xp_logs | Lakeside: Terry and Nathan

Very late Monday Night, Terry goes for a walk and runs into Nathan. They talk about losing, failure and grief.

Terry had been working late almost since she'd started this job and the situation in India hadn't helped in the least. Even she, the lowest on the totem pole, had felt the ripples of that. Getting home, she found her mind still too full and her body still too revved up--no doubt helped along by the massive amounts of coffee she found herself inhaling all day long. The restlessness manifested itself in myriad ways: music, training, painting.

Today it drove her outside, seeking the night air and the quiet. Her feet were bare as she walked, crushing blades of grass so they left dew on her skin. Her wanderings took her down toward the lake, not for any particular reason. Fireflies chased around her, winking in and out. She rather suspected she knew how they felt.

As her path took her towards the lake, a tall figure became visible in the moonlight, standing by the water's edge. Nathan was standing and staring out into the lake, something Terry couldn't identify at this distance tucked into the crook of his arm. The ripples moving over the surface of the lake didn't seem to correspond to any sort of regular pattern one might expect from wind, and there was a faint, soft radiance limning Nathan's form.

After a moment, he took whatever he was holding in his other hand, then unscrewed what was obviously a lid. Something fine, like dust, flew in elegant spiral patterns out of the container and was caught by the unnatural breeze. It moved across the lake, glittering faintly.

She watched, her breath held until the wind that she could neither feel nor hear took its burden away, settling over the waters. Terry nearly left, not wishing to intrude. Not sure she wanted company. But after several seconds she began walking again, down to where Nathan stood lakeside, apparently unaware of her existence.

"It was getting a little morbid, keeping him on my mantel," he said, almost conversationally, when she stopped beside him. Tears were glittering on his cheeks, though, and he didn't look at her as he put the lid back on the urn and then let it float to the ground. "Maybe this way he can spend eternity arguing with Mick and Tim."

Terry swallowed, not really sure what to say. Not sure that there was anything she could say that would even come close to being the right thing. She listened to his breathing instead, the faint hitch that said he wanted to cry--probably had before she arrived. Probably would have if she'd stayed away. "Were you ready to let go?" she heard herself ask.

"Fuck, no." He sounded almost gruff, as if he knew what she'd heard in his voice and was trying to disguise it. "I never am. But it was time. There's less excuse to let grief incapacitate you after the first half-dozen or so murdered loved ones."

She nodded like she understood though she knew that she didn't. Couldn't. "I can go, if you'd rather be alone," she offered, not looking at him. Out of her depth again.

"It's not my lake." The gruffness had softened slightly. He reached up and wiped at his eyes, then looked down at her. "What's got you up at this hour?"

"About fourteen cups of Sumatran coffee. I thought a walk might help work it out of my system before tomorrow's batch." It was technically true and that was good enough for her. "I missed a training session today. I'll be on comm duty for a week, I'm sure. Couldn't get away from work."

"Work?" Nathan was staring out at the lake again, but this time, in a way that suggested he was trying to remember precisely what sort of work Terry had been doing. To say that he'd been a bit disconnected these last few weeks would be overstating the case. Just a little.

She had hardly told anyone. Bobby, of course, and a short confusing phone call to Sean but almost no one else. Alison had teased it out of her when she'd called about something unrelated. "Ah, the internship. I told you about my interview? They approved it."

"That's good news, Terry. Congratulations." It didn't sound insincere, despite the flatness of his tone. "I'm sure Scott and Ororo won't penalize you for making some progress with your career."

Terry shrugged, "Maybe if I wasn't on thin ice with the team that would be true." Her voice was too controlled, no hint of stray emotions leaking out around the edges. She'd had a long time to get over the botched mission and she wasn't going to let anyone see that it still rattled her. She still had so much left to prove.

Nathan shifted slightly beside her. "Thin ice," he said, as if sounding out the words. Then, shocking enough in the same deliberate tone: "So in other words you're very deep into the self-flagellation for what happened in Vermont."

Terry shivered in the balmy summer night. "You'd have read the mission report. You'll know how badly I screwed up. I think thin ice is a fair enough assessment of the situation." She no longer thought she alone was responsible. But the fact remained that she'd been leading. And the fact remained that she'd left far more than her team vulnerable through her overconfidence.

The broad shoulders of the man beside her stiffened slightly. "Tell me something," he said. "I know you've reviewed past mission files fairly exhaustively. Including our first visit to Youra, where I got... every... single member of the team with me killed except Anika. Who only lived because of her healing factor. Have you been thinking I screwed up that day ever since you read about it?"

She had reams of notes about that mission. Things that had gone wrong, warning signs. But the failure wasn't his. "No, of course not." Terry looked up at him, sharply, "Would you say that they were the same situation?"

