xp_logs | Nathan and Manuel, Tuesday morning

Manuel arrives for his lesson. Nathan is waiting, and not feeling much more kindly towards Manuel than he was the previous night. Lusanya does put in an appearance, if looking rather most ghostlike than usual, and the whole conversation does not end at all well.

Nathan was already seated in the tutorial room, sipping calmly at a coffee when Manuel appeared. It could have been any other morning, any other lesson. Except for the fact that Nathan's psimitar was leaning against the wall beside his chair.

Manuel didn't walk in so much as stagger in. He looked like death warmed over - haggard skin, bags under his eyes, and his omnipresent sunglasses. He took one look at the psimitar and then laughed. "Feeling a little insecure, are we?" he said roughly, dropping into a chair.

"Call it bringing a gun to a knife fight," Nathan's voice was quiet, but icy, the look in his eyes absolutely controlled, save for a touch of contempt. "So, did you enjoy yourself last night? Nothing like a fun evening out to reward behaviour that should have had you back in the Box."

"No Box anymore." he said with a twitch of his lips that might charitably be called a smile. "And better some random club-goers than, say, somebody I might actually have to be concerned about."

"In an inhibitor, then," Nathan said just as coldly. "Where those who can't be trusted to control themselves belong."

"You control yourself your way, I'll do it mine. But don't try to sell me the same old bill of sale that you've been selling." he said with disgust. "I'm just willing to give to you what you gave to me. What everyone gave to me."

"You misunderstand," Nathan said, almost conversationally. "Setting aside the near-criminal behavior with Ms. Braddock - " He had promised Betsy he wouldn't pursue it, after all. "- there's a simple truth you're missing. When I tell you that you will control yourself around my wife and child, your willingness one way or the other is irrelevant. You will, and it's as simple as that. Your hurt feelings, your sensation of being ill-used by the world... none of it matters in that context. And if you haven't yet developed a marginal grasp on the concept of human decency, I'll just have to pity you and enforce what will be."

"So much for your vaunted ideals, your precious ethics." he muttered. "When the chips are down, it's always "I'll make you"." he said bitterly. "You want me to behave, to keep myself to myself? Fine. I want to talk to Lusanya. Now."

"No."

"No?" he echoed back. "That is unfortunate. It's a simple request."

"She doesn't want to talk to you. She's here, intact," he thought to reassure Manuel, "but unfortunately, she happened to resurface about the same time as I was reading those comments to my post last night."

Manuel shook his head. "Not good enough." he said. "Show me. Let her tell it from her own lips."

Nathan leaned forward a little, setting his coffee down. "Why should I?" he asked very quietly. "Bringing it back to the terms you understand, you have nothing I want. In fact, you're implicitly threatening one of the two people I hold most dear in this world." He leaned back. "I'm not even sure these lessons are going to continue, Manuel. Do you not get it? I had quite seriously started to think enough of your progress recently that I was doing this fairly cheerfully, not just willingly. I thought we were accomplishing something here."

"All I want from you is to talk to Lusanya. Alone. I need her help with something." he admitted. "Not like it means a fuck to you anyway."

Nathan sat up straight, his eyes boring coldly into Manuel's. "Why should it?" he asked deliberately. "What have you ever done for me that I should care what you need?"

"You've made it plain to me that you don't give one tenth of a shit about anything I may or may not have to offer." he said bitterly. "You like having me under your thumb, obedient to your commands. So offer me some. What do you want from me in order to talk to her?" he said with disgust.

"Have we backslid to the days when you couldn't keep a thought in your head for more than a minute at a time?" Nathan asked frostily. "What do you think I want, Manuel?"

"What you want I can't give you without talking to Lusanya!" he said, wincing as his hangover ripped his head apart inside. "I got a lot of shit hitting me all at once. With that psycho bitch Elisabeth parading around now, and Lucy being here or gone at your whim, and nobody knows fuck-all about the deeper parts of my power but her, and I am just FUCKING TIRED OF TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT BY MYSELF!" he screamed. "SO LET ME TALK TO HER AND GET SOME FUCKING HELP!"

My whim. Commenting on that would have no point. "Control yourself," he said coldly. "Now."

Manuel's nostrils flared, but he managed to sit quietly and not moan as his hangover devoured his eternal soul for the Lord of R'y'leh and then came back for more. "Fine."

