Log: Nathan and Lorna

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Nathan, on the eve of moving house, is pensive. Lorna brings him up dinner and pokes him until he talks. Rachel aids and abets in the way only Rachel can. Then Lorna gets things turned around on her. Fortunately, Nathan is somewhat more merciful than she is.



"Ooooo..."

Nathan looked down at the baby curled up on the floor on her blanket with Mr. Bunny and smiled a bit. "Hey, sleepyhead," he chided Rachel lightly. "We could always put you back in the crib."

Rachel blew a sleepy sort of raspberry and hugged Mr. Bunny to her, her eyelids drooping. Nathan watched her, smiling, not moving from the couch. There weren't many places but the couch to sit here in the living room anymore - there were boxes and so forth all over the place, in preparation for the move tomorrow. Rachel had been having a blast with them and worn herself right out, giving Moira a chance to run down to the lap to check on some experiment or other. She'd even left the suite door open, but Rachel hadn't seemed inclined to go wandering.

"I'd say the floor works for her," remarked an amused voice from the door. "Knock, knock by the way." Lorna picked her way across the floor dodging boxes and baby alike. "I brought you guys dinner cause I figured you'd have your hands full moving and you know, probably packed your dishes."

"You missed Moira," Nathan said with a smile, but didn't move from the couch. He'd moved around a little bit too much, these last couple of days, and his leg was bothering him. "Appreciate it, though." He laughed a bit ruefully, remembering. "I didn't actually eat lunch."

"She'll come back," Lorna said without worry, flopping onto the couch next to him and setting a picnic basket in his lap. "I heard this strange rumor that she likes you, though God only knows why. Besides, that will keep for a bit provided you don't, you know wait days and days."

Rachel yawned and blinked up at them, making an interrogative noise at Lorna before hiding her face against Mr. Bunny again. From her cage, Bella cooed, and Nathan smiled helplessly, drawing the cover off the picnic basket.

"Going to be a busy weekend," he said. "Moving house and office, and keeping track of bird and baby here..."

Lorna smiled, "I can watch the second but Lili would have way too much fun if I volunteered to care for the first. I say foist her off on David. He needs something to care about that isn't going to complain at him all day." She grinned at him, "No, I'm not going to offer to help move."

"Ah, good. Because I think we have a small army lined up already, and at some point... well, you'd know the saying about too many cooks better than I would." Nathan's smile stayed, but it turned crooked, a little pensive, as he turned his attention back to dinner.

"Too many cooks better get out of my damn kitchen, I think it how that one goes. Or at least that's the way Chef Marcel always put it." She let him eat, instead chattering to him about her week--minus the Alex bits--and various points of mansion gossip. "Prom plans are going along nicely. I'm totally loving the woodland fairies theme." Eventually she wound around to the topic of food for the prom and then to the kitchen again, "So what's this about you stealing away my assistant cook? Isn't it bad enough that Cain uses a Jamie for groundskeeping, you've got to take my super competent Scot?"

Nathan hesitated, then looked sideways at her. "Rahne's... a very good assistant cook, and a very good medlab assistant, and very good at just about anything she puts her hand to. But she's... frustrated." He bit his lip, staring down at the other redhead in the room for a moment. "I don't know how to explain it. And she's not good at showing it, when she needs to. I want to give her something that's going to appeal to her strengths and let her... step outside the boundaries that are making her frustrated," he continued, more quietly. "She genuinely wants to help people. She can do that here, I know, but she can also do it with me, in a way that'll let her see the world..." He shrugged, his smile gone a bit ironic. "It sounds a bit hackneyed."

Lorna just shook her head, "I'm okay with it, really. She's far too good to just be a cook. Hell, she's too good even for my job. Any moron with a Betty Crocker cookbook could do it. I mean, don't get me wrong, you're creating scheduling problems and more work for me and I'm so going to make you suffer for that. But I'm glad for Rahne. She needs much more than I can offer her."

"Rahne's got... such depth of character. I want to see her have all the opportunities imaginable to see where it can take her." But Nathan's expression was almost pained, and he was more picking at the food now than anything else.

