xp_logs | Nathan and Jim, Monday evening

Jim comes upon Nathan doing some legal research in the library. Turns out he's contemplating a more creative approach to making Gideon's life more difficult, but none of the options he was considering are panning out. Jim has a rather startling suggestion. It's almost certainly doomed to failure, but it still has its attractions.

Jim knew about research, but when it came to accumulating materials he was limited by the normal laws of physics. Nathan, on the other hand, didn't have to worry about practicality when it came to stacking his sources. Or getting up at all. As Jim watched, a book near the middle of one of the implausibly stacked books removed itself and glided purposefully towards the table. The tower, untroubled by this, peacefully reabsorbed the gap.

As a matter of etiquette, the telepath cleared his throat politely before breaking the silence. "Busy?"

"Somewhat," Nathan said, not looking up from the book, "but I'm not going to kick and scream at being interrupting. In fact, I should probably take a break." He turned the page, then shook his head irritably and finally did look up at Jim, mustering a wry smile. "I'm testing my frustration threshold. I should have waited to do this - ruining my good mood from yesterday."

Jim skimmed what titles he could read in the accumulated piles. "Legal problems?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. He made his way to the table, carefully taking a seat across from the older man. Touching the table itself wasn't even an option.

"Not so much problems as options that aren't as feasible as I'd hoped they would be," Nathan said with a sigh, closing the book in front of him. "I had all these devious plans, but none of them are going to work."

"Is this about . . ." Jim hesitated for a moment, then shook his head, "your friend?"

Nathan gazed at him for a moment, then nodded. "Criminal charges are impossible," he said, more briskly than he really felt. "Civil charges, on the other hand... I'd thought maybe it might be a possibility, a way of getting at my... at the person who killed him. But I don't have the standing to launch a wrongful death case, and GW had no living relatives."

Jim smiled faintly. "And a wrongful death suit involving mutant powers would be . . . well, let's just say problematic at best." He sighed, leaning back in the chair. It was the simple wooden kind, and thus less than comfortable, but he could already tell nothing about this conversation was going to be anyway. "Moira told me. About your uncle, I mean. I think she was worried I might put my foot in my mouth if I didn't know." Not that I'm proving her wrong now that I do. "As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't change anything."

Nathan raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything for a moment, his eyes dropping back to the piles of books. "Did she tell you about the nature of my uncle's powers?" Despite the formality of the words, his tone wasn't as stiff as it could have been. "About how he killed GW?"

"Yes. With -- with your powers." Jim fought the urge to look away, hoping he wasn't betraying Moira's trust in this. But then, she wouldn't have told him in the first place if there had been any doubt in her mind as to whether it was better he know. Jim swallowed hard and tried to convince himself to trust her judgement in trusting his. "It's . . . I understand what it's like. To b-- to feel responsible for the most terrible thing in your own life." No. Nathan wasn't responsible for that.

There was a lot behind that, Nathan registered, but let it pass. He didn't want to push again. He liked the younger man, already, and would prefer to minimize the missteps. "I'm trying not to wallow in guilt over it," he said quietly, "although being used as a weapon like that hit more than a few buttons, even beyond what he did to GW." He shook his head a little, the books rearranging themselves, floating back towards the stacks. "Suppose it doesn't really matter. Can't sue him for that." He gave Jim a faintly twisted smile. "I considered suing him over his role in what happened to my first wife and my son, but the statute of limitations has long since run out on that one. And hell, all he did that time was make a phone call. I'd never be able to prove it."

His first wife and son. Jim didn't know how long ago that must have been, but the pain in the man's voice was old. "No. Probably not." Jim ran a hand over his face, a familiar ache gathering behind his eyes. The more he learned about Nathan, the more heartsick it made him. "There's no statute of limitations on murder, but without proof . . . if you didn't file suit at the time, I think the only way you could pull off that one would be -- um. It's called the discovery rule, I think. If you miraculously found some solid evidence now that you didn't have then . . ."

Nathan nodded somewhat grimly. "Yeah. Won't work. I didn't find out about it until this past summer, and really, even if I could prove he made that phone call, he wasn't the one who killed them." Brooding, Nathan flashed briefly on the memory of that hotel room, Aliya on the floor and Tyler on the bed.

