xp_logs | Nathan and Callisto, backdated to Wednesday night

After returning from Mexico with Kurt, Nathan runs into Callisto while out running around (literally). Conversation is had.

It had been entirely too much time since he'd done this. Falling into the habit of using the exoskeleton too much... Flying was wonderful, and he wouldn't trade it for anything, as clumsy as the firebird still was in comparison to other flyers around here. But using his telekinesis to move from tree to tree was a different kind of experience, requiring much more subtle use of his TK. It was almost like meditation, really, but much more active. Which he needed, after too many hours in that cargo plane.

Beneath the canopy, he wasn't alone. Callisto frowned as she neared the other side of the small coniferous patch. There was definitely a human figure moving, somewhere above her, but the noise, the weight, it didn't quite tally with the size. Unless it's some strange hollow-boned bird-kid. Which, of course, is perfectly plausible... Eventually, glancing up at the right moment, she caught a glimpse. That definitely wasn't a bird-kid...

Nathan landed on a branch, balancing himself with precisely the right amount of TK applied in the right directions. He surfaced from the half-trance for long enough to recognize who was below him, and smiled slightly. "Sorry," he called down. "Wasn't paying attention." He stepped off the branch and fell, landing lightly. "Nice evening, isn't it?" The bizarre thing was, he was in a good mood, Brotherhood set-up or not. They'd gotten Kurt back largely intact and hadn't wound up in a fight with Magneto. Good enough for him.

"It's, um... Yeah, it's nice." In truth, Callisto had barely noticed the weather, due a severe case of brooding, though if asked she wouldn't be able to say quite what about. She'd been stuck in an unusually thoughtful state - for her - for some weeks now, and she wasn't sure she liked it. For her part she was keen to find a way to blame Ororo Munroe, but every time she saw the damn woman she was finding fewer reasons to hate her. It took a lot of energy to remain irritated with someone no matter how genuine and frank they were with you.

Nathan rubbed at his jaw, trying not to be too obvious about the assessing look he was giving her. The slight smile, however, lingered. "Just out getting some air?" he asked lightly. "I didn't expect to see anyone out here at this end of the lake..."

"I get around," the young woman answered with a shrug. "I like to stay out of people's way, mostly." Wouldn't want to get shot at and fucked with by some blue chick. Again.

Blue chick? Interesting. Nathan's eyes strayed towards the lake, glittering in the moonlight. "I needed some air," he said. "Just went to Mexico City and back in the hold of a cargo plane in the last forty-eight hours... I'll be glad when the new jet's ready. That was a little awkward."

"Sounds... inconvenient. Will be a li'l while yet. For the jet, I mean."

Nathan shrugged. "Not a comfy way to travel, but it was actually quite convenient for what we needed." He smiled somewhat wryly. "Last time I did that, I had to make the return trip with two bullets in my back. That was not comfortable."

Callisto nodded, sticking her hands in her pockets. "Yeah, being shot sucks."

"Do you heal?" Nathan asked idly, leaning back against the trunk of the tree he'd just 'disembarked' from. "I mean, more quickly than the norm."

Callisto blinked. It wasn't that she objected to being asked about her mutations. It was just that, generally, people didn't around here. She could only remember having talked about it with Wendy. "Uh, yeah. I mean, not super-fast. But I'm pretty tough."

Nathan nodded, smiling slightly. "I thought maybe." The comment about how getting shot sucked had sounded genuinely casual, not nonchalant. "I heal a little faster than the average. Probably a good thing, given how often I get banged up, doing what I do..."

"Working for an NGO not all with the campaigning and money-raising, then?" Callisto asked with a tiny, almost non-existent smile, the teasing in her tone subtle but there.

"Well, let's see - my last two work trips, I got sucked into a dreamworld inhabited by all my dead friends, and then onto the astral plane when a whole country had a case of the spiritual hiccups. I would kill for some nice, boring fund-raising right now," Nathan said, and meant it. "Or even just a couple of weeks where my biggest worry was keeping my daughter from rearranging our files again."

"I'm guessing she doesn't do alphabetical or chronological..."

