubbornness that is not going to help you develop your powers. Willful blindness is stupidity."

"I saw no such thing! When the uncertainty was removed, all these other emotions just appeared from nothing! And that is what does not make sense!" he said stubbornly.

"And I will ask you one more time," Nathan said tightly. "If you want to see what's behind them, I will show you. For the sake of the object lesson." His hands were shaking and he gripped the arms of his chair hard, breathing as deeply as he could. Thinking through the patterns. "Let's do that again, but linked, this time. So you see what I'm thinking, not just what I'm feeling."

"That won't do me any good. I am not a telepath." he said stubbornly. "So what is the point?"

Nathan rose from his chair. "If you don't want to explore what lies beyond the limits of your view, fine. Limit yourself that way. Just ask yourself if you're doing it because you're scared," he said, his tone withering. "If you're hesitating because you don't want any more of your fundamental assumptions challenged. If you're going to be a coward, be a self-aware one at the very least."

Manuel took a deep breath and fought to control himself. It was a close thing, but the control won. For now. "I am not always going to HAVE the services of a telepath when I am faced with these sorts of situations." he said through gritted teeth. "I do not wish to rely on anything save my own perceptions, my own abilities. I should be able to stand on my own two feet. I will NOT be reliant on YOU, the Askani, or _anyone else_, is that _clear_?"

"No, it's not clear," Nathan snapped right back at him, very deliberately. "If you don't want to explore things in controlled circumstances, how are you ever going to make a best guess out there in the world when you find yourself standing on your own? It's called learning, Manuel. You're here for help with it."

Manuel came within a hair's breath of exploding, both physically and psychically, at Nathan. "Make your _fucking_ connection, then." he said, still obviously seething. "If you will insist on persisting with this farce, I want it done quickly."

"Drop your shields," Nathan said coldly, sitting back down. Manuel did, and he established a light, surface link, enough that Manuel would be able to perceive the memories that would almost inevitably float to the surface once they tried this again. "Now. Do it again. Remove the uncertainty."

Manuel spent a long moment clearing his own emotional palette before reaching out to remove the uncertainty again. He did it quickly, and not at all gently. And this time he watched the entire cascade from the telepathic side of things, and not merely the empathic side.

Nathan didn't attempt to moderate or slow down the memories and images that swept through his mind as, once more, he felt himself trapped. He didn't even attempt to resist them.

The picture from the dossier. Maddie's voice, telling him the news. The image of himself sitting in front of the computer, trying to type up the email... all interspersed with flashes of memory, of his father lashing out at him, raining contempt down on his head.

The snow. Lost in the woods, freezing.

The night he'd left. Grabbing the snow shovel, his mother murmuring at him hopelessly to stop...

"So once again, we come back to the familiar refrain. 'Don't make changes, Manuel, until you understand their full ramifications.'" Manuel said in a fairly good impression of Charles's tones. "Which puts me precisely back where we all started."

Nathan, in a flash of real anger that had very little to do with Manuel's reaction, broke the link between them, without much gentleness, and rebuilt his empathic defense. "You're welcome, you impossible little bastard," he growled, forcing his emotions back into their proper patterns. "And yeah, it puts you right back where you started. Having to be more perceptive, more willing to compromise."

Manuel blinked as the link broke. "Do not take that tone with me." he said in a low, dangerous tone. "Block or not I will rip right through your mind and orient you to a far more friendly direction."

"And in the time it takes you to rip through my mind," Nathan said, his voice steel-hard, "and it will take you time, although I wouldn't be surprised if you could break through in the end, what do you think I'll be doing?"

"Would it _kill you_ to see things from my point of view for a fucking change? Put the link back in - I'm of a mind to share." he said savagely. "Put it back!"

"To hell with that," Nathan flared. "Amazing how quickly this turned into a debate again, isn't it?" He stopped, his eyes narrowing. "Share," he said suddenly, very softly. "Using emotions, not thoughts. Show me what you're feeling, and let me see if I can guess what you're thinking."