"Hired murder is still murder." Jim shook his head. "But if you can't prove it . . . you're right." He dropped his hand, frustrated by his inability to help. There had to be something, but this wasn't Jim's area . . . all he knew was psychic damage, and the very specialized areas of law that touched on it.

At that a thought occurred to him, and as it did Jim knew it was questionable at best. Still, it was all he had to offer.

"Your uncle," he said slowly, turning his eyes from the nearest pile of books back to Nathan, "was he the family member who damaged your mind when you were a child?"

Nathan gave a harsh sigh. "Yes," he said, the flatness in his voice not meant for Jim. "My mother was a telepath. He used her abilities... you know, I'm not sure what he was doing?" Nathan made an irritable gesture and the books sped up on their return path. "Other than editing himself out of my memory. But there was so much missing that my mind tried to fill in the blanks with fabrication."

Jim nodded. He remembered the psychic scar tissue all too well. "It's weak," he said, "it's very weak, but you could hit him for abuse. Ever heard of recovered memories?"

Nathan blinked, then paled suddenly, leaning forward in the chair, his shoulders hunching almost involuntarily. "I didn't... that didn't even occur to me. Isn't the idea of recovered memories largely discredited, legally-speaking?"

"Many times over," Jim admitted with an apologetic wince. This was obviously not a subject Nathan was comfortable with, but . . . "But in your case the issue isn't quite as clear-cut. True, a few years ago the APA ruled that repressed memories should be inadmissable in court, but they were talking about memories uncovered in the process of something called recovered memory therapy. The psychiatric community panned RMT because memories of the alleged abuse were skewed by the guiding therapist's bias; there was no way to know if they were real, or, if they were, to what degree. The loophole is, though, that your memories of your childhood have nothing to do with RMT, and everything with your uncle's abuse of telepathy." Jim shook his head helplessly, hoping he wasn't making things worse than they already were. "The court system still hasn't quite figured out how to deal with psionics, let alone their misuse. It may not work, but . . ."

"It's ironic, you know," Nathan muttered, rubbing at his temples as if resisting the onset of a sudden headache. "If he'd used my telekinesis to beat the crap out of me on a regular basis, that wouldn't be an issue. There's enough precedent for actual visible misuse of mutant powers... but telepathy is dicey. The use of telepathic evidence has been shot down more times than I can count."

The impact of Jim's fist on the table boomed in the quiet library. "What he did to your mind was a violation on a fundamental level!" For a tense instant the younger man's dark eyes remained locked on Nathan, then dropped to his clench fist. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then another. And another. When he opened them again, he was calm.

With painstaking care, Jim uncurled his fist and drew it back into his lap. In a more even, much quieter voice he said, "Telepathy isn't the evidence. It's the crime. You . . . you can at least try to make a case for that."

Nathan was staring at him, clearly taken aback by the eruption, however brief. "I could try," he said finally, almost reluctantly. "From what I understand of the precedents, it almost certainly wouldn't fly. And I..." He stopped, biting his lip. "I suppose it was easier to consider doing this on someone else's behalf. Rather than my own. I still don't remember him from my childhood, at all..."

Only that wasn't quite true, was it? Nathan's eyes went distant as he remembered the memories that had seemed oddly blurred, that night at the restaurant during the confrontation with Saul. Someone who wasn't Saul, standing over him...

Jim massaged his temples, the headache that had been threatening him now a very definite reality. Not overreacting too much, are we, Haller? "I'm sorry. This probably wasn't much help." He very definitely shouldn't have brought it up. He tried to focus himself back onto business. "It's just . . . there's nothing for this. Not in the courts. And yours isn't the first mind I've seen it in, either. There's no precedent, but there should be." He smiled weakly. "If not for your own benefit, then for someone else's."

There was something almost rebellious in Nathan's regard for a moment before he made a face and looked away. "Why is it that that keeps coming up?" he said with a sigh.

Jim blinked up at him, trying to marshall his thought process into something slightly more linear. "What, the lack of precedent, doing it for someone else's benefit, or doing it for your own?"

"I shouldn't have said that aloud. Makes me sound petulant." Nathan sighed and picked up his pen, flipping it back and forth between his fingers. "I just get discouraged sometimes, when I can't... fight something."

Jim laughed. The sound wasn't quite bitter. "Oh, believe me, I understand. The only thing I trust in anymore is that everything fall apart. Even certainties." He paused, then snorted. "Well, at least now your petulance is in good company."

