Angelo and Nathan, Wednesday evening

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Angelo spots Nathan heading up to a certain gravestone and follows. Things that have been danced around for a while now are finally said, but yet again, there's no resolution in sight.



It was past time for dinner, but Angelo was only now realizing how hungry he was. Deciding to do something about it, he stepped out of the boathouse... and froze, seeing Nathan heading up the hill towards where Foley and Morgan's gravestone was. The only sensible thing to do was really to follow.

Nathan, still moving stiffly, didn't notice him following. The time down at Harry's hadn't been bad - Logan was very good at pool, and contrary to popular belief, Nathan didn't always cheat; it had been a good two games - but he didn't feel relaxed as much as tired.

He lowered himself to the ground beside the gravestone. The grass around it was scrupulously well-tended, and Nathan reached out and brushed a leaf off the stone itself. Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by...

"I'm only supposed to mope on anniversaries," he muttered.

Nathan hadn't noticed him. Since when did Nathan ever not notice things like that, except when there was something really wrong? He was in earshot, even, close enough to catch the muttered comment, and still unnoticed. So he glanced down to look for a suitable stick, and trod on it quite deliberately.

Nathan twitched - quite violently - looking back over his shoulder and then wincing, rubbing at the back of his neck. "You're stalking me," he said, wondering how Angelo had spent the afternoon. He hadn't, in the end, gone back to the office to get work done - he'd immured himself in the library, looking up a few things. Hiding behind the computer. The place had been all but empty, because of the lack of classes, and he'd needed the quiet badly.

"Stalkers make some kind of effort not t'be seen," he observed, with a slight not-really-amused smile. "I wasn't."

"All right. Not stalking me. But now you're being a smartass." There was no edge to Nathan's voice, whether angry or amused. He looked back down at the gravestone. "You should go. I don't think the ghosts like showing up in mixed company." That had been meant to sound like a joke, and didn't quite manage it.

Angelo eyed him, disturbed by the flatness of his voice. "Don't think I'll be goin' anywhere just yet. The ghosts can deal."

"... I'm fine, Angelo. Just a bad day." The stone was cool, barely warmed by the sun. "Amusing that I'm still having bad days after fifteen months, but Jack would say something about that being how the mind works, occasionally."

"Then it won't hurt for me to stick around a while, will it?"

"You probably have better things to be doing with your time than playing Minderboy." Elbow braced on his knee, Nathan tilted his head, resting it in his hand for a moment. "I still miss them," he said very softly.

"Better things?" Angelo asked deliberately casually, dropping to the grass in the sun. "Nah. An'... of course you do."

"I have this whole list of people I've loved who've died in front of me. It's stupidly long, really. Hardly seems real at times." Nathan removed something else from the stone, a tiny petal of something that had probably been carried on the wind. "I suppose this makes me selfish, but while I've been thinking about what you said on the weekend and talking to Jack about it, that was one of the things that occurred to me. That probably there'd be less of that, if I hung up the leathers. Then again," Nathan said, "I'm not sure I mourn the dead I didn't see die much less."

Angelo considered this and finally asked, carefully, "When you talk about mournin' the dead, d'you mean just the ones you knew, or... everybody you're out there helpin', when you put the leathers on?"

"What do I do, if I 'retire' and the team started... bringing back children in bodybags?" It was the first thing that leapt to mind. There had been so many children in bodybags, these last couple of years. "Or each other? How do I live with myself, knowing that I could have helped, but I didn't because I'd come to some... selfish decision that enough was enough? I know," Nathan said restlessly before Angelo could answer. "It wouldn't be selfish. It would be for Moira and Rachel, and I'd never, ever want to leave them."

Angelo looked at him steadily. "Sometimes, Nathan, you have to put yourself first. Or put them first, if that's how you want to look at it. But if it came down to a stranger in a bodybag, even a kid, or you comin' back in one... I know what I'd choose." He wasn't touching the part about one of the others on the team, yet. Too much, too soon.

"What makes my life worth more than a stranger's?" Nathan asked. "No... what makes a stranger's life, or several strangers' lives, worth less than the possibility that I might get hurt trying to help them?" He looked back down at the stone. "You have no idea how many times I've wondered if I did the right thing that day. In that hallway. Fighting to incapacitate, even when we knew damned well they weren't going to be incapacitated..." This was more than Angelo knew. It was more than he'd ever been told, but Nathan went on, almost angrily. "I don't know where I found the room for moral equivalency in the middle of hell, Angelo. Why I decided that one life wasn't worth more than another, whether it was someone fighting beside me or a brainwashed automaton trying to kill me. I can't figure it out, and part of me keeps thinking that it wouldn't have been such a horrible thing. If there'd been a few less vegetables in that hospital in Washington, in return for my friends not being dead!" Nathan jerked backwards away from the gravestone, disgusted with himself for actually saying that aloud.

