xp_logs | Immram: Falling

Nathan is getting Rachel her breakfast when something very strange happens - and Rachel lets every psi in the mansion know about it.

"Dad? Dad?"

"Ray, I'm getting there," Nathan said tiredly, sighing down at the toddler who'd been following him around, wide-eyed and weirdly anxious, since they'd both gotten up this morning. He didn't know what the problem was, and he was not up to trying to figure that out. She might be telepathic, but that didn't mean it was all that much easier to know what was going on in her mind. Funny how that worked, especially when she'd already been out of sorts all week.

"Dad?"

"Yes, Ray." He'd slept badly, after the argument with Wanda, and woken up feeling disoriented and exhausted, almost sick to his stomach. Maybe the weariness over the last few days had been him coming down with something? "Cheerios?" he asked, turning towards the kitchen. Maybe if he got Rachel her breakfast, she'd settle down.

"Dad..." It was almost a whimper, and this time Rachel reached out and grabbed his leg, latching on. "Dad?"

"Hey - I can't make you breakfast if you don't let me in the kitchen, sweetheart." Nathan reached down, detaching her gently, and would have picked her up if bending over hadn't triggered a wave of dizziness that made him swallow and straighten up slowly. Rachel whimpered again and raised her arms, but he shook his head very slightly. "No, kiddo," he said a bit weakly. "Dad's having one of those mornings and I don't want to test your TK bubble by dropping you on your head."

"Dad!" It was almost a suppressed shriek. Warning, tantrum ahead... "Dad, what? What?" She trailed along behind him to the kitchen. "What? What?"

Argh. "Tell me what," Nathan said as patiently as he could, opening the cupboard with the cereal. Cheerios would distract her. She liked to levitate them. "Use your words, Ray."

"What!" She plucked at his pant leg, sniffling. Nathan looked down at her, frowning. All that was coming up the link was confusion, tinged by a strange wariness, and growing upset. "What is? What?"

"What is what?" he murmured, perplexed, as he lifted down the box of Cheerios. The sniffling continued, and he sighed, opening his shields to see if he couldn't pick up anything ambient that might be bothering her. Given the events of the week, that certainly wasn't out of the question.

Afterwards, he wouldn't remember making that decision. But it was that choice, to open his shields, that provoked what happened next. His shields opened - and Nathan staggered backwards, hands going briefly to his temples before his knees buckled and he fell backwards. He felt himself hit the floor, saw the ceiling going in and out of focus above him, and then his mind was spiraling downwards into blackness.

Rachel had taken a tottering step back, sitting down hard, as her father collapsed. Big gray eyes huge and terrified, she stared at his still form for one horrified moment - and then screamed.

#DAD! DADDADDADDADDADDAD!# The telepathic shriek was far louder than anything she'd managed so far in her young life. Loud enough for every psi in the mansion to hear her.

--

Kurt was the first to arrive - alerted by the Professor to get down there, he'd dropped everything to comply. He appeared in the usual cloud, by the boathouse door, and hurried over to the fallen man, only to run up against a telekinetic bubble.

"...Rachel?"

Rachel was sitting by her father's side, crying. "Dad? Dad?" she sobbed, pulling at his shirt - and completely ignoring Kurt. The TK bubble, glowing slightly after Kurt's impact with it, surrounded both her and Nathan completely. "Dad!"

"Rachel", he said soothingly. "Rachel, listen to me. I have come to help, but you must let me in or I cannot do that."

"No!" The shriek was very definitely directed at Kurt, as was the tearful gray gaze. "Bad! No!" The bubble started to glow a little more noticeably.

Normally, when told to go see what the cause of a disturbance was, a reasonable person might have opened the door to the boathouse with some force. Cain, however, tended to veer slightly south of 'reasonable', and managed to knock the door completely off its hinges, denting the doorframe as he lumbered into the boathouse.

"The hell is goin' on here?" he barked, waving his hand to clear the residual scent of brimstone from the air. "Kurt, what's the - Nate? Shit. We gotta get him to-"

When his hand touched the shield, Cain looked down at Rachel and grimaced. "Pipsqueak, you gotta quit playing silly games here or we can't get your daddy to the doctor. Drop the damn bubble already."

"NOOOOO!" The howl was accompanied by a fairly respectable push of telekinesis, coming from a two year-old. (Cain was, of course, entirely unmoved by it.) "Dad!" Rachel sobbed, pulling at Nathan's shirt again. "Go! Bad! GO!"

"I could try to teleport inside", Kurt told the bigger man, "but Jean is quite able to stop me when she wants to. I think Rachel could too." Instead, he crouched down to the little girl's level. "Rachel. You know me. I am your father's friend. You know I want to help make him better, no?"

"Dammit, kids like you. Make her drop the damn thing already," Cain growled, crouching behind Kurt. "Listen to Kurt, Ray, just let us get your dad out of here..."

A lamp flew at Cain's head, missing by several inches as it swooped into an arc that shattered it against the wall of the boathouse. Her face bright red and her big gray eyes overly bright - and not with tears - Rachel looked like she was about to launch into a full-scale temper tantrum.

But she fell silent suddenly, her eyes unfocusing in the way that meant telepathic concentration. It was a highly incongruous look on a toddler. "Dad..." she whimpered, little hands still plucking at Nathan's shirt. But the TK bubble abruptly fell.

"Good girl", Kurt said on a breath of relief, already moving to scoop Rachel up from Nathan's side. "Cain, I think we may be about to have more assistance, from the look on her face."

Cain nodded and slid over to Nathan's side, large fingers gingerly moving under his friend's jaw. "He's got a pulse and he's breathin', don't look like he's bleeding from nowhere or going into shock. Just out like a light."

Rachel sniffled, and Nathan's shirt jerked, as if pulled towards her by invisible hands. "Dad? Dad?" she said in a broken-hearted little voice, but then her head jerked sharply towards the door.

"It's me, sweetheart. We'll take care of him," Jean said from the doorway, her medical bag gripped in one hand - she'd heard the telepathic shrieking, of course, but had stopped long enough to get her supplies once Charles had contacted her. "There's something very strange about this," she told the two men, stepping into the room, and briefly resting a hand on Rachel's back for reassurance before kneeling at Nate's side and checking him over. "We need to get to him to the medlab and figure out what the hell is going on."