Nathan, Jean-Paul and Jean - Monday night
Jan. 19th, 2009 11:21 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsNathan has a bad night, makes a bad choice, and winds up giving two of his friends a real scare. Then the cracks really start to show.
He'd suspected this would happen.
It hadn't hit him until after he'd seen Moira and Rachel off. Sure, the drive home had been quiet, but he'd turned on the radio and listened to the news, and it hadn't been so bad.
Getting back to the boathouse had been bad. The office was empty, the whole house was empty, and so quiet. And although he knew perfectly well he should have gone up to the mansion, or stuck in a DVD, or something, instead he'd walked into the office, fetched a stack of open files, and come back to the living room to read them.
Or try, at least. Because his focus would stray every ten minutes or so, and as night fell outside, the whole boathouse seemed to be filled with shadows that the soft light from the lamp only seemed to emphasize. Sitting on the couch as he worked his way through the files, Nathan's posture grew increasingly tense, as if he was bracing himself for a blow.
He'd almost come to the decision that he needed to get the hell out of here and find some actual company when he looked up and saw the child standing in the corner of the room.
Nathan jerked backwards, a noise of protest catching in his throat as the shaven-haired boy stared right at him, nothing in his expression. Nothing in his eyes.
Nathan's mouth opened and closed, the icy clenching in his chest making his shoulders hunch defensively, and he pushed himself up off the couch, turning his back on what he knew perfectly well was a hallucination.
He strode as quickly as he could into the kitchen, ignoring the pain in his hip. "One of these days," he muttered shakily under his breath, running some water - very, very cold water - and splashing it on his face. One of these days, he was going to sit down with Charles and find out exactly what rogue subconscious Askani-influenced aspect of his telepathy kept doing that to him.
It wasn't fair. Only crazy people were supposed to hallucinate.
His heart was still pounding in his ears. Nathan swallowed, grabbing the handtowel and using it to dry his face. The cold water hadn't really helped. "Calm down," he muttered to himself, replacing the towel and getting a glass from the cupboard, keeping his back resolutely to the living room the whole time.
He needed to invite someone down to the boathouse. Or go to the mansion. Or make a phone call. Something. Except he needed to stop looking like he'd seen a ghost, before he did that - because he was not up for explanations.
There was a noise from the living room, like something had fallen to the floor, and a noise that was close to a strangled sob escaped Nathan. "Need to move into the Box for the night or something," he mumbled, his hand going white-knuckled on the glass he was holding.
There was a bottle of wine around here somewhere, wasn't there? From Manuel or someone, at Christmas. After a few minutes of searching, he found it stashed away in the high cupboard over the fridge. Not cold, obviously, but frankly right now he didn't care. He needed something to settle his nerves. He'd left the painkillers alone today, so there was no reason that he shouldn't.
---
It really was far too soon for any reasonable person to take up watchdog duties; Moira and Rachel had only been gone a few hours. However, the life he'd lead had left Jean-Paul Beaubier completely and unapologetically unreasonable on more than a few subjects, and so he didn't give his own early check-in more than a passing thought as he parked on the boathouse stairs and knocked. When there was no answer, he knocked louder.
"Nate?" The door swung open easily when he tried the latch and that set off warning signals. He walked in, scanning the darkened rooms warily. "Nathan, are you here?"
There was motion from the couch, but no answer. Nathan was well aware of the fact that Jean-Paul had just walked into the boathouse, but the wave of dizziness and nausea that hit him as he tried to sit up left him slumping back against the couch, breathing hard. What the hell?
The uncoordinated flail of motion from the couch kicked Jean-Paul's mental state from "concerned" to "on alert". He was at Nathan's side in an instant helping the other man as he struggled to sit up. His movements were sluggish and when he tried to stand, his balance was shot, and he was panting just from the simple motion of sitting up. Nate didn't look to be any more injured than he had a day ago, so then what the fuck was this?
