xp_logs | LOG: Haroun and Nathan

x-jetstream.livejournal.com posting in

Set between This and This letter being left. Haroun goes to Nathan for some perspective on his situation, and gets some advice he doesn't want to hear.

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Haroun sank back into the overstuffed chair with a sigh of sheer pleasure. His back was screaming at him again, and he just didn't have the strength to tell it to fuck off properly. But Forge's words kept coming back to him - how it wasn't the machine that was broken, it was the man. That all his problems were in essence his own doing. The machine was working perfectly. He didn't want to bother Alison with his dark thoughts - she was off mothering Miles somewhere - so he was putting in a rare public appearance in one of the lounges.

Last batch of essays. Nathan adjusted the pile under his arm, reflecting at how little it seemed to mean. He would have expected regret... or relief, but his decision not to teach classes next term had just felt more and more right. His gaze distant, he walked past the open door of the lounge, not registering Haroun sitting inside.

"Nate!" Haroun called out as his friend passed, apparently lost in thought. Besides, how often did he get the chance to ambush a telepath? "Got a few?"

Nathan hesitated, coming back to the door and eyeing Haroun coolly. "Depends on if you're going to tell me that my genome has given me a privileged life again."

Haroun shook his head. "Nope. Got that out of my system - I generally only go there when I'm blindingly exhausted. The filter between mouth and brain gets real damned porous at times like that, so I'm sorry if I unduly pissed you off." he said. "I ... I just wanted to talk." he admitted.

Nathan stared at him for a moment, then came in, sitting down in the chair across from his and setting the pile of papers down on the coffee table. "Well, the only thing I'd be doing in my suite will be marking."

"Alison's with Miles." he confirmed. "I had Forge check out the MMI and the 'ware for me." he said in a low voice. "Thought maybe the problem was with the machine - something was malfunctioning. And other than the MMI learning faster than I do it checked out five-by-five. Which means that all my problems - the back spasms, the pain, the nightmares, being offline - they're my doing. Physically, there's nothing wrong with me."

The look he got in return was definitely lacking in surprise. "I suspected as much," Nathan said. "You'd be prone to that sort of thing, after what you've been through."

Haroun sighed. He had the sneaking suspicion that _everyone_ knew where the real problem was but him. "I got a huge favor to ask of you, Nate. I can't really pay you back for it, but I have to ask anyway. Can you ... fix it for me? Just reach in and do what you need to do so that I can be whole?"

"Can't be done," Nathan said, his voice flat. "I doubt even Charles could do it. I know I sure as hell couldn't, and I'd probably damage your mind trying. There's a reason you're offline, Haroun, a reason you're having the reactions that you are, and trying to obliterate the symptoms isn't going to address the root of the problem."

Haroun sighed. He was afraid that that was going to be the answer. "Shit." he said, holding his head in his hands.

"You knew that," Nathan said with a sigh. "You just were holding out hope for the easy way."

"Hope springs eternal." he shot back, and then sighed. "It's very difficult for a man like me to admit that all of this is just in my head."

"You realize that comes with a corollary," Nathan pointed out. "If it's in your head, it can be solved."

Haroun rolled his eyes. "So people keep telling me. But it's not that simple, telepath." he said. "I don't know what's going on in my head or how to fix what's wrong with me. I mean, I know academically what I have to do, but actually doing it?" he said with a shudder.

"And? You thought it was going to be easy?" Nathan gave him a critical look, having noticed the shudder. "Maybe I have no perspective on this, given that I recognized almost two years ago that I was not as sane as I could be and, you know, took steps to try and rectify that..."

Haroun looked up at his friend. "Don't mock me right now." he said tiredly. "I have to figure out how to forget the last six years of discipline and learn to let go."

"I'm thinking dropping you off the roof might be a good start," Nathan said without blinking.

"Yeah, because multiple fractures is always a great motivator." he said. Then he looked at his friend. "You're joking, right?"

Nathan raised an eyebrow. "Your big mobility breakthroughs have all happened when they had to, when you didn't think about what you were doing but just did it. So if I unexpectedly dropped you off the roof I bet you'd fly."

"Or I might not." he pointed out. "Awful risk to take on a chance. You want to explain to Alison how you got me killed trying this experiment?"

