Manuel and Nathan, Saturday night...

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

Nathan and Manuel have the meeting they discussed at the beginning of the week. Things do not go well.


Manuel's got his iPod on, like he usually does, and he's walking the dorm room halls with curiosity, stopping to stare at each door he passes. Every few steps his head bobs, apparently in time to the music blaring in his ears.

Nathan, sitting in his room and attempting to read one of the new batch of novels Moira offered him (some dreadful thing about Scotland and time-travel), looks up from the book, his eyes narrowing as he senses the presence in the hall outside. He doesn't need to reach out to know who it must be. That sort of presence is unmistakable, like a streetlight in a room of dim candles.

To Manuel, Nathan's emotional signature is distinctively familiar, even though he'd never actually laid eyes on the man before. So he stops outside the appropriate door, looks at the door with a smirk, thumbs the volume down on his iPod, and then tries something a little new - an empathic "ping", just a short directional burst of interest, through the door and to the emotional aura beyond.

Nathan shivers, stiffening in his chair as he feels it, a moment of something almost like pressure that thankfully, fades swiftly. He's no empath himself, but too much experience has lent him a certain sensitivity. That had been the equivalent of a knock on the door, he decides. He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to release the added tension into the 'void' that was at the heart of the meditative techniques he'd been taught. It's not a particularly successful attempt, and he sighs, opening his eyes again.

"Come in, Manuel," he calls, setting the book aside.

Manuel turns the doorknob and swings the door open wide. "Buenos dias." he says, his accent immediately placing him as a Spaniard, from the Med side of things, and on the disgustingly wealthy end of the socioeconomic strata. "You wanted to see me, yes?"

"Yes," Nathan says as calmly as he can, looking the young man up and down. Not quite what he expected, but as he well knows, appearances are deceiving. This close, Manuel's presence is even stronger. "I appreciate you taking the time. Would you like to sit down?"

Manuel smirks in his usual calculated-to-piss-off-saints way. "Of course." he says, snagging a spare chair, spinning it around, and sitting down in it - using the motion to disguise how heavily he lands in the chair. He then tilts his head to one side slightly, and seems to stare right through Nathan's skull. "You're a very odd individual."

He's taking your measure, Nathan tells himself, even as another part of him is shouting, screaming at him to put some distance between him and the empath using whatever means were necessary. Let him do it, Nathan orders himself. We both need to know where we stand. "How so?" he asks, managing to keep his voice level.

Manuel gestures vaguely in the general direction of Nathan's head. "I see emotions as colors. Yours - have such clearly demarcated boundaries. I've never seen anything like it - which isn't saying much." Something he's seeing apparently fascinates him, as he keeps on staring through Nathan's skull at something. "It even bleeds over into the threads..." he muses to himself in Castillian Spanish.

"The threads?" Nathan asks, more sharply than he intended, his hands clenching and unclenching on the arms of the chair.

Manuel nods. "Si, threads. The little emotional connections that we all develop to things we feel about. To take an example completely at random, you care quite deeply for that doctor woman. And ... let's see here, what's this? A spouse? Ooh, that one's an angry shade indeed. That's almost a pretty shade of blue in with the red and the black, if I didn't know what it represented. Oh, don't go and be getting angry at _me_, I'm not the one who feels like you do." he smirks. "Besides, I don't like it when people are angry at me. It makes me angry."

Control, Nathan tells himself savagely. "Are you speaking metaphorically, or literally?" he asks, his voice coming out a shade too tight. "Because if you mean that you mirror the emotions around you involuntarily, I'll make more of an effort to control mine." Easier said than done, perhaps, but if that's the case he needs to try harder.

"Quite literally, I'm afraid. Although I am getting a little better about it. You're all kinds of angry at me - well, not _exactly_ at me, but close enough, and you're so scared I'm surprised you have not pissed yourself yet. I, on the other hand, am only a little bit annoyed with you, and not at _all_ afraid." Manuel says bravely. "You mentioned something about knowing about empathy. Tell me what you know."

Nathan raises an eyebrow at the peremptory order, but decides to let it pass, remembering what Marie had said about Manuel's social difficulties. Not that he's in much of a position to throw stones. Although he had thought he had the fear sublimated a little more effectively than he apparently does. "I've--worked with empaths," he says, forcing himself to meet the young man's eyes. "Mostly in black ops situations, where they were using their powers offensively." Start slow, he tells himself. Maybe you can give him some information he can use, clear some things up for him. He does know quite a bit about how empaths work.