"What...?" No, later. Any questions he had could wait the thirty seconds it was going to take to get his friend down to the medlab and he wasn't in the mood to have to argue Nate into seeing the necessity of the trip.
---
Saying that Jean was expecting a quiet night shift would be an overstatement - she just wasn't that optimistic about the rest of this month - but whatever she'd been expecting, it definitely wasn't Jean-Paul to more or less materialize in the middle of the medlab, a rush of wind heralding his presence and a bulky ex-mercenary explaining it. "What the hell?" she asked, but she was already reaching out telekinetically, lifting Nate off Jean-Paul's back and floating him towards one of the beds.
"Disoriented, balance shot, and hard breathing. I don't know the cause." Jean-Paul closed his eyes a moment, rifling through the still-frames of memory that represented the world at speed. "The door was unlocked. There were some files out, but nothing that looked as if it had been broken into. Bottle of wine on the kitchen table, with a glass..."
Jean was striding towards Nathan's prone figure but her step faltered and she glanced back at Jean-Paul, eyes wide. "Wine?" she repeated, sounding incredulous. "Oh, Nathan, you moron." And then she was running to his side, taking advantage of his wooziness to force her way past his shields, linking directly into his nervous system because she had to know exactly what he was feeling because if his liver was about to fail... And then suddenly Jean was coughing, practically gagging, and backing away from the table as the waste can shot away from the wall and settled next to the bed. "Ah," she wheezed. "Not the painkillers, then."
#Get out of my head!# The thought was projected loudly enough for the non-telepath in the room to hear, not just Jean. The volume was the product of panic, however, not a conscious thing, because Nathan was far too busy throwing up everything in his stomach. Thankfully, it wasn't that much - he had after all skipped dinner - and he soon sagged back against the bed, breathing raggedly.
"Stupid, paranoid, psychotic moron," Jean growled, not even noticing the ringing in her mental ears but deeply disturbed by how hard that link had hit her. "Stupid Wakanda," she muttered as she stumbled to the sink, filling up and draining a glass of a water in seconds before re-filling it and floating it to rest on the table near the bed. "Next time you will read the God-damned label on the God-damned pills and not mix antibiotics and alcohol. You moron." That bit bore repeating.
Between the sudden shouting between his ears and the stench of bile in the room, it took speedster a moment to take note of what Jean was saying.
"He got this way by mixing medications and wine?" There was a level of incredulity in Jean-Paul's voice typically only found in cases where one literally could not believe that someone could be so stupid. That had died down a moment later and he'd joined Jean in giving the dry-heaving figure on the bed a strong death-glare. "I'm not allowed to hit your patients, I take it?"
Another wave of nausea hit, and Nathan found himself entirely too miserable to object to the verbal abuse. There really shouldn't have been anything left to come up, but his stomach didn't seem convinced of that.
"No," Jean agreed, sagging back against the counter for a moment. "You have to have a medical degree to be allowed to do that down here."
--
Nathan was fairly sure that the only reason he wasn't being carried back to the boathouse like an awkward and moronic piece of baggage was that Jean-Paul really didn't want to see him keep trying to throw up the nothing currently in his system. So he focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and really wished that the cold night air was helping. His head simply did not seem to want to clear, however. At least Jean had found him some Institute sweats before letting him out from under her thumb. He could collapse right into bed when he got in.
Jean-Paul was right beside him at every step, trying to burn holes into the side of Nate's head with his glare. Part of him could not believe his friend had been that careless, and the rest of him very dearly wanted to smack him for scaring him again. But that could wait until they managed to get Nate up the stairs and pinned someplace he couldn't easily escape from.
The stairs were a bit of a trial. But stubborn pride - and Jean-Paul's help - kept him going, and Nathan wasted no time in crashing on the bed as soon as they were upstairs. Curling up, he tried to slow down his breathing, and willed the room to stop spinning around him. But there was one thing that needed to be said before he checked out for the night.
"There was no label on that damned bottle." It came out much feebler-sounding than the blunt statement of fact he'd intended.
