xp_logs | Laurie and Nathan, backdated to Wednesday

Backdated to Wednesday, not long before this log. Laurie follows up on her discussion with Forge by seeking Nathan's opinion.

Laurie looked up at the beautiful blue sky and wondered if she could convince Nathan to take a walk with her, rather then sitting around in the boathouse. She did want to talk to him, but she'd much rather do it outside on such a glorious day.

"Nathan?" she called out as she knocked on the door. "You home?"

"Yeah, Laurie," was the answer. "Come in." Inside, Nathan was checking over the contents of his old battered duffel bag, and offered her a wry smile. "Yes, I am heading out again. Just to Muir for the weekend, though. Moira wants to do something for my birthday." And I need some time away from the noise.

"The break should do you good." Laurie said with a smile as she watched him count off his pairs of socks. "I was hoping maybe I could lure you out into the daylight for awhile, actually."

Nathan glanced at his watch. "I've got an hour or two before my cab's here - and I really haven't got that much to pack." He straightened, eyeing her as he headed in the direction of her and the door. "Luring me out into the light... you didn't get me a pony for my birthday and it's outside on the lawn?"

"Only if it's a very tiny pony." Laurie replied, pulling a small box from the bookbag slung over his shoulder and presenting it to him as she stood aside to let him pass. "Although, we could go walk down to see the horses if you'd like. The younger ones have started getting big enough to ride now and I was going to go feed them some apples later."

As they headed out onto the deck, Nathan opened the box to discover two small, polished crystals, one clear and the other a deep purple. Amethyst, he thought. "They're very pretty," he said and smiled at her. "Thanks. Any special meaning behind them?"

"Well, the store I got them from told me that amethysts are for healing, and quartz is for energy." Laurie explained as they walked. "I wanted to get you something useful as well as pretty, and those should do both. Least, if you're into the new agey stuff anyhow. I kinda am, sorta. I figure it can't hurt, anyhow."

"Am I into the new agey stuff... well, I guess it depends on your definition." Nathan closed the box, tucking it beneath his arm and offering her another smile. "You're one of the few people who remembered my birthday, not that I'm complaining. It was nice and uneventful... well, at least in terms of my own life. And who really celebrates getting as old as I am, anyway?"

"I guess people have been somewhat distracted lately, but you could always use it as an excuse to get more food out of Miss Dane if you played your cards right." Laurie replied with an impish grin, " Besides, my grandmother always used to tell me that old was a state of mind, which probably means you're as old as the hills."

"I'll take a weekend in the quiet," Nathan said. "Best birthday gift I can imagine at this point." He looked down at her, raising an eyebrow. "You just come to deliver the gift, or is there something on your mind?" There quite definitely was, not that he was going to point out that he could hear her. He wasn't about to make a big show of his crappy shields.

Laurie continued walking for a moment, gathering her thoughts before she spoke, she wanted to ask the right way, and she wasn't quite sure she had it nutted out in her own mind at the moment.

"What do you think makes a good X-man?" she asked finally, thinking that this was possibly the best way to start.

"Huh." Nathan gave it some thought. "Bravery. Intelligence. The willingness to risk your life to help others. Belief in what we're doing... I find that to be key," he said wryly. "Wrestle with it all you want, but not when you're in the field, because then you get your friends killed."

"So, you wouldn't question an order in the field then? Even if you didn't agree with it?" Laurie asked, suddenly intent.

"Depends on when it was given. If we're planning, getting ready to do something, yes, I will give my opinions on deployment if I see something that needs bringing up. If we're in a lull and something needs raising, I'll speak up, too. In the middle of a fight, hell no," Nathan said fiercely. "Never." The look he gave her was almost sharp. "If you have doubts about that sort of thing, you need to work them out pronto."

"Not doubts..." Laurie began, trying to put into words what she'd been wrestling with lately. "Just questions, lots of them, I guess. Forge said I should talk to a couple of people, so I could get a better idea of the right answer for me, I think. I mean, you'd blindly follow an order you knew to be wrong because you were in the middle of a battle?"