Manuel smiled dangerously. "With pleasure." he said, then his eyes glowed a hellish red. All of his disappointment - his mounting sense of failure, his confusion and the anger that comes with it. The sick realization that he was going to be a cripple forever, that there was nothing that could be done. Struggling against fatalistic resignation, the struggle coming hard. The temptation to just take what he wanted and let the rest hang. And, under it all, the low burning shame of being a charity case, of having to accept the kindness of others.

Nathan's hands clenched hard enough around the arms of the chair that they cracked alarmingly. For a minute, he wondered dimly if this was too much, if he'd been wrong and couldn't handle this...

But no. He could still think. Could still analyze. He'd always been able to do it under pressure before.

"Lost," he whispered. "Lost in the dark, afraid to trust because people have left you there before. Afraid to trust because you're all you have, in the end, and you know that." He swallowed almost convulsively, squeezing his eyes shut. "Not sure how strong you are. Tired. It's always a fight, and you're wondering if it will ever stop. You're fighting yourself, not just the rest of us. You're afraid of yourself. You want to be strong, you don't want to be used, you want to be proud of yourself..."

Manuel sat back in his chair. "Perhaps." is all that he said. Nathan had the gist of it, if some of the particulars were incorrect.

"Yes, no, or partially?" Nathan challenged him.

"You're a telepath. You can just pull the answer out of my mind." he said nastily. "But in case you're disinclined to do that, your answer is partially."

"So given that I wasn't in contact with your mind," Nathan asked, trying to calm down, "what does that tell you?"

"I don't know that." he pointed out. "It tells me nothing."

"Then look, damn it," Nathan snapped. "You with the natural lie-detecting ability... am I lying to you?" He took a deep, shaky breath. "That said, I have been in contact with your mind before this. Maybe it's easier for you to believe that I'm going based on previous knowledge here, for whatever I did get correct. But if you don't understand the thoughts through the emotions, why would a telepath be able to get it all right trying to do it the other way around?"

"Because you can _read my goddamned mind_." he gritted out. "And you know many tricks from the Askani. You have learned how to hide from me, who's to say you can't lie to me as well?" he shot back. "I'm not a telepath. I can't tell what the fuck people are thinking. It doesn't work like that."

"What would be the point of lying to you, then? What would I gain?" Let's try a different tack, see if this maybe works. "All this was," Nathan said, breathing steadily, "was an attempt to show you that I can make a guess as to what's behind the emotions. Why can't you?"

"You get satisfaction. Pleasure, from putting one over on me. Who knows what else?" he snapped, then shut his mouth while he fought for control. "And I am _not a telepath_. I've been tested for that talent, tested powerfully hard. It _does not work like that_. I proved that to the asylum, how can I prove that to you?"

"You are really starting to piss me off." Nathan leaned back in his chair. "If a headblind person tells another headblind person, 'I'm sad', how do they know why they're sad?"

"They don't." Manuel said.

"Unless," Nathan said, "the person tells them why."

"And not even then. The first person could be lying." he said calmly.

"And as you just pointed out, maybe I could be lying. Maybe I've learned tricks from the Askani and what you think you're seeing in me isn't what you're actually seeing." He shook his head. "It's endless, Manuel. Once you decide not to trust, there's no way someone else can provide you with a reason to."

"I trusted you once." he pointed out. "It ended poorly."

"You never trusted me. Not really. You kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for me to tell you what I wanted in return for those lessons last summer," Nathan said. His mind was settling, if slowly. "I never did."

"If there is anything I have learned in this life, it is that you can never totally let your guard down. If you do, you get tear-gassed by the Federales. Or strapped into a chair and tortured. Or dropped when it becomes inconvenient, or when injury and other dramas throw up roadblocks." he hissed. "So yes, I am looking for what your angle is. What his angle is. Because altrusim is a lie. Everyone wants something, either up at the surface or deep in his heart of hearts."

Nathan was quiet for a moment. "You want someone to look at you and say 'Yes, Manuel, you matter more than anything else. Your needs are the most important thing here.'" He let his breath out on something that wasn't quite a sigh. "You want it because you've never had it."

Manuel blinked at Nathan. "Whatever." he said, stung by the revelation and fighting hard not to admit it.