Angelo just stared at him, lost for words for a minute or two. Eventually, he managed, "I'm not ever gonna tell you you were wrong for not wantin' to kill even to save your friends, Nate. An' I don't think they," with a wave at the gravestone, "would've said so either. As for what makes your life worth more than a stranger's... probably nothin', to someone that doesn't know you any better than the other person. But I was talkin' about to me, an' I don't even know where to start answerin'."

Nathan looked away, back down at the gravestone, blinking rapidly. "I don't know what makes one life worth more than another," he muttered, more faintly. "I'm not sorry I lived. I don't feel guilty anymore - I can't look at Rachel and wish I was in their place. But it's like... I got to have this, Angelo. I got to walk away... eventually, and have the family and the friends and the life they'll never have. What... business do I have," he burst out suddenly, "just letting go of any way I have to keep things like this from happening again?"

"Because," Angelo almost-snapped back, "you do have this. If you didn't have Rachel, I'd say, fine, go out there, do whatever you feel like you have to do. But she should be your business now, her an' the ways you have to change things without so much risk of gettin' yourself hurt. I never met Morgan, but I did meet Foley an' GW, an' the one thing I'm damn sure of is that neither of them'd want you to lose what you've got because you feel like walkin' away is somehow doin' them wrong." He was standing, by now, almost ashamed of what he was saying, but... he couldn't not, now he'd started.

Nathan's pulse was thundering in his ears, and he got up, his jaw trembling. "I walked away and did them wrong for eight years," he said, and his throat was so tight it was almost impossible to force the words out. "Eight years. I had my chance to be selfish and I took it."

"That was then," Angelo said quietly. "This is now. An' you've done more than most people'd ask of you, when you took down Mistra."

"Mistra," Nathan said, "was a drop in the bucket. Mistra was one group, Angelo. They weren't the devil. We didn't see everything that was wrong in our world as mutants die with them."

"I know we didn't. I was talkin' about avengin' your friends. An' it's not like you'd be forgettin' all about the world's mutant problems if you left the team." And there, it was said. "That's what Elpis is for, isn't it?"

Nathan rubbed at his eyes. "I know why you're saying this," he said tiredly. "I understand. I do. Jack didn't let me out of his office on Monday until he was sure that I did."

"So tell me what you understand." His voice was flat - not angry, not a challenge. He just wanted to be sure they were really coming from the same place.

"You don't just see the value in what we're doing - you believe in it." Nathan gave a slightly cracked laugh. "I helped turn you into a believer. You look at Elpis and you think I can make just as much of a difference applying my father's money in a suitably creative fashion - you might even be right."

"...I guess you did, at that," Angelo admitted with a crooked grin. "Call it my own version of the Dream. But... are you tellin' me you're not?"

"It comes right back to what we were talking about the last time we argued about this." Nathan rubbed at his temples this time, his shoulders drooping. He was so sore. Everything hurt, and he wasn't looking forward to sleeping tonight, not when he knew he could probably expect the nightmares again. "I believe we can. I know we can. But I know I can make another kind of difference with the team, too."

Angelo slumped back onto the grass, looking abruptly somewhat lost. "An' what if the day comes when you go out to make that kind of difference an' you don't come back? What am I supposed to do then?" Without you to show the way?

Nathan knelt back down, trying not to wince. "I could show you," he said. "What happened fifteen months ago - what I came back from. But I don't know, maybe that would just make it worse." He ran an unsteady hand through his hair. "I wish I could make you understand how much it would take it keep me from coming back."

"You've survived so far," Angelo said quietly. "But you said it yourself - you could be hit by a bus or the virus could get you tomorrow - an' trust me, that's not somethin' I want to think about. So why take even more risks?"

They were going around and around and around. "Why do you think Moira's never asked me to stop?" Nathan asked after a moment. "She hasn't. And I'd know, if she wanted to and didn't."

"I don't know," Angelo answered quietly, head down, no fight in his voice now. Nothing but the nineteen-year-old, scared of something he wasn't completely voicing.

"I don't know either." Nathan laughed suddenly, tiredly, and there was a strange sort of desperation in the sound as he rubbed at his eyes again. "I can't... I need you to have faith in me. Because I need to do this. We can go around and around and it keeps coming back to that."

"I always have faith in you," Angelo said fiercely, head snapping up. "I wouldn't still be here if I didn't. But if anythin' happens to you..."

"I'm going to do everything I can, every time I go out, to come back safely." Nathan tried to smile, but didn't quite manage it. "And I can do a lot, Angelo."

Angelo's returning smile was painfully forced. "Guess I'll just keep waitin' for you to come back when you do go out, then."

Nathan's head dropped, and he sucked in a shaky breath, covering his face with his hands for a moment. The argument had drained what little remained of his ability to put a good face on the day, and he was exhausted. "I can't just sit and wait. I can't be helpless like that." I won't ever be helpless again.

"An' I won't go out there an' fight," Angelo said almost to himself. "Not the way the team does. So I guess..."

Someone has to sit and wait. Might as well be me.