"You're assuming I'd let you hit the ground if you didn't fly," Nathan said impassively. Haroun was giving him an odd look. "I'm more than capable of catching you before you go splat."

"Assuming your brain was in working order..." he muttered.

Nathan raised an eyebrow. "My brain is, actually, in better working order than it has been in a while," he said, flatly but with an edge of something else there for the first time.

Haroun snorted. "I'm not willing to risk my life on that chance." he said flatly. "You are not throwing me off the roof, and that's final. I can't even _run_ yet, Nathan, let alone fly!"

"Fine. It was just a thought."

"And I appreciate the sentiment, grievous bodily harm or no." he said. "I am not good at surrendering."

"You should try it sometime, says the ex-Spartan. Remarkably liberating feeling."

Haroun stuck his tongue out at Nate - a very Alison gesture. "I can't help it if I've had to develop some fairly rigid habits of mind regarding being disciplined. If I wasn't, I was just another parapalegic." he said. There was a skitter of something across his mind ... something along the lines of ~ohGodwhatifI'mstuckthiswayforever?~ but it came and went in a flash.

"What if you are?" Nathan asked.

"What if I am what? Just another parapalegic?" he asked. "Well, for one, they might be artificial, but they do theoretically tie into my nervous system." he said, thumping one of his legs and wincing. "And I can walk, albeit sometimes with difficulty."

"What," Nathan said, very calmly, "if you're stuck like this?"

Haroun scowled at his friend. "Stop reading my mind." he said accusingly. "And ... I don't know." he said with a heavy sigh. "I've crafted who and what I am around being Jetstream. If I can't do that anymore..."

"Then it's good incentive to set aside your fear of surrender and work on the problem, isn't it? If you don't want there to be another option but to get back to who and what you were." Nathan shook his head a little. "I'm not a psychiatrist, Haroun," he said. "People seem to lose the distinction between a telepath and a shrink sometimes, but the line is an important one. Talk to Charles. If you don't want to talk to Charles, I'll give you Jack's number. But you have to try."

Haroun set his shoulders. "It's not going to come to that." he said. "I will be Jetstream again. I don't know how, and I don't know when, but I want it to happen. I've pulled myself through Hell once, I can do it again."

Nathan shook his head. "Are you even listening to what I'm trying to tell you?" he asked, and for a moment, the cool distance that had dominated the face Nathan had shown to the world since the night at the Hellfire Club was gone. "You try and bull your way through this and you'll drown in it. Like you're drowning right now. The only way out is down and through."

"There be dragons there." he said, startled at the change in his friend. "Big nasty ones with sharp teeth."

"I used to break down on a weekly basis with Jack," Nathan said, eyes glittering in his suddenly ashen face. "Me, who spent almost as many years as you've been alive terrified of showing weakness. And you know, I hated myself for it every time. But I wasn't going to understand what was going on in my head if I just focused on sucking it up and soldiering on. Sometimes willpower isn't what's needed."

"The only reason I am still _alive_ is because I fought for it. Something I think you know about. Now you ask me to throw that all away? I can't do it, Nate. I just _can't_."

"You're not listening." The mask fell over Nathan's face like a curtain dropping. "You're not fighting for life, Haroun. You're fighting yourself. And that's a battle that none of us can win."

"I won it before." he pointed out. "If I hadn't, I'd still be a bedridden parapalegic, or at best maybe living out my life in Boston somewhere as a disabled worker."

"Why do I even bother talking?" Nathan got up. "You won't see what I mean, and you won't see what you need to do. Until you do, enjoy being a flightless bird, because you're never going to be anything else."

"What bug crawled up your ass and died?" he said, hurt by his friend's refusal to see. Nate was usually so very good at seeing his side of things - usually if only to ridicule it mercilessly. But now it was as if he wasn't even listening. He then stood up - shakily - and made for the door.

"You want my opinion, but you won't listen to it. You've closed your mind entirely, and now you're running, again. Are you going to do this every time we have a conversation these days?"

"For fuck's sake, Nate!" he exclaimed, pausing in his unsteady flight from the Lounge. "You just don't get it, do you? You have no comprehension of what keeps me up at night, what gnaws at me."

