xp_logs | Kurt and Nathan, Monday

Kurt and Nathan catch some time down at Harry's, and have one of those Very Serious Talks.

The trapeze was all very well, Kurt decided, for meditation. It was an activity that hadn't required thought, for him, for years, and sometimes that was what he needed. But sometimes it just got predictable, like now, so he headed out to the lake to try his skills on the trees nearby instead.

The splash, as he approached the lake, was colossal.

He'd reacted on instinct at the first sound, teleporting up into the treetops where the leaves caught most of the water. He was still dripping slightly, however, when he came back down in time to see Nathan's firebird construct resurface.

The firebird shook water off its wings, and then turned in Kurt's direction. "... whoops," Nathan said from inside the glowing psi-construct. "Umm... how wet did you just get, Kurt?"

"Not too much," Kurt assured him, shaking himself anyway. "I was in the trees, they blocked most of the splash."

"Sorry about that." Nathan hovered there. "I was, um... practicing the diving again, and didn't quite pull up in time." Okay, so that was a lie. He'd headed right for the lake, because the splash was fun.

Kurt eyed him, amused. "Or perhaps you decided to go swimming?"

"They banished me from the office!" It slipped out before he could help it, and Nathan closed his mouth abruptly. He took a deep breath, then went on in a more temperate tone. "I figured I might as well be accomplishing something. I mean, who knows when I might wind up going down in water and need to learn how to use the exoskeleton underwater..."

Definitely amused now. "You are right, I suppose. The practice will be useful."

Nathan lowered himself to the shore, the exoskeleton collapsing inwards. Despite his close encounter with the bottom of the lake, he, unlike Kurt, was completely dry. "I had stuff to catch up on," he muttered rebelliously.

"And when had you planned to take time off, if not today? If they had not banished you?"

Nathan looked like he was giving serious consideration to the question. "Christmas?"

"Nathan," came the chiding response. "Are you really surprised that your friends took action, if you told them that?"

"There's too much to do!" Nathan sighed and rubbed at his jaw. "Ah, well. I agreed to a week in lieu of kidnapping. I supposed I should shut up and take my medicine."

"There will always be too much to do," Kurt pointed out, then shrugged. "If you are resigned to not working today, would you like to go to Harry's?"

"Sure, why not?" Nathan asked after a moment's contemplation. Probably a far better use of his time than divebombing the lake. And he hadn't seen enough of Kurt lately.

Very few people had, all things considered. Kurt smiled at his agreement. "I was just going to use the trees for a little practice, but I can do that at any time."

"All right. Shall we?"

---

Nathan raised his glass. "To our families?" he ventured wryly. "Can't live with them, can't kill them. Or resurrect them and kill them again, damn it."

Kurt toasted back, with a crooked smile in acknowledgment. "To families. And the power to choose them."

"Don't get all profound on me." Nathan took a sip of his beer - no tequila, tonight.

"Oh, it is to be one of those evenings?" Kurt asked lightly. "Very well, then."

"Well, unless you really want it to be. But my pithy advice tends to get rather threadbare when I'm tired and tipsy," Nathan said, setting his glass back down. "And frankly, I don't think you're in need of my, ahem, wisdom."

"I will never turn down advice," Kurt said with a shrug. "But as you will. We can talk about something else."

"Okay. When are you coming back to the team?" Nathan asked, quite innocently.

Kurt blinked. "I... think that is not entirely my decision. Scott and Ororo have a say..."

"Hey, I should be asking the same thing of Scott, quite frankly. As for 'Ro... wherever she is, if she came home to find you both back on active duty she would probably do cartwheels, quite frankly."

Kurt gave this some thought, then said slowly, "If I am wanted back, then... as soon as might be. But Nathan, I know we do good work, but... I am not sure yet that I would not be staying just because I have nowhere else to go. And I do not want that to be so."

Nathan raised an eyebrow at him, tilting his head. "What's made you think that?" he asked. "I always thought you were committed to what we do here, not that you were here just because you had no other option."

It was never really the case before," Kurt explained. "I could always have gone home, until now. And I do not... three times, it has happened that I have hurt people, and the two times that it was the right thing to do are the two times that those people were to some degree innocent. It is something I must think on."

"Reexamining things never hurts," Nathan said, taking a sip of his beer. "Just make sure you don't make decisions out of guilt - oh, there I go with the advice. Sorry."

"If I chose from guilt, I am not even sure if my choice would be to go or to stay," Kurt admitted.

"Quite the conundrum," Nathan said, and saluted him with his glass.

Kurt chuckled and toasted back. "I suppose I have no shortage of time to think about it, as needed."

"There is that." Nathan yawned and slouched in the booth, rubbing at the back of his neck.

Kurt eyed him - the tiredness was pretty much impossible to miss. "And how have things been with you?"

