Nathan and Askani, Nathan and Alison, Friday morning

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

Frustration over the state of his memories finally gets to Nathan, and he decides to try something new to try and break through the blocks. We finally find out just what Askani thinks about the whole situation.


He really ought to have picked somewhere a little bit more private for this, Nathan thought, settling into a crosslegged position on the sunroom floor. The suite, maybe, since Moira was down in the lab... but he'd been drawn to the sunroom for some obscure reason. Maybe simply because it was the antithesis of the memories he was intending to explore. Sunlight and warmth to counteract the cold and dark, just in case.

Askani was hissing at the back of his mind. Disapprovingly, he thought, although when he'd asked her to elaborate on why she seemed to think this was a bad idea she hadn't come up with any concrete reasons. He got the very distinct impression that she was confused these days, not sure what to make of Saul and what he'd had to say. Which was a very good point, since if everything Saul said was true, it made their connection across the centuries... not make a whole lot of sense anymore.

But he wasn't going there today. That was a problem he would tackle later.

Right now, he had some holes to start filling.

Closing his eyes, Nathan shut out Askani's grumbling and started to trace one of the more complex meditative patterns in his mind, over and over again. If he deepened the pattern, made it more three-dimensional, he could use it to travel through his memories, revisiting those twelve years in an attempt to connect the pieces.

It wasn't working. The realization formed slowly, as the minutes passed and his mind kept skipping over the gaps, the pattern stuttering. Fuck... He surfaced slowly, aggravated and perplexed. Why hadn't that worked? That should have at least triggered a few connections between details, giving him a few more threads to work with than he had now. What the hell good was the photographic memory if it wouldn't even work with what was there?

Nathan's shoulders slumped as he fought off a sudden wave of depression. What was he supposed to do, damn it? However much outside confirmation he got of what Saul had said, it would never fill the gaps inside his head. Intellectual acceptance was all well and good, but he needed to believe. He needed to be sure.

#You need to stop wanting to shape your reality to his!# Askani burst out suddenly, sounding infuriated.

#Leave me alone,# Nathan snapped right back. #This isn't your business.#

#The flonq it isn't. He has you completely turned around!# The firebird shifted restlessly at the back of his mind. #He's making you doubt yourself.#

#And there's no room there for doubt?# Nathan challenged her. There was no reply, and he gave a bitter mental laugh. #I'm not arguing about this right now,# he shot back, fighting irritation. #I'm getting enough caution and suspicion from everyone else, I don't need to deal with it from you.#

#That,# Askani said icily, #is unfair.#

#True, though.# And between the doubt he was feeling, and what well-meaning others were instilling in him, he was going to start forgetting what was up and what was down.

To hell with it. Nathan formed a knife-like mental probe, the sort that was meant to slice through a shield, and turned it inward. Let's see just how sturdy those blocks are...

The pain was instant, almost overwhelming. A scream tried to tear its way free from his throat, but he was being sucked down into the cold, into the dark. The sunroom vanished around him, winking out to be replaced by the Alaskan woods.

But only pieces. There were great, dark voids all around him, pulling at him, and Nathan stumbled, falling to his hands and knees in the snow.

The hands he stared down at were small. Child's hands. His, but not his. Nathan blinked, trying to focus, but things were blurring, awareness of where he was fading into dull, agonized panic.

He was in the woods. Of course he was in the woods, in the end he always was. But there was something wrong... holes? Why were there holes in the world?


Alison chooses a very good - or a very bad - morning to go sit in the sunroom. (It depends on your perspective.) Nathan is in serious trouble and pulls her down into the mess. But something new does surface.


The room was dead silent, save for his labored breathing. Wind. There should be wind, screaming through the trees that likewise weren't there. The air was cool, but not cold enough. His hands clenched and unclenched, and he stared blankly at the far wall, trembling. Where was he? Where? He couldn't see the way home, couldn't find the path. Too much snow.

