xp_logs | Angelo and Nathan (Reply)

In the early hours of Thursday morning, Nathan strays into Angelo's latest nightmare, and sets about trying to help. Angst and cute in almost equal measures.

Angelo was having another nightmare, for no particular reason in this instance, unless it was Nathan being shot, but then, they didn't always happen for any particular reason. As usual, he found himself back in the alley, after his manifestation.

Once again, he saw the familiar scene - ancient posters and graffiti on the walls around him, trash scattered about at random and most of the windows in the vicinity cracked or shattered, the filthy pavement he was kneeling on - and the other young men around him, expressions ugly.

He knew what was going to happen next (had happened?) but, hands bound, could do nothing about it even if it hadn't been inevitable. The gun pressed to the back of his head lifted away at a signal from the leader, and was raised in preparation for a knockout blow. As is often the way with dreams, it seemed an inordinately long time in coming, when it had only been a few seconds in reality.

The blow never fell. A hand shot out, catching the wrist of the one holding the gun. "Angelo, you're dreaming," Nathan said calmly, ignoring the way the young man with the gun cursed and struggled.

Angelo looked up at him and blinked. "...Nathan? What are you doin' here?"

Nathan shrugged, flinging the kid with the gun back against the wall of the alley. He disappeared into it with a ripple, and Nathan blinked after him for a moment before turning his attention back to Angelo. "Not entirely sure," he confessed, ignoring the others. "But I seem to be making a habit of this."

Angelo, aware now that it was a dream but still finding himself bound by the physical rules, tried to get to his feet with his hands still tied behind his back, the bandana cutting into his wrists painfully, and failed. "When did it happen before?"

Nathan frowned, trying to concentrate. "Amanda," he said finally. It was difficult to think, to focus on the 'real' world - dreams were just a different kind of reality - and not slip seamlessly into the mindscape. "Betsy, too. This is what happens when you're expanding your limits faster than you master control, I suppose." He glanced down at the bandana restraining Angelo's wrists, and experimentally, pushed at it with his mind. It turned into a bird and flew away. "Huh," he said thoughtfully.

Angelo watched the bird fly away, vaguely surprised, and rubbed at his wrists before standing up. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it," Nathan said, only then looking around at the other young men. "You want to get rid of them? They don't seem like fun company."

Angelo looked at them with a scowl. "Yeah. An' at this point when it happened for real, they weren't."

"It's your dream," Nathan pointed out. "Go to town."

Angelo grinned suddenly, wickedly. "It is, isn't it?" He turned to face them, and concentrated on making them go away, gratified to watch them burst into flames and disappear.

"So what," Nathan said dryly, "you just needed me to remind you that you could do that? Or are you not into lucid dreaming?" He wasn't being entirely fair, of course. His presence here was probably changing things, giving Angelo the opportunity to react on a conscious level here within the dream itself.

Angelo frowned, thinking. "Not really sure. All the dreams before... weren't like this. Not just that you weren't in them... things happened just like they did for real, more or less." He glanced around. "Well, now you are here, an' stuff isn't goin' like usual... wanna see some things?"

"Sure," Nathan said, vaguely remembering Madelyn telling him that she was adjusting his IV to help him sleep. "I'm probably not to be waking up anytime soon, so we may as well take advantage. Lead on."

Angelo nodded. "Okay then. Well, as you've probably figured, this here is right after I manifested. Wasn't where it stopped, though - if you hadn't stepped in, the scene was just about to change 'cause I got knocked out." He focused, and the oddly insubstantial form of the burning car appeared in the alley beside them.

"You shouldn't cling to the details like this," Nathan said quietly. "You don't have the excuse of a telepath's memory that retains all of it naturally."

Angelo shrugged. "It wasn't all that long ago", he pointed out. "Samson says if I keep goin' to the therapy sessions an' bringin' it out in the open, the dreams'll stop, an' they already don't happen half as much as they used to..."

"Good," Nathan said, glad to see the insubstantial car start to fade again. "You and I ought to talk about lucid dreaming, too. It might help."

"If it'd let me do things like that, I think it would", Angelo answered. "Stop me wakin' up five times a night on the bad nights, anyway."

"I don't know what Samson would think of it, but it's worth a try." Nathan noticed, as they moved out of the alley, that although it seemed to be full light down here on the deserted street, there was no apparent sun. "What do you want to show me now?"

Angelo thought about that. "The gang house, maybe. This way." He led Nathan towards what looked like a disused warehouse, almost falling apart.

As they walked inside, shadowy figures emerged from the walls. Angelo looked at one group, and they sharpened and became more visible - a young teenage boy, recognisable as Angelo pre-manifestation and grey skin, lying face-down on the floor, teeth gritted as he tried not to flinch, while an older boy worked at carving into his shoulder with a knife. "That was the point of no return, I guess you'd call it. Seemed like it then, anyway. I was fourteen."

Nathan stared at the scene for a moment, and then pulled up his sleeve. For some reason, he was in the dream in sweat pants and a t-shirt, the sort of thing he slept in. Made sense, he supposed, but it also made showing Angelo this easier. "Never showed you this," he said, as Angelo looked at the small tattoo. "It's the Greek letters alpha and omega. They gave it to us once we survived the conditioning process, to remind us that we belonged to them from that moment until the end of our lives. I was... a little bit older than you were here, I think. I'd just turned fifteen."

