Nathan and Lorna, Tuesday morning
Aug. 8th, 2006 11:16 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsLorna and Nathan run into each other in the library, and she makes it clear that she wasn't precisely done with the conversation she and Nathan were having over email last night. Nathan proceeds to demonstrate that he is still very much a novice telepath, even when his telepathy isn't actually working.
Occasionally his language skills let him down almost entirely. Today was one of those days, and Nathan was grumbling softly under his breath as he headed in the direction of the library and its Hausa dictionary. African languages were not his strong suit, and had never been. But he was going to decipher this report one way or the other. He was.
Lorna hadn't precisely known that Nathan was going to be headed to the library this morning but it was always a pretty fair bet and she didn't really have much else to do. She'd selected a novel at random from the pile of 'reading these will make you a better person' novels and was sitting with her back to the door in one of the armchairs. Her smile was somewhat sadistic but for some reason that didn't bother her at all. Maybe it was just that she wasn't having a very good summer.
Oh, swell, Nathan thought, spotting the familiar green hair. He went over to the foreign language shelves and pulled down the dictionary he was after, and after a moment yanked the grammar as well, tucking both books awkwardly between his sling and his body along with the report, before he headed back over and sat down at one of the tables.
The smile was gone by the time Lorna turned around as though just checking to see who had come in. She even managed to fake surprise fairly well as she bounded up out of her chair, "Nathan, fancy seeing you here. Aren't you usually down in your office about now harassing your secretary?"
Nathan raised an eyebrow, then waved the dictionary at her before he set it down and opened it. "Translating something," he said curtly.
"Oh good, so your migraine is gone then?" She dropped into the seat across from him, sitting sideways with her hand hooked over the chair back. "I see your attitude hasn't improved though."
"And I see you're still in a sadistic mood this morning. What," Nathan inquired lightly, "did my TK fit last night deprive you of the opportunity to hammer your point into the ground?"
"Sadistic? Because I'm tired of hearing how awful your life is? Yeah, I'm a cold hearted witch of a woman. Okay, fine." Lorna rolled her eyes and pulled a pitying face, "Poor, poor Nathan. How tough it must be to be you. You're so wrongly used and harshly treated and it's just a tragedy how no one ever acknowledges the suffering that you go through."
"You know, I might be squirming with guilt or shame like a gradeschooler who got caught drawing dirty pictures on the wall of the school, because that tone of yours really is damned effective... except," Nathan went on, "you decided to get in touch with your telepath-related trauma at my expense last night. And so," he concluded, his voice almost conversational, "I may be a whining ass, but you were doing your very best impression of an insensitive bitch."
"Well, she lived in my head for three months so I had plenty of time to study. But if you'll recall, I wasn't ever too keen on telepaths in my head anyway. And you know what? That's why there are ethics about things like that." Her tone was flippant but her eyes were flatly serious. "Telepaths, ethical telepaths, don't go poking around in other people's headspace. Particularly just to satisfy their curiosity or because they suck at reading people any other way."
"And again, we hear from the arbitrer of telepathic morality. If you care, or will bother to actually listen... I don't go poking into other people's heads unless I have a damned good compelling reason," Nathan said. "Or I didn't. I listened, Lorna. I matched stray thoughts with expression and body language, because that is the only way I really knew how to use my telepathy before I met Charles. My own personal early warning system. Because actually scanning? Still feels even under the best of circumstances like a violation to me." His expression was cold as he looked up at her. "Should I grovel, for the flippant comment? Beg your forgiveness for not watching what I say about my more than moderately obscene mutation?"
"If I believed it was just a flippant comment, I wouldn't have called you on it," Lorna said shortly.
"You didn't listen to what I just said - or it makes no difference. I figured as much." Nathan opened the report in front of him, but stared blindly down at it for a moment, clearly not processing the words in front of him in the slightest. "I spent," he said, "twenty-five years of my life hating what I was. Wishing I could reach in and burn out the part of my brain that made me a telepath - which is really kind of ironic, in retrospect. And all because every telepath I met, until I met Charles, was the kind that liked to carve into the brains of children."
He looked back up at Lorna. "Maybe I should be glad," he said, the line of his jaw tight and bitter, "that I wound up with an aversion to using it actively for that long. Given my ethical models, I could have done some real damage. But I had two years of instruction from Charles, two years of instruction in how telepathy should be used. I haven't mastered it. I probably won't master it in ten years... always assuming that it comes back properly. He told me once that being a telepath meant facing ethical challenges every day, and that I would slip. That it was inevitable. But that what mattered was what I did afterwards, whether I learned from it and made sure I didn't make the same mistake again. And then he told me," Nathan said, his voice still low but almost savage, "that he believed I could do it. Minimize the slips, and learn."
