Log: Friday morning, Monet and Nathan.

[x-m.livejournal.com]

Monet and Nathan have a chat about his temporary bout of insanity.



Monet was slumped at her desk, one hand wrapped around her coffee cup, the other propping her head up. God, it was early, barely half past ten. There were two stacks of papers in front of her, labeled 'well, you can just fuck off and die' (those were reports, usually about unpleasant things) and 'all lawyers must fuck off and die' in pink sticky notes. She took another sip of coffee and glared at them. It occurred to her that while, all her life, she'd known people with
jobs, that it had never really dawned on her that it was this dull.

Nathan had in fact been up since about five, but he had deliberately stayed upstairs, finding other things to do that didn't involve venturing down into the office. He could check his email from anywhere, after all. But eventually he was forced to admit defeat and head downstairs to snag some of the reports that only existed in printed form. He was less than enthused to realize that Monet was the only one in the office, but reminded himself that he would have had to run into her at some point. She worked for him, after all. Even if he could very dimly remember trying to pound her into the ground like a human tent peg.

Turning at the sound of what could only be deliberately loud footsteps, Monet saw Nathan. "Good morning?" She wondered if there was a tactful way to bring up the invoice for the manicure she'd gotten. It was in her wallet, after all. Maybe she'd lead in gently. "Do you know what we need around here? An espresso machine. And possibly a naked boy to make us all decent coffee. Maybe even a naked, mutant boy whose power involves awesome coffee. Can you find me one? We can chain him to my desk."

Nathan blinked at her for a moment. "I think it would work against the office ambiance," he said finally, moving towards his desk. His back ached, and the chair was looking pretty good right now. It would take him a while to go through those reports, and fleeing back upstairs would be a bit obvious. And cowardly. "I'll... take the espresso machine under advisement, though."

"Like the current ambiance is so fantastic," Monet snorted. She eyed Nathan carefully, having barely seen him since the whole ...incident. "So... uh. How are you?"

Nathan sank into his chair, and took a moment to locate the first of the reports in question before he answered. Rahne or someone had made sure that anything he might want while he was still doing half-days was right at hand. "Doing okay, I suppose," he said, not meeting her eyes. "Sorry about what happened. Not that I'm... absolutely sure how it happened, but I do remember knocking you around."

"You really don't remember? Seriously?" Monet stared at him, startled. Leaning forward slightly, she gave him the quick version. "You remember the crazy part, right? Well, me'n Alex got drafted by a bunch of the X-Men and we got you outside and uh... I wasn't really using my telepathy, since it was ... weird, but you know how my shields are, right? So I could hear you thinking about Rachel, thinking she was in trouble." She gave him a humorless smile. "And then I learned a very
valuable lesson about why we don't claim we've kidnapped crazy telekinetics children."

Nathan couldn't repress a wince. Or the response that insisted on coming out, like someone else, someone who wasn't feeling guilty, had just commandeered his voice. "Um. Can I ask you why you thought that was a good tactical choice?"

"Well, you wanted Rachel and were headed to the boathouse to get her. Ororo wanted you away from people, so... I figured, I'm pretty much invulnerable, so what was the worst that could happen, anyway?"

Nathan caught himself rubbing at the spot between his eyes. The headache was coming back. Psychosomatic, clearly. "So the plan was to what, get me to come beat on you in hopes of distracting me so that someone could sneak up behind me?"

"I didn't really plan that far ahead. I thought, maybe you'd follow me?" Monet's plan seemed more insane every time she had to discuss what, precisely, she'd been thinking at the time. Thank god Scott had been busy with Jean last week.

"Not the best call." He left it at that, though, and there was no censure in his voice. He had no business giving it, after his role in all of this. "I'm sorry. It was a lousy way to be repaid for trying to
help."

"You're telling me. I had a black eye, Nathan. An honest to god, black eye. And I had pieces of that ...plant... rose ...thing in unmentionable places. It was kind of fun, in a way, though. Exciting. But, if you wanted to make me feel better, you could always get me a naked coffee mutant."