Pausing a few steps into the room, Alison stared for a moment, confused. This was the sunroom. Sunrooms weren't supposed to be chilly, most certainly not in the summer. She would have turned to check on the thermostat, only something drew her attention - setting the glass with the jangling ice cubes down, she listened. And then took four long strides forward, enough so that the man seated on the floor by one of the couches came into sight.

He did not look like a happy man, at that.

"Na-" she stopped in mid word, biting down on the rest, and walked a bit closer instead, recognizing what he was doing and reluctant to break his concentration so suddenly.

Couldn't find it. Couldn't find the way home. Everywhere he looked, the woods just ended, turned into a blank void, and his breath came faster, labored gasps. "I want to remember." The voice was choked-sounding, impossibly distant. "I want to remember, why can't I... give it back..."

The chill was there again, ebbing and flowing - and it wasn't the room at all, Alison realized, one hand resting on her arm briefly just to make sure. Her skin was still warm, as it had been before. "Nathan," she murmured, ready to duck if he came out badly of whatever trance he was in. "Nathan!"

"I'll find it." His voice cracked. "I'll find it, don't... I don't want to go." Running down the highway, towards the lights of a truck. "I don't... don't want to go to the desert..." But he had, hadn't he? His grip on the highway and the Alaska forest started to fray. "No..." It was almost a moan. "No, I have to find it..."

One hand reaching out she laid it lightly on his forearm, planning on calling out his name one final time and then somehow getting Charles involved as directly as possible because frankly, this was scary. And Nathan was oozing cold at her and it reminded her of... her eyes widening, the sound of howling wind echoing in her mind, and she closed her hand on his arm suddenly, as much to dispel the sensation as to keep from overbalancing over.

"Don't make me go... I don't want to go..." Then someone was touching his arm and he grabbed at them desperately, not with his hands but his mind, trying to hold on. They would show him, they would show him the way back home and he'd see.

He'd see what was real.

The tipping over was mental this time, Alison slipping from one reality to the other in a heartbeat - the brief sensation that someone's attention had been drawn to things flickering out of her awareness the instant the cold hit in all it's chilly glory.

She remembered this place only too well. Looking about wildly, Alison tried to find the little boy once more, wondering what in the world had happened to cause this. Realization hit the second afterwards, and it was all she could do to keep from speaking the man's name out loud.

"It stops." The voice was young and tired and scared, and seemed to come from all around her. "Why does the world stop? I don't want to fall off the edge..."

"Nathan?" That was the little boy's voice, the sound still seared into her memory from the only other time she'd heard it. "I need your help. Please? Help me find you? I can't do it alone." She lit up, reflex, despite knowing this was Nathan's mindscape and not reality - though elsewhere, light started to gently spark into being as well.

"I can't get across. I can't get back home." The light illuminated a small form huddled in the snow, farther back in the trees. Nathan's younger self was crouched right on the edge of a vast, empty blackness, staring out into it with tears freezing on his cheeks.

Scrambling through the snow, Alison made it to the boy's side, reaching out to gently pinch the back of his shirt. Reflex, the memory of a small green boy being flung over the edge of a mall's second floor blossoming unbidden into her mind. "Maybe there's another way?" she asked, reaching out with her other hand, making sure there were no broken bones this time before gently drawing him nearer to herself.

"I can't put it back together." His voice was shaking. "I lost the pieces. Or they took them away. Maybe I lost it all and what's left isn't real. I tried to fill in the gaps and it's all wrong." The switch between possibility and certainty, back and forth as if he couldn't settle on any single explanation, was all too obvious. "It's my fault." That, at least, sounded more sure. "I'm weak and it's my fault. He says it isn't but it is. He'll change his mind. I don't want to be weak."

It was, eerily so, like being right back to the first time she'd been "here". And the mere thought of Nathan returning to that point nearly made her scream in frustration on the spot. "Would you believe me if I said it wasn't your fault? That you're not weak?" Looking up through the storm, an idea settled in. A way to use the environment they were in, somehow perhaps shift things about a bit. And this - was a return, of sorts to what she'd done before with her power anyway.