"You can." There was no hesitation there, no pandering. Lorna simply agreed without so much as batting an eyelash. "We all face ethical challenges every day, Nathan. That's the nature of being human. But turning a blind eye to it just because it's uncomfortable or hard or just a tiny slip? That's part of the mistake."
"So I'll ask you again. What do you want? Me groveling? Writing a ten page essay on why my comment last night was a violation of telepathic ethics in and of itself, despite the lack of, oh, any actual telepathy use?" Nathan stared down at the dictionary for a moment, then slammed it shut, the noise echoing in the quiet library. "Maybe we can skip the essay. Fine. Even the suggestion of doing that was wholly and completely inappropriate. You're right, you were right to rub my nose in it, and you were possibly even right to rub my nose in the fact that I'm benched. It adds a nice personal sting that should remind me to triple-check any thought I have about telepathy before I air it anywhere in your vicinity."
"How about just admit that it's wrong? You haven't actually done that yet. You've told me all the reasons why I'm misinterpreting it and blowing it out of proportion but you haven't yet admitted that wanting to check Julio's mental state to see if he was really pleased wasn't cool." Lorna shook her head and reached over to adjust her sling. "Let's not even get into the benched and not topic. You're the one who tried to pull the team into this."
"... I'm talking to a brick wall, aren't I? Or what, didn't I sound sincere enough for you?" Nathan said bitterly. "Fine. I was wrong."
Lorna shrugged her good shoulder and stood, "Here's the thing. If you're not sorry, don't say it. There's not any point. I can bitch at you until I lose my voice and it doesn't make any kind of difference. I'll see you later, Nathan. I have things to do."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Believe me," Nathan said with a sudden, weak laugh before she could leave. His jaw clenched. "And no, not because you're bitching at me. Something else Charles told me once was that we can gauge our use of telepathy by how the people around us see it."
Lorna looked back at him, her expression softer than it had been, "I'm not a very good mirror, I'm sure. Ask someone else. See what they think."
"If you're not a good mirror, then I sure as hell shouldn't be trying to make my own choices about telepathic ethics, either. If certain unfortunate experiences mean that we can't manage clarity of thought, I'm extremely screwed." There was a little wrench of misery to his voice on that, but it steadied as he went on. "I say that I was afraid of my telepathy, but that's not true. I still am, underneath all of it. I may not throw up or pass out when I try to use it actively anymore, but the fear's still there. But there's something else there, too... Charles showed me you could use it to help people, too. And what the fuck do I do if I can't tell what's help and what's unwarranted intervention? If I can't draw that line, then playing God is lurking down the way, and I'm no better than any of the telepaths at Mistra. They thought that what they were doing was for the greater good, too."
He laughed again, more shakily, and looked down at his report. "And I'm addicted to the idea that I can help, you know. That I can actually do good with it. It makes the part of me that still looks at myself and sees something obscene get very, very quiet. But maybe that's a bad thing, because maybe that makes me more likely to cross the line if I think it's for a good reason. I don't know. And I don't even know if it matters anymore, because right now, I can't even touch my daughter's mind when I put her to bed."
"You're starting to sound self-pitying again, old man," Lorna said but not harshly. "Go play with your daughter. Look at her and tell me that she sees anything at all wrong with you. The report can wait."
"She can't figure it out, you know... she looks at me with this quizzical little face when I don't project patterns at her, for her exercises. And I think she keeps throwing Mr. Bunny at me because she keeps expecting me to catch him." But he was getting up even as he said it, collecting the report, and, after a moment, the dictionary and grammar. Shan would let him take them down to the boathouse. "I don't know what I want anymore, when it comes to this," he said more faintly, moving around the table. His face was taking on the pinched look that Angelo would have diagnosed as 'incoming headache'. "I just don't. I wish this had happened because of the tsunami. It would have made everything so much easier. I'm good with costs and benefits. I can handle that."
Lorna shook her head, "You're kinda hopeless, Nathan, you know that?" She quirked an eyebrow at him, tucked her book into her sling then reached over the table to give him a quick ruffle of his hair. "Stop fussing over why and how and whatever. Daughter, play. Happy."
"She can still touch my mind, at least. And she does," Nathan muttered, utterly confused by the affectionate gesture. And if he said that, she'd just probably give him more of a hard time about not being able to read people without the telepathy. Best to keep his mouth shut. He repeated Lorna's own move of tucking books and papers into his sling, then rose. "I'm still mad at you," he said somewhat feebly. "You made me break my violet." Although this morning he was wondering if he'd thrown it by hand and not realized it. There certainly hadn't been a flicker of telekinesis since. "Ororo's never going to let me live it down."
