xp_logs | Nathan and Marie, Sunday night (Reply)

Backdated to Sunday. Marie visits Nathan in the medlab, and their conversation goes some interesting - and difficult - places.

He had finally found something to count. There was a very faint pattern of--something on the floor, visibly enough to count if he leaned sideways a bit in bed.

He was up to two hundred and three when he sensed someone in the hall outside, a familar unreadable presence that made him forget his latest time-killing method and smile. Straightening, he thought for a moment and then decided to try.

#Hello, Marie,# he projected, wondering if she would hear him.

Nathan's thought startled her and Marie reached into her own mind to silence the voice before realizing that it had come from outside of her. She opened the door to Nathan's room and looked in. "Hi, yourself," she said with a smile. "Thought someone up here," she tapped her temple, "was getting frisky there for a moment."

It struck Nathan that she might not have been the best person to try that with and he grimaced, annoyed at himself. "Sorry," he said hesitantly. "Just... practicing. I didn't think... well, I didn't think." He offered an apologetic smile. "Charles was trying to convince me that if I used my telepathy a little more with people I trust, my comfort level in general would increase."

"It's okay. Really." Marie came in and closed the door almost all the way behind her. "I was teasing. I mean, I did think it, but it didn't bother me. I don't mind trying it with you. How are you, anyway? I was worried about you."

"Oh, I'm all right," he said quietly, the smile lingering, turning a little wry. "Not going to be running any races in the immediate future, but I suppose I feel pretty good, given the circumstances."

"That's good." She brought a chair over closer to Nathan's bed and sat down, hands folded in her lap. "Is Charles helping at all?"

Nathan nodded. "He has. I figure Wednesday's must just have been... particularly bad," he said, his mouth twisting a little. "I don't remember what happened, so I can't say for sure."

Marie shook her head. "Is there any way they can put a monitor on you? Does your heartrate or blood pressure drop, anything that could be used to sent an alert to someone so that they could come and make sure you were okay? It sounded like it took Moira a while to find you or something."

"Moira's working on something with Henry, I think," Nathan said. She had mentioned something to that effect last night, at least. "And yeah, it did take her a while to find me..." He trailed off, frowning as he remembered the flashes he had gotten across the link when she had told him about it. "Apparently I was talking to Manuel, and since he didn't have a phone in his room..."

Marie's expression darkened. "He doesn't have a... of course he doesn't." She pulled her own phone out of her hoodie pocket and punched a few things into it. "Just reminding myself to get one for him."

Nathan smiled slightly. "Apparently we were having a nice, rational discussion. Just wish I could remember what about, or hell, going to see him in the first place."

"He is capable of those, you know," Marie said dryly. "Nice, rational discussions. We have them more often than not. Have you asked him what you were discussing?"

"Not yet. Haven't seen him. Apparently he's having some sort of unwarranted guilt." Nathan sighed. "I'd go tell him not to worry, but they're not letting me out of here yet, and I'm not sure I want to take the cheap way and do it over email."

"Guilt?" Marie looked a little worried. "That's a good sign and yet, I know how he's been at his moments when he thinks he's been 'bad'. If I see him, I can tell him for you."

"Damn it, I wish I remembered," Nathan said, part of him surprised by how frustrated he was. "I think I know why I probably went to see him - he wanted to know about psi-links - but I'm going to be thoroughly disgusted with myself if I made things harder for him."

"Shh." Marie reached out to calm Nathan, her hand stopping inches from his. "He's got people looking out for him. I'm sure Charles will take care of things. You just get better."

Nathan nodded, his mouth twitching in an involuntary smile. "Don't ask me when I went from wanting to run away from Manuel to counseling him about psi-links," he said, as wryly as he could. "Partially because I'm not sure I've stopped wanting to keep as much of a distance as possible. I just...it's too familiar, what he's going through with that link. And when it's happening to someone who's not all that stable to begin with..." Nathan stopped, shaking his head quizzically. "Yeah, I really don't know what I'm thinking," he confessed. "Apparently I've developed a new love for acting on impulse."

"That's not such a bad thing. If you've been so tied up in trying to keep control of so much for so long, that's going to happen when the pressure's off." Marie settled back into her chair with a shrug. "And maybe it's a little safer here, somehow, you can take your chances?"

Nathan started to answer and then stopped, the words dying on his lips. "Charles has been--offering some more general advice, during our sessions," he said slowly. "He said something very similar. But he also pointed out that it's very hard to go back to that level of--control, once you've let go." He met Marie's eyes as frankly as he could. "I'm not sure I'm ready for that, to be honest. Not sure it's safe. I wouldn't undo what's happened between Moira and I for the world, but..." He trailed off, grimacing helplessly. "It would be so easy to forget," he said, seized by a sudden, different frustration. "Even if I resolve my Askani problem overnight, a lot of the facts of my life haven't changed, Marie."