On the floor, Rachel's eyes opened. She made an aggravated noise and crawled over to the couch, pulling herself up on the edge and extended her arms to her father with an imperious little grunt that might have been 'Up!'. Nathan sighed and set the basket atop one of the boxes on the coffee table, lifting her into his arms.

"Hi."

"Meh," was his daughter's aggravated pronouncement as she snuggled.

Lorna leaned over and kissed Rachel's head then fixed a sharp look on Nathan. "You're unhappy. She's unhappy. I don't think it's Rahne's bright and sunny future that's giving you the mopes so what's up?"

Nathan gave her as patient a look as he could muster. "I do not have the mopes." Rachel muttered and grasped at his shirt with her little hands, and he turned the look on her. "I don't. Stop playing barometer, munchkin. You're not infallible."

"Bah."

"She says that you do. I say that you do. And there are two of us and one of you and you're definitely unhappy so spill, Nathan. Before your slightly creepy daughter does it for you via interpretive bubble dance or whatever new trick she's come up with today." Lorna tucked her hand in her hair, leaning against the back of the couch. She was obviously quite willing to wait him out.

Nathan rubbed Rachel's back for a moment before he answered. Just to make sure she settled a little. "I had lunch with Amanda today," he said, and then shook his head at Lorna. "And no, before you go jumping to conclusions, that's not the reason for the mopes. Well. It's not the main reason for the mopes. I'm just..." He grimaced a bit, kissing the top of Rachel's head. "I'm tired," he said, and did indeed sound weary, all at once. "It seems like I stop for long enough these days and it all catches up to me."

"That's one of the virtues of being a moving target. Nothing sticks for long," Lorna agreed. "The downside being that when you do all the things that were chasing you come down like a ton of bricks and you do stupid things like start running again."

"I didn't think I was running," Nathan said with another crooked, slightly pained smile. "I thought I was moving on. Then, when I stop and realize that hey, it's been a whole six weeks since my uncle was effectively torturing me in an attempt to get at my now non-existent precog, I wonder about how honest I'm being with myself."

Lorna rubbed her forehead with the palm of her hand, "You say these things and a tiny, honest part of me says 'word'. Which is not cool." She sighed, "And how did Amanda fit into all this?"

"The conversation made me think about when this all started last summer. When I found out about Gideon being family, and everything he did..." Rachel whimpered a little and Nathan sighed, extending a telepathic tendril of comfort until she settled back down again. "I don't think even now I appreciate what a blow that was to the way I see the world. I was talking about boundaries, with Rahne... the boundaries of my life, my past, look nothing like they did before last August." He shook his head a little. "And I wonder if things... people, didn't slip between the cracks during the transition. Okay," he amended, a bit bitterly. "I know they did. What I don't know is how I feel about that."

"Amanda being one of those who slipped through. Tell me that you're not blaming yourself for her being a moron? Please?" Lorna shifted, sitting up a little straighter. "We all have those times when what we're trying to hold on to is too big for us to grip. And when that's other people...sometimes that's when you have to let go and trust them to stand on their own."

"You also have to be there when they can't stand on their own. And I wasn't." Nathan paused for a moment, then looked at Lorna. "You were busy in your own unpleasant ways last September. You may or may not have read back enough in the files to have found out that Pete put me in the hospital."

"I don't remember reading that but hey, there was a lot I missed and my speed-reading session through it wasn't exactly designed for retaining information." Lorna flicked her fingers. "Still, if you're going to tell me that you failed her because she made stupid choices and went over to..." she glanced down at Rachel and amended her statement, "that woman's side then I'm going to have to hit you very, very hard."

"I wasn't there to fail her. What part of me wasn't mentally gone after finding out about Gideon and all of it in August was gone after that. I was still walking around the school, but I might as well have been on the other side of the world for how connected I was to what was going on around me." Nathan stroked Rachel's fine red hair. "I look back on that and part of me's just disgusted at myself. Then there's another part that resents the fact that I seem to need to feel disgusted, when my whole life was... upended. It's a funny kind of dichotomy."