"Chaos," Nathan said, and slid down the tree to a sitting position. "Pure blissful chaos. I rather envy her sometimes." He wasn't making a lot of sense, but ah, well. It had been a rough few weeks. "The rest of us poor saps have to try and make order, instead. Which I think is a losing proposition."

"Kids, huh?" Callisto smirked. Her relationship with children in general was an interesting one - she possessed very little maternal instinct, but with her general instinct to see people safe, her basic common sense and lack of condescension tended to make her well-received by children of any age - far better, usually, than she was by adults.

Very few children had been under her charge in her days with the Morlocks, but those who had she'd formed a far stronger attachment to than the older mutants. She felt a nasty twinge in her gut as she remembered Sarah, who she hadn't seen since their encounter in the mansion's front hall. It didn't look like they were ever going to be friends again. Brushing the thought away, Callisto pulled her hands from her pockets to fold her arms.

"Difficult creatures, children," Nathan said, 'hearing' probably more than he should, but remembering his manners. "Rachel's not even three yet and already I wonder about what it's going to be like when she's older and her own person. If she gets the stubbornness from both sides, she's going to be a horror when she's fourteen."

"I'm fairly sure all fourteen-year-olds are pretty horrific at the best of times," Callisto said. "I remember this kid I knew once used to burn you if you tried to order him around... Still, it wasn't totally his fault; his sweat was mostly... potassium or sodium or something... and you know what teenagers are like for sweating. You could always tell when he was coming from the hissing sound he made as water dripped on him from the tunnel ceiling..."

"When I was fourteen..." Nathan trailed off, smiling a little. It was an odd, crooked smile, not possessing much in the way of humor. "I hope she is a horror," he murmured, almost under his breath. "I hope she makes me go bald, because I'll love every minute of it. Because it's the way a fourteen year old should be."

Calliso smiled grimly. She didn't even begin to muse on her own fourteenth year. "I'm sure in a place like this she'll have a good, uh, thing... environment."

"It's a good environment for us hopeless cases too, you know." Nathan paused, his lips twitching into something closer to a real smile. "They can be very irritating. And persistent."

Callisto gave a short laugh. "Hah, you're not wrong there," she said, in a tone that testified to the fact she'd already suffered from one of the mansion's irritating and persistent types - for all that it was harder and harder to stay irritated with Ororo Munroe for long.

"I wasn't such a challenge for them, when I first came here. I was... so damned exhausted that all they had to do was feed me and offer me a little kindness, and I was theirs."

"Oh, I doubt I'm challenging. The not-very-well-kept secret is I'm kind of a pushover."

"Oh, so you're a nut who wants to be cracked?" Nathan tilted his head. "-that didn't come out quite right. I mentioned, cargo plane, lack of sleep, expecting megalomaniac and ambush at the other end?" He rose, grimacing as his knees protested.

Callisto unfolded her arms to wave off the apology as unnecessary. "I dunno what I am, really," she said with a shrug. "I guess I'm just... waiting."

Nathan gave her a long look. His voice was suddenly entirely serious when he spoke again. "It's not such a bad thing. To find yourself in a place where the world's not demanding you answer all those questions right now, or else." He shrugged. "Having so much you want to do that you regularly bemoan the lack of extra hours in the day is highly overrated."

"Mm. I guess I just put so much for so long into just having enough to eat without breaking too many laws. Not having to worry about that stuff, I dunno what to do with myself." Callisto frowned, as she always seemed to when she disclosed more than she necessarily meant to, sticking her hands back in her pockets.

"It'll come to you," Nathan said. "Just a question of what, or when, and keeping yourself occupied in the meantime. Which you seem to be doing, from what I've heard..."

"Yeah? Well. I guess I find stuff to do..."

"I need to do some more work on the Blackbird myself. I'm very good at the heavy lifting," Nathan said, sounding amused. "It's one of my few useful qualities."

"I'm sure you have plenty of useful qualities," Callisto said with a chuckle. "I thought your yelling down a phone skills were excellent when I saw you last..."

"No, see, that is an art, not just a skill. And yet the boy thinks it's really me losing my temper. Well," Nathan said with a smile and another shrug. "sometimes it is. Not as often as he thinks, though. It's hard to break the habits of a lifetime. Intimidation used to be a very necessary tactic."

