Nathan and Jean Paul - forward dated to Saturday morning

[x-cynosure.livejournal.com]

Nate and Jean-Paul have a shouting bout and Jean-Paul gets a glimpse inside of Nate's mind.



Beaubier quite literally hit the wall, but at least that snapped him out of the blind panic that had prompted him to launch himself from the bed at inhuman speeds. He slid down to the base of the wall, more stunned than hurt, and tried to figure out exactly what the hell had just happened. The only illumination in the room was moonlight filtering in through the blinds and all the rest was still, save for Nate, who was sitting up in bed and staring at him. The moment called for reassurance of some kind.

"Good thing I have a hard head." Jean-Paul pushed himself up off the floor and headed for bed again.

The burst of profanity was in a mixture of Askani and Russian, oddly enough. Nathan got up, paced half-across the room, and only then turned to look at Jean-Paul. As if he'd had to get to a safe distance. "Are you all right?" he asked, his voice low and tight.

Jean-Paul blinked, trying to puzzle out his friend's reaction. "Not even bruised. My powers tend to take off the worst of any impacts I cause." The other shoe dropped. "Nate, that wasn't your fault. You didn't toss me."

"Oh, right." Louder, this time, and with an undertone of incredulity that was verging on mildly hysterical. "I'm only rearranging the furniture on a regular basis, but of course I didn't throw you at the wall."

Nathan started to turn, only to jerk away from a shadow as if it had reached out to grab him. "God damn it," he snapped shakily. "I need to start sleeping in the Box. Before I kill someone." What if he'd tossed Moira like that? Or God, Rachel, during one of her frequent episodes of sneaking-into-Mom-and-Dad's-bed?

"Nathan." Jean-Paul was trying very hard to sound calm and reasonable, but his heart was still pounding in his chest. "My powers only protect me from my own propulsion. If you had been the one to throw me, it would have hurt a lot more. I think...I think I was having a nightmare of my own, that's all. I've had restless nights before. Like I said,
it wasn't your fault."

"You just decided to launch yourself across the room?" Nathan looked like he was about to launch into another rant, this time about how improbable that was - but he stopped, his mouth closing with a snap and his eyes narrowing as he stared at Jean-Paul. "You were having my nightmare," he said flatly. "Weren't you?"

The suggestion caught the other man flat-footed. He hadn't lied his own frequent nightmares, but they didn't typically manifest so violently.

"I...I don't..." Jean-Paul pulled himself together. "How am I supposed to know something like that? I had a bad dream. It is not the first time." He took a deep breath and tried to relax. "I don't recall any details."

Fire.

Dammit.

Nathan's shields were shredded at the moment; they hadn't been very good lately to start with, and only mostly-awake, with this sort of situation staring him in the face... "Right," he gritted, his eyes glittering almost feverishly in the moonlight. "So I may not have thrown you at the wall, but instead, I'm projecting at you and digging
up old phobias. That's just so much better."

That made Jean-Paul flinch; it was bad enough when he understood his own vulnerabilities, but his reactions to this were still something he was trying to piece together. Having anyone, even Nate, simply pluck it out of the air was unsettling. Humiliating.

"I'm fine, Nathan," he snapped back. "You don't need to go poking around in my skull. I have to meet with students in the morning, so let's just try to sleep."

Nathan twitched at the (deserved) rebuke, but it only put him more on edge. "This isn't going to work," he muttered, retreating to one of the armchairs by the window. He sat down stiffly, his shoulders hunched. What the hell was he supposed to do? Sleeping pills might stop his powers from being so active, but that wasn't a long-term
solution. "You're not going to... keep seeing that, if it's enough to make you try and put yourself through a wall."

"For fuck's sake..." Jean-Paul sat on the edge of the bed, arms folded over his chest. He could see where this was headed and he did not approve in the least. "It is not a big deal! I might as well have rolled out of bed for all the harm this did me. And I'm not leaving you here to collapse the roof on yourself on top of whatever else you've been through!"

"Do you know why I haven't just gone to Muir?" Nathan's voice was brittle-sounding, and he was staring at the window, not at Jean-Paul. "Part of me would love to just... go, and not come back, until I stop wanting to-" He made himself stop there. That was not being said aloud. "But I'm afraid of hurting Moira. I'm afraid of hurting
Rachel, just by being around her like this... but I'm not not going home just so that I can make you the collateral damage!"

Jean-Paul scowled. "Even if being around you were dangerous for me --and I am not conceding that it is -- I'm not worried about being hurt." At least not in the context they were talking about. "You need someone around right now and that means more than stopping by to clean up the morning after."

"No. No, I don't. I need to stop dragging people into this - this mess I've made," Nathan said hoarsely, his hands clenching almost involuntarily. "And you need to stop letting me."