"I'll get her really, really drunk tomorrow and make sure she forgets all about it. You can buy her a rose bush to make up for it too." She gave him a wave. "Later."
Occasionally his language skills let him down almost entirely. Today was one of those days, and Nathan was grumbling softly under his breath as he headed in the direction of the library and its Hausa dictionary. African languages were not his strong suit, and had never been. But he was going to decipher this report one way or the other. He was.
Lorna hadn't precisely known that Nathan was going to be headed to the library this morning but it was always a pretty fair bet and she didn't really have much else to do. She'd selected a novel at random from the pile of 'reading these will make you a better person' novels and was sitting with her back to the door in one of the armchairs. Her smile was somewhat sadistic but for some reason that didn't bother her at all. Maybe it was just that she wasn't having a very good summer.
Oh, swell, Nathan thought, spotting the familiar green hair. He went over to the foreign language shelves and pulled down the dictionary he was after, and after a moment yanked the grammar as well, tucking both books awkwardly between his sling and his body along with the report, before he headed back over and sat down at one of the tables.
The smile was gone by the time Lorna turned around as though just checking to see who had come in. She even managed to fake surprise fairly well as she bounded up out of her chair, "Nathan, fancy seeing you here. Aren't you usually down in your office about now harassing your secretary?"
Nathan raised an eyebrow, then waved the dictionary at her before he set it down and opened it. "Translating something," he said curtly.
"Oh good, so your migraine is gone then?" She dropped into the seat across from him, sitting sideways with her hand hooked over the chair back. "I see your attitude hasn't improved though."
"And I see you're still in a sadistic mood this morning. What," Nathan inquired lightly, "did my TK fit last night deprive you of the opportunity to hammer your point into the ground?"
"Sadistic? Because I'm tired of hearing how awful your life is? Yeah, I'm a cold hearted witch of a woman. Okay, fine." Lorna rolled her eyes and pulled a pitying face, "Poor, poor Nathan. How tough it must be to be you. You're so wrongly used and harshly treated and it's just a tragedy how no one ever acknowledges the suffering that you go through."
"You know, I might be squirming with guilt or shame like a gradeschooler who got caught drawing dirty pictures on the wall of the school, because that tone of yours really is damned effective... except," Nathan went on, "you decided to get in touch with your telepath-related trauma at my expense last night. And so," he concluded, his voice almost conversational, "I may be a whining ass, but you were doing your very best impression of an insensitive bitch."
"Well, she lived in my head for three months so I had plenty of time to study. But if you'll recall, I wasn't ever too keen on telepaths in my head anyway. And you know what? That's why there are ethics about things like that." Her tone was flippant but her eyes were flatly serious. "Telepaths, ethical telepaths, don't go poking around in other people's headspace. Particularly just to satisfy their curiosity or because they suck at reading people any other way."
"And again, we hear from the arbitrer of telepathic morality. If you care, or will bother to actually listen... I don't go poking into other people's heads unless I have a damned good compelling reason," Nathan said. "Or I didn't. I listened, Lorna. I matched stray thoughts with expression and body language, because that is the only way I really knew how to use my telepathy before I met Charles. My own personal early warning system. Because actually scanning? Still feels even under the best of circumstances like a violation to me." His expression was cold as he looked up at her. "Should I grovel, for the flippant comment? Beg your forgiveness for not watching what I say about my more than moderately obscene mutation?"
"If I believed it was just a flippant comment, I wouldn't have called you on it," Lorna said shortly.
"You didn't listen to what I just said - or it makes no difference. I figured as much." Nathan opened the report in front of him, but stared blindly down at it for a moment, clearly not processing the words in front of him in the slightest. "I spent," he said, "twenty-five years of my life hating what I was. Wishing I could reach in and burn out the part of my brain that made me a telepath - which is really kind of ironic, in retrospect. And all because every telepath I met, until I met Charles, was the kind that liked to carve into the brains of children."
He looked back up at Lorna. "Maybe I should be glad," he said, the line of his jaw tight and bitter, "that I wound up with an aversion to using it actively for that long. Given my ethical models, I could have done some real damage. But I had two years of instruction from Charles, two years of instruction in how telepathy should be used. I haven't mastered it. I probably won't master it in ten years... always assuming that it comes back properly. He told me once that being a telepath meant facing ethical challenges every day, and that I would slip. That it was inevitable. But that what mattered was what I did afterwards, whether I learned from it and made sure I didn't make the same mistake again. And then he told me," Nathan said, his voice still low but almost savage, "that he believed I could do it. Minimize the slips, and learn."