Nathan's grip on the pen went white-knuckled suddenly. "Fuck it," he said suddenly, his voice several degrees colder, although the chill wasn't directed at Jim. "Even if it comes to nothing in the end, it might piss him off. And I have no problems with the idea of a death of a thousand cuts."

Jim blinked at the sudden hardness in Nathan's tone, then grinned. "I should probably encourage purity of purpose," he said, aware that he was taking a little too much pleasure in this, "but unfortunately Charles couldn't quite cure me of the vindictive streak. And from what I've seen so far, excruciating bloody death couldn't happen to a nicer man."

Nathan eyed him for a moment. "I was speaking metaphorically," he pointed out, then smiled a bit twistedly. "I'm not going to kill him. Or my father. They have given me every reason in the world to do it, but that's the problem. They've given me every reason."

Jim shook his head, the grin falling back to something a bit less vicious. "Then you're much more forgiving man than I. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing." The smile went lopsided. "So you won't kill them. At least promise you'll make them wish you had."

"That's the plan. This-" He gestured around at the law books, "is me trying to explore a new way to do that. Something that doesn't involve blowing shit up. I'm supposed to be turning over a new leaf, after all."

Jim nodded solemly. "Pain without property damage. A worthy goal."

Nathan took a deep breath and then let it out, rubbing at the spot between his eyes. "Do you have a headache?" he asked abruptly. "I have a headache."

"Yes." Jim paused, then made a face. "Oh, no. We do seem to have that effect on each other, don't we? At this rate it's going to turn into a secondary mutation . . ."

"We need to start socializing in completely harmless and fluffy ways. Do you play pool?" Nathan smiled, tiredly but somewhat mischievously. "I'm very good at pool."

At least the headache wasn't the only infectious thing about the man. Jim returned the smile gratefully. "Well, I don't play at all. Maybe I'll discover untapped potential. Or barring that, at least turn out to be entertainingly bad."

"I have to talk Scott into sidling up to a pool table again," Nathan mused. "He's been avoiding it since he lost his eye. He was phenomenally good beforehand - he played a friend of mine who's a probability-warper once or twice, and it was a thing of beauty."

"A what? Oh, hell. That must be interesting." Jim shook his head, not even bothering to play out the potential ramifications of that little scene. "I don't know why I'm surprised. If there was ever a place for a probability-warper, it would be here."

Nathan smiled again, a bit wistfully. "I don't know when Dom will be back, next. Possibly sooner than I think. She and Pete have this whole John Steed/Emma Peel thing going on these days." The glimmer in his eyes made him look ten years younger, all at once. "And yes, I'm gossiping. I'm allowed to do that."

Jim snorted. "Now there's a coincidence. In light of Wanda's powers, I'm starting to wonder if the universe is trying to imply something to do with luck and the counseling job. This is not altogether reassuring."

"Hmm," Nathan said, mock-soberly. "Could be. Although the idea of Dom having anything to do with counseling kids is enough to make me whimper like a little girl."

Jim gave him a look of mock-offense. "At least wait until they break me before starting to talk about my replacement -- it hasn't been that bad. Although I admit, I have yet to meet Manuel de la Rocha."

Nathan gazed at him for a moment, the smile turning a little thin. "You're not likely to meet Manuel," he said quietly, looking back down at his books. "He's washed his hands of this place."

The tenor of Nathan's voice and set of his jaw bespoke a rawness the younger man had, at least for the moment, no desire to probe. Jim backed away from the topic, but gently. "As he probably will with any offer from me," he conceeded with a half-smile. "But . . . you can't stop extending the hand just because you know it'll be kicked away. Even if it hurts sometimes." The smile went wry. "Maybe I'm biased. If it wasn't for the professor's unflagging masochism, I'd still be catatonic in the chronic ward at Muir."

"If you want to try, I admire you for it," was Nathan's only answer for a moment as he opened another law book, flipping through the table of contents. "I suppose that's probably why you're the student counselor and I'm a burned-out mostly ex-teacher, though."

Jim shook his head at that. "We all burn out. That doesn't mean we stay that way. Even if sometimes we'd rather we did." Some of the warmth crept back into his smile. "We get better. In the end, that's the only thing that makes it worth the fight, really."