"Then you keep changing them, slowly, Nathan. You're not the only one here with a lousy past, who's used to sleeping with one eye open." Marie met his eyes with a calm expression. "Or not sleeping at all. You won't forget. And things do change, even the things that have been the same for as long as you can remember. I don't know if you can resolve the Askani problem without making the changes you fear."

"I want to stop running," Nathan said tightly, his hands clenching on the blankets. "I've said that to Moira, to you, and I still mean it." But it was suddenly terrifying, the idea of--changing this much, of letting his guard down, to make some sort of real, sane life for himself. Because he knew that Mistra wouldn't go away just because he decided to move on, and the thought of making a life and then losing it provoked a sudden flash of almost-physical pain. Yet that life was beginning to make itself around him, wasn't it?

"I think you've already stopped running, Nathan, not that you had a choice in it," Marie pointed out. "Your mind's not caught the idea yet, or your instincts haven't at least. The question is whether or not you'll start when you get your feet back under you."

"I can't," Nathan muttered, his mind full of Moira. "There's no way I can leave her," he said, and then blinked at himself, realizing that had been aloud.

"That makes it simple then, doesn't it?" Marie said, giving him a slightly sad smile.

Nathan drew in a shaky breath, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. "Oh, fuck, do I have a problem," he said unsteadily, thinking of a Mistra retrieval team here, or at Muir Island. "I just hope to hell I can get myself straightened out before it comes looking for me."

"Or we could go looking for it." Marie's voice was mild when she spoke but her eyes were serious. "We just have to know where to look."

Nathan's eyes snapped back to her. "You don't know what you're saying," he said shakily, panic flaring erratically inside him. "You can't, Marie, none of you can... they can't come here, they can't find any of these kids, you don't know what they'd do..." His voice grew louder and louder, his eyes blurring humiliatingly with tears.

"They?" Marie asked calmly, moving to sit next to him. "You think "They" don't know about us? Stryker did. I'm sure they do too. Nathan... we're not all children here. And we won't let them take you, or anyone else, from this place, no matter who they are."

He looked over at her, seeing and sensing her calm determination. But his mind was full of the faces of these kids, and yet there were the faces of the children in the training program there, as well. He was suddenly nearly overwhelmed by a memory of sitting in his tiny room, watching through the tiny slit in the door as they wheeled Megan's body past on a gurney, everything but her face covered with a sheet. She had been in the room next to his, and they had whispered through the vent at night to each other for weeks...

"Nathan, honey. Look at me," Marie's tone was only a little too gentle to be an order. "That was then, this is now. This is here. This is us. And you have a second chance. If you stay, if you make this home, then you won't be alone. Your problems won't come looking for you if we go find them first, and we will. Trust me. Have I been wrong yet?"

Pull yourself back together, he told himself harshly, letting his head rest in his hands for a moment. A shaky laugh slipped out before he could stop it. "I--don't get it, you know," he muttered, and made himself look at Marie. "Why now? I coped with it for fourteen years before they got my team killed. I didn't even think of running, do you know that? I told Moira when we were in Lake George... I was the project's field commander, Marie. What does that make me? All those years, I did as I was told, I just watched... I don't understand why my friends had to die before I could do anything!" His voice was getting too loud again, a distant, calmer part of himself pointed out. He would wake Moira up.

"The only thing I can think of, Nathan, is that your mind wasn't your own then." Marie offered him her hand to hold. "And it's to your credit that you had a limit that they could break at all, because other people don't. You woke up and you got out. I'm sorry it took losing so much to make it happen, but it did happen."

He stared at the offered hand for a moment, and then took it. "I am such a mess," he said shakily. "My thoughts keep going around and around in circles... I used to have it more together than this."

"Nathan Christopher Dayspring." Marie gave his hand a squeeze. "You have an alien civilization in mid-genocide in your head, you keep dying on us, you've fallen in love, you've come back to the country you fled years ago, you're living in a school full of strange and possibly dangerous people, and you're changing your entire life around. Together is not an option. I am so sorry, but you're going to have to accept that you're a mess, because the rest of us do, and it's okay."

He could feel Moira stirring in the back of his mind, sending out a sleepy wave of reassurance, and he laughed again, more weakly, but between that and Marie's steady, warm gaze, some of the pain started to ebb. "I've been here for long enough that I'm starting to--" His voice wavered, but he forced himself to go on. "It could be home, Marie," he admitted, and those four words were among the most difficult he had spoken in years. "I'm just... having so much trouble believing it, really believing it."

"I know you must be really scared then, Nathan. There's so much to lose." Marie reached out to cover his hand with her other hand. "A lot of us feel it, to one degree or another. See, even in that, you're not alone."

He managed a smile, somehow. It was a bit shaky, but real. "I'm beginning to understand that," he said. "Every step counts, huh?"

"Yeah. Even the backward ones, believe it or not." She answered his smile with one of her own, steady and genuine, all the way to her eyes.