"What is it... is it Elpis? What is it you do, anyway?"

"Mutant-related humanitarian work," Nathan said. "That's Elpis. We work in the developing world - I know there are plenty of things that need addressing even here in the US, but... I saw a lot, in my previous life. And at least here, people have a chance of looking after their own problems. In other places that's just not an option, because there's so little in the way of support there to work with."

"Mm." Callisto just nodded a little at this, her brow furrowing again as Nathan's words sent her mind wandering back to that shelter. She'd been back again, of course; hadn't been able to stay away. She'd told herself she was just taking a ride into the city to escape the mansion for a few hours but she'd arrived there almost on autopilot. And for all that she'd never admit it to a certain white-haired mutant, Munroe was right - Callisto, just by being around, talking to those kids, was helping. Not much, but if she started going more regularly, maybe a couple times a week... Goddamnit, you are not being drawn into this. But even her determined internal monologue was sounding a lot less certain of that these days.

Then she seemed to realise how long they're been quiet - audibly, at least, and added. "I mean, yeah, Angelo said you were a... thing. NGO."

"You do and act a certain way - organize yourselves following a given model, to get the chance to do the work you want. I may chafe at the formalities sometimes-" And push the envelope a little too far. "- but I recognize the necessity."

"I'm not sure I'd be very good at that." Why, then, did her tone suggest she might actually have given the concept some thought?

"The question you have to ask yourself is if it's worth not accomplishing your ends because you don't like the means. Obviously if the means are really objectionable, that's one thing. But if they're just... dull, or tedious, or shaped by the rules of a society that's not done much for you over the years... it's a game that's worth playing, sometimes."

Callisto's intense expression didn't leave her face as she considered this. "That's always assuming you actually achieve anything from it. There's no saying I could." I've failed before, after all.

There's a lot going on in there, Nathan thought. And he was getting the distinct sense that she both had few people she could talk to about anything, let along the big questions like this, and that he might very well scare her off if he got too intense, here. "Of course you fail," he said almost casually. "Rarely completely, though, if you put any effort into it at all... and in that case, why not trying? There's always something that can be accomplished."

The mechanic chuckled wryly. "Now you sound like Munroe."

"Ororo's persistent, but she's got nothing on me," Nathan said dryly. "When I became an X-Man, they had to beat the crap out of me in training for months before I learned that it was okay to retreat. Holdover from my past life," he said, and didn't elaborate, "but the epiphany didn't really take when it came to anything besides combat. I don't think if I want something badly enough that I can give up. I've never hit that point."

Pursing her lips, Callisto shrugged, and Nathan could see (and feel) her drawing back into herself, the brief glimpse of ideals, passions, principles, disappearing once more beneath her usual apparent apathy and simplicity. "Good for you, I guess," she said, though there was no sarcasm to her tone.

"Well, yes and no," Nathan said. "Any virtue taken too far is a vice. I think it's harder to learn to wait than it is to act."

"The whole thing sounds like it involves layers I just don't have," the young woman commented.

"Says who?" Nathan demanded, not quite humorously. "I somehow doubt you're a simple soul."

"I dunno about that." Callisto met Nathan's eyes a little calculatingly. "Nothing terribly interesting or complicated about me."

"See, people who say that aloud instantly disprove it." Nathan's words were almost teasing. "Simple people don't evaluate themselves for complexity."

Callisto rolled her eyes. "That sounds like talking in circles to me," she said, stepping back a bit to lean against the tree behind her, glancing up to the canopy above where Nathan had so recently been moving.

"I have a piece of paper hanging on a wall that says I'm a licensed expert in talking in circles," Nathan said, floating a few centimetres off the ground. "But I still think I have a point."

But Callisto's gaze didn't leave the treetops, her lips pursing slightly as she shrugged. Clearly whatever sharing had gone on between them today was over in favour of her usual paper thin but numerous walls.

"I'll let you get back to your walk," Nathan said, the smile lingering as he moved smoothly upwards. "And I'll get back to mine."

"Right," Callisto nodded, obviously slightly relieved, although she managed a tiny smile. "See you around."