Manuel nods. "So _that's_ what that is! I've never seen another empath's handiwork before. Very interesting. I wonder what mine looks like? Very neat, very clean. I can't get the edges to line up that neatly - I've tried, and they just get messy again." he muses to himself.

Nathan's blood runs cold, and he rises from his chair, without meaning to. He covers it by picking up the book, moving across the room to return it to the shelf. "Not precisely what I meant," he says, and this time he can't keep the edge out of his voice. The fear is bubbling up again, like acid along his nerves. The fight or flight impulse is building, too. "But yes. I was empathically conditioned during my government service. I also served with empaths in various operations."

The fear spike hits Manuel right between the eyes, and he skitters backwards explosively. "Why are you so damned _afraid_? All I wanted was to _learn_!" His own fight-or-flight reflex kicks in, but he chooses to fight - his eyes glow scarlet as he reaches out with his power, smothering the fear with an icy fist of enforced calm. Compared to the government empaths, Manuel's technique can probably best be described as rough sandpaper across silk.

Nathan staggers, the book dropping from nerveless hands. The pressure is different this time, so much stronger. His shields don't stop it, but then, they never did, never could. He feels the calm descend on him like a sledgehammer, impossible to resist. Deep down, though, beneath the layer of false tranquility, the intrusion triggers something, and Nathan feels the power flow up out of him, lashing out. He manages, somehow, to direct it away from the young empath. It has to go somewhere, though, and the books fly from the shelf in front of him. On the bedside table, the lamp hurls itself at the ceiling and shatters, and the curtains at the windows billow wildly. Drawers fly out of the dresser, one missing Manuel by only a few inches.

Manuel has the good grace to look startled. "Estupido! Stop it, now!" And he backs up _that_ little request with another empathic push - this one the probably sickeningly-familiar-to-Nate "OBEY" imperative.

More pressure, and Nathan isn't seeing anything now. Just white, and he is only peripherally aware of the young man now, and only because there is a part of him that isn't touched by any of this, a fragment that's shouting at him to stop, yelling at him that he can't hurt the kid. It's enough, if barely, to keep him fighting himself, to not allow his telekinesis to touch Manuel. It touches everything else in the room, though. The bed rattles, lifting off the ground. The door to the washroom swings wildly, trying to rip itself off its hinges. Small objects levitate and start spinning in wild patterns, and one window explodes outwards in fragments.

Manuel stands up shakily, mopping his suddenly-sweating brow with a shirt sleeve. "Control yourself! Now!" he shouts over the noise of things breaking. "You will lower all the objects in this room immediately. You will then sit down on the bed, and you will _not_ use your power on anything in this room until _I_ tell you to! Is that understood?" His eyes are screaming scarlet now, giving his features a hellish cast.

Nathan hears him, from that impossible distance, but can't obey. The reaction isn't under his conscious control and he remembers the warning he was once given by a senior Mistra operative. *You don't create a perfect weapon and not build in some safeguards,* the man, his first real mentor, had said. This is one of those safeguards, he realizes. Something to keep an enemy empath from coopting him. Only this isn't an enemy, this young man standing in the room with him, and Nathan is not--going--to--kill--him. He pushes the power elsewhere as it fountains out of him, barely aware of the rest of the windows blowing out, of some of the spinning objects in the air flying out of their patterns and driving themselves into the walls. The mirror in the washroom shatters and the faucet in the sink flies off, water fountaining upwards. The bedframe disassembles itself into its component pieces and the mattress falls to the floor with a thud.

Nathan becomes aware of something else, a tearing pain in his chest that's all too familiar. His breath is coming shorter now, and he tastes blood at the back of his throat. Even though Manuel's enforced calm still holds, part of him moans as he loses his visualization of the virus.

Manuel cowers and ducks as things go flying through the air and chaos reigns. Never before has he seen someone so effectively shrug off one of his empathic "orders", and it scares him. "STOP! STOP!" he shouted over and over, flailing about ineffectually with his power.

Nathan hears the walls groan in protest, and when a crack spiderwebs across one, he knows he has to stop this some way. Any way. But if he lashes out at the boy, even just to break his concentration, he could kill him. There's too much power here, building and building every time Manuel tries to force him to stop, as if the empathic intrusion is hitting the same button over and over.

One other option. He feels one of the parts of the bedframe somewhere above his head and to the left, and pulls at it, pouring all of what little control he has into it. The heavy piece of metal flies towards him, impacting with the back of his head.