"And you know," Nathan said slowly. "Because you can feel it, when someone's emotional attention isn't focused solely on you. You always know when they're distracted."

Manuel leaned back in his chair and blinked hard. "So what if I am?"

"If that's what it is," Nathan said, more softly, "I don't blame you, for an instant. And I think I understand a little better now, where you're coming from."

"Well, that just makes it _all better_, now, doesn't it?" he spit. "So you think you understand me. That and a dollar-fifty gets me a cup of cheap coffee."

"I said if," Nathan reminded him, his voice just as calm. "I'm willing to admit that I may be wrong. That telepath or not, I'm not seeing it all. But does that mean I shouldn't act based on what I think I see?"

"So what now? You gonna pat me on the head, tell me that you're gonna make everything better? So that you can fuck me again?" he asked, blinking away the tears that were trying to form.

"In all the time we've known each other," Nathan said quietly, "have I ever, once, led you to believe that I offer easy answers? That I think I can wave a magic wand and fix all the ills of the world... of the people I care about?"

"That's how you feel. That's what you want." he answered back just as quietly.

"Of course that's what I want. To be able to snap my fingers and cure Amanda's addiction and her fears, wipe away Moira's worries about the baby, fix Dom's broken heart... give you the peace and the strength you're looking for." Nathan swallowed, past the lump in his throat. "But I know I can't," he said, almost inaudibly. "As much as I want to. I can only do what I can do."

"You're right. You can't. You can't, I can't, fucking Charles Xavier can't, NO ONE CAN!" he said, finally giving a voice to his frustrations. "And I sit here, trying to hang on, to play the game by the rules laid out for me, and then I realize something. I can't. I just can't. I can't meet the requirements."

"Of course you can't." Nathan tilted his head a little, regarding Manuel steadily. "None of us can, not completely. Ever. There are things we can't ever forget, scars that won't ever fade. Pain that won't ever quite go away." He took a deep, cleansing breath. "That doesn't mean we stop trying. It doesn't mean we never win. Just that we don't always win. But what's the alternative, Manuel? Stop fighting? Stop trying to be better?"

"I don't know what the alternatives are. No matter how you slice it, they're uniformly pretty shitty." he said shakily. "But hey, what I feel doesn't mean shit in this equation. So tell me what the next step is."

"Steps," Nathan said suddenly, a thought hitting him. "One of the things my therapist is always telling me is to break things down into small, more manageable steps." His eyes narrowed a bit. "Is this making any sense?"

"Does it matter?" he shot back. "Just tell me what the next step is, and I'll see if I can do it." he said. "These sessions are required. If you wanted me to stand on my head and sing the Marsailles, I'd have to learn French first, but I'd do it."

"Oh, no," Nathan said warningly, "we're not going there again. If you don't want these sessions," he said flatly, "we'll stop them. I am not twisting your arm into being here."

"That is correct. You are not." he said with a shrug.

"And you are not taking enough responsibility for being here," Nathan shot back. "When did I say, when I told you about this, that I would be giving you the answers? I said I was here for you to practice your projection on."

"Fine, then. What do you think we should work on next, then? More fine-tuning of my targeting?" he said, leaning back in his chair and sipping at his now-cold coffee. Making a face, he dropped the cup into the trash. "Because the emotional chains thing is just Not Happening the way you want me to train it."

"Train it?" Nathan leaned back in his chair, eyebrows heading for his hairline. "I was giving you an example of it to examine, Manuel. When was I telling you what to do about it? That would be Charles' place," he said, "you know, the man who's actually teaching you theory?"

Manuel sighed. "Fine, then. Show me this fucking chain thing again, and I'll see if I can puzzle it out."

"With or without the telepathic link?" He might be able to recuperate more easily than the headblind from empathic manipulation, but he was definitely starting to feel it at this point.

"Without." he said firmly. "Like I said, when I'm out on my own I won't have a telepath to link me in. I have to learn how to do it myself."

Nathan took a slightly shaky breath and cleared his mind as much as possible. It was a bit more of a struggle to rebuild the small-scale defense than it should have been, but he stabilized it. "All right. Ready."

