xp_logs | LOG: [Nathan, Haller] Back in the wreckage . . .

After encountering Jane in the city, Haller stops by Nathan's office to see how he's holding up in the aftermath of his precog-fit. He's been better.

This was just damned depressing, Nathan thought with a sigh, bending to pick up scattered files. Using his telekinesis wasn't really an option, given the lingering headache, even the day after. Which was a pity, because the office was a mess.

It was a logical detour on his way to the professor's study. Jim didn't need his telepathy to know Nathan was in -- he could hear the shuffling. Still, he knocked for the look of the thing. Gently. "Can I come in?"

"I didn't realize the door was still attached," Nathan muttered, then looked up with a very wan smile. "Hey, Jim."

Jim returned the smile as he pushed the door open the rest of the way. One of the door hinges seemed a little loose. He glanced around the other man's office as he entered and raised his eyebrows. "I knew you'd had a telekinetic event, but this looks like my old room on Muir."

"It wasn't entirely me. And actually, it was a combination precognitive/telekinetic event. Wait, no, there was some less-than-appropriate use of telepathy in there somewhere, too..."

Jim winced. "So I guess the drug-therapy with Jean didn't work . . ." He shook his head. "Angelo mentioned there was a student involved. Marius, right?"

Nathan stood - slowly, very slowly, and carried the files back to the desk. "No, the little precog-be-gone pill worked nicely," he said. At least since it had been a joint project, Moira had been able to carry right on with the testing, despite whatever had happened with Jean. "I think it was coming off it that was the problem. And yes, Marius was the student involved. I'm sure you've read his file," Nathan said somewhat bleakly, sitting down. "Suffice to say that I couldn't have picked a worse kid to have an episode around."

"Marius' power is . . . interesting," Jim agreed. He hadn't talked to the boy much, but Moira had expressed concern that Marius needed training in psychic defense -- especially given his unexpected reactions to other people's mutations. Jim would normally have volunteered, but the power-issue complicated the matter. Better to leave that to Charles. Besides, he'd gotten the sense the boy wasn't interested in talking to a counselor. Are you the best person to talk to about power-issues, anyway? "What's that make it," he said, "twice he's attacked you now? Good thing Angelo was around . . ."

"Technically three," Nathan muttered dryly, rubbing at the back of his neck, "but the second time wasn't all that serious." He leaned back in his chair, a muffled noise that was not a whimper, really, slipping out. "Fuck, I hurt," he said with a sigh. "Bruises from my own damned TK. And I feel like someone's been using a blowtorch on the inside of my head. Charles did what he could, but it was like the damned precog got cranked up all the way."

"It sucks, doesn't it? The bruises, I mean." Jim laughed and cleared aside a few fallen books and folios on his way to the chair. He stacked them on a neat pile on Nathan's desk as he took a seat. "But you didn't break anything, and that's a plus. Nothing that can't be replaced, anyway." The younger man settled back in the chair and eyed Nathan speculatively. "So, you think it was coming off the drugs that made it recoil like that?"

"Suspect so. Moira ran me through the EEG last night and my readings were still messed up. I was getting residual flashes all night," Nathan said, sounding more aggrieved than he really felt. The flashes... hell, the episode itself, had left him with an awful lot of food for thought.

"It sounds like it was just suppressing the precog, then, not canceling it." Jim could feel the ghost of a tension headache. Frowning slightly, he nonetheless extended a telepathic hand to alleviate it a little. Nathan sounded as if he could use it. "I still think some kind of circuit breaker would be useful. Obviously chemical suppression alone wasn't strictly healthy."

"Charles has suggested the same," Nathan said with a slight smile of gratitude for the telepathic help. The pain in his head eased, and he took a deep breath, then went on. "Since this is mostly supposed to be a... safety net, maybe, for missions, a circuit breaker that could be opened up gradually to manage the recoil might work." He snorted. "Oh, I can't wait. 'Sorry, Scott, I can't make it to debriefing - I need to go to the infirmary and come down off my drugs.'"

Jim glanced at the surrounding debris again. "I think the team will support whatever suggestion results in less cumulative damage." He hesitated. "What did you see? Anything useful?"

"Lots," Nathan said, shifting in his chair a little. "My own future, again. Bits and pieces, most of which were unpleasant... and then there was my uncle." He gave Jim a tight little smile. "I need to meditate."

Jim nodded. "If I can do anything to help, let me know. I'm not Charles, but . . ."

Nathan gave a helpless, faintly bitter laugh. "Tell me I'm not a bad person? I don't like it when students come away from conversations with me unconscious and traumatized..."

Jim gave him a lopsided smile. "It wasn't your fault. As I understand it, Marius has survived being beaten up by staff before -- the risk seems to be an aspect of his mutation. And your assistant did the actual knocking-out. It sounds like the lack of consciousness was the best and only option." He wouldn't mention that Haroun had apparently been hurled from the office and into the adjacent wall. Nathan didn't need another reminder of guilt.

"I should have headed right to Moira when the headache started. You'd think I'd have learned by now that drugs have odd effects on me and adopted a preventative approach." Nathan shook his head a little. "I wish I could shut it off permanently," he murmured, his tone odd. "If it had just stayed burned out... that would have been nice."

Jim fixed his eyes on the desk. "Even if you could, you'd miss it," he said quietly. "Not the pain, or what it does to people around you, but . . . you'd miss it. On some level. It's a part of you." He looked up, smiling slightly. "When you're supposed to have something, and don't -- it gets to you. Physical or psychic. Even if you can get by without." Charles knew.

