Cammie & Nathan

[x-scorpion.livejournal.com]

Cammie and Nathan have a conversation while she works, that clears whatever might have been between them, since the accident with Jean-Paul.

Work. She had a job. Cammie had two jobs, really. It would give her a chance to stuff a shiny new bank account with money. And what she was going to do with that money wasn't even on her mind yet. Just that she would have some and not have to get it illegally.

She was reluctant about leaving Kurt's room at first, but this was something different. So she had hijacked his shower put on clothes from her bag that were clean and made her way down to the boathouse looking a bit more human than she had felt the last few days.

Here went nothing. She walked into the boathouse/office. "I'm here," was all she said.

"Cammie," Nathan greeted her, amiably enough, although there was a hint of something more assessing in his gray eyes as he watched his newest employee walk in. "Just you and me this morning. Fortunately there's a pile of filing to be done." He inclined his head at the quite tall stack of files on the corner the desk she shared with Catseye.

"Okay," she said, looking towards the pile. "Oh, that's going to be fun." She didn't miss the assessing look. She was generally pretty good at reading other people, "Something up?" she asked. Her stance was worn out.

The last week had left her pretty tired.

"Mmm." Nathan offered her a faint smile, although the look in his eyes was a little gentler than it had been. "Well, I believe in being forthright with my employees - maybe too much so, sometimes - so I should be honest and say that I heard about the, uh, mishap."

"Oh," Cammie said, "Well... uh... yeah. I didn't... well, at least he's going to okay, right? I apologized to him and stuff. I didn't really mean to hit him that bad. Or...well... at all." It sounded so lame to her.

Nathan gazed at her for a moment. "Jean-Paul's a good friend of mine," he finally said, "and you - well, I don't offer jobs to people I don't like - and yes, I know we've only talked a couple of times, but I tend to trust my first impressions of people. So, I'm just glad it didn't turn out as badly as it might have. But are you okay?"

She looked down at her feet and then up and smiled, it was fake, "I'm doing... okay. I've been hanging out with Kurt since he caught me kinda walking out. This happens with me, so it was kinda just a matter of time."

Nathan tilted his head, but decided to leave the fatalism alone. That was long and bitter experience speaking there, he suspected. "Yet you were convinced not to leave," he said, "not chased away. I bet that messed with your expectations, at least a little."

"Yeah, a bit. People normally don't fall over themselves to keep the walking death trap around," Cammie said, moving a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. "So yeah. Kurt's... not like most people though. He's a good guy."

"He's not the only one here who feels like that." Nathan got up, but instead of coming over to where Cammie was standing, headed for the coffeemaker.

"It's been... five years, now, since I came here," he went on, "and I brought with me all kinds of dangers to the people around me. Different dangers than yours. I mean," he said, giving her another slight smile over his shoulder, "I am definitely what one might call a dangerous mutant, but it was the people hunting me that were the real threat."

"You crash land, that's only dangerous to yourself. I pack enough poison to bring down an elephant, I sneeze wrong and I could accidentally kill someone," she pointed out, her arms over her chest as she looked at the large pile of filing. When she started the busy work, maybe that would make it so she couldn't think.

"If I wanted to, Cammie, I could level the mansion," Nathan said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. "Wouldn't even take me that long. A couple of telekinetic shockwaves. Maybe a minute, and this whole place would be a crater."

Cammie picked up a group of files, "That would be a sight to see," she said, "One I wouldn't want. I mean, if I could say I have a home... this would be it. My friends made it very clear that charges or no charges, I'm not welcome home. I suppose I could ask if you've killed someone. So, have you killed someone?"

Nathan turned back towards her, leaning against the edge of the table and sipping at his coffee. "I was a soldier for almost twenty-five years, Cammie," he said simply. "American special forces of a sort for most of that time, and a mercenary for several years after that. I've killed a lot of people."

"Yeah, but what about on accident?" she said, as she started sorting files, trying to put them in some sort of order. "There's kind of a difference there. Or hang around to watch them die?"

"Yes," Nathan said, his voice very calm but his throat dry as he thought of the dead children in New Mexico, "and yes. It's not something I look back on easily, but you learn to live with it. Day by day, then week by week... there's no secret to it. Just persistence."

"Ah. Okay," Cammie said. She wondered if it was different when the person you accidentally killed was someone close to you. "Well then, I guess the thing is to keep on trucking as old people like to say."

Well, she was talking, not shutting down, or looking like she wanted to run. That was all very good. "Persistence can have its drawbacks," he said after a moment, pondering his coffee. It was weaker than it needed to be, really. "I spent a number of years on the run, as much from myself as the people who were after me. It got to the point where I didn't really know how to stop. In the end the only reason I did is that my powers went crazy and forced me to."

"Oh," she said, "I suppose crazy TK would be a good reason to keep running. I mean, I just have the killer arm. Which saying that makes me sound totally emo, I'm sure."

"Actually, it was crazy seeing-the-future. Which I don't do anymore, thank God. But my point is that forward momentum only takes you so far. There are times you can't, or shouldn't run." Nathan shrugged, unable to help a brief smile. "If I hadn't stopped, I wouldn't have the wife, or the daughter, or the nifty NGO where I can employ all kinds of interesting people."

"There are people more interesting than me?" she joked as she started putting files where they went. It was easy work, really. "So the moral of the story is stop running and you get a wife?"

"Depends, do you want a wife?" Nathan said with a perfectly straight face. Maybe that would do it, for today. He wasn't trying to get her to open up, after all; just to let her know that her experience wasn't entirely foreign when it came to the mansion's population, and hopefully to establish himself as someone who would listen if she ever felt like talking. "I'd heard Clarice had given up on men..."

"God no. Women are insane," Cammie said with a laugh. "Universal truth, right there."

Nathan shrugged cheerfully, turning back towards his desk. "There's a red-tagged folder at the bottom of that pile," he said. "When you get down that far, copy the contents for me before you file it?"

"Yeah, I can do that," Cammie said simply. "Copy the red tagged file, sounds dangerously simple, but hey, you're the boss."