"As if you haven't been beaten to hell often enough that you don't know that pills and booze do not mix. Try again." Jean-Paul went to fetch a glass of water. He was here to keep this stupid batard hydrated, so he was going to stay hydrated. "I suppose we are lucky it was only the antibiotics that you forgot about."
"I wasn't about to screw up with the painkillers," Nathan muttered, and sat up, with some difficulty, to take the glass of water. "I'm not that much of an idiot." He hadn't even thought about the antibiotics, though. They'd seemed like such a pro forma thing, just Jean being careful.
"Ordinarily, I'd take your word for it." Jean-Paul sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to will away the headache lurking on the edge of his awareness. "I saw you flopping about like a landed salmon and thought someone might have turned up to finish you off."
Nathan nearly fumbled the glass of water. "Not much chance of that," he said gruffly. "Getting through our perimeter isn't the easiest thing in the world." Wait, did I just take that seriously? Nathan sighed, squelching the surge of unease, and took another sip of water before setting it down on the nighttable and sagging back against the pillows. "I'm sorry. Didn't meant to cause drama."
"I didn't say it was a reasonable fear, did I?" Jean-Paul leaned against the foot of the bed with a sigh. Nate hardly even looked worth shooting at this point, and while the Canadian maintained that he was immune to cute, pathetic was something else entirely. "And that last I can believe. I don't think you have the energy for drama right now."
The smile the comment provoked was faint, there and gone again almost too quickly to notice. Nathan took a deep, careful breath. He still felt very unwell. According to Jean, he could count on suffering the consequences of being a moron for a couple of days. How was he going to explain this to Moira? Or hell, anyone?
Jean-Paul was still looking at him. "I just... it was too quiet. Messing with me. I don't do well with quiet."
That soft admission brushed aside the last of Jean-Paul's anger. "You should have made a trip up to the main house. Now look, you are stuck with me on top of feeling wretched."
"Oh no. Whatever will I do." It was almost inaudible, and Nathan's eyes closed as he said it. His head was still spinning sickly, but at least shutting out the room made it a little less noticeable.
Jean-Paul shook his head. "Fall asleep and feel better in the morning, with any luck. Fais de beaux rêves."
---
It was sometime after three in the morning when it started.
The first warning sign was an almost delicate vibration through the structure of the boathouse, like the tiniest of earthquakes. Loose items on tabletops and the like started to rattle audibly as the vibration came again, this time stronger.
The only sound from the bed from which the waves of telekinetic energy were emanating was increasingly rapid breathing. Nathan was curled tightly in on himself, as if he was trapped somewhere with no room to move.
He was projecting, however. In his sleep, and unconsciously - but very forcefully.
Jean-Paul was stirred from the couch in the upstairs living area first by the chattering of his own teeth -- a distinctly odd sensation; he hadn't shivered since he was a boy -- then woke fully as he bit his lower lip. The house was groaning around him and at first he had the wild thought that it was an earthquake before the furniture began to scrape across the floor in erratic jerks. That took the mystery out of things and he sprinted for the bedroom, vaulting over an armchair that seemed determined to block his way.
The furniture was moving - but not flying, as if even in the grip of his nightmare, part of Nathan was restraining himself. As Jean-Paul reached the bed, however, the air grew impossibly heavy, ominously charged. The smell of smoke and the crackling sound of flames hit him like a brick wall of sensory input. Nearly overwhelming, even though there was quite obviously no fire in the house.
'He's projecting.' That didn't stop the desire to cough, or the sudden, bolt of primal panic that turned his stomach cold and oily, set his heart racing, and screamed at him to run. He swallowed hard, trying to get a hold of himself, but the hand that reached out to shake Nathan's shoulder still trembled. "Nate. Nathan! Wake up!"
Nathan jerked and came awake with a strangled cry. Telekinesis pushed outwards at Jean-Paul - not hard, because even dazed from the nightmare, Nathan was realizing that there was indeed someone else in the room with him. A friend. Not someone he wanted to hurt.