Manuel blinks as Nathan quite neatly knocks himself out. "Well, that's one way to do it." he comments to no one in particular. "I think it would be best to end this conversation. Now And maybe go find a doctor or something." And with that, he steps gingerly over the ruined debris that is Nathan's room to let himself out.

***

Manuel, covered in plaster dust, stained with sweat, and wild of expression, goes looking for Moira. First stop - her room. As that is right across the hall from the room he's just left, he doesn't have far to go. *KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK* goes Manuel's fist on her door. ~Open the door, you!~ he shouts in Castilian.

Moira jumps awake at the noise and then blinks tiredly at the language. 'Tha's...Manuel?' She jumps out of bed and flings the door open. She pauses at the sight of him. "Wha' th' bloody 'ell 'appened to ye?"

Manuel steps partially to one side and gestures at the disaster area that was formerly the Casa del Dayspring. "He happened. He tried to kill me! Knocked himself out."

She's already heading into Nathan's room and stops at the sight of it. "Bloody 'ell..." She doesn't know what happened, what caused this but she reaches Nathan's side quickly.

"Are ye 'urt?" she sends over her shoulder as she starts to inspect Nathan's injuries.

Manuel nods, even though she can't really see him that well. "Yes. He tried to kill me! Repeatedly! It's only fair that he knocked himself out. I was responding to his email about me and my power, and then - this!"

"Nathan, wake up, sweetie," she says, softly enough so that Manuel can't hear it over his ranting. She tries to remain calm, slows her breathing down, knowing that Manny would mirror what she was feeling.

Manuel, for his part, is too busy keeping his mad-on towards the unconscious merc to bother mirroring Moira's feelings. "Stupid oaf." he mutters in Castillian.

"Manuel." Moira looks over her shoulder at him. "G' inta me room, I need ye ta call 'enry's emergency beeper number."

"I don't think so." he says. "Call it yourself. For all I care, he can die slowly. Serves him right, the assassin."

Moira straightens. "Considerin' once I 'ave th' -full- story, I will be talkin' ta Emma Frost, ye may want ta save yerself some trouble an' actually -try- an' 'elp."

"Go ahead." Manuel smirks, calling the Scotswoman's bluff. "My story will scan as true. We were talking, and then he tried to kill me. I didn't do _anything_ to him but try to protect myself."

"-Wit'- warnin' tha' 'e's like this." She matches his look with a glare. "An' if nay...why are ye still 'ere? Bloody well bugger off if'n ye dinnae plan on bein' o' any 'elp." She shrugs out of her lab coat, having fallen asleep in it, and uses it to pillow Nathan's head.

"It's very simple." he says, speaking insultingly slowly. "If he lives, I want to know /why/ he tried to kill me. And no one said anything to _me_ about him blowing up at empaths!"

Moira rolls her eyes and ignores him as she spots the phone buried under rubble. Thankfully, it looks like it's still in one piece. She continues ignoring Manuel as she dials Henry's emergancy number and Nathan's room number.

"You'd think I'd have stabbed his family personally the way he carried on. He's the _only_ one here who knows anything about empathy. I had to know!" he says accusingly. "Do _you_ know what he knows?"

"Nay, I dinnae. If'n I 'ad, I would 'ave already been workin' wit' ye," she says, honestly. She sighs and her shoulders slump. "I'm...sorry." Moira looks at him as she kneels next to Nathan again. "If'n I promise ta see what I could do, when 'e's stable an' nay likely ta snap, an' see wha' information I can get...can ye jus' -try- ta be 'elpful?"

"Gah, you're still useless." Manuel grouses at Moira's back. "This is so _frustrating_! What do you want from me?"

She shrugs, focusing on Nathan. "'onestly, ta 'elp but I cannae if'n I dinnae 'ave th' information." An idea suddenly floods into her mind and she files that away for later. The technology for Kevin...

Manuel picks up on the bright golden sparkle of inspiration coming from Moira. "You have an idea." he says accusingly. "Tell me!"

She holds out a hand. "Manuel, I PROMISE ye, once this particular disaster is over, I'll tell ye -everythin'- 'bout th' idea I jus' 'ad. Everythin'. But this needs ta cleaned up, Nathan needs ta be checked out." She's telling the truth and she means every word she said.

Manuel squints at the Scot, then nods his head. "You know where to find me. Once the assassin is well, then come find me. We will talk."

"Aye, we will." She turns back to Nathan and starts to double check for any open wounds on the back of his head.