And if she could do a light show to make people scream themselves hoarse, late into the night... surely she might be able to reproduce an aurora borealis. Here, at least, she just might be able to do that.

It's all in the mind. And with that, she set to work, bringing light slowly into shifting, shimmering existence.

There were lights in the sky. The young Nathan looked up, something other than weariness and dull pain and fear finally taking shape on his features. "I remember these," he said very quietly, and something else formed in the blackness in front of them, like a reflection in the mirror.

The cabin, and the boy Nathan had been were there, too. Sitting out on the steps, but wrapped in a blanket, and the woman who had one arm around his shoulder, holding him close, was slender and dark-haired, no more than twenty or twenty-one.

Curtains of light were shimmering across the dark sky in a slow dance, blue and violet in the foreground, a sheet of green following in harmony far above it all. It framed the image floating before them, Alison reflectively holding onto the boy now staring up with a quieter expression, though she had no blanket to offer him. Light would do, as it had the previous time, though she was careful to keep it as low as possible. "Who..." She knew, who that was. The eyes were the same, she realised - and asked the question anyway. "Who is that?"

"My mother."

The younger woman looked down at Alison, her expression calm but tired, her eyes strangely intent. She adjusted the blanket around the boy she held, the gesture almost protective.

"I remember..." Nathan trailed off. "I think?"

How long will they last? his voice whispered in Alison's mind.

As long as they do, a different voice, a low, soft female voice said. We can stay and watch until then. Are you cold?

No.

Not saying a word, hardly daring to breathe, Alison kept still. The storm seemed to be more distant somehow, though she knew getting Nathan to focus on now again was imperative, to say the least.

They were in the sun room. Perhaps... perhaps if she segued both environments somehow, the dreamscape and reality, it might make it easier for Nathan to snap out of this.

The aurora borealis started to shift a bit, brightening slowly. The scenery shifted gently, night turning into day, cold into something akin to heat. As long as it was light related, she should be able to do something. Or so she told herself. This was, to say the least, unnerving.

The forest shimmered and then fractured, breaking apart into pieces that spun off into the void. For a moment other images fluttered in the blackness - a long, empty road, a boy standing beside a lake, snow driving against a window...

And then Nathan, in the sunroom, slumped sideways, trembling violently and trying to catch his breath.

The motion unbalanced Alison as well and she slapped one hand down on the floor beside him, to keep from falling on her face. Shivering, she opened her eyes wide - into the real world, the sun flooding the room, miniscule dust motes floating in the air. "Nathan?" Thumbing her comm, she sent out a signal to the medlab. "You have got to stop doing this," she murmured, moving to rest one hand on his shoulder, not sure she trusted her own legs to support her should she try anything more.

The cool, hard surface beneath the side of his face was the hardwood floor of the sunroom, part of Nathan's mind registered, but he was still shaking, waves of arctic cold sweeping over him, almost in time with his racing pulse. The link was still firmly shielded - that, he'd made sure of before starting this - but his shields were fluttering like curtains in the breeze and he couldn't seem to focus.

The cold came and went irregularly, Alison lighting up and radiating heat in return from pure reflex. Nathan's expression was vague and unfocused, a lost look in his eyes which did nothing to reassure her. "Nathan. You're in the mansion. I'm right here. Focus on my voice, okay?"

He could hear Alison's voice, in the distance. The wind was louder. Nathan's eyes tried to flutter closed, but there was another presence there suddenly, clear and calm and reassuring. He couldn't seem to muster a response, but one didn't seem to be required; there were other shields folding themselves gently around his mind suddenly, and he made a noise that was half-sigh of relief, half-moan. The trembling in his muscles slowly eased.

The cold ceased and the warmth of the room took over as the shifts in perception ended instantly. "It'll be okay." She'd yell at him later for scaring her silly like that, she decided, a trembling hand patting his shoulder gently. "Someone will be here any second. Everything will be fine."