Tuesday afternoon, Lorna's Suite. Nathan, Rachel, Lorna

[x-polarisstar.livejournal.com]

He's an ex-super-agent of a secret military program trained in lethal arts. She's a pre-speech flying infant with designs on taking over the world through cute. Together, they Fight Crime! And attempt to cheer up Lorna. They're marginally successful at both.



"Bah-mah?"

"Stop wriggling," Nathan instructed his daughter severely. Rachel promptly 'pbbthed' at him and continued to squirm. Shaking his head, he let the tray of food float up into the air beside him and took a firmer grip on her. With both hands, this time. "You're high-maintenance," he informed her as they headed down the hallway towards Lorna's door. "And don't even look in the direction of that tray."

"Mwahahah..."

Lorna was trying to read. Well, not really trying to read but at least trying to pretend that she was doing more than staring blankly the same paragraph for full minutes at a time before turning the page just for the look of it. Who she was performing this little play for, she didn't know. Just that it was important to maintain the appearance of things because if she didn't...well, it was important.

She jumped about a foot when someone knocked on her door. "Come in?"

The door opened, the tray preceding Nathan in. "Oh, look, Ray. Aunt Lorna's pretending to read," Nathan said wisely, jiggling the suddenly giggling baby in his arms. "Let's save her the pretense and distract her, shall we?" He let go, and Rachel floated across the room, doing a lazy somersault in the air as she headed in Lorna's direction. The tray came to a gentle landing on the coffee table. "I brought lunch."

"I'm not hungry," Lorna said automatically as she reached up for the giggling redhead who settled in her arms and started blowing friendly raspberries at her. She blinked and edited her statement, "I mean, I just ate. And I wasn't pretending to read. This is a very interesting book on..." ...what the hell was it about? "horses." Probably.

"Uh-huh." Nathan looked mournfully at the tray as he sat down on the couch beside her. "I made it with my own two hands and you're going to let it go to waste? Okay, so it didn't actually take a lot of cooking.." He'd focused on stuff she could nibble on over the course of the afternoon, if she wanted

"And you're trying to guilt me. I may be Catholic but I'm also immune to my own tricks." She took a celery stick anyway, figuring it would be safe enough. "Tell him, baby. Tell your daddy that he can't guilt trip a master."

Rachel burbled at her and proceeded to snuggle like the evil, manipulative little thing that she was, occasionally reaching up and patting Lorna's hair with a slightly damp hand. "I'll save the guilt trip, then," Nathan said easily, watching the two of them. "And be all direct. You okay?"

Lorna smiled at Rachel. "I'm just fine, Nate. Don’t worry about me." She rubbed the baby's back, curling up around her, protectively. Though who exactly she was protecting was open for debate.

"People are always telling me not to worry about them. I think it's payback for all the times I went 'I'm fine!' when I was anything but. Karmic retribution for all the frustration I put Moira and far too many other people to count through..." He snagged a celery stalk himself. "I suppose that's fair."

"It's definitely fair," Lorna said, bouncing Rachel on her knee, making her squeal and giggle, "And in this case, it's also true. I'm fine." She'd only eaten about half the celery.

"I filed a report," Nathan said after a moment. "I mean, it was a
non-event, really..."

"I saw that. Probably not necessary but better to have it in the archive than not, right? It's not like anything happened. Everyone was nice and polite and getting away scot free." She was very suddenly extremely interested in the tiny snaps on Rachel's onesie.

She had turned avoidance into an art form, Nathan thought. Really. "It was in their interest to be polite," he pointed out. "Forge did a smart thing, bluffing like he did. And even if they hadn't bought the bluff... well, arrogant though I might be, we could have handled things fairly easily. If not quite discreetly."

It would have taken no effort at all to slit Toad's throat. "Of course."

He wondered what would happen if he shook her. Just... shook her, just a little. What kind of reaction he'd get. "Sucks, sometimes," he said casually. "Having a hand tied behind one's back in situations like that."

Lorna nodded and winced as Rachel grabbed a lock of her hair and dragged it down to her mouth, "No, sweetheart, that's not for chewing." She disentangled the thick coil from around the chubby baby wrist. "We're always having one hand behind our back. That's part of being the good guys."

"Doesn't make it any easier sometimes." Nathan smiled a bit at Rachel's disgruntled look. "I said in the report that I didn't get much from them, telepathically - nothing really useful, at least. But I did see that they weren't quite sure of what to make of all of this. Forge's book, I mean. Toad was a little more unsettled about it than Mystique, but both of them were... puzzled. I think," he said after a moment's pause, "that Forge has done something that could be really important. I mean, I've always thought that, or I wouldn't have encouraged him in the first place, but I don't know that I really appreciated the scope of it at the time."

"He's making himself a target. He's not like the rest of us; if they come after him, he can't protect himself." Lorna didn't look away from Rachel and her carefully formed smile never slipped as she played pat-a-cake with the baby, "Next time they come back they won't be puzzled. They'll be mad."