"I think you actually managed to manufacture occasions to feel guilty. As a Catholic, I'm very impressed." She leaned over to the picnic basket and stole a clump of grapes. "So, you went through a horrible trauma and you blame yourself for not being able to just take that in stride and deal with everyone else's horrible traumas at the same time?"

"Moira, and the little megalomaniac in my arms here... they were the only things holding me together. Literally. If I hadn't had both of them... even with them, there were times I felt like I was in pieces. And what energy I had, I needed. For myself. It makes sense," Nathan said quietly, "and I shouldn't blame myself for that. The funny thing is, I don't think I do... not deep down. But that doesn't mean I can't see where I could have done things differently, done some good if I'd been able to pull myself together and look past what I was going through."

"You just blame yourself for not blaming yourself?" Oh, ha, apparently that's why her therapist was always so irritated at her. Imagine that.

"No, I just..." Nathan's pause went on considerably longer this time. "I'm tired," he said finally. "I'm an adult and a teacher and I'm supposed to be a mentor, but I've had a hell of a year. I've lost too much, and too many people I love, and after a while, soldiering on into the future, however much more bright it looks, just takes too much." There wasn't any self-pity in his voice, just weariness, and he was cradling Rachel against him with a sort of absent tenderness.

Lorna's smile was fond as she offered him a grape. "I think, and my opinion isn't actually worth the breath it takes to say it but, I think that you need to stop worrying about being a teacher and being a mentor and heck, even being a soldier for a while. Be a Daddy. Be a husband. That's what grounds you and...that's where you're going to be able to rest and heal."

He took the grape with his free hand, after a moment, his gray eyes suspiciously bright. Rachel immediately raised her head and grasped for it. Nathan gave it to her and she relaxed against his shoulder again, peering at the grape with wide-eyed fascination.

"I'm being a bit whiny," Nathan said after a moment. "I am, really. I know that. I knew that lunch today was going to involve a detailed rehashing of just where last fall went wrong for Amanda and I, and I thought I had myself psyched up for that suitably. I guess I was wrong."

"You whiny? I don't believe it. You're the king of anti-whine." It wasn't that Lorna was taking this lightly. Just that she refused to let him mope more. "I...it's impossible to ever really psych yourself properly to face someone when there's that much hurt between you. Even more when it's in the place of that much affection."

"I can accept what happened, you know. My role in it. I know where I went wrong, I can see it... and to be honest, Lorna, I've had to live with a lot worse." He thought for a moment about eighteen trainees, trapped in their sensory-deprivation cells in New Mexico when the Mistra facility collapsed around them under the weight of his grief and rage. "She's trying," he said finally. "She's trying very hard. And I love her very much. I just wish that conversation hadn't turned into me trying to explain myself when it came to every way in which I'd failed her." He rubbed Rachel's back again, although despite his calmness, he looked to be the one who needed soothing. "Old, bad patterns. I still think I can fix the world for the people I love." He bent his head, kissing the top of his daughter's again. "I just wish I could," he murmured, the pain audible in his voice again. "I do a lot of tilting at windmills. You might have noticed."

"Yeah, I think I did." Lorna sighed, "Nathan, it's not about having lived through worse. Because...what's worse? The smallest change can mean everything. How do you weigh what came before against what was happening? They were totally different situations." She tucked her legs beneath her and bit her lip. "Sometime these things are pretty objective. A hangnail is not worse than bullet. But most of the time they're not and you can't expect yourself to make it through all of them in the same way."

"No, but I do expect myself to make it through them all," Nathan said with a faint quirk of his lips. "How I do it, when I do it... that part doesn't matter. But if I don't do it, then I can't be what I need to be." Rachel tossed the grape at the floor - it froze in mid-air, and Nathan shook his head at her.

"So get through it. But stop piling on. It's not always the easiest thing to draw the line and say 'I can't do this' but, damnit, the alternative is crazytime. And if you're going to blame yourself for not taking on crazytime. Or blame yourself for not blaming yourself or whatever. Then you're just going to...well, become me. And we don't want that." Lorna ate another grape with the flourish of someone who has had her final say on the matter.