"You can." There was no hesitation there, no pandering. Lorna simply agreed without so much as batting an eyelash. "We all face ethical challenges every day, Nathan. That's the nature of being human. But turning a blind eye to it just because it's uncomfortable or hard or just a tiny slip? That's part of the mistake."
"So I'll ask you again. What do you want? Me groveling? Writing a ten page essay on why my comment last night was a violation of telepathic ethics in and of itself, despite the lack of, oh, any actual telepathy use?" Nathan stared down at the dictionary for a moment, then slammed it shut, the noise echoing in the quiet library. "Maybe we can skip the essay. Fine. Even the suggestion of doing that was wholly and completely inappropriate. You're right, you were right to rub my nose in it, and you were possibly even right to rub my nose in the fact that I'm benched. It adds a nice personal sting that should remind me to triple-check any thought I have about telepathy before I air it anywhere in your vicinity."
"How about just admit that it's wrong? You haven't actually done that yet. You've told me all the reasons why I'm misinterpreting it and blowing it out of proportion but you haven't yet admitted that wanting to check Julio's mental state to see if he was really pleased wasn't cool." Lorna shook her head and reached over to adjust her sling. "Let's not even get into the benched and not topic. You're the one who tried to pull the team into this."
"... I'm talking to a brick wall, aren't I? Or what, didn't I sound sincere enough for you?" Nathan said bitterly. "Fine. I was wrong."
Lorna shrugged her good shoulder and stood, "Here's the thing. If you're not sorry, don't say it. There's not any point. I can bitch at you until I lose my voice and it doesn't make any kind of difference. I'll see you later, Nathan. I have things to do."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Believe me," Nathan said with a sudden, weak laugh before she could leave. His jaw clenched. "And no, not because you're bitching at me. Something else Charles told me once was that we can gauge our use of telepathy by how the people around us see it."
Lorna looked back at him, her expression softer than it had been, "I'm not a very good mirror, I'm sure. Ask someone else. See what they think."
"If you're not a good mirror, then I sure as hell shouldn't be trying to make my own choices about telepathic ethics, either. If certain unfortunate experiences mean that we can't manage clarity of thought, I'm extremely screwed." There was a little wrench of misery to his voice on that, but it steadied as he went on. "I say that I was afraid of my telepathy, but that's not true. I still am, underneath all of it. I may not throw up or pass out when I try to use it actively anymore, but the fear's still there. But there's something else there, too... Charles showed me you could use it to help people, too. And what the fuck do I do if I can't tell what's help and what's unwarranted intervention? If I can't draw that line, then playing God is lurking down the way, and I'm no better than any of the telepaths at Mistra. They thought that what they were doing was for the greater good, too."
He laughed again, more shakily, and looked down at his report. "And I'm addicted to the idea that I can help, you know. That I can actually do good with it. It makes the part of me that still looks at myself and sees something obscene get very, very quiet. But maybe that's a bad thing, because maybe that makes me more likely to cross the line if I think it's for a good reason. I don't know. And I don't even know if it matters anymore, because right now, I can't even touch my daughter's mind when I put her to bed."
"You're starting to sound self-pitying again, old man," Lorna said but not harshly. "Go play with your daughter. Look at her and tell me that she sees anything at all wrong with you. The report can wait."
"She can't figure it out, you know... she looks at me with this quizzical little face when I don't project patterns at her, for her exercises. And I think she keeps throwing Mr. Bunny at me because she keeps expecting me to catch him." But he was getting up even as he said it, collecting the report, and, after a moment, the dictionary and grammar. Shan would let him take them down to the boathouse. "I don't know what I want anymore, when it comes to this," he said more faintly, moving around the table. His face was taking on the pinched look that Angelo would have diagnosed as 'incoming headache'. "I just don't. I wish this had happened because of the tsunami. It would have made everything so much easier. I'm good with costs and benefits. I can handle that."
Lorna shook her head, "You're kinda hopeless, Nathan, you know that?" She quirked an eyebrow at him, tucked her book into her sling then reached over the table to give him a quick ruffle of his hair. "Stop fussing over why and how and whatever. Daughter, play. Happy."
"She can still touch my mind, at least. And she does," Nathan muttered, utterly confused by the affectionate gesture. And if he said that, she'd just probably give him more of a hard time about not being able to read people without the telepathy. Best to keep his mouth shut. He repeated Lorna's own move of tucking books and papers into his sling, then rose. "I'm still mad at you," he said somewhat feebly. "You made me break my violet." Although this morning he was wondering if he'd thrown it by hand and not realized it. There certainly hadn't been a flicker of telekinesis since. "Ororo's never going to let me live it down."
"I'll get her really, really drunk tomorrow and make sure she forgets all about it. You can buy her a rose bush to make up for it too." She gave him a wave. "Later."
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