xp_logs | Nathan and Morgan, Tuesday afternoon

Morgan comes to Nathan for some advice on adapting to being an ex-mercenary. They wind up having a more lengthy philosophical discussion when she realizes there's something up with him.

"There's this whole learning thing which is kind of a plus, but it's kind of strange to think about not being out there, getting shot at and having explosions going off nearish pretty frequently," Morgan explained to Nate. She'd stopped by because she was already up around the mansion anyway and she hadn't seen Nate in a while. Besides, her head was in knots now that she had grasped what leaving Mag Ealga and joining X-Force meant a bit more. He was the only person who had made the transition who she spoke to. Everyone else was dead or still in the life. "How do you actually get it into your brain that people aren't going to be trying to kill you on a daily basis most of the time anymore? It was one thing when this was just a pit stop, but now this is life and that's not. It finally sank in and now I just can't grasp it."

"What you've signed up for might be somewhat less active than what you left," Nathan conceded, scraping at the wallpaper on Rachel's wall. He'd moved on to the second wall now. "From what I understand, it still has its moments, however. They just may not be as simple as getting shot at."

"Weird ass mystical, mythical and magic shit? Yeah, so I hear. Mostly from Sparks, which makes sense since she's all mystical and magic too." Morgan picked up a miscellaneous stuffed animal of Rachel's and stared it in the eyes before squishing the bear's sides. "I mean, it's not like I've signed up for the We-Love-Our-Enemies-And-Only-Believe-In-Pummeling-Them-Not-Killing-Them Brigade like you did. How did you go from sixty to zero? I mean, you're well adjusted. For, well, you."

Nathan snorted. Loudly. "Actually, I would call it going from zero to sixty," he said, scraping a little harder at a recalcitrant giraffe. What had been in his head with the decor in here? "So damned much more complicated than it used to be - I bet you find the same, over at Snow Valley. You can't just react, the way you're used to reacting."

"Complications slow things," she corrected. "I stand by sixty to zero." Morgan pointed at him in a forceful manner to punctuate her point. The punctuation fell flat with her laying across Rachel's tiny person bed in the middle of the room with her shoulders and head hanging over one side so she was looking at Nathan upside down.

"You just wait until you have to tackle the complications just as quickly as you would have tackled the more straightforward situations." Nathan took a step back, eyeing the wall. "This is going to take forever," he muttered. And Moira had made him promise not to do it telekinetically.

"Eh," Morgan made a face and her hand felt uselessly to the floor. "I'd really rather just shoot people, honestly. It solves everything. They're dead so they can't be a problem. Or shoot them in the knee so they can't stand. Shoulder so they can't shoot back. But no, now I've got to not kill them or even injure 'em some of the time. What's wrong with these people? Who gave them permission to have morals?"

The bear was set down on Morgan's stomach and she turned her head until she was looking at Nate and the wall sideways at least. "I'd offer to help but I don't feel like having your wife point that shotgun I hear she's got at me for letting you cheat by getting help."

"I didn't promise I wouldn't get help. I just promised I wouldn't do it telekinetically. She wanted the redecorating to take me the next two weeks, until she and Ray come back."

Morgan grabbed the bear, flipped over and left Fuzzy on her lower back to watch Nate. She had no idea if the bear had a name but she had dubbed him Fuzzy in her head. Her elbows balanced on the edge of the tiny bed and her chin was propped up in her hands. "Why's she want to occupy you for two weeks? Scared you might develop callouses from all the jerking off if you're not properly distracted when left without her?" She grinned broadly at him.

Nathan's answering smile was a little tight. "She wants to keep me busy," he said. "Something nice and manual and innocuous, so that I don't sit around feeling sorry for myself and/or drinking myself into a stupor."

That was no the sort of smile she generally expected to get from a guy when a masturbation joke was made. She hopped up, not noticing when little Fuzzy tumbled to the floor, and sat on her knees on the bed giving Nate a curious look. "What happened?"

Nathan shrugged. "Some fairly bad things," he said, "back in January. Hadn't been doing a great job of facing up to them until the last little while. Which of course has just compounded the problem." He attacked the wall again with the scraper.

"Stupid." It was the first word out of her mouth and Morgan was pretty sure it was the most appropriate one as well. She scooped Fuzzy off the ground behind her and then lobbed him at Nate's head, direct contact being made. "You should know that you deal with 'fairly bad things' or they wiggle into a crack, infest you and then half of you's rotted away in no time. Don't be such a fucking girl about things. You, issue, head on death match or you can land yourself in therapy or something equally annoying for ages." She would suggest going to shoot things but maybe that only helped her. Sometimes what you had shot was the fairly bad thing and shooting more things only reinforced the issue instead of solving it.

"That's a lovely thought, when the issue is something conquerable," Nathan said. He'd tensed at the impact of the bear, and the tension stayed in his posture, as if he was having a hard time keeping his back to her. "Anyway. Don't think of your new limits as morals being imposed on you. Subtlety is what it is."

"Twenty dollars in quarters in a tube sock is more subtle than me." It was only partially true, but it was true enough to be a good point. "All things are conquerable. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot over it be my guest, but relax your fucking posture. It was a bear, I'm not pointing a missile or even a handgun at you and there is no disguised bomb in the area." She paused, then added, "That I know of."