Nathan looked up at her a bit sharply. "A black eye, huh?" A more familiar note of challenge was in his voice suddenly. "Not so invulnerable after all, then. Although given the year you've had you'd
think you wouldn't need the reminder."

"I can fall a hundred meters out of the sky when I'm zoned out and walk away with a scratch, once I wake up and play with Angel when she's fired up. I'd say I'm pretty damn invulnerable unless you hit me really hard. So, really, it's a good thing that you were busy with me, rather than oh, Alex." She fiddled with the papers in front of her. "And Marius was different. He fucked with my brain, rather than my actual powers."

If I'd been any more focused, I could have killed the lot of you, Nathan thought, but didn't say. Monet didn't need to know how easily telekinesis could induce a stroke, or a heart attack. "Neither of you should have been there," he muttered, staring down at the report and not seeing a word.

Monet remembered that moment, face down in the rose bushes, in a vice-like grip. She'd thought she was going to die. "Probably not, no, but fuck. We live here. We know the risk we're taking, just by living in this place. Remember Murderworld? Or the dinosaurs? Or when Kane dragged me off into an Afghani war zone? Really, how is that different to this? You lot could always get a base someplace else, that isn't hidden in a school full of kids for cover but you haven't. Till then, we live here and we know the risk we're running because of the X-Men. Besides, fuck, I'm almost 21. I'm an adult, Nathan. You don't get to feel guilty about this shit, since I was well in my rights to ignore Ororo and run to the shelters. So you don't get to fucking feel guilty about it, okay?"

"I'm not allowed to feel guilty that I went crazy and nearly killed you," Nathan said flatly. He had never liked being lectured. Particularly not by young women whose logic was a little shaky. You could say a lot of things about this situation, but it certainly hadn't had a thing to do with the X-Men. "Well, that's a shocking and distressing revelation. Damn you for depriving me of the fun of the aftermath of my psychotic break. Seriously. Damn you right to hell."

"Given you were off visiting psychosis land, it's not your fault. So I'm glad you understand my point of view here and have come around to it." Monet smiled brilliantly at Nathan.

"I find the mouthiness only intermittently appealing, just to warn you." He was too tired to argue with her. He didn't want to be reassured - he knew how perverse that was, and he knew that part of him actually did want that. But he'd tried to help a friend, and he'd gotten a psychotic break and the same old mockery out of it.

Monet sighed. "Fine, Nathan. Look, I'm just trying to say, I don't hold it against you. Especially since I made the whole thing worse, myself." The lack of integrity in Monet's shields had long ago ingrained a certain caution about casual contact. Ignoring this, she reached out, touching his hand. "I don't hold it against you, okay?"

Nathan managed not to pull his hand away; it was hard, as his own shields were shaky still and the immediate urge was to withdraw again. "All right," he said, after a moment. 'That's very kind of you' would have been both unnecessarily snarky and a little insincere. He had put so much effort into working on the mess in his head, into becoming reliable, one of those people who didn't blow up innocent rooms with no provocation.

It was hard to know there had been backsliding, and harder to know that people didn't see that it was backsliding. He supposed that was part of the problem, that Monet was brushing it off as something he couldn't have controlled. And I am thinking far too much about this.

"I can't even remember what I came down here for," he muttered.

"Those, maybe?" Monet pointed a stack of papers bristling with sticky notes, with 'Nathan to deal with' paperclipped to the front. She was well aware that he was changing the subject, but, well, whatever. Nathan had issues and clearly, talking to him about them didn't do anything.

Nathan blinked, then squinted at the pile. "Ah," he said a bit absently. "Yes, those." The pile shifted itself over to the empty spot in front of him. "So," he said more casually, after a moment. "Hating the job yet?"

Monet reached over to her post-it note labels and showed them to Nathan. "What do you think?" She'd used five different colours and blanked out the 'u' in 'fuck' on both, replacing them with little skulls and crossbones. She'd spent almost an hour on them yesterday.

Nathan gave her a look that might have been amused if it was even a little less tired. "Oh, pride is a wonderful thing, isn't it."
Monet smiled broadly at him and then began to giggle. "Yeah."