In the next instant, he was scrambling out of bed and pushing past JP to where the wastebasket had wound up, several feet away. Apparently his stomach wasn't quite convinced that there was nothing left to come up.
Jean-Paul's first instinct in most cases would have been to leave Nate to get a hold of himself, to give him some privacy in a moment of vulnerability, but he needed very desperately to reassure himself that he was in the here and now and not his own nebulous memories. He picked up the half-full water glass, which had somehow managed to wedge itself between the toppled alarm and Nate's phone without toppling, and went to crouch by Nate's side until his ribs had stopped heaving.
"Here." He touched the other man's shoulder lightly. Solid. Real. "Rinse your mouth out."
Nathan did, and took another minute or so to try and concentrate on breathing, rather than retching (or hyperventilating). He didn't get off the floor. "Please tell me I didn't hit you with anything," he said, his voice ragged.
Quietly in the dark, ""Non. I'm fine. It was just a shove. No harm done." He'd said he wouldn't ask questions about what had happened and right now, making Nathan think on what had put him in this state seemed the cruelest thing to do. Nathan was shaking, unable to even look up. "I'll stay in here, if you like." Jean-Paul offered the weakest of smiles. "Give you a punt if it starts up again, oui?"
"There should be plenty of blunt instruments up here. If you need them." Nathan rubbed at his eyes, then sunk his head into his hands for a moment, as if he was trying to hold it together physically. "This is stupid," he muttered, almost too quietly for Jean-Paul to hear him. "So stupid..."
"I don't think we need to go that far. Nathan..." Jean-Paul eased an arm around the older man's torso, trying to coax him off of the floor. "It's not. Come on. You can't stay down here."
"The roof has farther to fall if I'm down here," Nathan mumbled, but let Jean-Paul help him up off the floor and back to the bed. The dizziness was easing a little, but he was freezing. Strange, given what he'd been dreaming about.
Once Nate was settled under the blankets again, Jean-Paul headed for the opposite side of the bed as if he belonged there, countering Nate's bleary Look with a shrug. "I have it on good authority that I make an excellent hot water bottle."
He'd suspected this would happen.
It hadn't hit him until after he'd seen Moira and Rachel off. Sure, the drive home had been quiet, but he'd turned on the radio and listened to the news, and it hadn't been so bad.
Getting back to the boathouse had been bad. The office was empty, the whole house was empty, and so quiet. And although he knew perfectly well he should have gone up to the mansion, or stuck in a DVD, or something, instead he'd walked into the office, fetched a stack of open files, and come back to the living room to read them.
Or try, at least. Because his focus would stray every ten minutes or so, and as night fell outside, the whole boathouse seemed to be filled with shadows that the soft light from the lamp only seemed to emphasize. Sitting on the couch as he worked his way through the files, Nathan's posture grew increasingly tense, as if he was bracing himself for a blow.
He'd almost come to the decision that he needed to get the hell out of here and find some actual company when he looked up and saw the child standing in the corner of the room.
Nathan jerked backwards, a noise of protest catching in his throat as the shaven-haired boy stared right at him, nothing in his expression. Nothing in his eyes.
Nathan's mouth opened and closed, the icy clenching in his chest making his shoulders hunch defensively, and he pushed himself up off the couch, turning his back on what he knew perfectly well was a hallucination.
He strode as quickly as he could into the kitchen, ignoring the pain in his hip. "One of these days," he muttered shakily under his breath, running some water - very, very cold water - and splashing it on his face. One of these days, he was going to sit down with Charles and find out exactly what rogue subconscious Askani-influenced aspect of his telepathy kept doing that to him.
It wasn't fair. Only crazy people were supposed to hallucinate.
His heart was still pounding in his ears. Nathan swallowed, grabbing the handtowel and using it to dry his face. The cold water hadn't really helped. "Calm down," he muttered to himself, replacing the towel and getting a glass from the cupboard, keeping his back resolutely to the living room the whole time.
