xp_logs | Kyle, Nate, and inside Kyle's head.

x-wildchild.livejournal.com posting in

Backdated to the 13th. Kyle goes to see Nate about the 'voice in his head' during the events of Keep the Faith. His suspicions about it are confirmed, and Nate gets to telepathically meet the Other Kyle.

Bright sunny summer day, with all of the typical summer day accompaniments. Chirping young birds, the sound of a riding mower, several teenagers playing volleyball. And an angry young man in torn jeans and a white t-shirt storming across the grounds in bare feet.

Kyle got all the way to the door of the boathouse before even thinking that this might be possibly a bad idea. It was the briefest of thoughts before the anger returned, and the draw to fix the problem, and go to the only person who was at all familiar with it.

He opened the door, ignoring the eternally patient office assistant, and Jane, who was carrying what was probably a stack of papers and Kyle barely registered either of their prescenes except to note that they weren't in his path between the door and his goal.

"Get. It. Out. Of. My. Head." He stood in front of Nate arms crossed and with a nearly violent look on his face.

Nathan had looked up from his work a few minutes ago, frowning as he sensed Kyle's very agitated psi-imprint approaching. By the time Kyle opened the door, he'd been waiting tensely, wondering what was about to descend. "It?" he asked after a moment, rising from his chair. "Maybe we should go out to the deck-"

"Okay, whatever." Kyle said, waving one hand in the air dismissively. "I just want it gone. No more crazy thing in my head. " And despite the intense anger in his voice, there was a hint of pleading desperation. "I don't want to have to tell anyone that I have a crazy head guy too, one of us with one is more then enough."

Crazy head- "Deck," Nathan murmured, steering Kyle in that directly gently, but firmly. Only when the door closed behind him did he speak again. "You saw something, while the Brotherhood had you," he said. "Yourself?" It was only technically a question. He could guess the answer.

Kyle pointed to his own head, and made the circling gesture that indicated 'crazy'. "Ohhh yeah. Me, only way more like, what I'd want to look like if I was a bad ass. I was very 'cool'." The sarcasm practically danced around on the floor around him. "With the tactics and the survival and the telling me to calm the freak down-." He paced around in a tight circle, hands in his hair. "He was sarcastic. Am I even supposed to refer to it as another person? I don't know!"

"Well, I've always thought of mine as sort of an asshole," Nathan said, then sighed, sitting down with a thump on one of the chairs. Kyle looked too restless to sit, but he was fucking tired, and he needed to think and sort this out. He'd told Kyle about the Mistra tactical personalities ages ago, but he'd also told him that his conditioning hadn't been far enough along to produce one. There goes your credibility down the toilet, Dayspring...

"I'd call mine an asshole but he ... " Kyle threw his arms in the air. "This whole thing is stupid! I'm not supposed to have one! I don't want one! Do not want!" The tight circle of pacing grew out into more of a figure-eight. "He was all like, 'come with me if you want to live' except more like 'God, you're a spaz, so I have to help you through this. And he has this whole 'I know this because you know this." thing and I'm not supposed to even HAVE ONE!"

Nathan tilted his head, regarding the very angry young man for a long moment. "Well, not to be unsympathetic, but apparently you do. And if he was helpful while that son of a bitch was torturing you-" Nathan hid an inward flinch, remembering Senyaka in Tibet. The whole night with that bastard... "-maybe it's not such a bad thing."

Kyle sat down, rather abruptly, head in his hands. "I don't care. I don't want it. I don't want to -be- that. I don't want to have some kind of tactics thing in my head, I just want to be Kyle. I want to watch wrestling and learn self defense from Garrison and be a teacher and go on dates with Clarice and eat steak!" He looked up at Nate. "I don't care if it was helpful. I don't want it."

"You can still do all those things," Nathan said gently, trying to be reassuring. "It doesn't make any difference. It doesn't stop me from being-" He paused, blinked. Tilted his head a little farther. "Teacher?"

"Uh." Kyle managed to look embarrassed, even though he was still angry and desperate to get the other Kyle out of his head. "I might have, um, already declared a major." He looked off at the sky, and covered his face with his hand. "I swear to God, if that thing starts commenting on my major or my homework I'm going to put a screwdriver in my ear. I'm serious. I'll lobotomize myself."

"Kyle, do you remember the way I was when I was stuck in the infirmary, after Youra?" Try a different tack, here, Nathan thought. Part of him was still mulling over the 'teacher' thing, though. Why was that both such a pleasant surprise and totally unsurprising? "That's when I actually saw mine for the first time."

"I am not emo or ass-busted." Kyle protested. "I'm pissed." He stood back up, pacing again. "I was fine! I did therapy, I got over the Mistra thing and the kidnapped thing and I was being all productive and crap and now I'm crazy and I get to find out that I am so not over the Mistra thing and they put a thing in my head that I wasn't supposed to have and I don't do emo anyway. It's boring." He wasn't actually sure where the last part came from, but being depressed sounded -boring-.

"You weren't far enough along to have a fully developed tactical personality," Nathan said, more firmly, although the urge to smack him just a little for the 'emo' comment. "They wouldn't have finished. But they might have started - I just never thought of how a feral's mind might react over time and under stress." Completing the work, so to speak. "What you have is probably not what I have. But it could be a coping mechanism."

"Oh, -great-." Kyle groaned, one hand over his eyes all-too-dramatically. "So I am crazy. Great, that's exactly what I wanted as a graduation present! To have a coping mechanism!" He removed the hand and looked at Nate. "Okay. Okay, okay, how do I get rid of this? Therapy? Get you or the Professor or someone to poke around and remove it? I'm serious. I want it gone."