"Don't rule out Ray's occasional chemistry experiments." Nathan scraped away the face of a cheerful fish, and then rubbed at his shoulder, which was throbbing. "And frankly, not all things are conquerable. Some, you just survive." He was not prepared to lay it all out to Morgan, although nor was he really in the mood to hear the whole situation oversimplified like that.

Morgan looked unimpressed. "Just surviving is making it a bit simpler than it is, innit? Loads of people don't or even can't just survive. By surviving you are conquering something. Even if it is a passive action it still results in conquering something. Failure is an important thing to have conquered and not surviving is a failure in a way. You shouldn't forget that."

"You know, I am not in the mood for pop philosophy, however elegantly expressed, right now." He managed not to gouge the wall as he gave the fish's body an overly-enthusiastic scrape. "I have got a fairly rigorous therapy schedule ahead of me, most of which is likely to be hugely unpleasant, and I had to have Charles stick something in my head so that my nightmares about being trapped in a demolished building with dead children don't have me tearing apart the furniture with my telekinesis."

"Nightmares are good for you" she said seriously. "They keep you human and remind you of the awful things you've done so you don't go off doing them again. They help point out your boundaries. Or they just give you a healthy fear of rattlesnakes sometimes." Morgan shrugged. "I was told once by someone that everything's conquerable, Nate. You've got to have the nerve to stare it in the eye even when it gives you demolition worthy nightmares, aye, but if you've the will for it and the dedication to tear it down until it's begging for mercy with tears streaming down it's metaphoric cheeks then all things can be conquered. A big part's whether or not you let yourself. Because sometimes in conquering horrible things people end up thinking you're a monster. Sometimes people believe the mark of your humanity lies in the psychological and emotional damage life has done to you. The man who told me that also saved my life when I thought I was just being condemned to a new ring of hell."

Morgan shifted, swinging her legs out from under her until her feet were on the floor. Her elbows rested on her knees and her chin fond its place propped on her hands once more as she stared at her one time rival's back. "Aleister was right. And if I hadn't believed him I'm pretty sure I'd have died any number of times between then and now. Actually, I know I wouldn't still live, I'm just not sure if someone else would have really been responsible for that or if I would have. I'm not pretending it's easy, but hell if you're going to convince me you're only strong enough to survive this, Nate. You're strong enough to conquer it. So how come only one of us in the room understands that?"

"You have a habit of intellectualizing things," Nathan said, not looking at her. Still scraping at the wallpaper. "It's not a bad habit. It's probably saved your ass any number of times, so this isn't me telling you to break it. But," and he sliced the rest of the fish off the wall with one stroke, "you should probably concede that maybe, just maybe, you haven't yet run into something you can only survive."

"I have a habit of thinking. It can lead to intellectualizing, yeah." Her agreement, though was short-lived. "Maybe I haven't run up against something I can only survive yet. I'll give you that. But the day I run up against something I think can only be survived and not conquered is the day I don't think I deserve more than to just survive it. You get what you give in this life. Even when it comes to yourself."

Nathan looked back over his shoulder at her, gray eyes steady and almost preternaturally calm. "I agree," he said, sounding utterly serious. "About what we deserve. I completely agree."

"You've made your bed so now you're going to lie in it? That's what it comes down to for you?"

"You're not getting it. But then, I suppose I'm not really explaining." He turned to face her, finally, still wearing that serious, too-calm look. "I may move on from this. I may even be able to try and fight the same battle again." Someday. Maybe. "But it will never change watching those kids gunned down. Or being trapped under the debris with them, feeling their minds unravel. I will never have done anything more than survive that."

"Yeah, well, you excel at not explaining things." But she did shut up and listen. Morgan understood having issues with seeing kids killed in combat. She had issues with that. She had a no kids clause that meant she and the guys wouldn't take any jobs that they knew involved child soldiers. Sometimes you didn't know until it was too late, though, and then your reputation was on the line if you didn't make good on your end. "Kids are hard. So why'd you choose to be there? I mean, this wasn't an X-Men thing. That means there was a choice. You made your choice to be in that situation. And you couldn't have been ignorant to the many ways in which it could end if that's the way it actually did. So why sign up?"

Nathan gave her another of those strained little smiles. "Well, see," he said, his voice a little hoarse, "it was one of those 'Dayspring, do you want to come use that handy-dandy brainwashing-cracking psionic trick of yours on these children, or are you going to make us go in with guns blazing?' situations. So, being a bit funny on the subject of child soldiers, having been one and all, I don't think I saw it as much of a choice. I also didn't expect to be put in front of a firing squad and then have a building blown up around me, but as you've just so eloquently pointed out... sometimes, them's the breaks."

"Sometimes the kinder choice is to let them be killed," she said without remorse. Morgan fully realized what she was saying and to whom, but she stood by the thought. Sometimes letting people be gunned down was kinder than forcing them to face things they'd done when not in control of themselves. She thought Jay Guthrie was probably a damn good example of that, actually. Not that she was opting to kill off her boyfriend's little brother, but she was sure if given the choice the little brother might have opted for it. At one point in her life she would have and she didn't even have the excuse of brainwashing.

"Condemned to life, huh? Strange sentiment from a woman who just got finished telling me how important it was to conquer life's little adversities," Nathan said wearily, flicking bits of wallpaper off the edge of the scraper. The look in his eyes was shuttered, however, as if his emotional involvement in the conversation had just been...switched off.

Morgan shrugged. "Some people really aren't strong enough. They break. That's never pretty." She didn't put Nate in that category, but it didn't change the fact.