He needed to invite someone down to the boathouse. Or go to the mansion. Or make a phone call. Something. Except he needed to stop looking like he'd seen a ghost, before he did that - because he was not up for explanations.
There was a noise from the living room, like something had fallen to the floor, and a noise that was close to a strangled sob escaped Nathan. "Need to move into the Box for the night or something," he mumbled, his hand going white-knuckled on the glass he was holding.
There was a bottle of wine around here somewhere, wasn't there? From Manuel or someone, at Christmas. After a few minutes of searching, he found it stashed away in the high cupboard over the fridge. Not cold, obviously, but frankly right now he didn't care. He needed something to settle his nerves. He'd left the painkillers alone today, so there was no reason that he shouldn't.
---
It really was far too soon for any reasonable person to take up watchdog duties; Moira and Rachel had only been gone a few hours. However, the life he'd lead had left Jean-Paul Beaubier completely and unapologetically unreasonable on more than a few subjects, and so he didn't give his own early check-in more than a passing thought as he parked on the boathouse stairs and knocked. When there was no answer, he knocked louder.
"Nate?" The door swung open easily when he tried the latch and that set off warning signals. He walked in, scanning the darkened rooms warily. "Nathan, are you here?"
There was motion from the couch, but no answer. Nathan was well aware of the fact that Jean-Paul had just walked into the boathouse, but the wave of dizziness and nausea that hit him as he tried to sit up left him slumping back against the couch, breathing hard. What the hell?
The uncoordinated flail of motion from the couch kicked Jean-Paul's mental state from "concerned" to "on alert". He was at Nathan's side in an instant helping the other man as he struggled to sit up. His movements were sluggish and when he tried to stand, his balance was shot, and he was panting just from the simple motion of sitting up. Nate didn't look to be any more injured than he had a day ago, so then what the fuck was this?
"What...?" No, later. Any questions he had could wait the thirty seconds it was going to take to get his friend down to the medlab and he wasn't in the mood to have to argue Nate into seeing the necessity of the trip.
---
Saying that Jean was expecting a quiet night shift would be an overstatement - she just wasn't that optimistic about the rest of this month - but whatever she'd been expecting, it definitely wasn't Jean-Paul to more or less materialize in the middle of the medlab, a rush of wind heralding his presence and a bulky ex-mercenary explaining it. "What the hell?" she asked, but she was already reaching out telekinetically, lifting Nate off Jean-Paul's back and floating him towards one of the beds.
"Disoriented, balance shot, and hard breathing. I don't know the cause." Jean-Paul closed his eyes a moment, rifling through the still-frames of memory that represented the world at speed. "The door was unlocked. There were some files out, but nothing that looked as if it had been broken into. Bottle of wine on the kitchen table, with a glass..."
Jean was striding towards Nathan's prone figure but her step faltered and she glanced back at Jean-Paul, eyes wide. "Wine?" she repeated, sounding incredulous. "Oh, Nathan, you moron." And then she was running to his side, taking advantage of his wooziness to force her way past his shields, linking directly into his nervous system because she had to know exactly what he was feeling because if his liver was about to fail... And then suddenly Jean was coughing, practically gagging, and backing away from the table as the waste can shot away from the wall and settled next to the bed. "Ah," she wheezed. "Not the painkillers, then."
#Get out of my head!# The thought was projected loudly enough for the non-telepath in the room to hear, not just Jean. The volume was the product of panic, however, not a conscious thing, because Nathan was far too busy throwing up everything in his stomach. Thankfully, it wasn't that much - he had after all skipped dinner - and he soon sagged back against the bed, breathing raggedly.
"Stupid, paranoid, psychotic moron," Jean growled, not even noticing the ringing in her mental ears but deeply disturbed by how hard that link had hit her. "Stupid Wakanda," she muttered as she stumbled to the sink, filling up and draining a glass of a water in seconds before re-filling it and floating it to rest on the table near the bed. "Next time you will read the God-damned label on the God-damned pills and not mix antibiotics and alcohol. You moron." That bit bore repeating.