Don't shake the boy. This is not the week to shake the boy. Nathan stepped very, very hard on the impulse. "If this was a fully developed tactical personality, there'd be no way to remove it. Charles could try and encourage it to reintegrate, but that's it. And your situation is probably more complicated. If it's there, it's all bound up in psychic scar tissue, you know. And you can't just rip it out."

"Can't you check to make sure?" Kyle practically pleaded. "I don't want it integrated!" That would mean it would be part of him, and he didn't want -that-. "I don't want it. I don't want any more 'you know what you have to do' and 'I know what you know' and 'pain isn't important.' in my head. No more freaky whatever in my head." He couldn't stand still, even pacing didn't feel like enough. "And I swear to God, if it tells me that Wildchild is something Mistra picked out, screwdriver. Ear. I totally mean it. None of this 'Cable' crap for me. It doesn't get a name!"

Nathan pressed his fingers to his temple for a moment, focusing on a) not laughing, because laughing would be totally inappropriate, and b) not grinding his teeth, either. "Sit down," he said very levelly, instead. "I can't do the Vulcan mind-meld with you pacing back and forth across the dock."

"I hate you." Kyle muttered. But he sat down anyway, indian-style, because he was pretty sure that was some kind of requirement for the whole telepath thing, and rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists. And tried very very hard not to fidget, even though there were dozens of things he could fidget with, like claws or hair or the stiches in his arm that were starting to dissolve and God, they itched.

Perhaps not so oddly for someone who had issues with territory, Kyle's mental landscape looked an awful lot like his room, only bigger and without any of Julio's stuff in it. Instead there was just a seemingly endless expanse of carpet and books and papers and piles of CD's that surrounded the bed and desk.

Nathan stood in the midst of the clutter, reflecting for a moment that going into someone else's mind on a bad shield day wasn't the smartest idea he'd had. Putting that thought out of his mind, he concentrated, seeking out any trace of a familiar sort of pattern.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are..."

The door to Kyle's closet had -not- been there a moment before, and if Kyle could've leapt over and slammed it shut before it opened, he probably would have. But he didn't, or couldn't, and it opened, and the Other Kyle stood, leaning casually against the doorframe, still in the black bandanna and tank top and cargo pants that Kyle had first seen him in. "I thought you'd never ask. He hates me, can you tell?"

Nathan didn't reply for a moment. Just stared - at, and into the image of Kyle, sizing up what he was seeing. He sighed finally, a soft, wry noise. "You must have been buried pretty deep. For Charles to have missed you. And Kyle doesn't hate you. He's just angry."

"I'd explain that, but I try not to ask too many questions." The image of Kyle said wryly. "I kept him alive, that's my job. Anger, hate, it really doesn't matter, he doesn't want me around. I know that much. I've been around, he just never needed me before." Unlike Kyle, the image stood straight, practically military posture, and spoke without a single word of lazy skater slang. "I know you have one. Because Kyle knows. And I know you think yours is an asshole, like he hates me."

"I think he's an asshole. I don't think he's an idiot. And he's a little... more than you, I suspect. He shared my subconscious with Askani for an awfully long time." Nathan looked around, then sat down on the bed with another sigh. "So what was it? The repetitive kidnappings? Haller met mine, after the team retrieved me from Ushuaia. He'd been... asleep for a while, but what Gideon did woke him back up. There's a parallel for you."

The not-Kyle coughed into his hand. "Waking up strapped down to a table for the third time. He was drugged the second time, I didn't have a chance to do anything." If Kyle's face normally screwed up in disgust at the mention of Dr. Rory Campbell, this Kyle's face was that, tenfold. "You should have let him keep the ear. " He said, smirking.

Nathan eyed him for a moment, then whistled the first couple of lines of 'Minstrel Boy'.

"Is that a hint?" The image asked. "It didn't work on him when you got him out of the facility. Maybe it'd work now. It''d make him pretty happy, if I was gone. Do you ever wonder if the rest of the people you got out kept theirs? Kyle does. He wonders if Ani has one." Another smirk. "When he's not thinking about what she looks like naked."

"Actually, I just wanted to see if you jumped." Nathan didn't move, didn't rise from where he was sitting on the bed. But all at once, he seemed very... tall, on Kyle's mindscape. Very tall and very present, the weight and complexity of his psionic presence very gently warping the fabric of the mindscape around him. His clothing flickered between what he'd been wearing in the real world and stark, unrelieved black.

It was, in fact possible to have posture better then nearly-military. The brief flicker had the other Kyle nearly snapping to attention, with the bearing of a Marine Private about ready to salute a four-star General. Even after the flash passed, he remained with his back straight and chin up, with his eyes fixed on a point straight ahead, somewhere about a foot in front of where Nate sat.

Nathan nodded fractionally. "Try to avoid making yourself any more obstrusive than you need to be, while he comes to terms," he said, his words not quite clipped. "Charles is probably the best person to help him do that. And there are worse things than going back to sleep again until you're needed." He smiled very slightly. "You are what you are."

"Understood." It was definitely responding as though it was an order, even though everything Nate had said were just suggestions. And the unspoken honorific of 'sir' hung in the air for a moment, unsaid, but certainly there nonetheless. He remained standing at attention until Nate stood as though he were ready to leave, and only then turned crisply, and disappeared through the closet door.