Nathan and Jean-Paul

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Jean-Paul and Nathan go fishing. Jean-Paul completely misses the point, but manages to enjoy himself anyway.




"I am going to starve to death before we catch anything worth keeping," Jean-Paul observed, curling his lip as he hooked a fresh cricket onto his lure. He would have preferred worms, honestly. They probably thrashed more, but at least they didn't have faces.

Thusfar uncooperative fish were the only real complaint he could make about the trip. The weather had held, still warm but more than tolerable with all of the shade available. He hadn't burned down the forest using a camp stove. And it was very quiet, to the point that he found himself thinking at Nathan more than actually speaking. Even the unhurried flow of this lazy stretch of the Ausable River seemed loud after the startling quiet of the woods, but it was enough noise that speaking did not seem so intrusive.

"So impatient," Nathan said calmly, casting his line smoothly. "You've been fidgeting all afternoon." He, unlike, Jean-Paul, was actually in the river; it was surprisingly comfortable, with waders on, although before too much longer he was going to need to get out and sit down for a while. "The fish will respond on their own time."

"Oh, well, so long as my hunger pangs do not inconvenience the fish, that is all right." Jean-Paul had unconditionally declined to wear "the bottom half of a rubber clown suit", proper gear or no. He'd opted instead to fly out to a rock in the middle of the river and fish from there. He cast his line awkwardly and took a deep breath, trying to relax. The air smelled pleasantly of the forest and the river itself, earth and water and growing green life. There was certainly a temptation to give up on the idea of fishing completely and just bask on his rock until Nathan gave in. Except that would mean admitting defeat to a stretch of water and annoyingly mobile entrees. "This is truly ridiculous. I can even see one over there."

"Yes," Nathan said, just as placidly. "The fish are taunting you. I can hear them. 'Writhe, puny Canadian! For we are legion and we will not be dinner.'" And he'd taken a double dose of his painkillers this morning. He was still feeling a little mellow.

"Nathan, you are a telekinetic. There are fish in plain view. This should have resulted in a pile of fillets hours ago."

Nathan rolled his eyes good-humoredly. "I could make a snarky comment about instant gratification right about now, Beaubier..."

"There is something to be said for instant gratification." Jean-Paul gave the river another annoyed glare, then reeled in his line and floated back over to the opposite bank to stash his pole, ignoring the half-amused, half-questioning look on Nathan's face as he hied out to his rock again to retrieve the can of crickets and repeat the journey to shore. "There," he said as he tilted the insects onto the grass, "begone and remember your benefactor kindly." He turned his attention back to the water, but his gaze was less irritation now and more that of a man measuring up an opponent.

Nathan's eyes narrowed. "You cheat and I may give you the silent treatment for the rest of the trip," he said, his lips - just barely -twitching. "There's no honor in the easy way."

Jean-Paul gave Nathan a Look. The comment had been made without malice, and so he tried not to take it to heart. Still...it was a sore spot. "And there is honor in tricking something with a brain the size of my thumb into swallowing a hook? Besides, those damned bugs kept looking at me while I skewered them."

Nathan cast again, shifting a little where he stood. He was starting to reach the limit of how long he could comfortably spend on his feet, painkillers or not. The fatigue caught up with him either way. "Fly, little crickets, fly," he murmured. As a wisecrack it was somewhat safer than what he'd just let slip.

"Time for a break?" Jean-Paul glanced away from Nathan, toed off his shoes, and sat long enough to remove and roll his socks.

Nathan made a face. The only problem with the whole concept of running away to the woods - the only problem, quite seriously - was that it sort of hightlighted just how far off his physical best he was. He reeled his lure back in and started for the shore, moving slowly out of care as much as necessity. "We do have plenty of food without the fish," he pointed out.

"That we do. It is also irrelevant at the moment." Both Jean-Paul's curiosity and his sense of competition had been tweaked, and he was quite willing to pit himself against the whole of the Ausable to satisfy both. He was back on his rock in a moment, crouched, eyes trained on the water.

Nathan managed to take off the waders, then cheated a little himself, using a flicker of telekinesis to lower himself into a more comfortable sitting position on the shore. "This is where all the pent-up energy that you're not using in climbing goes, huh?"