"I thought of that, while he was working on the book." He'd considered consequences from a number of angles, even going as far to talk to Charles about some of the concerns that had come up. "But we all deal with things in our own way. There were risks in doing this-" There couldn't not be, not when you were dealing with Magneto. "-but there's a lot of value in it, too. He thought it was worth it. I thought it was..." He trailed off for a moment, his expression a bit distant. "I thought it was remarkable."

"Well, it's certainly being remarked upon. It's not always good, being remarkable. I'm worried about him." Rachel wriggled in her lap and flung herself forward to give Lorna a sloppy open-mouthed kiss on the cheek, babbling at her. Lorna laughed and kissed her back with a loud smacking sound, making Rachel giggle. "Yes, baby. I know, Aunt Lorna's being mopey and defeatist. She learned it from your daddy."

"Oh, sure. Blame me. She was like that before we were ever training buddies, Ray, just to let you know." Nathan watched his daughter ignore him loftily and make another grab at Lorna's hair. Ray was a fan of green hair. Or hair in general. "I'm worried about him too," Nathan said after a moment. "But then, I've always been worried about him. He's too... useful." Nathan grimaced as if he'd bitten down on something particularly bad-tasting. "It's a slippery slope. Even with gifts that can be that positive."

"He's brilliant and young. Which means that he's periodically also deluded into thinking he's untouchable. And that it's only important to be good at the things he's good at." She moved her hair out of the way again. "Did you see that conversation he had with Marius in the journals the other day? After Terry told him to shut up? I didn't like Marius's attitude. Forge shouldn't be told to go invent. He does that anyway."

"I didn't like it either. But I'm not the person to be intervening with Marius," Nathan said, his tone somewhat dry. "I'm just not sure whether there's anything we can do to help Forge with that. Or whether it's something he's just going to have to learn for himself, with time."

"I wasn't around. I saw it later." She sighed, "And it seems wrong to scold a kid who has suffered like Marius while he's still in recovery. I don't really like interfering in the kid's politics anyway. My teachers never did unless it was really getting out of hand."

"I learned the hard way that jumping into situations like that right off the bat doesn't work," Nathan said, grimacing a bit as he remembered some of those learning experiences. "Leaves us with the central problem, though."

"I already screwed up with the whole keeping my mouth shut thing so far. I'm sure our newest student thinks I'm some kind of ogre." Lorna frowned, Crystal had never responded to her email. "And yes. How do you solve a problem like Forge? He's come a long way since he got here but that's hardly good enough."

"My inclination would be to say that he needs to do things that don't involve building things more often. Whatever the complications, the book was good for him. Exercised an entirely different set of mental muscles, you might say." He smiled again. "Then again, he isn't nearly as socially challenged as this is all implying that he is."

Lorna gave a half-laugh, "We are making it sound a little dire. No, he's not. And he's got plenty of experience behind him to show him that he's far from invincible." Rachel succeeded in seizing her necklace and ramming it in her mouth with a happy squeal. Lorna rolled her eyes, "Rachel, love, no." As she worked on opening slippery, drool covered baby fingers, Lorna mused out loud, "He kinda needs a pet. Or, you know, a girlfriend. ...wow, I really just said that, didn't I?"

"Yes. And I hate to tell you, but that officially makes you old," Nathan said a bit mischievously. Rachel squealed again.

"I'm more afraid that I'm going to get taken down by the Girl Cult for equating a pet to a girlfriend. Oh god. Rachel, honey, let go, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to offend the sisterhood!" Rachel yanked on the necklace again, laughing bubbling up. "Seriously though, Forge needs something that he can't engineer his way out of."

"Interesting thought," Nathan said, deftly detaching Rachel from the necklace. He eyed Lorna for a moment, somewhat amused by how completely she'd managed to change the subject. Ah, well. He was in therapy, he didn't have any business playing shrink.

Lorna passed Rachel back to him, making tsking noises at her, "Here, take back your brat before she tries to go after my hair again."

Rachel howled, then sat sullenly on Nathan's lap. Nathan was trying very hard not to laugh at her. "Aunt Lorna loves you, munchkin. You're just being something of a monster."

"She does," Lorna confirmed, "She just doesn't want to have to wash her hair yet again today." She looked down at the tray on the table then over to the clock on the wall. "I should see if Jamie needs any help with dinner. We've got a bunch of new diets to coordinate. Did you know that Eliane decided she was going to be a fruititarian? I give her a week."

Well, maybe she hadn't eaten, but at least she was leaving the room. Small victories, Nathan thought, then stood, bouncing Rachel gently in his arms. She squeaked at him and them made a mad grab for his nose. "Speaking of dinner, someone needs hers. I promised her a banana."

"Bamamamama..."

"Just so long as it isn't one that fell from the tree of its own volition. We're saving those for Eliane."