"Banishment from the office aside? Not bad, I suppose." Nathan stared somewhat pensively at his beer, his expression giving the lie to his words. "Accomplished some things ahead of that, or at least dropped the right words in the right ears to get things accomplished. It's been nice having Dom here. Rachel has a whole bunch of new words.""

"She is growing fast," Kurt said with a smile. "I will have to come and visit, some time when she is here."

"You should do that. Rachel is a good cure for the blues... figuratively speaking, of course."

Kurt laughed. "Figuratively speaking, I have got that idea. She is something special, your little telepath."

"Yeah, she really is." The words didn't come accompanied by the usual fatuous paternal smile. Nathan was staring off into space, his eyes and in fact his whole expression unfocused.

Kurt looked at him in sudden concern, and finally prodded, "Nathan?"

"I'm okay." Nathan pressed his fingers to his temple for a moment, closing his eyes, and then opened them again and reached for his beer. "It's this whole sitting around with nothing to do with my hands. My mind goes right back to Smichov. I mean, work."

...well, wasn't that a telling slip. "Work," Kurt said quietly. "I see."

Nathan sipped at his beer. "I agreed to the banishment under duress," he said quietly. "There is still more to do." More he needed to do. Had to do.

"But as I said, Nathan - there always will be. You will have to stop sometimes."

"Right." Nathan raised his glass, a faint smile tugging at his lips. "Just one man, and all."

"Exactly. Though I do wonder sometimes if you know that."

"I have a firm grasp on that particular piece of truth sometimes. Other times, not so much." He smiled a bit mirthlessly at Kurt. "I spoke to your mother," he said. "Twice."

Kurt froze at that, and whatever he'd had in the way of a smile vanished as he took a careful drink of his own beer. "She was there?"

"Yes, she was. Trying to convince some of the militants to take a nice, non-violent approach to airing their grievances." Nathan's mouth twisted. "She might even have been successful, I don't know. Until that incident outside the walls happened."

"She was..." He frowned in confusion. "To make the mutants look better to the outside world?"

"That was the idea. Although really, in the end, I'm sure Smichov served her purposes just as well."

"Perhaps," Kurt acknowledged quietly. "It depends on how it is viewed."

"A government overreacting and winding up killing both mutants and baseline humans out of fear? I think that's marvelous recruiting material for the Brotherhood, don't you?"

"...yes." His smile now was pained. "Yes, I suppose it is."

"I'm sorry." Nathan's voice was almost brusque, but there was no doubting that he meant the apology, by the look he gave Kurt before he looked back down into his glass. "It's not your fault. Hell, it's not even her fault."

"I wish I could be sure of that. But then... you are the one who was there."

"That I am. For all that it matters." Nathan drained half his glass, then set it down on the table. "You shouldn't feel guilty about Smichov, Kurt," he said, his gray eyes level as he looked at Kurt. "Don't factor that into your decision-making."

"That will be one less thing, then." He took another drink, then looked up at Nathan. "It is not that I want to leave. But I do not want to stay... by default."

"Like I said, I get it. Although I also think you may be overthinking it." Nathan laughed a bit bleakly. "Jack would probably tsk at me for saying that."

"What would you do?" Kurt asked abruptly.

"I don't know that I'm the best person to ask. I came here with no other options, remember? And now..." Nathan ran a finger down the condensation on the side of his glass. "I don't know, Kurt. I would say that wanting to be here, wanting to do what we do, is enough."

"And if I fear where doing what we do may lead? If I am afraid of another Youra, or another Monaco, or Alcatraz?"

"Afraid of another Youra." For a moment there was an edge of something close to stony anger in Nathan's voice. "Alcatraz and Monaco, I'll give you. But Youra? Have you forgotten who you're talking to, Kurt? Fifty people, people I was trying to save, I left as vegetables."

"...I did not mean it like that," Kurt said after a moment, looking down at the table. "I would have said Radonic, it would have meant closer to what I am afraid of. Because you, Nathan... you were not the one who did that to them. You did save them, in a way."

"Like hell I did," Nathan muttered, and picked up his beer again. "But fine, let's look at those three incidents together. Two of those things are not like the other."

"I know. The third was not an attack on an innocent man who could not control what he was doing, and it is the only one that was not the right thing to do."

"Which bothers you almost as much as doing it in the first place, I'm guessing."

"You would guess right." He glanced down. "I asked my mother, when I saw her, if she thought my father - whoever he was, I still do not know, only that even she considered him unfit to be one - might have passed traits down to me. She said no, I think she meant to be reassuring. But all that means is that all I have done is only me."

"On the other hand... it means that everything you've done is only you." Nathan's fingers rapped out an irritated rhythm on the table. "Don't minimize the importance of that, bad and good. Take it from someone whose father considered him his greatest achievement." The venom that dripped from Nathan's words did so briefly, but there was no mistaking it.