"I did not even get my run this morning and I drove all the way here besides," Jean-Paul said, smirking. "You are lucky I am not swinging through the trees." A flicker of motion caught his eye. There was a blur of motion and a small explosion of water before Jean-Paul was back at his post, dripping wet and empty-handed, eyes on the water again. Dammit. Account for refraction next time.

Bursting out laughing at him would not be nice, Nathan thought, his lips twitching helplessly. He straightened one leg carefully, rubbing at the knee. "Dear diary," he said. "Day two, and the fish are outwitting Jean-Paul."

"Not for very long." Warm day or not, his shirt was already clinging to his skin in that itchy, thoroughly unpleasant manner that wet cotton had. He shucked it off and slapped it onto the rock with a wet splat. Despite his failure, the speedster had a Cheshirian grin on his face as he waited for the water to clear again. "Stop your yipping, Dayspring, and think of this as a show and dinner."

"You know, hunting and killing your food really is an age-old male method for depressurizing," Nathan observed. "We're being very predictable."

"It is probably good for us. Reassurance on an instinctual level that no matter how badly the rest of the world chews us up, we will always have the upper hand over crickets and fish." A flash of movement beneath the water caught his eye. Another blur, a much lighter splash, and Jean-Paul was on his rock again, this time holding up the trout he had hooked by the gills. "There are worse methods of blowing off steam. Can I have the bucket, or are you going to make me use my shirt?"

The bucket floated, wobbling a little, over to Jean-Paul on his rock. "You catch it, you clean it," Nathan said primly. "Those are the rules. Or so the fishing master who taught me used to say."



After their fishing trip, Nate and Jean-Paul relax and review the summer.



=====

"It's ironic, you know," Nathan said, poking at the fire. "You had no trouble at all gutting those fish, yet you wibbled over spearing crickets to catch them. I find that highly inconsistent." It was cooler than he'd expected tonight, again. You could really tell that summer was at an end. A clear night, though, he thought, looking upwards at the stars.

"I think not." Jean-Paul was still in an excellent mood after his victory over nature - he hadn't once complained about being the one who had to catch, cook, and clean dinner, or even about clearing up after. He was stretched full-length in front of the fire beside Nate, arms folded behind his head. "To start, I am used to thinking of fish as food, and gutting food is just part of the cooking process. Second, I maintain that the fish at least had something of a fighting chance. Third, the crickets were completely unnecessary to my getting fed, so why not exercise clemency?"

"You have a strange ethical system," Nathan observed, rubbing gently at his side. Even when he was relaxed like this, his breathing still had that hitch to it, and he was beginning to wonder if that was going to be permanent. He supposed that with all the damage he'd done to his lungs over the years, it was inevitable. "You're probably corrupting the children."

"One of many to do so, I am sure." Jean-Paul stretched, then rolled over to his side. "How are you holding up?"

"Not too bad," Nathan said quietly. Better than he'd expected, actually, but he was being careful about how much he was moving around. His lips curved in a brief smile. "By the way, if I'm longer than five minutes in heading down to the infirmary for a check-up after we get back, Amelia's going to drown both of us. And yes, she used precisely those words."

"I do not doubt it." Jean-Paul exhaled slowly, raking his fingers through his hair. River water was not the best shampoo. "We could always decide not to go back, but I think there is only so long Jeanne-Marie will put up with the rats."

Nathan eyed his friend for a long moment. "You're not quite sure what to think about the change in your powers, are you?" he asked after a moment. "You don't want to... commit to reacting, in case the two of you wake up some morning and it's gone back to how Langowski left you."

Jean-Paul's eyes narrowed, and suddenly his entire attention was fixed on the heart of the fire and the fragile pyramid of wood starting to cave in upon itself. "Twenty years and she -- I do not know what the bastard actually did to her. I had long-since gotten used to the idea that touching Jeanne-Marie would be painful, that it would make us...a liability. I did not like it. I learned to live with it. Now that is changing again and what I worry about is that I will wake up some morning and it will be worse than before. Maybe this time, we will really hurt ourselves or someone else." He pulled a leaf out of his hair and flicked it onto the embers just beyond the borders of the firepit. "I should be in medlab right now myself, if we are being honest."