"Utter bullshit. Besides, you didn't drag me, I volunteered to wade in." Jean-Paul rose to his feet and headed for the chair, only to be brought up short by an invisible wall of force. "Oh, you cannot be serious! Stop being an idiot."

"No." Nathan came to his feet, swaying a little. "I'm not being an idiot. You're being an idiot," he said, and a very tiny part of him observed that he was doing a very good job at sounding about five years old or thereabouts.

Jean-Paul's fraying temper snapped. "I am not the one who came home shot to hell, I am not the one who needed to be hauled down to Dr. Grey because he couldn't be bothered to wait two hours before trying to find the bottom of a bottle, and I am not the one insisting that he be abandoned to his own devices when he is clearly about to fall on
both his physical and metaphorical ass! So forgive me if I don't trust your evaluation of the matter!"

"Then don't!" Nathan wasn't quite yelling back at him, but it was close. "Seriously, don't trust me, that's perfectly good advice, and you should think about taking it! None of this would have happened if someone had told me that my judgement was shot at New Year's!"

"Excellent! And since we both agree that your judgment is on the wrong side of fucked up, that is all the more reason for you to drop this wall and listen to me!" Jean-Paul was still yelling, and showed no signs of backing off on volume.

"Listen to what-" Nathan snapped - or started to, because there was a dark, still form sprawled on the floor at his feet, and the smell of blood was so sudden and overwhelming that nausea hit him like a punch to the gun. He whirled away, abruptly enough that his balance nearly deserted him and proved Jean-Paul right.

"Nate--!" The wall wasn't budging, but the speedster had a moment of clarity in his frustration.

'You can fly, idiot.'

The barrier wasn't ceiling height, it turned out, and Jean-Paul made his way over in a moment, guiding Nate to an abrupt crash-landing back into his chair.

"What the hell is going on inside your head?" The question was very quiet on the heels of so much shouting, and half-under Jean-Paul's breath, as if not meant for Nate at all.

Nathan was blinking rapidly, not focusing on Jean-Paul at all, and for a moment, flickering, fragmented images sliced into the non-telepath's mind like shards of broken glass. Flashes of light in the dimness, the staccato sound of gunfire. Bloodstains on the cuffs of a shirt.

Jean-Paul jerked away, one hand going to his brow as if to physically pull the jagged moments of shared memory from his head. The moon outside had been swallowed up in clouds and room had gone completely silent, save for two sets of uneven breath in the dark.

Finally, "Who...was that?"

It had taken a very long moment to fight back the memories, and Nathan knew that was a bad sign. For a moment the despair was nearly as overwhelming as the memories had been. And then Jean-Paul jerked away, and asked his question in a distant-sounding voice.

Nathan swallowed; his throat felt raw for some reason. "It doesn't matter," he said in a numb-sounding voice.

The words left Jean-Paul incredulous.

"'It doesn't...' He tried...no, he did shoot you." The images were lodged in his mind, a crystal-clear trio of fragments that left him with still more questions and no answers.

"No. He didn't shoot me." If there was an emphasis on the last word, it was tiny, barely audible.

"Not for lack of trying." Jean-Paul's gaze lingered on the long scar along Nate's temple. "What happened?" There was the question, at long last.

Nathan stared at him, gray eyes black in the dimness. "No," he finally rasped, and despite the hoarseness of his voice, his tone was oddly detached. He rose, making use of the space that Jean-Paul had put between them to step away from the chair. "Do you think I haven't been sharing on a whim? I had to tell SHIELD, at the debriefing - I had to
sit with the lights shining in my eyes and knowing there were more of them behind the glass. There always are, when they debrief you..."

"This isn't a debriefing," Jean-Paul protested taking a step closer, "and I am not here to pick you apart and tell all that you did wrong. Whatever happened, you are reliving it every night already and it seems it is biting deeper, not getting better. You do not have to be alone in that every time, Nate."

"Yes I do." It was almost a whisper. "Because if you knew what I'd done, what I'd let happen..." His voice broke, and he raised both hands, rubbing at his temples as he turned away. "None of you would be able to forgive me for it. I let it happen again. It's my fault, just like the last time."

Jean-Paul shook his head. "I think you are judging yourself and the people who care for you very harshly." Coming from Jean-Paul, this was the mother of all hypocrisies, but they weren't talking about him, were they? It wasn't as if the world needed two people that stubbornly miserable anyway. "Whatever happened, you do not deserve this."

Nathan almost told him that he was right, because a few weeks of misery was definitely not sufficient penance. But that was overdramatic, and God, how he wanted the drama to stop. He would have given anything to be numb. Maybe he could beg Amelia for a sedative, and a night in the Box...

His feet were taking him towards the stairs, before he quite knew what he was doing. "Yes, I do," he said, more to himself than to Jean-Paul. "Yes. I do."