"If the person giving it was in command, yes," Nathan said instantly, and the tension in his voice and posture was very much obvious. "Laurie, when you're in the middle of a battle, fighting to keep yourself and your teammates and innocent civilians alive, you don't see the whole picture. Your field commander does - or they should. There are times they make mistakes, yes, but..." His jaw tightened, his hands clenching into fists at his sides and then relaxing again. "Thinking you have the big picture when you don't gets people killed. I choose people to follow that I know I can trust to keep their eye on the overall situation, not just the immediate tactics."

Laurie nodded, thinking that through. It was what she'd thought, if you were giving the care of your life and the lives of others into someone's hands, then you had to trust them to make the right decisions 100% of the time in the heat of the moment. You couldn't be second guessing the orders they gave but how did you come to that level of trust? Was it through training, or just time?

"How did you come to trust our leaders that much? Was it hard for you?" she asked finally.

"They're gifted. They're strong in what they believe," Nathan said, then made a face at how odd his choice of words was. "It's not that they're not human, or that they don't doubt. In fact I find the doubt and the self-examination a good trait, especially when they keep resolving it in favor of fighting on. They're human, and they see me as human," he muttered, looking away from Laurie. "You have no idea what a powerful combination that is."

"There were people that weren't human, or didn't see you as human?" Laurie asked, curious. She'd read several of her teammates files, but she hadn't yet moved onto the older members of the X-men, sometimes she felt like she should get to know _them_, rather then reading a sterile report of what had gone before. She knew now she should read the files, but it was something she disliked, it felt too much like prying.

It was with a sudden stab of amusement that she suddenly realised that the question she'd just ask could well be seen as prying as well. She supposed that eventually she was going to have to leave irrational prejudices behind and just learn as much as she could.

He'd forgotten she was of a different student generation. "Laurie, I was psionically conditioned and trained as a soldier from the time that I was fourteen years old. Yes, there were plenty of people who saw me as a particularly talented performing attack dog."

"Oh." Laurie replied, remembering how he'd reacted to her while he was sick, and she wondered now if that's who he'd thought she was. It made a lot of sense now that she looked back at it. He must have been terrified. "I'm sorry."

"It was a long time ago. But it's why I'm here, doing what I do. And it's because they're so different from the people who used to give me orders that I trust Scott and Ororo, and trusted Alison."

"Do you think a good leader should know how to follow too?" she asked suddenly, veering off into another question, she didn't want to question Nathan about things that were obviously painful.

A philosophical discussion, then. "They should always be willing to take into account that they may be wrong," Nathan said after a moment. "It's not the same as knowing how to follow, I know."

Laurie thought about that for a moment, allowing her legs to stretch her strides out since Nathan was taller then her, and would be able to keep up. They'd reached the woodline now, and a dirt path stretched out in front of them, leading eventually to the stables.

"What makes a good follower then?" she eventually asked.

"Being an informed follower," Nathan said. "Understanding why you get the orders you do, and what your leader is thinking when he or she gives them. Knowing when to speak up."

"What if you'd rather be a leader then a follower? How do you get there?" Laurie asked as she looked up, looking at sunlight drift through branches above only to land on the scattered ground cover in broken beams.

"There's an interesting question. I can't really answer that. I've been both. You find the role that's right for you over time. Experience helps."

Laurie kicked at some leaves that had fallen onto the path, sending them off to the side to join the rest of the ground cover. She wasn't yet sure if she was a follower or a leader, although she had a feeling she was somewhere in between. She did know she found it hard to let others take the lead in crisis, preferring the ability to act without having to wait on someone to tell her what to do. She somehow figured that wasn't what a leader did though, or what a leader should want.

It was a change from who she'd been when she first came to the school, back then she'd always waited for someone else to come. She knew better now, you couldn't always rely on someone else to save you, sometimes you had to act.