Angelo nodded. "Sounds like the same sort of thing. The gangs weren'tt that hard to get out of, but not that many of us wanted to." He paused, thinking. "There's one other time from this place that's a major memory, but it's not the next one time-wise. Probably easier to show you that first, though." He turned to another side of the warehouse, and the boy he'd been appeared again, perhaps a year older, still lying on the floor, but now on his side, a pool of blood gathering. It appeared to be mostly coming from a wound on his back, although there was a smaller one on his side.

"What happened here?" Nathan asked, moving around to get a better look.

"Got shot", he answered neutrally. "Doin' somethin' incredibly stupid, but you do things like that when you need the money, or the respect. Tried to knock over a liquor store with a few of the boys, an' of course the guy had a gun. The others got me out, an' brought me here, fixed me up the best they could. I got lucky - the bullet went straight through an' didn't hit anythin' important. I was here for about a week before I was well enough to walk an' go home - don't really remember, I was out of it, an' I'm still not sure how it didn't kill me, not goin' to the hospital." He sighed. "The boys went back to the store, after, one night when nobody was there, an' burned it down. I didn't die, so the guy that shot me didn't - but he did lose his shop."

"You're ashamed of that," Nathan said thoughtfully, eyeing Angelo. "You blame yourself."

He shrugged. "Some. If I'd been payin' more attention, I wouldn't've got hurt, an' they wouldn't've needed to go get revenge."

"Why does it reoccur in your dreams, then?" Nathan asked. "This, here, rather than getting shot."

Angelo looked momentarily confused. "You know, I'm not sure. Maybe 'cause this is where I was thinkin' about it, when I was fit to think at all..."

"Times like this are harder," Nathan said quietly. "Being in danger, fearing for your life - your choices in situations like that are straightforward, even if they're not easy. It's picking up the pieces after those choices are made that tends to obsess us..."

Angelo nodded. "Yeah. In the store, it happened so fast. Here, though... I thought I was gonna die..." He sighed. "Well, probably time to move on now." He concentrated, and the warehouse shivered and changed, to become a similar place but obviously not the same. The figures that appeared this time formed a disturbing tableau - a bruised and battered Angelo, looking as young as he had in the first scene, and another boy of about the same age, beaten bloody and being held up by two older boys, while others surrounded them, jeering. The younger Angelo was holding a gun to the near-unconscious boy's head, tears of obvious grief and rage running down his face, hands shaking. "This is what I told you about."

"Stop," Nathan said, and was mildly disturbed when the whole scene froze. That wasn't precisely what he had intended. He turned to Angelo, keeping his voice level, his expression blank. "What are you feeling? Right now?"

Angelo looked away from the scene in front of him with difficulty, forcing himself to focus on Nathan. "Right now? Tryin' not to feel what he is."

"It's in the past, Angelo," Nathan said, knowing what a hypocrite he was being. But he reached out, laying a hand on Angelo's shoulder, squeezing gently. "You know this. You're not him."

"Maybe not. But he's me. Him an' all the others."

"Bullshit," Nathan said, softly but savagely. Angelo looked at him, startled. "If they're you, then I'm still one of Mistra's mindwashed faithful dogs. I left that me behind, Angelo. You did the same." He waved around at the dreamworld. "Or mostly. You're still holding onto it, here."

Angelo glanced down. "Yeah. Not a conscious thing - well, duh - but probably. I'm not sure I'd've chosen to leave it behind, you know. 'Cause for all the bad, an' as much as I'm not proud of it now, those guys were my family."

"You have another now," Nathan said, still quietly, but forcefully. "Once that's far better for you, far more genuinely caring, than these - " He gestured at the older boys, unable to come up with an appropriate description.

"Oh, they were never family", Angelo said hastily. "No, they were the enemy. But the guys weren't much of family when I was a mutant. An' I know I do. But it just all ended so suddenly..."

"And?" Nathan asked pointedly. "We don't get neat endings with all the loose ends wrapped up, Angelo. That's called life."

Angelo half-glared. "I know that much. Just sayin'... it would've been easier if I'd got to make the choice, loose ends or not."

"Knock it off," Nathan snapped, irritated. He waved a hand around at the scene. "You want to prove to me that you have let go? Get us out of here. Take us someplace good."

Angelo nodded dubiously, obviously not convinced he could, and closed his eyes, the better to concentrate. The scene wavered around them, almost returned to what it had been, then reformed, as the rec room in the mansion. Angelo as he was in the present was sitting there, a sleeping or nearly-so Paige lying with her head on his knees.

The TV was on in the background, but he wasn't really watching it, concentrating more on Paige, as he ran his fingers absently through her hair, soothing her to sleep if she wasn't already. He was obviously as content as he'd ever been since arriving at the mansion.

"These are the dreams you need to be having," Nathan said quietly.

Angelo nodded, not taking his eyes off Paige. "It'd be good. You said somethin' about lucid dreamin', before. Is that somethin' you could teach me?"

"I could try," Nathan said, and then chuckled. "We do however need to be awake for it."

Angelo grinned, finally looking back at him. "Yeah, I figured. Well, that's workable."

His eyes widened as Nathan, in the middle of opening his mouth to answer, suddenly faded and disappeared, quickly followed by the rest of the room, and he found himself back in his darkened dorm - awake.