xp_logs | Tatiana and Nathan, Monday morning

Nathan finds Tatiana up a tree, and gets her to come down.

It didn't take him long to find her. She had a particular, favorite tree, after all. "You know, if you really didn't want to talk," Nathan said, stopping beneath it and looking up, "there are probably better places to hide from a telepath than two minutes away from the boathouse."

Tat's eyes widened. "What?" She was momentarily distracted from dwelling on her own problems when he said that- "But you're not telepathic." She didn't come down, and it didn't do anything to help how red and puffy her face was, but at least she wasn't going around and around mentally anymore. Later, of course, she might realise how dumb it was for her to actually argue about this with him, but right now, she wasn't too up on the common sense.

Nathan tilted his head, realizing that no, he never had mentioned that to her. Hadn't wanted to make her skittish around him. Ah, well. "Telepathic," he said dryly. "Am, too. Believe me. I won't prove it, but it made it not hard at all to find you."

Tat sniffled, and glared at him the best that he could. "Unfair advantage," she said, her voice nothing if not stuffy. "I'm okay... ish." Which was a total lie, and for all that she's a smart girl, the thinking is apparently lagging behind.

"Uh-huh. Of course you are." That was why the journal post that was as good as a cry for help, even if she claimed she didn't want it. Ah, teenagers. Nathan slid down the trunk of the tree into a sitting position, picking a spot where he could still see her easily if he looked up. "So what happened?"

"There was a cow that got caught in some barbed wire when Kevin and I were sandbagging." She tried to make her voice as flat as she could, and tilted her head back against the trunk. "Use your imagination." She kept running it over in her mind. Her fear- God, the fear, and how much she hated it, and how it'd felt and the instincts- It had all been too much, and she might have been imagining it, but the look on Kevin's face-

Horrible. It had been horrible.

It really sort of sounded, from things he'd heard around the mansion, that this particular RedX trip had not gone particularly well for anyone. "Well," Nathan said, not quite lightly, "I can certainly see why that would put you in the mood to hate the world. And your life." Jim needed to get his ass back from Muir one of these days. Tatiana could use his particular insight.

"I don't hate my life," she mumbled, tugging her knees up to her chest. "And I don't hate the world." She just wondered what the hell she was doing here, and if she could somehow put herself in some sort of a bubble so she wouldn't get bled on.

"You wish it could be different, though," Nathan said, and pondered. "If I show you something, will you promise not to fall out of the tree?"

"I guess I could just get down." She bit the inside of her lip, and rubbed her face one more time with the hem of her shirt, before moving to swing down. She was so obviously miserable, sniffling again as she dropped to the grass. "What is it?" She didn't say anything about wishing it could be different, but she did. A whole lot of it, actually. Her mutation. Her life before she came to Xavier's. She wouldn't change the people she'd met, just.... maybe make it a little better. No be rich or anything, just... not have it suck quite so much.

Nathan waited until she was on solid ground. "I want to link to your mind, just for a minute," he said. "Can I do that?" Asking permission was a very, very good thing. If she wasn't really skittish about telepathy he didn't want to make her skittish. "I just want to show you something."

Tat swallowed hard, watching him warily. "... You won't like... dig around, right? I mean, by accident, or anything?"

"No digging at all. I just want to let you borrow my 'eyes'."

That was the queue, of course, for her to think of all of the things that she didn't want him to see, but she nodded. "Then it's okay," she said quietly, her hands twisting in the hem of her shirt. "Go ahead."

Nathan reached out and touched her mind gently, drawing her into the lightest possible link. #I want to show you a couple of things, actually,# he said, and drew them back towards the mansion, even as he thinned out his shields. The buzz of all those different minds grew steadily in volume, all those different voices talking at once. #That's the mansion, with my shields at about sixty percent... I would never drop them entirely while I'm linked with you, but imagine all that noise times two. And the mansion is very quiet, compared to somewhere like New York City.#

"I'd throw up, I think." She could barely get the mental concentration together over that racket to actually say something, but she swallowed hard. "Or go nuts." She didn't know what she was supposed to get from this. - if she was supposed to realise that what she had wasn't that bad, or- or what. She knew- Well, she assumed that the other people here would be able to handle it better. That they wouldn't feel sick at just knowing - that it was a fault in her, and not one in her mutation (for all that her mutation was hardly roses and lollipops.)