It was a token gesture. Proof enough that Manuel could control himself, though, which would have been enough to make Nathan angry if he hadn't had his emotions knotted so tightly into the defensive pattern. Nathan tilted his head, turning his attention inward to the murmuring voices.

"If you're sharp with her, this is the last time you'll see her," Nathan said, quietly but warningly. "Her father is gone. She's upset." Finding Galin among the... missing? Was that even the word? once the Askani had settled had been a shock.

"If this is the last time I see her..." he said, and then bit off both his words and his thoughts. "Bring her out."

Nathan stared steadily at him. "No orders," he said. "She's coming because she wants to, and because I'm letting her. This doesn't happen until you acknowledge that. Without screaming like a five year-old."

"No. It's time for you to understand something. I need her. I need the knowledge she has, the friendship we've shown towards each other. I need her a helluva lot more than I need you. So if you take her away from me, you lose any leverage you might have ever thought about having on me and mine." he spit out. "Keep that in mind."

"You shame me."

The voice was soft, tired. It came from the window, where a faint figure was outlined in light, staring out at the grounds.

"Is this what you do," Lusanya went on very softly, "with everything I have tried to teach you? With all the kindness I have tried to show you?"

"It's not like that!" Manuel said, slumping in his chair. "I'm overwhelmed. I'm having a hard time dealing, and the stuff you showed me isn't working anymore. None of my usual escapes are working anymore." he said with a fine disregard for Nathan's presence. "And every time I see that _bitch_ I want to go rip her head off! I can't calm myself down, I can't accept her for who she says she is now. I look at her, and I see the Other. The one I told you about, the one I let you see."

"What 'stuff' is this that no longer works?" Lusanya asked, almost tonelessly. The sunlight shifted through her, and she didn't turn to face Manuel.

"I meditate. I try to put my mind somewhere else, to remember the things that please me. I build my walls up as high as I can go. I play music, I try to paint, I go bother Amanda. It's not _working_ anymore!"

"What?" Lusanya finally turned, her face barely able to be distinguished from the light. "What is not working?"

"All of it!" he said urgently. "I can feel all the control I've worked to build slipping away. And then asshole here starts throwing around demands about how we treat his family with kid fucking gloves while I'm over here danging over the Abyss without so much as a by-your-leave!"

"Lusanya," Nathan said simply.

Her eyes flickered to him, and then back to Manuel. "It is," she said very quietly, "a lack of will. An inability to release emotional connections. You are sabotaging yourself."

"It would be so easy to just - let go. Dance in the river again, feel everything down to my very bones. That's the thing about control - it's cold. Lonely. Isolating. And now you're telling me that I don't _want it badly enough_?" he said to Lusanya, his voice breaking just a little. "How can you say that, when you know what I've done, how hard I've worked!"

"You are holding too tightly to what can only damage you," she said. "There are other forms of release than surrender to the river, Manuel. You love your pain too much." She bowed her head, turning back towards the window. "Pain does not nourish life."

"Pain does not nourish life?" he said incredulously. "Pain is _all that kept me alive_ for _years_! Pain is how I knew I _was_ alive!"

"And pain is what will prevent you from truly living. From being happy. How can you live your life when you cherish each wound, each scar, and choose to relieve the pain of them whenever possible?" Lusanya shook her head slowly. "Bitterness and joy do not cooexist. A sense of entitlement will never be fulfilled. I had hoped you had begun to learn this."

"Men like me aren't meant to be happy." he said sullenly. "Perhaps my father was right about that."

Lusanya turned, fixing him with piercing blue eyes. "Do you want him to be right?"

Manuel wilted under the gaze of those blue eyes. "I don't know." he said. "Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. I'm not good with joy. Happiness is no friend of mine. And why is it that everyone _else_..." he started to say, and then bit it off. "Never mind, I know the answer to that one. Part of our curse, our burden to bear alone."

"No." Lusanya shook her head. "A choice. Always and only a choice." She came over, crouching beside the chair, a little more solid now that she moved away from the light. "What are you going to do when I'm gone?" she asked softly, looking up at him.

"You can't leave me!" he said, clutching at the phantasy that was Lusanya. "There's so much I have to learn yet, so much more you can teach me!"

"I'm a memory, Manuel," she said very softly. "And I'm fading."