Nathan gazed at him for a moment, then sighed. "Forty years old and still having powers accidents. At least it's been a good long while since the last one... although getting a student caught up in this one kind of negates what little credit that might have gotten me." His mouth twisted for a moment, before his expression smoothed again, the comparatively brief descent into guilt a sign he himself never would have recognized of just how much progress he'd made. "No permanent damage done, at least. Although I do need to find a way to make it up to Marius."

Jim's smile widened a touch. "This was attack number three? Maybe the best thing you could do for each other is avoid personal contact from now on."

Nathan laughed, a little. "I'm sure at this point he probably wouldn't resist the idea too strenuously," he said regretfully. He looked down at his hands for a moment. "You know, it's ironic. I'm trying not to look at this as backsliding into unreliability... although it is, but it's stemming from something I've been doing to be more reliable on missions. It's like a lose-lose situation." He looked up at Jim, gray eyes wry. "I'm not really as discouraged as I sound. I just... don't want to be unreliable. Ever again."

"I get that." Jim rubbed his right hand. "It's not backsliding -- it's part of the learning process. One step forward, two steps back is still better progress than standing still. I speak from experience." Say it enough, and maybe one day you'll believe that.

"I used to be terrified of the steps back." Nathan paused, giving that some thought, and then smiled faintly. "Okay, so they still scare me on a visceral level. Part of me still expects to be punished, when I make a mistake, or don't perform up to expectations. You know, Alison and Scott and Ororo had to drive me to exhaustion in the Danger Room over the course of weeks to get me to the point where I could concede that retreat was necessary?"

"'The way that leads forward seems to retreat,'" Jim smiled faintly. Another lesson from Charles. "It's hard to unlearn things. Especially if they used to be what kept you alive. But it's easier to accept the small defeats if you know they'll keep you from a big one." Or killing people. Jim pinched the bridge of his nose. Stop.

Raw as his mind was today, Nathan didn't miss picking up on the shift in Jim's thoughts. "Glad you came back yet?" he asked wryly, rising from his chair and going over to pick up more files. "Seems to be giving you an awful lot of food for thought..."

Jim smiled wryly. They can all see it. Great. "You could consider this part of that experience I was talking about. The peanut gallery gets restless sometimes." Especially when his mood was down. The talk with Jean had gotten to him more than he'd thought. Pushing the intrusive thoughts aside, Jim raised himself from the chair and knelt to help Nathan. "I've had my share of setbacks, so I know where you're coming from. But I've had enough to know a temporary relapse doesn't have to be the end."

"There's a sort of irony here, you know," Nathan said, staring down at the files for a long moment, and somehow it was entirely clear that he wasn't talking about setbacks, but the files themselves. "All these bits and pieces, scattered... and the future's here, too. I think I knew that all along. I think that's why I was drawn to doing this..."

"Because it's a part of you," Jim finished. He glanced at the battered documents in his hands. "All that you are shapes all that you were, and all that you will be. Sometimes it's painful, but that doesn't make it any less true. The trick is to remember that everything we go through is part of the same whole." He smiled up at Nathan. "Trying to undo what's done or worrying about what's to come is a waste of effort. There is no 'if only.' Only 'there is.'"

Nathan gave Jim a long, steady look. "Charles fed you books as a youngster, didn't he?"

Jim laughed at that. "I fed myself, actually, although Charles did his share of aiding and abetting. Lots of religion, lots of philosophy. I didn't have much else to do for a few years. Even I couldn't be crazy all the time."

"Did I tell you that my first degree was in history?" Nathan asked, stacking files. "History, then international relations, then the law degree... I must have been the best-educated brainwashed mutant supersoldier ever."

Jim raised his eyebrows. "So you could truly appreciate the historical and cultural background of the places you blew up, and then talk your way out of charges afterwards?"

Nathan grinned abruptly. "Now, how did you pin down my line of thinking that clearly? You'd think you were a mindreader or something..."

Jim snorted in amusement. "Some days, I'd be inclined to agree." He sorted the contents of at least four different files into individual stacks. Thank goodness whoever had compiled them had thought to include a header and numbered the pages. "I, uh . . . I'm actually making some progress there. I'm starting to sense things now. Charles says it's because I'm in a setting where I feel safe enough to receive." And with people he felt safe receiving from.

Nathan smiled. "Glad to hear that," he said, and meant it. It was nice to know that someone was indeed making forward progress without blowing stuff up. He rose again, then grimaced as his back complained. "I'm going to be glad I've got Bobby working for me now, too," he said. "Suddenly all the filing needs to be refiled, after all."

Jim chuckled, finishing up his piles before rising in turn. "Poor Bobby. And Angelo, too. Maybe they're the ones I should be giving the don't be discouraged by setbacks speech to. There is only 'there is,' and that is an unholy mess."

"Angelo gets a free pass on this, I think. Given that he was the last man standing and all..."

"Come out of a disruptive situation vertical, be excused from paperwork? No one can ever say you're not fair." Jim dusted off his hands on his pants, smiling. "I'll leave you and Bobby to your fates, then -- I have to deliver some things to Charles. I just stopped by to see how you were. Moira didn't tie you to a bed, so I didn't think you'd be too badly off. You may want to indulge the headache and lay down for a little while, though."

"Moira only ties me to the bed when I've been very, very bad," Nathan said with an absolutely straight face, then laughed, if not quite as uproariously as he might have, given the headache. "Go, before I break your brain any further..."

Jim shuddered, covering his eyes. "Clearly you're fine if you can torment me with the image of you and Moira playing Naughty Doctor. I'd better leave before you set my therapy back any further."