Manuel took a deep breath as well. "Go." he said, and then started the exercise again. And, as before, the removal of one emotion spawned two or three more, all of them detrimental, and all of them from nowhere. "This is frustrating." he admitted when it was all done. "I remove the feeling, the thought-structure changes, which spawns all sorts of new emotions that I really don't want to be there. Hrm. I wonder..." he said as he thought. "Reset it and do it again. I want to try something."

"Right. One sec," Nathan said unevenly. He closed his eyes, concentrating on the patterns for a moment. "Feel free to muse aloud if you're trying to figure something out. I may not be teaching you theory but I do have experts on psionic theory in my mind, remember. They might have helpful things to add."

Manuel scowled at that idea. "OK. I wipe the feeling, which changes the thought-structure, which spawns new, unwanted feelings. So my thought is that I'm going to wipe the feeling, and then I'm going to shitcan the stuff that spawns off it as soon as I can sense it. See where that goes."

Oh, yeah. This is turning into such a blast. "Ready," Nathan said, keeping his eyes closed. The uncertainty went, triggering the rest of the emotional chain-reaction... and then that was gone, too.

And the patterns in his mind fractured abruptly, trying to reorient around the sudden void. Nathan found himself sliding from his chair and to the floor, struggling for composure, feeling the resistance within his mind surge erratically.

Manuel killed his modifications as soon as he saw Nathan slump. "OK, I'm guessing that didn't work well." he said with a growl of frustration. "Why not? It should have!"

"Think... for a minute," Nathan forced the words out, breathing hard. "Told you, part of the reason I could do this... the patterns are stronger." They were reforming again, even as he spoke. "Doesn't mean the patterns aren't there in normal minds. Doesn't mean that you don't break them, when you do things like that..."

Manuel got up and walked over to the blackboard. "OK, here's how I see things." he said, and then started sketching. "Here's the initial emotion. Now here's all the telepathic crap surrounding it. All that crap spawns these threads here." he said, sketching quickly. "But if I kill the spawned threads here and here, you collapse. I don't get it."

Nathan pushed himself upright, getting back up and into the chair. "It's an interactive system," he said tiredly. "You call it telepathic crap, but it's as much a part of the mind as the emotions are."

"Yeah, it's crap because I can't touch it. I've told you this. I've been tortured for it before, I suppose you want to try it again?" he asked tiredly.

Nathan stopped, swallowing, trying to concentrate. "No one's telling you that you need to be able to touch it," he said heavily. "But you do have to recognize that if you manipulate emotions it touches on the stuff that you can't influence. And maybe, just maybe, that people aren't doing that to be irritating."

"But you are." he said. "You are telling me that I need to touch it. Demonstrating that quite nicely with your little slumping trick. All of this _CRAP_ is outside of my control! I can't see it, I can't affect it, it is a mystery to me. All I can do is affect _this stuff_." he said, emphasizing his point on the blackboard with some scribbled circles.

"Think of it this way," Nathan said, squeezing his eyes shut. "It's a question of shifting balance. Yes, if you pull on an emotional string, other things you can't affect will topple. But if you understand why they topple, maybe you can pull on a string in a way that will have the other things toppling the way you want them to."

Manuel looked at Nathan as if he had suddenly started doing the hula while reciting Roman love-poetry backwards. "I am open to suggestions..." he said tenatively.

"Maybe, start with simpler emotions? Things that you can intellectualize a cause for, rather than the mess in my head right now. Things where the connections are easy to see, rather than completely mysterious."

"I'm still open to suggestions - because I have no idea." he said with a shrug. "Maybe I'm just not getting it. I don't intellectualize about emotions. They're _emotions_. You feel them, you don't think them. If I thought them, I'd be a telepath."

Back to this again. "Why do people enjoy food?" Nathan asked, taking a completely sideways approach.

"Because it tastes good?" Manuel said. "Where are you going with this, Nathan?"

"Is that the only reason?"

"Who the hell knows?" he said with disgust. "I've never bothered to look at people enjoying a good meal. They enjoy it because they do."

Nathan took a deep breath. "You're hungry. You eat because you're hungry. You feel satisfied. If the food's particularly good, you feel not just satisfaction but appreciation."