"You have a whole list of things gnawing at you. And you're taking the most ass-backwards approach to addressing all of them," Nathan said coldly. "You're ignoring the option that's going to work because you don't want to appear to be weak. Didn't you learn anything from what the COs put me through before they cleared me for active duty?"

"Let's play a little game here, Nate. Just for a second, pretend you're me, OK? You've probably read my file, you know me, you're a telepath, it shouldn't be difficult. Now that you're me, what do you do?" he asked. "How do you reconcile who you are with who you want to be? How do you not give up your intensity, your control, your determination when the machines that let you function as a man demand that you back down, give over, slow down, and give up control?"

"You TRY!" The furniture rattled ominously. "You don't stare the knowledge of what you need to do in the face and complain about how hard it is."

Haroun barked out a laugh. "I AM TRYING!" he responded hotly. "I am edging as close to that abyss as I dare, and it is _not enough_! And I too scared to throw myself in headfirst!"

"You're not trying. You're standing here being poetic, making it perfectly clear that you know exactly what the problem is, and wanting someone to drop the answer in your lap. You don't have my excuse," Nathan growled. "I ought to throw you off the roof so you stop fucking overthinking. To think, this is you with this problem. It's ironic, is what it is."

"Yeah, well, not everyone gets the super-secret Askani Man Without Fear rituals to banish all human emotion from their minds!" he snarled then took a few more steps towards the door. "I'm afraid, Nate. Afraid of letting go, afraid of not being able to come back."

"From where? What the hell are you talking about? Are you listening to yourself?" His voice was still a growl, but his eyes were flat, like dull gray ice, any emotion that had been there gone in an instant at the first half of Haroun's reply. "You'd think there's really an abyss. That letting go is some catastrophic loss of self, that surrender is defeat. You make no sense."

"You know, you've been hurt before. Badly. You know what it takes, what kind of inner drive you have to have, to come back from injuries that should by rights kill you, and at the very least stop your career dead in its tracks." he said. "When'd you go so cold, man? When did you lose your ability to empathize?"

Nathan stared at Haroun for a moment, thinking that it seemed like a sincerely meant question, not a rhetorical one. "Since the thing that happened at the Hellfire Club that I didn't put in my report, I suppose. If I'm being cold. I don't know, Haroun. To me this feels like thinking clearly. I see you building the complications," Nathan said, "and when you tell me you know you're doing it, it makes no sense to me why you don't just stop."

"It's not that simple, telepath boy." he said with a heavy sigh. "I'm trying to do this the only way I know how, and it's not working. I can keep going like this and be nothing or I can let go, betray all my hard work and sacrifice, for the _chance_ that it will come through in the end. Maybe."

Oh. So he hadn't really wanted to know. "Offer to throw you off the roof stands. Otherwise... either talk to a point, or shut the hell up." There was no animation at all in Nathan's voice or expression. "Right now all you're doing is convincing yourself that you have an impossible dilemma, and the more often you repeat it, the more you'll believe it."

"Maybe." he admitted. "Maybe I just wanted someone to talk to about it. Someone who might understand." he said. "Someone who's been there."

"I've never been there. I've never been perfectly healthy, perfectly able to see what the problem is, and unable to take the last step. And don't, don't," Nathan said almost violently, stepping away from the chair and heading for the door, "lay guilt on me. My guilt is a toy no one gets to play with anymore. Not you or anyone else."

"You feel guilty about shuttin' me out like this, that's all you, not me." he said stiffly. "I went to you for help."

"Hypocrite," Nathan snapped at him. "Tough love for everyone but yourself, is that it? How many times did you tell me to suck it up and cope? How many times did you yell at me when I was in a hospital bed? And never mind that... the real irony is that the man of faith, doesn't even have enough faith in the rest of us to catch you if you take that leap and fall."

Haroun exhaled harshly, Nathan's words hitting home _hard_. "Thank you." he said quietly, and slipped out of the Lounge.

Nathan stared at the door for a few moments, then raised his hands to his temples, taking three deep, harsh breaths. Slowly, the look in his eyes cooled, the color coming back to his face. Once his mask was back to coolly neutral, he walked out the door in the opposite direction from the one Haroun had taken.