Between the sudden shouting between his ears and the stench of bile in the room, it took speedster a moment to take note of what Jean was saying.
"He got this way by mixing medications and wine?" There was a level of incredulity in Jean-Paul's voice typically only found in cases where one literally could not believe that someone could be so stupid. That had died down a moment later and he'd joined Jean in giving the dry-heaving figure on the bed a strong death-glare. "I'm not allowed to hit your patients, I take it?"
Another wave of nausea hit, and Nathan found himself entirely too miserable to object to the verbal abuse. There really shouldn't have been anything left to come up, but his stomach didn't seem convinced of that.
"No," Jean agreed, sagging back against the counter for a moment. "You have to have a medical degree to be allowed to do that down here."
--
Nathan was fairly sure that the only reason he wasn't being carried back to the boathouse like an awkward and moronic piece of baggage was that Jean-Paul really didn't want to see him keep trying to throw up the nothing currently in his system. So he focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and really wished that the cold night air was helping. His head simply did not seem to want to clear, however. At least Jean had found him some Institute sweats before letting him out from under her thumb. He could collapse right into bed when he got in.
Jean-Paul was right beside him at every step, trying to burn holes into the side of Nate's head with his glare. Part of him could not believe his friend had been that careless, and the rest of him very dearly wanted to smack him for scaring him again. But that could wait until they managed to get Nate up the stairs and pinned someplace he couldn't easily escape from.
The stairs were a bit of a trial. But stubborn pride - and Jean-Paul's help - kept him going, and Nathan wasted no time in crashing on the bed as soon as they were upstairs. Curling up, he tried to slow down his breathing, and willed the room to stop spinning around him. But there was one thing that needed to be said before he checked out for the night.
"There was no label on that damned bottle." It came out much feebler-sounding than the blunt statement of fact he'd intended.
"As if you haven't been beaten to hell often enough that you don't know that pills and booze do not mix. Try again." Jean-Paul went to fetch a glass of water. He was here to keep this stupid batard hydrated, so he was going to stay hydrated. "I suppose we are lucky it was only the antibiotics that you forgot about."
"I wasn't about to screw up with the painkillers," Nathan muttered, and sat up, with some difficulty, to take the glass of water. "I'm not that much of an idiot." He hadn't even thought about the antibiotics, though. They'd seemed like such a pro forma thing, just Jean being careful.
"Ordinarily, I'd take your word for it." Jean-Paul sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to will away the headache lurking on the edge of his awareness. "I saw you flopping about like a landed salmon and thought someone might have turned up to finish you off."
Nathan nearly fumbled the glass of water. "Not much chance of that," he said gruffly. "Getting through our perimeter isn't the easiest thing in the world." Wait, did I just take that seriously? Nathan sighed, squelching the surge of unease, and took another sip of water before setting it down on the nighttable and sagging back against the pillows. "I'm sorry. Didn't meant to cause drama."
"I didn't say it was a reasonable fear, did I?" Jean-Paul leaned against the foot of the bed with a sigh. Nate hardly even looked worth shooting at this point, and while the Canadian maintained that he was immune to cute, pathetic was something else entirely. "And that last I can believe. I don't think you have the energy for drama right now."
The smile the comment provoked was faint, there and gone again almost too quickly to notice. Nathan took a deep, careful breath. He still felt very unwell. According to Jean, he could count on suffering the consequences of being a moron for a couple of days. How was he going to explain this to Moira? Or hell, anyone?
Jean-Paul was still looking at him. "I just... it was too quiet. Messing with me. I don't do well with quiet."
That soft admission brushed aside the last of Jean-Paul's anger. "You should have made a trip up to the main house. Now look, you are stuck with me on top of feeling wretched."
"Oh no. Whatever will I do." It was almost inaudible, and Nathan's eyes closed as he said it. His head was still spinning sickly, but at least shutting out the room made it a little less noticeable.