"What if you're not good at either though, is it just 'practice makes perfect'? Or are you fundamentally one or the other, do you think?" she asked after a moment of thought about what he'd said, looking up at him this time rather then simply staring at the scenery.

"There's no middle ground in the field," Nathan said warningly. "In the rest of your life, it can be situational, but not there."

"So, you're a follower out there till someone says otherwise then?" Laurie asked, wondering if that sort of thing was really so cut and dry. What if something happened, people got hurt? What then? "I mean, what if someone gets hurt? I'm not about to, you know, try to wrestle control from someone in the middle of a battle but shouldn't we all be capable of leading if something bad happened?"

Nathan raised an eyebrow and stopped, turning to face her. "Aren't you jumping the gun a little here?" he asked, patiently enough. "You're still working on basic skills, Laurie. And this is not meant to be hurtful, but the only time you're likely to find yourself in a position to give orders for the foreseeable future is if half a dozen X-Men get knocked out and you're the only one conscious."

Laurie grinned up at him, amused all of a sudden. She resisted the strong urge to roll her eyes at him, but only just. "I know that. But I should take the long view, shouldn't I? Know where I want to go and work to get there? It's all sort of...figuring out where I want to be right now, I guess. If I don't really know what the possibilities are then I'm just going to flounder around and never get anywhere."

"It's not good for you to be thinking that far ahead," Nathan said. "Work out your motivations for being here, and hone your skills so that you can make a contribution. Being Joe Average X-Men is still an enormous responsibility, you know."

"I know that too. I know it's hard work, and it takes time and practice and lots of bruising, well, for me at least." Laurie replied, feeling slightly frustrated now. She didn't like not having an ultimate goal, she worked better when she had an ideal function to aspire to. She supposed he was right though, you had to learn to crawl before you could walk, before you could run. "It's just...it feels like everyone else is moving on and I'm stuck here."

"Don't be in such a hurry, Laurie. You know," Nathan said, "it was something like... seven months, I think, for me to go from reserve status with the team to full X-Man. Me, with all my experience working with small mutant units. I'd say you're doing just fine."

"Yeah, just sometimes I feel like no one really expects me to make it all the way. They just seem to be waiting for me to bomb out." she replied, noting that they'd reached the stables.

She walked forward and reached up to hug the neck of one of the horses who'd already come forward to greet her, they always seemed to know when she was around.

"Pack dynamics," Nathan said. "You give off the wrong signals. Uncertain yet challenging. When they think you yourself don't know what you want, yet push anyway... well, they push back."

Laurie fished an apple from her jacket pocket and held it out in her hand for Charger to take, brushing her other hand down his neck as he lipped the apple from her hand. "How do I give off the right signals then? I want to be an X-man, I've never really doubted it. How do I get them to see it?"

Nathan shrugged. "I can't really answer that for you. You need to resolve the uncertainty and dial back the challenge. Which is a lot easier said than done."

"I don't know if I can be any less challenging, I've always been taught to go for what I want and to reach for the best rather then settling for 'just good enough'." Laurie admitted, moving past Charger and reaching across to the other yearling Wildfire, who accepted her caress with a disdainful air but accepted the apple nevertheless. "Less uncertain I can do though, I think. It's hard when I don't always understand what being an X-man is. I could read more, actually take a look at team files instead of waiting for people to tell me."

Nathan managed not to snort at the last. "Yes, you could. You could also meditate on the difference between asking questions - which you've been doing perfectly well for the last fifteen minutes or so - and pushing."

Laurie looked back at him over her shoulder, her hand paused on Wildfire's neck. "I'm not sure what you mean by pushing," she admitted finally.

"'Should I be able to lead?' That sort of thing. The running before you can walk sort of thing," Nathan said.

"Ahhh." Laurie said, a small blush creeping into her cheeks as she finally realised what he'd been talking about. "So, in other words, stop being such a punk? I think I can do that, with the right prodding."