xp_logs | Nathan and Kurt, Saturday night

Kurt and Nathan wait, and ponder questions of justice and revenge.

It had been noted before, but there was nothing quite as good at making a man feel helpless as the time - either before or after the rescue - when there was nothing to be done but wait. Kurt had learned this far too many times. Right now, he was in the waiting room of the old hospital, going between pacing and - when he caught himself at it - sitting hunched in a corner.

Nathan was not pacing. He had sat down on one of the few remaining chairs and was sagging further and further as time wore on, the look in his eyes almost oppressively blank. The slashes on his face were still bleeding, if sluggishly. He didn't seem to notice.

Kurt noticed, as one of his restless swings around the room brought Nathan into his eyeline and he stopped, then strode over, concerned enough to be briefly distracted from what was going on inside the room. "Nathan?"

With his powers still out, Nathan didn't sense Kurt's approach. Didn't hear him, either. The buzzing in his ears was the fluorescent lights, he knew dimly. The white noise inside his head was something else.

Kurt laid a hand on his friend's shoulder, hoping to get his attention that way - and knowing that this would be one of the safest times he could ever risk startling him that way.

Nathan jerked at the touch of Kurt's hand, then looked up at him, a flicker of something more recognizably him in his empty gray eyes. "Kurt. What is it?"

"You did not look... well", Kurt said quietly, not sure he wanted to think hard enough about what he'd seen in Nathan's face to put it into words. "Not that I would expect it, of course."

"I'm all right. I'll be feeling my age in the morning." It might have been a joke, under other circumstances. If the slight smile Nathan gave Kurt had been any less ghastly.

"And more, I would say", Kurt answered with an attempt at a smile of his own. "Has anyone looked at your face?"

"My face?" Nathan gave him a blank look that turned into a wince as he raised a hand to the injured side of his face. His fingers came away bloody. "It's fine. Just scratches."

"Scratches do not bleed quite that much", Kurt pointed out. "They are not bad, I think. But they will still need attention."

"Later." Nathan looked away again, the brief light that had been in his eyes dimming again. Strangely enough, however, he spoke. "I broke his nose. Possibly his jaw, too."

"Campbell's?" Kurt asked, and there was an uncharacteristically hard note in his voice on the name. "For what he has done, I would say he got off lightly."

"I should have killed him. He attacked me. Would have been an easy self-defense plea."

"But you did not. And that is only to your credit, Nathan, in the circumstances. He will not get away with this." Some might have said death would have been too easy. But Kurt believed in hell.

Nathan reached up with his good hand - the other arm was still numb, from getting hit by Rory's cattle prod - and ran his fingers over the teeth marks in the shoulder of his jacket. "He already has. Even if he spends the rest of his life in prison."

"No", Kurt said firmly. "He has not. The children will be restored, physically, and as for the rest... that will come too, in time."

Nathan gave him a look that might have been bleak, if there'd been anything even resembling emotion in it. "Restoration is a tricky concept."

"But it is the best hope we have", Kurt countered, dropping into his habitual crouch next to Nathan's chair.

"Hope?" Nathan said slowly, as if trying out the word. "The best they can hope for is to recover."

"Yes", Kurt said sadly. "The best hope for them, for now, would be to recover fully. Later, when they have got that far..."

"There's no recovering fully." There was life finally in Nathan's eyes - seething, dark rage that was almost a palpable thing, despite his currently wiped powers. "There's no such thing."

Kurt looked at him for a long moment then looked down, nodding. "Then, perhaps... to recover enough that they can go on as they did before. Or close to it."

Nathan's hands clenched and unclenched - or one did, at least. The other was still not moving properly. "I could still kill him. Once my powers are back. Wait until he's in prison and thinks he's safe, and then kill him. I don't need to be in line-of-sight to induce a heart attack."

"I cannot say he would not deserve it", Kurt said quietly. "But the question you should be considering more is what doing it would do to you." He wasn't talking about the immediate satisfaction of removing Rory Campbell from the world.

"He's no different now than anyone who did the same sort of thing at Mistra. Worse." At least with them it hadn't been personal. "They taught me how to kill at a distance. There's a certain symmetry." His lips twitched in a smile that provoked a wince as it pulled at his injured cheek. "But maybe you're right. I don't have to kill him. I could just visit him, in prison, and tell him that I will. Leave him wondering every day how many more hours he has to live before I stop the car ten blocks away and kill him."

"There would be a certain satisfaction in that", Kurt agreed, with a flicker of something that might have been a smile. "Without the damage to your soul."

"Leave him wondering for the rest of his life... it's all about fear for him, you know." Nathan's voice was distant, detached. "What he's done is as much about lashing out at what frightens him as it was about Moira and I. So I think this fits. That he should be afraid of a mutant for the rest of his life."

"So many are... but in his case, I think the personal aspect would be fitting." He quirked a smile. "He will go to prison for the rest of his life, you know. And I imagine the children's families will have lawsuits in store, too, to strip him of anything else he might have had."

Nathan was silent for a long moment. "What I don't know if I'll be able to live with," he said finally, almost inaudibly, "is that I may have given him the idea. My background. He didn't kill them, or just hurt them, did he?"

"If you did", Kurt told him, "it is none of your fault. You could not have known he would finish insane enough to do this. And you had no reason or means to keep your background from him, when you knew him."

"It doesn't matter. It was still me."

"It does matter. The guilt is not yours... if anyone's, it is Mistra's."

"It doesn't matter," Nathan said again, but went in a surprising direction as he continued. "No. That's not it. I can't let it matter. It'll be hard enough for Moira."

Kurt had been preparing another rebuttal, but stopped before it made it into words. "How does it make it easier on Moira if you take undeserved guilt on yourself?"

"It's not about me. I shouldn't indulge myself and let it be." Nathan took as deep a breath as he could and then let it out. The calm that settled over his features was about a millimetre thick in places, but unbroken. "I'll be fine."

Kurt looked at him carefully. "You will be, yes. But if you are not now, or soon... you know where I am."

It seemed to strike Nathan, finally, that he was alternating between making no sense and alarming his friend. His lips twitched again, if briefly, and he let his head dip in a nod. Then he went back to staring at the door.

Kurt followed his gaze, and didn't look away. "How long did they say it would take, again?"

"They had no idea."