xp_logs | Nathan and Jean, Thursday morning

After returning from Nicaragua late the night before, Nathan finally stops in to see Jean. He brings coffee and an additional perspective.

He'd deliberately picked a time he knew that Scott was busy elsewhere; Nathan didn't think that the younger man would actually try and stop him from seeing Jean, but he'd noticed a certain protectiveness that he didn't really want to try and test. Knocking lightly on the door of the suite (and keeping his mind where it belonged), Nathan waited.

Jean, unsurprisingly, still had her good days and her bad days. Or maybe it was her not-so-bad days and her dreadful days. Either way, today wasn't on the bad side. The knock on the door still made her pause a little bit. Shaking her head at herself she called out, "Coming," as she headed to open the door.

Nathan tilted his head as she opened the door. "Hi, Jean." He raised the little bag he was carrying, giving it a suggestive shake. "I brought you coffee," he went on, with a crooked smile. "From Nicaragua."

"Hi," she said, tilting her head at him. "Come in, come in. I hear you've bought a church."

"Nice big church," Nathan said, stepping into the suite and eyeing it for a moment. Still not much in the way of personal touches; he had to wonder if Scott had told her yet what had happened to their old suite. "Should work quite well as a shelter and training facility. The coffee's a thank you gift, actually," he said, going over and setting it on the small island that separated the kitchenette from the rest of the living room. "For teaching me how to talk to politicians. I actually listened to one threaten the kids we're trying to help with death squads and didn't leave him whimpering on the floor."

Jean blinked, then raised an eyebrow. "Clearly I taught you too well. What possible excuse could the bastard have had for doing something like that? And do you want some coffee now?"

"Natural viciousness, I think. He was a bigot. Fortunately, another member of the Managuan council is a telepath, and a pretty level-headed and civic-minded one. She assures me she'll keep an eye on him, and liase with the shelter staff to make sure they know if he decides to change his mind and order a raid." Nathan shook his head, trying to shake off the glum mood. "Yes," he said, forcing a smile. "I would like a coffee. I'm a bit scrambled still from the trip."

"Take a seat, then," Jean said, accpeting the bag of beans and heading into the kitchen. It took only a few seconds to grind them and start the drip into a waiting cup. "When did you get back?"

"Very late last night. I'm surprised we actually got everything done that we wanted to do, but Rahne and Angelo are highly efficient. I need to pay them more," Nathan said, slouching in one of the chairs at the table. "I knew Angelo was taking to the work, but it's a delight to see how fast Rahne's doing the same."

"I'm not surprised," Jean said over her shoulder, swapping cups under the drip. "She's an incredibly bright girl and a hard worker. Always did wonderfully in the medlab."

"She's a keeper," Nathan said lightly. "I ascribe it to all of these strong female role models she has around here..."

Jean smiled wryly then, setting the coffee pot in place, came back out into the living room. "Your coffee," she said, handing a cup to Nate before taking a seat.

Nathan took it with a quick, faint smile, and then studied her for a moment as he took a sip. She looked... tired, he thought. Tired, and pale in the 'really haven't seen enough sun lately' sort of way, although he knew she wasn't quite immuring herself in the suite at this point.

"How are you doing?" he asked, his voice light, undemanding.

She shruged slightly. "Better," she said. "Although I'm not sure how much that means."

"It's not worse," was Nathan's reply. "That's something." He took another sip of his coffee, still watching her. "I would have come to see you sooner," he said, lightly again, "but your husband's been giving anyone mentioning wanting to see you the evil eye. I think he might be a little overprotective."

There was something infinitely right about hearing Scott referred to as her husband. A tiny sign that things could be ok. "Yes," Jean said, "I had noticed that people tended to come when he's not around. Which, I admit, I started by posting inviting them to do so."

"I'll say what I said when I initially responded to that post," Nathan said. "I don't need an explanation, and I don't have anything I particularly want to hold you to account for. I just..." He smiled again, a slight, strangely sad smile. "I meant it. I've missed you. And if there's anything I can do... babble at you about Rachel's latest trick, or just listen while you talk, I want to do it."

Jean turned her head, gazing out the window for a moment, and when she finally spoke she didn't turn back to look at him. "How odd is it, a telepath being afraid of other telepaths? Probably not that strange, I guess. But there was a reason I never sought you out, I avoided Charles. Hell, I wouldn't even have picked to talk to Betsy but I just ran into her."

Nathan gave her a long, patient look. "How odd is it? Jean, remember, you're talking to the man who loathed and despised and feared his own kind for years. For different reasons than you had... but I do understand, at least a little." His expression went distant. "What it's like, hating people in your head, even if you're the one bringing them there..."

"I..." Jean paused, biting her lip. "I don't know if I hate her. She hated me. I hate what she did. But... She was the part of me that had all the hate. All the anger. All the fear. How can I hate her when I'm the one who made her?" Finally she looked back at Nate.

Nathan's smile was somewhat mirthless. "If you don't, you don't. These things don't have to make sense, Jean... if there's anything two years of therapy have taught me, it's that the human mind doesn't. Even, or maybe especially minds like ours."

Jean's look was somewhat wry. "Wait, you mean there's something strange and non-sensical about creating a second personality to take on all of your negative emotions after nearly dying in an attempt to hold back an entire dam's worth of water by yourself? No, really?"