"Oh, look, sweetie," Nathan said to Rachel. "Aunt Lorna's decided to distract me from moping by running herself down."

"Hah!" was the rejoinder to that, and Rachel crawled down off Nathan's lap and over to Lorna's, looking up at her with what could only be described as a mischievous look. "Mah? Mah-bah?"

"Mah-bah." Lorna agreed solemnly and gathered up the little redhead, giving her a kiss on the head. "And it's a time-honored and well-documented practice. Because then the only way to stop it is for the first party to agree that he is a dork."

"I am a dork. A big mopey dork." Nathan gave her a long, thoughtful look. "Amanda's looking at a job with Pete and Remy's new outfit, did I tell you that?" He shook his head a little. "She's going to have to overcome this issue of hers with secrets, if she's going to do that kind of work."

"Uh no you didn't," She lowered her face to Rachel's and babbled at her for a moment. Not at all because she was blushing at the mention of Remy's name. No, because that would be really really stupid. "Who's a precious baby?"

Nathan noted the blushing as Rachel babbled back at Lorna exuberantly, waving her little hands. "So, you two haven't sorted things out yet, I'm assuming?" He smiled a bit and went on before she could answer. "And no, I'm not talking about Amanda, so don't play coy."

"I'm going to pretend that I actually told you about Remy and that I'm not just really bad at hiding things." Lorna looked up, cheeks still faintly pink. "We're kind of...maybe...just a little...except not...seeing each other. Or talking about it. Or something. Oh god, pretend I'm not talking."

"If you don't mind a piece of unsolicited advice... well, actually I'm going to give it to you whether you want it or not," Nathan said a bit wryly, "so tough. But it's pretty simple. Talk to Moira." He made a small, self-deprecating gesture with one hand. "She has a certain amount of experience in understanding and helping with the transition Remy's still making."

"I...yeah, okay. Maybe I will." She made a face, "Sometimes...well, it doesn't really matter. I should get going though."

Rachel yelped and flung her arms around Lorna's neck, holding on with a surprisingly strong grip for a nine-month old. Nathan took one look at the two of them and then laughed. Loudly.

"I will never," he said, wheezing a little, "get over her sense of timing. It's positively preternatural. Come here, munchkin," he said, reaching out to detach her.

"WAAAAH!" Rachel immediately howled, which was echoed in the same moment telepathically. Her face turned bright red and she started to thrash in Nathan's arms. "WAAAAH! WAAAH!" A few small objects that hadn't been put in boxes yet abruptly went flying.

Lorna jumped when Rachel started wailing. "Okay, okay. I won't go. Geez. Calm down, precious. I'm not leaving." She frowned at Nathan. "You have a manipulative daughter."

"It's calling 'practicing'," Nathan said wryly. "I try not to think of for what. Because then that leads me to imagining her as a teenager and the spectacular battles of will that will ensure, and then I feel eighty instead of forty."

Lorna snuggled the little girl and cooed at her sweetly, "You're just going to be an utter terror, yes you are." She grinned at Nathan, "I should give you my dad's number. He was about your age when I was born. I'm sure he'll have a couple of tips on what to do about having a teenage daughter. Though, as a former teenage daughter myself, don't threaten the boyfriends with physical violence. It just makes us mad.'

"The good thing about me is that I don't need threats or weaponry to intimidate teenaged boys. It might yet save me," Nathan said somewhat sententiously.

Lorna laughed, "Well, best of luck." She made a face at Rachel, "Can I go now, monkey? Or are you going to scream again?"

Rachel seemed to contemplate the issue for a moment - and then gave Lorna a somewhat sloppy kiss on the cheek. Nathan chuckled and reached out to take her again. "New trick," he told Lorna. This time, Rachel didn't howl.

Baby slobber cut through foundation and blush like nothing else. She dabbed at her cheek, resigned. "It's a very good trick." Lorna got to her feet. "I'll see you later, Nathan. Tell Moira I said hello."

"Thanks for dinner, Lorna. And the talk." Nathan raised Rachel's hand to wave at Lorna, and the baby squealed in delight.