Nathan took yet another deep breath and let it out. "Touchy subject for me," he said, lightly. Okay, almost lightly. "There's a part of me that still wants to drown in guilt anytime I feel like I'm not doing everything I can for someone I have responsibility towards. Especially since the times when I've actually put... myself, or something to do with me first, it hasn't turned out very well."

"Some people you just can't help. That's not your fault. Sometimes it's not even theirs." That was something Charles had spent a long time trying to make him understand after his tour of the UK. He sighed, rubbing the back of his head. "And even though I can actually see the hypocrisy pouring out of my mouth as I say this, spending all your time trying to help other people doesn't always help you. Sometimes it does the opposite."

"My shrink would agree with you." Nathan subsided with a brooding look. "Oh, for the ability to time travel," he said after a moment. "I think I'd go back to the day after Rachel was born and do the rest of the year over again."

Once again, it was a sentiment Jim understood all too well. "That would be nice . . . but the past is done. And you are who you are now because of it." Another thing Charles had worked for a very long time to make him truly understand. "But now regret and self-recrimination isn't going to get you anything but more pain. All you can do now is pick up the pieces and try to move forward."

Nathan gave Jim an aggravated look. What was it with people and kicking him in the ass? Did he seem that disheartened when he got broody? "O xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tade," Nathan muttered, a bit ironically. "I don't do anything but move forward."

Noticing his irritation, Jim gave a rueful laugh. "Okay, so that was probably more for my benefit than yours. Some days I need reminding." He tilted his head. "What language was that?"

"Ancient Greek. The first part of the inscription from the memorial stone at the site of the battle of Thermopylae." Nathan gave Jim an odd little smile. "I was a Spartan, you know. Not just metaphorically, either."

Jim couldn't stop himself. "College basketball? Well, you've got the height for it."

Nathan actually laughed, if softly. "Yes. College basketball." He tilted his head at Jim, then decided to go for the short summary. After all, the man had seen inside his head. "Moira didn't tell you that part? I came out of a government training program," he said briskly. "It involved telepathic-empathic conditioning of preteens and young teenagers, run by a bunch of sick minds who had an unhealthy fixation on Spartan legend and lore. We were supposed to be supersoldiers."

Jim's returning good mood abruptly fell through. "Yeah," he said softly, "that's not funny." A muscle in his jaw twitched, then relaxed. He needed to not take what he was feeling out on the table again. "I will never understand," he said suddenly, "how anyone could ever think it's 'acceptable' to rip open something as fragile as the mind and just fucking -- tear. What they think they're accomplishing by it. I wish--" his throat was so thick with bile could barely bring himself to spit the words out, "when that happens sometimes I wish I could just show them."

Nathan gave him a long look, the look in his eyes oddly gentle. He wasn't a dumb man, and he knew that he didn't know precisely what was going on with Jim, but his attitudes towards certain things were certainly suggestive. "Then we become scary telepathic monster-things and it rarely does any good," he said softly. "Believe me, I do understand the feeling. And you should have known me a year ago. I was considerably more bitter."

"You have a right to be." The statement carried the full weight of a conviction reached by a look at the other man's mind, but he couldn't sustain the anger in the face of Nathan's evenness. Jim exhaled slowly and looked at the tabletop, the tension in his jaw slowly easing. "And I wouldn't go down that road. I can't." He rubbed his forehead, realizing the denial wasn't terribly comforting by itself. And again, the information wasn't a secret. "That night I told you about in the convenience store I killed six people. I hit them with . . . everything. All of them. I was in their minds when they died. That's what broke mine." He dropped his hand and met Nathan's gaze again, the helpless, humorless smile returning. "I can't shred a mind. Not even on purpose."

Nathan shook his head a little. "It's not a bad thing," he said quietly. "Not to be able to do that. I don't think I could, after... well, even beyond my own experiences as a victim of that sort of thing, I had something happen along those same lines last year. I remember, telling one of the team..." He paused, looking troubled. "Minds, breaking. I think it's a... telepathic immune system reaction. Unless you're psychopathic, it goes from hard to unbearable pretty fast."

"I know. That it's not a bad thing. I just . . ." Jim dropped his gaze, feeling his face twist. "How can anyone do that to another human being on purpose?"

"I can't speak for everyone," Nathan said after a moment, "but I think that the key, for the telepaths and empaths who worked on the conditioning teams at Mistra, was that we, the candidates, weren't seen as human." His jaw clenched briefly before his expression smoothed. "Because we were mutants. And if they wanted to be seen as more than the raw material we were, they had to be useful. They had to earn toleration as useful employees, if not acceptance as human beings."