#That's thing number one. This is thing number two.# Reinforcing his shields again, he drew them back out of the mansion, back to the boathouse. To Rachel, playing happily with her toys on the floor of her room. There was a slight background buzz from Juliette and the others working in the office, but the sharpest, clearest thing were the perfect, glowing patterns of Rachel's mind.

She noticed them watching, and suddenly there were three of them in the link, one gleeful. #Tat! Hi Tat# Rachel's mental 'voice' was like golden champagne bubbles, warm and happy and affectionate.

Tat's mouth opened and closed, her eyes brimming with tears. That was... that made it worth it. Made his mutations worth it, that he could- #Hi?# She didn't think it particularly loud, not even knowing if it worked. "That's-" She wondered, then, if she could have what he had. If she could have a family. What would happen if there was actually a boy... But then, what if she changed? What if she actually hurt him? She couldn't say anymore that she wouldn't, not after what'd happened before.

#Come play, Tat?# Rachel beseeched.

Nathan smiled. #We'll see if we can talk her into it,# he said to his daughter, and released his link with Tatiana just as gently as he'd created it in the first place. It wouldn't stop Rachel from chattering at her, but that wasn't a bad thing. "I imagine now you're wondering 'Can my mutation really have a good side?'" he said, gazing at Tat. "I wish I could tell you that it could. I don't know if that's possible for you - and that's not me making an objective judgement, it's mostly because I'm not you."

"I have a friend - a very dear friend. He's about eight feet tall, and looks like a bear. Not even a very humanoid bear. His parents left him in the middle of nowhere, in Northern Canada, when he was a few years younger than you. They were afraid of him, I would think." Nathan raised his hands, palms up. "He spent at least ten years - Theo's not sure just how long it was - living alone, in the wilderness. The few human beings he saw during that time were terrified of him, and that made him afraid of himself. By the time I met him, he honestly thought he belonged there. That it was the only safe place for him to be."

Her eyes burned with tears, not even realising that they were dribbling free down her cheeks. "But I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life-" Her voice cracked, and only then did she scrub at her face with her hands. She was only sixteen; the rest of her life was a vast and overwhelming concept.

"Theo lives in Tel Aviv now. He works for Elpis. He's not found a woman willing to put up with his bad habits yet, but he has friends. A lot of very good friends, and children to be a very fierce uncle to." Nathan took a deep breath, let it out on a soft sigh. "I know that sometimes he's wistful, and wants more than that. We keep trying to remind him that it's not impossible, especially now that he's living in one place, with what passes for a normal life."

Tat wondered if Nathan could understand, if there was some sort of 'fry people's brains' setting on his telepathy that made him scared about what he might do. "I'm glad for him," she said, swallowing hard and forcing a smile. It didn't change many things; that she was wondering why she was here if she was just as scared as she had been, and... and all sorts of things.

"Nothing I can say is going to make it any easier, when things go badly and you're not sure whether it's going to get any better," Nathan said, not reading her mind. He smiled a bit, half-sadly, half-encouragingly. "But if it helps, at all - I think it can. I've seen it get better, for people in your situation, or situations that have been bad in other ways. And whatever happens, I hope you know that I'm going to do my best to always be here to help."

Her chin wobbled again. "I don't- I mean, I didn't have anyone like that. Not- Not since-" She wasn't going to say 'not since her Dad left', since the last thing she wanted was for him to freak out or something. She'd been young at the time, and even she knew she had an idealized mental image of her father. "So- Uh. That's- That's really-"

And then, that was it. She covered her face with her hands, and just cried. It didn't make sense - not much did, when you were sixteen - and it wasn't something she did often.

Nathan just smiled again, shifting forward and hugging her. "It's okay," he said gently. "Although you do realize that any minute now, Rachel is going to start singing in your head, trying to cheer you up..."

Tat hiccupped, her forehead against his chest. "Just as long as it's not the Wiggles, I'll survive. Doodlebops would work." She sucked in a breath, and then another, trying to calm down. "I was so scared, Nate. I... I wish I could at least know when it was going to happen."

"We're going to work on that."