Jean-Paul shook his head. "Fall asleep and feel better in the morning, with any luck. Fais de beaux rêves."
---
It was sometime after three in the morning when it started.
The first warning sign was an almost delicate vibration through the structure of the boathouse, like the tiniest of earthquakes. Loose items on tabletops and the like started to rattle audibly as the vibration came again, this time stronger.
The only sound from the bed from which the waves of telekinetic energy were emanating was increasingly rapid breathing. Nathan was curled tightly in on himself, as if he was trapped somewhere with no room to move.
He was projecting, however. In his sleep, and unconsciously - but very forcefully.
Jean-Paul was stirred from the couch in the upstairs living area first by the chattering of his own teeth -- a distinctly odd sensation; he hadn't shivered since he was a boy -- then woke fully as he bit his lower lip. The house was groaning around him and at first he had the wild thought that it was an earthquake before the furniture began to scrape across the floor in erratic jerks. That took the mystery out of things and he sprinted for the bedroom, vaulting over an armchair that seemed determined to block his way.
The furniture was moving - but not flying, as if even in the grip of his nightmare, part of Nathan was restraining himself. As Jean-Paul reached the bed, however, the air grew impossibly heavy, ominously charged. The smell of smoke and the crackling sound of flames hit him like a brick wall of sensory input. Nearly overwhelming, even though there was quite obviously no fire in the house.
'He's projecting.' That didn't stop the desire to cough, or the sudden, bolt of primal panic that turned his stomach cold and oily, set his heart racing, and screamed at him to run. He swallowed hard, trying to get a hold of himself, but the hand that reached out to shake Nathan's shoulder still trembled. "Nate. Nathan! Wake up!"
Nathan jerked and came awake with a strangled cry. Telekinesis pushed outwards at Jean-Paul - not hard, because even dazed from the nightmare, Nathan was realizing that there was indeed someone else in the room with him. A friend. Not someone he wanted to hurt.
In the next instant, he was scrambling out of bed and pushing past JP to where the wastebasket had wound up, several feet away. Apparently his stomach wasn't quite convinced that there was nothing left to come up.
Jean-Paul's first instinct in most cases would have been to leave Nate to get a hold of himself, to give him some privacy in a moment of vulnerability, but he needed very desperately to reassure himself that he was in the here and now and not his own nebulous memories. He picked up the half-full water glass, which had somehow managed to wedge itself between the toppled alarm and Nate's phone without toppling, and went to crouch by Nate's side until his ribs had stopped heaving.
"Here." He touched the other man's shoulder lightly. Solid. Real. "Rinse your mouth out."
Nathan did, and took another minute or so to try and concentrate on breathing, rather than retching (or hyperventilating). He didn't get off the floor. "Please tell me I didn't hit you with anything," he said, his voice ragged.
Quietly in the dark, ""Non. I'm fine. It was just a shove. No harm done." He'd said he wouldn't ask questions about what had happened and right now, making Nathan think on what had put him in this state seemed the cruelest thing to do. Nathan was shaking, unable to even look up. "I'll stay in here, if you like." Jean-Paul offered the weakest of smiles. "Give you a punt if it starts up again, oui?"
"There should be plenty of blunt instruments up here. If you need them." Nathan rubbed at his eyes, then sunk his head into his hands for a moment, as if he was trying to hold it together physically. "This is stupid," he muttered, almost too quietly for Jean-Paul to hear him. "So stupid..."
"I don't think we need to go that far. Nathan..." Jean-Paul eased an arm around the older man's torso, trying to coax him off of the floor. "It's not. Come on. You can't stay down here."
"The roof has farther to fall if I'm down here," Nathan mumbled, but let Jean-Paul help him up off the floor and back to the bed. The dizziness was easing a little, but he was freezing. Strange, given what he'd been dreaming about.
Once Nate was settled under the blankets again, Jean-Paul headed for the opposite side of the bed as if he belonged there, countering Nate's bleary Look with a shrug. "I have it on good authority that I make an excellent hot water bottle."
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