"They're not much different. You and I were both taken by surprise by events we could never have anticipated. The Brotherhood's ambush, Ruiz's Masada trigger. It's how we reacted, after the hammer fell, that's important." Nathan blinked a bit too rapidly, staring out at the moonlit water. "You brought your team home alive. Don't minimize that."

"Getting ambushed wasn't my fault," Terry agreed and looked down at her feet, covered in grass and dew and mud from the bank. "The damage they took getting out--I wasn't as careful as I should have been. And... Do you know Bobby's spent the last month with every kind of spook crawling all over the Keep? She's got me jumping at shadows because she knew how to get to me."

The look he gave her was too bleak to be called amused. "You do remember who you're talking to? You can actually learn to live with the uncertainty. Given that I don't think you'll be killing Mystique anytime soon, I think you have to."

"Aye, I can't outthink her. I can't outfight her. I can't do anything about her but try to prevent her from hurting something I love. I was overmatched. We were all bloody overmatched." Anger rippled through her voice before she mastered her tone. The flush of it still stained her cheeks, coloring them dark in the silvery moonlight. "That's the trouble. How can they put someone who isn't good enough in charge of a mission? Knowing that we're sitting ducks."

"This is going to sound a little brutal," Nathan said after a moment, "but what happens if, on the next mission out against Magneto... or hell, the latest terrorist group of the week, Ororo and Scott are both killed?" He looked down at her, raising an eyebrow. "What then?" he asked. "It's entirely possible. One lucky energy blast could take out both of them."

"Nightcrawler would lead. Cannonball's back, he could step up too. You have years of experience too. Why trust me?" She had so much work to do before she was worthy. She'd thought she was doing well. But that had been proven false, brutally false.

"And if Kurt goes down on the next mission? Or Sam finds something his blast field can't stand up against? God knows I've come pretty close to buying it a few times. You're missing my point." Nathan shrugged, folding his arms across his chest. "You can choose to be the next one who stands up if that day ever comes - or not. No one's going to think any less of you if you pick the latter. If you stick with being a good X-Man and a reliable member of the team. But if that day ever comes, can you really tell me you want to be waiting for someone else to step into that gap and start giving orders?"

"No!" Terry's hands fisted at her sides, trying to sort out how to explain her problem. "I'm not...I'm not good enough. There wasn't any way to prevent the ambush but after that? How much faster would we have been free if someone else was leading? How much worse was it because it was me and I'm not ready? They see that. They have to see that. This is all that I've wanted for years and I'm fucking it up at every turn."

You see that very handy lake right there? Nathan wanted to say, but didn't. "You are what you believe you are," he said, instead. "If you go on thinking you're not good enough, you won't be. You won't learn whatever there is to be learned from this, and you won't have a next time where you can do better."

She looked away from him, staring off at nothing. Her voice was thin when she spoke, all the emotion pressed out of it. "What do you believe? You read the report. Are you telling me you think I didn't make mistakes?"

Nathan gave the question some due consideration before he answered. "I don't think you made any choices that weren't dictated by the situation," he said finally. "If it had been a different team, maybe there would have been other choices. If this had happened somewhere else, a more populated area... other possibilities. But you and the others did your best. And you, I think, could benefit more from getting back up on the horse than dissecting events I suspect you've been over a thousand times at the point."

It wasn't a no. It wasn't a yes either. It was...exactly what it was. An analysis of the situation and Nathan's opinion. Whether or not she chose to accept it was her own problem. Terry sighed. "I'm afraid."

Nathan made a sound a little too shaky to be a laugh. "Then you are doing something very right. I would never follow the fearless for an instant. There's something badly broken in someone who does the sort of things we do and isn't afraid."

Terry stared out over the lake, focusing on the moonlight until it dazzled her eyes and they welled up in self-defense. She blinked to clear away the tears. "Is this inevitable? Standing here mourning your dead?"

"I don't know," Nathan said, almost under his breath. "I hope not. I wouldn't wish this on any of you." His jaw clenched. "I have a memory crystal, in the boathouse, that Forge made me. It's full. All the people who should have been in Rachel's life, but won't be..."

As old as Terry was, it wasn't her own death she worried about. Though she knew better, some part of her mind still clung to the invincibility of the young. But losing others--the ones she was responsible for, the ones she loved, the ones who didn't do anything to deserve it--that was almost more than she could face. "A couple years ago, Sean gave me a photo book. Pictures from when he met my mother. I'd never really felt like I'd lost her before that."

"I know it'll hurt her, too, to know them, in the end... it can't not." There was loss in every image in that crystal. "But it's better than being forgotten." Nathan gave another one of those not-quite laughs. "You'd think I'd be over that particular hang-up by now, but I'm not. I think I've actually gotten worse." He took a deep, unsteady breath, then leaned down and picked up the urn. The telekinetically-assisted throw sent it spinning out to nearly the middle of the lake, and it disappeared with a splash.

Terry shrugged, and exhaled, letting go, "I don't think it's a hang up. But then again, I'm Irish."