xp_logs | Nathan and Jean-Paul, late Friday night

Jean-Paul comes across Nathan in the stables, and in a very dark mood.

He appeared to have lucked out; there was no sign of Scott slipping down to the stables to play the sax Nathan knew perfectly well was stashed around here somewhere. This was good, because he didn't really want the company. Nathan clicked his pen over and over, almost a nervous twitch as he stared flatly at the wall of the empty stall where he'd found a congenial bale of hale to use as a backrest.

The little leather-bound notebook laid open on his lap to a paper that was empty save for one angrily scrawled line. This time, I was there with them, it read, and try as he might, Nathan couldn't figure out anything else to say but that. His long-suffering therapist was going to be disappointed in him.

"Now this is a disappointment." Jean-Paul (apparently having added telepathy to his list of talents) walked into the stable. He was in his old Alpha Flight skinfit, which was shedding a thin, nearly translucent layer of ice from the shoulders and chest as he moved. "I was in the mood for some music before bed. What brings you out here?"

Nathan's gaze dropped, and he closed the notebook, sliding the leather strap around it. He shrugged, still not looking up. "It's quiet," he said, his voice gravelly. "And warm. And ghosts don't like horses."

"How do they feel about Quebecois?" Jean-Paul headed in, only to be intercepted by a curious head poking out of a stall. He hesitated a moment, then scratched the mare between her ears, leaning against her neck as she blew sweetfeed breath against his chest. "Need to vent at someone?"

Nathan shrugged again, the gesture more jerky this time, almost helpless. "I hurt," he finally said, awkwardly. "I mean literally. Not just where I was shot. I suppose it's the cold and the damp. But I'm sick of this. I feel decrepit."

"An unfortunate side-effect of having a building fall on you." Jean-Paul gave the horse one last pat and moved to share Nate's hay bale. "There's always the whirlpool bath in the gym for the aches and pains, if you're allowing yourself that much tonight."

He didn't get much acknowledgement to the suggestion. "I used to bounce back from this sort of thing, you know," Nathan muttered, fingers curling around the notebook. "Hell, even four years ago, when I broke my back... I was back in leathers what, four months later?"

"It has not even been four months in this case," Jean-Paul pointed out. "And you are trying to cope with...considerably more this time. You won't be decrepit forever."

"Won't I? There's only so much punishment the human body can take. And at this rate I'm going to be walking Rachel down the aisle in a wheelchair. Or not walking her down the aisle at all, because my twenty-three concussions are going to have me a vegetable with early onset dementia."

"Let me rephrase -- assuming you give yourself adequate recovery time, you will not be decrepit from this forever. I think you will hold together for a while yet. What happens next time..." Jean-Paul trailed off. "Just to remind, living for other people, so you do not have to feel guilty? It sucks. In the end, it is a recipe for waking up some day with more years behind than ahead and more regrets than can be counted. If you wanted to hang up the leathers, to increase your chances of saying hello to your grandchildren, it would not be a monstrous thing, Nathan."

Nathan gave a brusque laugh with a little unsteadiness beneath it. "I'm laughable enough as is. Nathan the amazing accident-prone X-Man. Let's not add cowardice to the list."

Jean-Paul gave him a dirty look. "Don't make me punch a recovering man, Dayspring; it will upset the horses. There's a difference between running away and leaving for something better."

"Except that if I left now I would be running away. Don't argue with me, because it's true," Nathan said tightly. The knots of pain in his back seemed to be multiplying. "As tempting as it is to run away and leave all this unfinished business for the younger and less decrepit... I'm not going to leave this life a broken, burned-out old warhorse, trailing unfinished business behind me. I won't."

"It is you or them and the rest of us get to place bets and throw rocks from the sidelines?" Jean-Paul twirled a stalk of hay between his thumb and forefinger. "That is your choice. I think it stinks, but it is still up to you. It may be that you will even be the one to walk away. You are a stubborn bastard."

"Not stubborn enough. Not nearly." Nathan flipped the strap off the notebook and opened it again. Back to the page with the one solitary line on it. "I never used to think history repeated itself."

Jean-Paul's brows knitted. "In what respect?"

