xp_logs | Nathan and Jubilee at Harry's, Nathan and Zanne walking home

Nathan came to Harry's, but mostly for the alcohol; Jubilee, unfortunately, isn't willing to let him drink peace. Later, Zanne is recruited to steer a very drunken Nathan home.

Jubilee was at that point of the night where you had to walk carefully in order to stop the floor from quietly deciding that you'd had enough and rise up in a rather nasty way to slam you in the face. She needed a spot to sit, one that didn't already have an entire group of people sitting in it. It was at this stage that she noticed her old friend, Nate. Her old friend who happened to be looking quite maudlin and alone in a corner with a rather large bottle of tequila. Jubilee decided that it was her duty as his friend to help him drink said tequila, after she finished her rum and coke, anyhow.

"Nate! Did you know that the tequila worm is actually the most alcoholic part of tequila? At least, I think that's right. Something about soaking up all the juice for so long. Anyway, you should totally let me have that, since you're old and it'd probably kill you, or give you an alcohol induced coma or something." Jubilee noted, sliding onto one of the empty chairs at his table. "By the way, anyone tell you you look like hell yet today? Cause dude, bath time, seriously."

Nathan grunted and refilled his glass, keeping the bottle away from Jubilee. It was one of the only other signs that he'd registered her existence, because he went back to staring off into the distance immediately.

Jubilee took a sip of her drink for a moment, watching Nate as he drunk. Here was a man in dire need of a good shag. She should probably call Moira, tell her she needed to come home before Nate drank himself to death due to lack of sex.

"You know what you need?" she noted with the air of someone dispersion great wisdom. "A really awesome sleep, like, totally 10 out of 10 snooze fest. Always makes me feel better, ya know?"

A snort was her only reply this time. Nathan tossed back the tequila in his glass and then refilled it - again. He was about a third of the way through the bottle. He fully intended to finish the whole thing, and then stagger home to the resoundingly empty boathouse.

Jubilee on the other hand, looked down at her drink with the forlorn expression of one that would have to get up and move allll the way back to the bar in order to get a refill. While, technically, she could probably somehow convince one of her friends to grab a refill for her, it would require a great deal of bribing, and possibly a vow to do a lot of paperwork in the near future.

It just wasn't worth it really, not when there was an almost full bottle of tequila in front of her, all convenient like. "You won't mind if I take just a little, right? Old times sake and all that."

Nathan reached out and moved the tequila bottle farther out of her reach. For the first time in the conversation, he actually looked at her. "If I'd wanted to drink with someone," he said - slowly, but quite precisely, "I wouldn't be sitting in the corner."

"Yes, but one that drinks alone..." Jubilee paused, thinking for a moment. "Hmm, can't think of anything that rhymes with alone. But anyway, totally not healthy for you. You'll get all crotchety and grim and then students will be giving you frightened looks and calling you a ninja and it'll all end in tears."

She reached over for the tequila again with a completely angelic expression, fingers brushing the base of the bottle.

Nathan promptly smacked her upside the head - not hard, and not forcefully enough to draw any attention to their corner, but it was very definitely a warning.

"Dude!" Jubilee hissed, too drunk to move out of the way quickly enough. "What's with the bad touching? Grumpy old man. You are totally takin' advantage of my inebriat...ineb...drunken state."

"Go. Away." The growl was barely audible. "This was cute when you were a teenager. Not so much now."

Jubilee's metabolism had always meant that even when drunk, she needed to continue to drink in order to maintain it. A costly exercise when in a bar, and for the most part something she only did when really in need of the company. She'd learnt recently that drinking alone always seemed to leave her feeling just that little bit more like a complete failure and fuck up.

"You're hurting, Nate. Anyone with half a brain can see that. I wouldn't leave one of my team alone at a time like this, what makes you think I'll do that to you?" she said, voice soft as the mask of affable drunkenness retreated, leaving a tired looking young woman who'd seen too many bad miles of late.

"What makes me think you wouldn't?" Nathan said curtly. "You and I haven't been close for years, Jubilee."

"I'd like to think that history doesn't exclude one from acting differently in the present." Jubilee noted, a wry smile fleeting on her lips. "We haven't been close in years, no. But that just means that you don't know me now, or I you. I I can talk to you while you try and drink your way to the bottom of that bottle, or I can just sit here and watch you drink and be quiet, or I can get one of your friends to watch you, but what I won't do is leave you by yourself."

Nathan shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said, and refilled his glass.

"I think I will." Jubilee noted with a grin, leaning back and hooking a chair with her foot, before resting both her feet on it. "I'm totally gettin' someone else to drag your drunkin' ass home though."

--

"Bet you were just thrilled to get babysitting duty," Nathan muttered, peering very carefully at the ground in an effort to discern precisely where he should walk, if he was going to walk a straight line. "Pointless, you know. I've found my way home in worse shape than this."

"Yes, but we want to make sure that it's your home. Nothing worse than pulling a Robert Downey Jr. if you can help it." Zanne trailed a few steps behind the somewhat plastered man, a deeply amused grin affixed upon her face. "Besides, I don't really mind. It was getting to be time to go anyway."