"I understand that . . . in theory." Jim snorted a laugh. "I had the same problem, you know? After my father was killed I didn't see people as people anymore. Not some kinds. Not unless they proved it to me first. Now I know I was wrong, but with some things I just -- objectively I can understand, but I still can't forgive." He shook his head. "I -- don't want to."

Nathan didn't answer for a moment. He leaned back in his chair, thinking hard. He didn't want to misstep again, and yet...

"There was a man," he said thoughtfully, "that I knew, back when I was first in training at Mistra. He was my first hand-to-hand instructor. Gruff, no-nonsense... didn't hurt us for discipline reasons, not like some of them. He just was very firm about teaching us right."

He paused. Jim was listening, apparently calmer, so he went on. "He came back into my life, two years ago. Turned out that he had been fighting for ten years to bring Mistra down from the inside. Only what I found out is that he had helped found Mistra, twenty-five years ago."

Jim frowned at him, not quite seeing where this was going, but trying to trust there was a point Nathan wanted to make. "So he . . . what, started with good intentions, and it went horribly wrong?"

"It did, I think," Nathan said judiciously, thinking about some of the things MacInnis had told him in their talks since... well, since Nathan had gotten accustomed to talking to him instead of threatening his life. "And it warped him, in a sense. He wound up using me to get at them... nearly got me killed, actually. But he was also the one who was working behind the scenes trying to save me, when I first got free." He shook his head a little. "The last few months," he said, quietly, "he was with GW and the others in Africa, helping them track down these camps. I don't generally like the concept of redemption... I think it's selfish, on the whole, but forgiveness... I can get behind the idea of forgiveness." He looked back up at Jim, smiling a bit. "In a way," he said with an honesty he wouldn't have used with anyone who knew MacInnis, "he's been more of a father to me than my own father has. Much more."

"I . . ." Even thinking through the screaming tension in his head was almost impossible. There was no way to explain this that made sense. Not to anyone besides Charles. "I spent a long time trying to learn to forgive . . . anyone. Even myself. But I just -- I'm not--" The hands in his lap curled into fists again as he whispered, "I'm not strong enough."

"I'm not trying to tell you what to do," Nathan said slowly, seeing the signs of extreme stress. "I suppose, when it comes to forgiveness... I'm just saying that you never know. When it might suddenly feel right, even if you never dreamed it could."

"I would . . . like that." In more ways than he could name. This conversation had gotten far too difficult, but that wasn't Nathan's fault. He tried to make his voice sound less like something dragged over a patch of broken glass and managed, "Charles always told me to hold out hope for the longshot. Sometimes he was even right. Maybe this time, too."

Nathan gazed at him for a moment, and then rose, shaking his head. "I give my wife ulcers, and now I'm breaking the new counselor," he muttered, more to himself than to Jim. "People are going to start running away from me in the halls." The last of the books reshelved themselves as he moved around the table. "Come with me," he said briskly to Jim. "And no, we're not going to Harry's."

"Oh, thank God," Jim said fervently as they rose from the table. "This would be a very bad mood to drink on . . . I'm sorry. Again." He paused, then frowned at Nate. "Um. Where are we going?"

"Do you play Go?" Nathan asked with a perfectly straight face.

"Uh . . . that's the one with small, chokable pieces, isn't it? No."

"Good. Then I'll teach you. You'll like it," Nathan said very firmly. "It's very soothing. Except when you're playing with Haroun, but that's only because he cries like a little girl when you kick his ass."

Jim laughed, even managing to keep the barely-hysterical edge to a minimum. "Yeah, Haroun's . . . interesting. And I could use soothing." He grinned, a little manically from the abrupt cessation of tension. "All those warnings the rest of the staff heaped on me, and somehow you got left off the list. Maybe it's just me. I'm starting to suspect something about your mutant power affects my sanity like Superman under a red sun."

"I'm very trying," Nathan agreed. "My wife makes sure that I'm reminded of that fact on a regular basis. And my daughter has already mastered her 'hey, you! Yes, you, my idiot father!' imperious looks."

"I should be taking lessons from Rachel. I don't think I'll be flinging rodents anytime soon, but I may pick up valuable survival skills."