His smile turned crooked again. "You know what I mean. But yeah, I know it sounds like a platitude. Doesn't make it any less true, though, unfortunately." Nathan peered at the coffee. "This is good. I pick good beans."

"Sorry," Jean said, blushing slightly. "As a side effect of the reintegration, I seem to have rediscovered my inner sarcastic bitch." She took a small sip of the coffee. "And yes, you do."

"Did I ever tell you about how I talked to myself several times in the infirmary, after Youra? Literally, I was manifesting a part of my consciousness like I used to manifest the Askani. None of you ever caught me at it," he said with a slightly sheepish look, "but he kept coming back. Harassing me. He was something of a bastard."

"Then that, I'd say, we have in common. No, you never told me. Why were you manifesting him?"

"I wasn't sure I wanted to continue with the team, after what happened," Nathan said after a moment. "So much of everything I'd been... so many of the people who'd made me that person died that day. I felt like the whole world had come crashing down, and I didn't know what pieces I wanted to put back together and what I wanted to let go."

Jean nodded. "Seems a perfectly reasonable thing to be considering, yeah. Which side of the argument were you on and which was he?"

"I wasn't sure. Whether I was even going to walk again, let alone put on leathers. He kept pushing me to think of all the good I could do, now that I was... free." Nathan shrugged a bit. "So a beneficient bastard, in a way. But damn, was he ever annoying. Taunted me constantly. There were times I could have throttled him cheerfully -and he probably would have cheered, because one of the problems he seemed to have was with how passive I was being."

"Ah," Jean said. "Yes, that I remember. You had us worried about that, you know. It's one of those fairly standard axioms of medicine that a patient won't get better if they don't want to."

"You can thank him for prodding me out of that lovely little fugue state," Nathan said. "He's back to... being a part of me, too," he went on, more vaguely. "I don't quite know how to describe it. But I had pretty bad disassociation from way back. That was part of the conditioning, you know. The disassociated personality that they turned into the battle computer."

"I've decided I'm not a fan of disassociation. At all. At least not where it applies to me. Although... it's very strange, in someways, having all of the shit I gave Jane back. I yelled at Scott. I don't think I've ever yelled at Scott, except when I was crazy."

Nathan's eyebrow quirked. "Never yelled? Okay, that's unhealthy. Moira and I used to shriek every second conversation at each other for about the first five years or so..."

Jean shrugged. "Different people are different. I don't... I don't like getting upset. I don't think I could be in a relationship that made me upset. Enough other things in my life always did."

"True. Moira and I... our yelling was as much a defensive mechanism as anything else, I suppose. So that we didn't have to deal with what we actually felt for each other." Nathan tilted his head at her again. "So you yelled at him. Are the two of you okay?"

She nodded. "He was being a dumbass, which he finally admitted around the time I apologized for being a bitch. He's been under a lot of stress, and just giving himself more."

"He's the best field leader I've ever seen. Light-years better than I ever was - but he's going to burn out before he turns thirty if he keeps it up," Nathan said with a sigh. "It's not like I have huge amounts of free time, but I was considering volunteering to take on some extra training duties. That, I have more experience with than just about anyone here, and it might free up some time for Scott and Ororo to do things like get eight hours of sleep and the like."

"He needs to delegate more," Jean agreed. "Especially with Ali and Haroun gone. A third of the command team left, but not a third of the work."

"We'll get it all sorted out," Nathan said, as encouragingly as he could. "A fix this time, not just stopgap measures." He smiled playfully. "I'm feeling all proactive. Can you tell?"

"Proactive is good. I'm in favor proactive. Particularly proactive that helps me keep him from working himself into the grave."

"I think what we all need is a good, straightforward mission," Nathan said. "One of those happy successes with no lingering consequences. Too bad we can't order them up like a pizza."

"Maybe we could order pizza and have that be the mission," Jean joked. "Figuring out who wants what toppings, and how much we have to tip the delivery boy, and then saving the delivery boy from the descending horde of teenagers..."

"Hard on the delivery boy," Nathan said with a twinkle in his eye. "Then again, he'd be all grateful, once we rescued him. Maybe he'd start bringing us pizza for free."

"Hey, when is delivering to this place ever not hard? This is just adding an extra level of odditiy. And if it gets us free pizza, I think we need to try."

Nathan laughed aloud, his expression fond as he gazed at her. He had missed her. He wasn't dumb enough to think a little witty banter meant that things were all right, but it was still good to hear. "You feel up to maybe playing with a baby, sometime before too long?" he asked. "I can shield her, if you want, so that she doesn't go poking anywhere she's not invited, but she has missed you."

"I've missed her, too. All of you, really. I'd love to see her. But..." Jean hesitated. "It might be better if you shield her, yes. She wouldn't make it through my shields," which were still wrapped around Jean like steel, "but running into them might... upset her."

"You should come down to the boathouse sometime," Nathan invited. "See her, and the new office. You won't recognize the place."

"I can imagine. It wasn't exactly office material before..."

"My new secretary took the place in hand. It's too bad she's a fluttery nitwit," Nathan said cheerfully, then grinned at Jean's raised eybrow. "What? I hate people who flutter."