Manuel shook his head in denial. "No. You can't fade, not now! Nathan, you hang onto her! Hang on with everything you have!"

"It is not Nathan who is unable to hang on."

It was a different female voice, coming from the window where Lusanya had been. Askani stood there, far more solid than Lusanya was, regarding Manuel calmly.

Manuel looked at Askani. "You can't hang on?" he said incredulously. "Why? Do you hate me that much?"

"If I could," she said, "I would transfer her memories to your mind, imprint them on your thoughts so that she was with you always."

"Sounds good. I'm willing, and I've got more than enough power. Do it. Now."

"I," Lusanya said quietly, "am not."

"You're not? Why?" he asked Lusanya, sounding almost betrayed by this. "You could live on forever, and together we could turn me into the person you always knew I could be!"

"I am dead, Manuel. I have always questioned this... afterlife, of mine, and now that I am beginning to understand it, I find myself reconciled to the end as it approaches." Lusanya smiled at him, gently if sadly. "There is more that I can teach you. The end is not here yet. But turning yourself into the person I hoped you could be? That is a job for you alone. In the end, all of the choices are yours, and I cannot help you make them."

Manuel shook his head. "I need you!" he exclaimed. "Your knowledge, your _friendship_. You've never let me down, even after I've bitterly disappointed you. If you were real, I'd make you the first Mrs de Guzeman! Please, I am begging you, do not leave me like this." he said, dropping to his knees.

"I am as real as you believe I am," Lusanya said. "I am as real as you remember me to be, whether I am here or not." She tilted her head, gazing at him. "There is still time," she said somewhat enigmatically. "I am not leaving yet."

Manuel sighed, and stood back up slowly. "It isn't the same, and you know it. Still, you're here now, so let's make it count. Do you have any thoughts for things I can try?"

"Stop hating," Lusanya said.

"It's not that simple!" he protested. "My power doesn't work on me. I can't help it!"

"Choose. Choose to stop hating. Choose to let go." Lusanya rose. "Not just with her," she said steadily. "With the world. Stop hating, or none of it will ever work. You will only twist yourself further until there is no redemption, no salvation."

Manuel sighed. "I'm trying." he said quietly, and then looked at Nathan. "Oh, shut up, you. I am!"

Askani vanished in a flash, and Nathan stared at Manuel. "She can come to talk to you whenever she wants, as per usual," he said curtly, nodding at Lusanya. "No more lessons from me, though. If there's no value to them, as you said, I don't see the point in wasting the time. And I'm not kindly enough inclined to you, after this bullshit, to take the chance that you're just being an asshole."

"Fuck you too, sweetheart." he shot back, and then only after that second remembered how useful it was to be able to practice on an actual mind. He'd leaned more from those lessons than he had in the previous twenty of pure theory. Ah well, he'd have to make do with what he had.

Nathan noted the shift in Manuel's expression, and shook his head, reaching out for his psimitar. "All you need to tell me to change that is that they're doing something for you and you want them," he said pointedly, rising. "Keep that in mind. The ball, as usual, is entirely in your court."

"Like it matters to you." he grumbled. "I can't tell you how much I _love_ being yanked around at the end of your chain. Fills me with a big ol' happy to know that even now, when I'm supposedly safe and protected that the same shit is going on that's been going on for years."

"Well, guess what, ace," Nathan said, a touch of sarcasm in his still-cool voice. "I nearly killed myself trying to help you once, and I'm not doing it again. Not when you can't stow the pride for the moment it would take to be honest, and certainly not when you can't be bothered to respect the welfare of my unborn child."

"You can't handle honest." he said bitterly. "You wouldn't like honest. You don't want honest. Christ, I should just give you the drugs now, make it _just_ like old times. Did I ever tell you that you remind me of him? He used to jerk me around like you do."

"Reality check," Nathan said, ignoring Lusanya's silent, imploring look. "You are not the only one in this house carrying around more than his fair share of trauma. Up until this week, I thought you were doing a damned good job of digging yourself out from under. But now it's back to the same old patterns, and after a while, trauma ceases to be an excuse." He shook his head. "Grow up," he said coldly. "Find a spine that doesn't involve trampling on the people around you. Be a man. Etcetera. I'm getting tired of you."

Manuel stood up, drawing his dignity around him like a cloak. Without a word, he turned on his heel and walked away, chin up.