"Don't be surprised if my wife orders you down there once she gets back. You know, though," Nathan said after a moment's consideration, "if anyone could give you concrete answers, it's her. She makes Langowski look like a bumbling amateur."

Jean-Paul let out a half-laugh at the easy target Nathan had tossed him, acknowledging the effort without actually taking the bait. "Maybe. It would be a good thing. But right now...she is there, I am here, and we are safe and safe to be around while I have my little freak-out over one more stupid complication to this entire stupid summer." There was a definite note of bitterness there, dark, brittle and, as ever, turned inward.

Nathan was silent for a long moment, staring into the flames. He kept watching the fire, even when he finally spoke. "Has it occurred to you that all things considered, you've come through the stupid summer remarkably intact?"

Jean-Paul glanced over at Nathan, still on painkillers, his body still knitting itself back together. "Desole," he said, and went quiet.

Nathan sighed. "That's not what I meant. Idiot," he said - meaning it, if affectionately. "I meant that you're walking, talking, living your life. Even enjoying it from time to time. Other men would have taken up permanent residence under their bed," he said, striving for a flippant tone.

"Mostly due to excellent timing on Jean's part." Jean-Paul sighed. "I know. I know I am holding up well for now. I am surprised myself, though I suppose having all the telepaths that keep an eye on me does not hurt. Or the therapy. It just keeps coming. Jeanne-Marie came back. I almost lost you." He hesitated, then, with reluctance, given the relative scale of events, "Jake. And now this. Things just would not hold still long enough for me to see where I was standing."

"Don't I know that feeling," Nathan murmured, his mind insisting upon reviewing the events of the year as well. "When you stop to total things up and are shocked by the tally... well, then you run away to the woods. Or your retreat of choice." He was silent for a moment again. "Seems like there have been more years like that than not, lately."

"I must be out of condition," Jean-Paul remarked dryly. "I can recall a time when a student could nuke me and all it meant was that I worried about my hair falling out."

Nathan snorted, a little too forcefully, and winced, rubbing at his side again. "Neither of us are as young as we used to be," he said, managing to suppress a sigh.

"No. But that is why we are out here where nothing can find us for a bit, non? Putting the world on pause for a bit before going back to deal with things." Jean-Paul laughed softly. "Still not too old for powers training, I suppose."

"It's a complex sort of problem, isn't it?" Nathan asked, gratefully taking the offered distraction. "At least the two of you are used to training intensively. No bellyaching or complaining or excessive enthusiasm, like some of the kids..."

The woodpile collapsed in a shower of sparks.

"Oh, expect complaining. The lightshow really just adds up to a more controlled power drain. Useful in certain situations, but it takes a lot out of us and slows us down." At least it didn't hurt; that was something. "Not that I expect we will be using it in the field again, but it is good not to go around blinding people." Jean-Paul sat up and reached for a few sticks to build up the fire again. "This is what I needed, I think. We should do this again, without the whole running away component."

"Plan a vacation?" Nathan's smile was brief, oddly sad. "That would be tempting fate. Moira and I were going to go to Santorini this summer, I remember. Seems like we talked about that forever ago."

Jean-Paul literally flinched before he lay back down. "Yes, bad idea. Nevermind."

Silence fell again, and Nathan poked at the fire again, watching sparks spin upwards into the darkness. "You could climb, tomorrow," he said. "I could stand at the bottom and critique your technique."

"It would be something to do." Jean-Paul let his eyes slip shut. "Why Santorini?"

Nathan shrugged. "It's the place we go, when it all gets to be too much." He eyed Jean-Paul. "You probably don't remember, when you were with me on my mindscape - the white house in the mountains. It's a piece of Santorini."

There was a flicker of something in the back of Jean-Paul's mind, a skipped heartbeat of images...a white house on a mountainside and something else, bright like a muzzleflash, and then they were both gone. "No," Jean-Paul said after a moment. "Too deep, probably. Or too close to the block, I do not know. I am sorry you did not get to go." A smirk. "As pleasant as my company is, I do not think I can compete with the good doctor."

"Another time," Nathan said. "Now that I'm not aiming to die in the harness anymore. There are benefits to putting yourself out to pasture."