"Biological changes. Also outside my bailwick. Although - I wonder if I could make shit taste good. Want to test this theory?" he asked with a wolfish grin.

"Stop it," Nathan said irritably. "Listen to me. What did I just sketch out for you?"

"A biological stimulus-response chain. So what?" retorted Manuel.

"Is it solely biological? Or are biological stimuli producing an emotional reaction... what's biological about expressing an appreciation for the work for the chef, feeling admiration for their skill?"

"Reward mechanisms are ingrained fairly deeply into the human animal." he said, going a little bit slack as a memory rocked him.

"What?" Nathan asked.

Manuel's ashen look deepened, and now he looked haunted. "Reward mechanisms. Deep structures. Go in deep, stimulate the deep systems. Chart the progress. Do it again." he said robotically.

"And what," Nathan said very steadily, knowing this was cold, "does this previous experience tell you about emotional chains?"

Manuel looked almost like a corpse. "Life and death. Deep structures. Will to live. Can he affect it? Can he make someone want to die? Have to find out. Go in deep. Bypass the conscious, go past the unconscious. Find the primals. Touch them."


Nathan pulled himself up out of the chair and came over to where Manuel was standing. He took a deep breath, then laid a hand on Manuel's shoulder and reached out with his mind at the same moment. Shift the pattern, get him out of the memory.

#Manuel, come back here. Remember where you are.#

Manuel looked at Nathan, and his eyes were glowing red. ~I'm sorry. I'm sorry I had to kill you. They made me do it! They made me kill your will to live, and keep it beat down! You were such a bright light...~ he said in Castillian Spanish robotically.

#Remember where you are,# Nathan said and overlaid the images in Manuel's mind with others, the antithesis of what he was reliving. His friends here at the mansion, soothing vistas that bore a very strong resemblance to his Castilian home.

Manuel finally fought his way out of the memory-loop, but not without a worrisome skip in his heartbeat. Gasping, he very nearly collapsed out of his chair. ~What happened?~ he said, too tired to remember to speak in English for Nathan's benefit.

Nathan was feeling more than a little wrung out himself. He went over and sat down again before he answered, more to buy himself a moment than anything else. "You had a flashback," he said. "I think there's a problem here we didn't realize."

"And what would that be?" he asked, pulling himself together enough to speak English.

"You know how some of these emotional chains work," Nathan said with a sigh. "But it's knowledge you don't want to have."
"What?" Manuel asked, clearly confused. Pulling himself together and wiping at the layer of sweat on his forehead with his free hand, he stood up slowly. "Is it hot in here or is it just me?"

Over on the side table, the pitcher of water floated up into the air, pouring some of its contents into a glass, which came gliding over to Manuel. "From the asylum," Nathan murmured.

"What about it?" he asked, draining his glass of water in a single swallow. He then walked unsteadily over to the pitcher, and drained it down to the dregs. "I don't remember."

Nathan closed his eyes. "You understand how some very damaging emotional chain reactions function," he said, almost as robotically as Manuel had spoken earlier. "You've blocked the knowledge, and I don't blame you. But that might be why you're having such trouble mastering it now. Your mind is not wanting to go there again."

Manuel shrugged. "Maybe. I dont know. Is that what we were working on when I ... had my little fit?" he asked tenatively.

"Yes. Something I said... brought it back to mind for you, and triggered the flashback." It was a wrenching thought, more than he'd thought it would be, and put the lie to his claim that he could be dispassionate about this.

Manuel shrugged. "Oh. If you don't mind, I think we've done enough for one day, don't you?"

Let him retreat, Nathan thought. He couldn't push too hard, not after this. And he thought that some headway had been made in any case, even with the flashback. "Same time on Thursday?" he asked quietly.

"Sure." Manuel said quietly. "I really don't feel well. I think I'm going to go lie down for a bit. If I don't show up for dinner, send Amanda up to get me, OK?"

Nathan nodded. "Will do," he said. "And Manuel?" he said as the young man got up. "Small steps."

Manuel walked over to the chalkboard and doodled a picture on it before leaving the lecture hall.

On the chalkboard, next to his diagram of the mental chain process, was the Greek letter psi.