"I always thought that it was just human nature. That events themselves moved on, one way or the other..." Nathan's hand went to his forehead, rubbing lightly. His expression was tight, definitely overcontrolled. "I never told you what happened to the Mistra home facility fifteen years ago, did I? What I did."

"You've referenced around it," Jean-Paul said quietly.

"I got myself shot up then, too. Not when I went back - before. When they came after us." When they'd killed Aliya and Tyler. "Took me a while to be mobile again," Nathan went on roughly. "But I went back, once I was. Because I was bringing that place crashing down if it was the last thing I did. And I did. As far as I know, there's still a crater in the middle of the badlands in New Mexico."

He stopped, swallowing. He didn't look at Jean-Paul. "I didn't know that there were candidates locked in their cells. It was years and years later when I found out the staff had left them there, when they evaced. So," he went on almost brusquely, "I killed them without knowing it. Buried them beneath God only knows how much debris. I wiped them out of existence, just as casually as that bastard did those kids in Puerto Rico."

"Don't you dare equate the two. Don't even...!" Jean-Paul's voice held real anger. He rose to his feet, pacing the short stretch between the door and stalls. "Maybe you could have known. Maybe you should have. You are the telepath, non? But whatever you have done, do not even try to paint yourself the same as that bastard. I saw enough to know the difference, so do not argue with me."

Nathan gave another shrug, as if to say whatever. The line of his jaw was noticeably unsteady, however, and he was staring fixedly at the wall of the stable. "Maybe this was my punishment for that, finally," he muttered. "History repeats itself, and this time I'm the one buried under the building with another bunch of kids. Although that theory falls apart given that I'm not dead."

"Bullshit logic anyway." Jean-Paul's words were clipped, his accent thicker. "If there were a divinity handing out ironic punishments on behalf of the innocent dead, these beasts would have had their heads put on spikes by their own creations years ago. They are not bothered by body count. If you try to stop them, they kill people. If you do nothing, they still kill people. The evil they do is not on your shoulders. And just because they are not in reach right now does not mean you should be trying to rip your own throat out."

"Says you," Nathan retorted bleakly. "I'm getting sick of people telling me not to be so hard on myself. Especially when they know the things I've done and not done."

Jean-Paul opened his mouth to retort...then shut it quickly enough that his teeth clicked together.

"You're very good," he said, one side of his mouth curling in a wry smile. "Not quite good enough to get me to join in on the abuse, though. You may be sick of it, but you do not think it is perhaps just a bit unreasonable to expect those around you to see you come back hurt and then say nothing as you dig your fingers into the wounds?"

"Clearly I need to find more judgemental confessors. That's the ticket." Nathan leafed through the notebook. "You'd be surprised. Contrary to popular belief, we're not all sweetness and light and tolerance. If I wanted to find someone to tell me I was a despicable piece of shit, I probably wouldn't have to look very far."

"Probably not, but then people who agree with you in these moods tend to either say their piece and leave or ask why you haven't killed yourself yet. Us agents of sweetness and light tend to stay and get tangled up in these sorts of arguments." Jean-Paul returned to his seat.

"Six years ago, on nights like this, I would have gone out to the worst bar I could find, gotten drunk, and picked a fight," Nathan said. "Then I got old and supposedly respectable."

"More likely you started having a reason to care if someone got in that one-in-a-million shot while you were distracted. Small, red-haired, hates squirrels?" Jean-Paul shook his head. "Fighting never did much for me, except as a warm up. I had to go find people that I didn't know to drink and fuck my way out of the moment."

"All the things we try to do to forget... too bad all of them are temporary." A weak laugh slipped out. "Charles would lecture me again if he caught me wishing I could excise my own memories."

"It's not the worst wish in the world. How many bad memories do we need to keep our winning personalities intact anyway? Surely some of them must be redundant by now." Jean-Paul gave Nate a contemplative look. "When does the plane get in?"

"This weekend sometime," Nathan said. He didn't look all that excited, for a man who'd spent days fussing over a certain small redhead's bedroom.

"Come flying with me. It won't help the hurt per se, but it may wear you out enough that you don't mind so much."

"Mmph." Nathan shrugged, then tucked his notebook into the inside pocket of his jacket. "On the bright side, not drunk tonight. Hopefully I won't take out any trees."