Kurt looked at him directly. "If you are any achievement of your father's, then that must include everything you have done in the last year or two, not only before that. And those things are nothing to be ashamed of."

"Then why are you focusing so hard on the times things have gone wrong?" Nathan parried swiftly. Apparently beer encouraged the law degree come out. "If that advice works for me, Kurt, why can't you take as much pride in all of the many things you've done right - and you've been doing good for longer than I have, pal..."

He acknowledged that with a wry smile and a half nod. "I always used to. Sometimes... but I find it takes more effort, these days. To remember. Tell me, Nathan, what did you think, that day in Chicago?"

"What did I think about what?" The deliberate obtuseness was entirely obvious.

"You know about what." He was willing to give Nathan time to answer, but attempts to buy said time were not going to wash.

Nathan clearly didn't need the time; he'd just been giving Kurt a chance to rethink the question. "I thought you made a stupid choice. Whatever she did or didn't do with you, that week... what she's done in the past and what she's capable of doing in the future are much, much more important. That said," Nathan went on levelly, taking a sip of his beer, "I've also made stupid choices when family's been involved. If you'd been clear-headed, I would have been a little concerned about your freakish ability to compartmentalize."

"I have always been good at that, to a degree," Kurt said ruefully. "And... you already know she had done nothing to my mind. Nothing no other person could not have done, at least."

"Saul never did anything to my mind directly either. Didn't stop him from screwing me over but good."

"I would like to say," Kurt said slowly, "that it would not change things, in the future. That if we met her again, I would take the side of the team, and not hers. But - apart from the fact that I think the team will not let that happen..."

"Are you telling me that if you were out with the team, and she was assisting her humble bucketheaded employer in his latest scheme to do something terrible, you'd have any doubts about whose side you'd take?" Nathan asked evenly. "Because if that's the case you do have a problem."

"No," Kurt said immediately. "Only, perhaps, if it were... not quite so clear. Perhaps. Like the situation you describe in Prague."

"So what she's done in the past bears no weight for you? I mean, there's being a bad girl, and there's collaborating in attempted genocide, Kurt."

"It does, of course," he said miserably. "And I would... I think I would... be able to act for the team in whatever circumstance. But."

"She did one kind thing for you, Kurt - she didn't raise you to be what she is, do what she does," Nathan said. "If that was her one demonstration of humanity, she chose a good time to make it. That doesn't change who she is - it doesn't excuse what she's done, and it doesn't make her any less dangerous."

"I know all of that," was the only answer Kurt could give. "I have since I was first at the mansion."

"But it makes the rabid animal different, when she's family. Except it doesn't really - you just want to believe that it does, and when you get bitten, it hurts even more." The bitterness in Nathan's voice wasn't directed at Kurt.

"I wish I had never found out," he said quietly. "Everything was simple, once."

"Life is complicated. But ask yourself, Kurt, while you're making your decisions... ask yourself if doing what we do isn't honoring whatever humanity in her made her leave you with Margali. More than walking away to find your fortunes elsewhere would." Nathan fell into a brief, pensive silence. "With Elpis, I do what my father could have done... should have done. If he'd lived, maybe..." He shook his head, tightly. "Never mind. It's not necessarily a good thing that his memory drives me to do this."

"But it is a good thing that you do it." He fell silent for a moment, thinking. "Do you remember when Marie-Ange's powers were causing people to see visions, in the mansion?" At Nathan's nod, he went on, "What I saw was Mystique... in leathers."

Nathan gazed steadily at him. "So? I saw my dead friends in leathers, Kurt. Doesn't make either scenario mean anything." His mouth twisted and he looked down into his glass.

"As I understand it, they are things that might have been," Kurt said mildly. "And if we are talking about her humanity... I am thinking only of something to remember."

"That in a different world, she could be the type of person who wears leathers? What about this world, Kurt? You're never going to reach that ideal possibility if you stand aside and let her continue what she's doing. If you don't show her something better." He shook his head. "If your birth got her back in touch with her humanity, what might your life do?"

"...you mean if I walk away," Kurt said with a faint smile. "If I go back to being an acrobat in a quiet little circus somewhere, and never do anything like this with my life again. Live something like I would have had if Stryker had never found me."

"Easier. Simpler."

"Yes. And there is a reason I did not go straight back to my old life, after I met Jean and Ororo in Boston. But more often, this last year, I have wondered why we put ourselves through this. And I... do not want to wonder that, Nathan. I wish I still knew why with no doubt."

"We have reasons," Nathan said. "Think about the faces of the people you've helped, Kurt, not just the ones who've gotten hurt."

"For those I know, I will try to do that. To remember," he promised quietly, as much to himself as to Nathan. "And the other thing."