"Shouldn't have come in the first place," Nathan mumbled. "Not something to be celebrated, any of this... could've drunk myself into insensibility inside my own four walls. My own four empty walls..."

Well, he was a cheery drunk. Couldn't have been one of the fun ones who spontaneously broke out into show tunes and pirouettes, could he? "If it was a celebration, I think it was more of the 'yay we're not dead' sort than 'yay we squished the bad guy'." she observed mildly. "People tend to do that sometimes. It helps them make sure they're really alive."

"Overrated," Nathan grunted pensively - and just barely dodged a tree that wound up unexpectedly in his path, sneaky tree. He teetered slightly, but only for a moment. "I'm tired of war zones. I was tired of war zones ten years ago. And yet they keep happening."

"Hey there, big guy, slow down." Zanne hurried over and hooked and arm though Nathan's. "No need to go charging up trees," she said, gently steering him back onto the sidewalk. They walked in silence a few more feet before she spoke again. "So long as people are what they are, there's always going to be a war zone somewhere. We're lucky in that they're usually not in our own backyard, but that also lets people forget that they're out there. I'm not saying that this was a good thing by any means, but one of the positive outcomes is that maybe it'll wake people up a bit? Make them see the world around them."

"Hard to imagine. People are so... wilfully ignorant." Nathan let his head bob to the right, then the left, wishing that the knots in his muscles would untie themselves. He had more bruises than he'd expected. "I heard you defused the bomb," he said abruptly.

"I was there? Really?"Zanne asked with mock incredulousness before chuckling. "Yeah, I did. With a lot of Adrienne's help," she acknowledged. "I wouldn't have known what to do if she hadn't been there to 'read' it. We almost ran out the timer, though. That was...pretty unpleasant. But nothing exploded, so all's well that ends well. I hear you were up to some pretty insane things though."

Nathan shrugged. "We met him," he said. "Apocalypse. Not like the rest of you saw him, at the end... scary as hell. You should have seen his psi-signature." Except Zanne wasn't a telepath, so she wouldn't have been able to do that. Ah, logic.

"Impressive?" she asked, gently steering them back off of the grass.

"I doubt we could have killed him," Nathan said somewhat muzzily, not at all sure how he'd come to that conclusion (if very sure about it), "even if we'd tried. He still... it's hard to explain. And you know," he said more forcefully, waving his free hand unsteadily, "I wouldn't have killed him. Would make him a martyr. If he's a prisoner, we prove him wrong. Make him weak." A bark of laughter escaped. "Not every day that following the rules actually works to undermine the bad guys."

Zanne was pretty sure that she wasn't quite getting all of Nathan's explanation, but that was okay. She could ask him again when he sobered up. "No one needs a martyr here. Not on any side." she agreed. "And SHIELD has him now, so they'll prevent that from happening." I hope.

"I didn't like this operation," Nathan muttered. "Too many things to do. And unpredictable things. People I don't know." He eyed her, swaying a little. "You're not unpredictable," he said, almost grumpily, as if he was reluctant to make the admission. "Suppose I knew you weren't."

"Thank you." The words lilted up at the end, not quite making them a question. It sounded like compliment, so Zanne decided to take it as such. "We were lucky things turned out so well for us, all things considered.So much could have gone- Careful!"

Nathan blinked up at her from where'd he just toppled off the curb. "I say something nice about you," he said accusingly, "and then you move the ground."

The sight of Nathan sprawled across the ground, gazing up at her with an owlish expression was too much for Zanne and she started to giggle uncontrollably. "All things considered, I think you're the one more likely to move ground out from under people," she pointed out. "Are you okay?"

"No," was the suddenly hollow-sounding reply. Nathan shifted over to where he could sit on the curb, instead of the road. His head was bowed, but the sudden wrenching sadness in his expression was visible enough if you looked from the right angle. "She helped me, when I wasn't in control of my own actions... and I couldn't do a damned thing for her. Just a fucking pep talk to the others. Let's go kick ass, guys, and worry about Alison later..."

Fuck. Zanne sat down beside Nathan. The Alison thing had hit a lot of the older X-types hard, and some of them were holding up better than others. Nathan clearly was going to fall into the 'other' category. "You just said it," she noted quietly. "There wasn't anything you could do for her then. You had other people you were responsible for and you did your job. it's not that you didn't want to, I'm sure."

"She has a little boy... not so little anymore, I guess." Nathan's voice was still unsteady, but he looked marginally less likely to crumple in on himself. "At least he'll get his mother back. Even if she's not in her original condition."

Zanne ducked her head to hide her expression as realization dawned. This wasn't just about Alison and his inability to save her. "Condition doesn't matter so much, so long as you have your parent back," she said finally. "He'll be happy to have his mother home again." God knows she would have been.

"Home, and living with things she should never have been forced to do..." Nathan sounded just tired, now. He rubbed at the back of his neck, a sigh slipping out. "Sometimes it costs a lot. To be who we are and what we do."

"Sometimes," Zanne agreed, slowly drawing herself to her feet. "But sometimes it's worth it. It's a decision we have to make."

"Step over the dead and broken friends and keep on truckin'." There wasn't any anger in Nathan's voice, however, and he lurched back to his feet, looking around as if he'd forgotten the direction home.