Log: Nathan and Jane - stories and fears of the past on a Tuesday night in June

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After seeing some disturbing video footage of Jane killing dupes, Nathan goes to see how she is doing. He tells her a story that resonates, she breaks down, fears come to light, and they become friends.

Nathan knocked gently at the half-open door. "Hello?" he called softly, sensing that Jane was alone in the room. Good, he told himself; this wasn't a conversation they needed to be having with any kind of an audience. "Can I come in?"

"Come in!" Jane called. She was sitting on her bed, doodling in her notebook. She'd been trying to fill in some of the blanks on her relationship map, but she was having trouble concentrating. She looked up to see Nathan come in and grinned. "Are we going to start our language lessons now? Remember, you did promise to teach me every language you know!" She giggled a bit and then frowned sternly at him. "But you also promised me to never get hurt again so Amanda won't get upset, and then you go and get drugged!"

Nathan remembered, a bit ruefully, how Jane had snuck down to the medlab a few days after the return from Muir and made him promise not to stress out her roommate anymore. He'd been thoroughly loopy from the drugs at the time and hadn't been able to imagine anything else happening to him in the immediate future. Probably jinxed myself... "Maybe not today, but soon," he said, hobbling over to a chair and sitting down with a sigh. "And I'm sorry about breaking my other promise, Jane. Trouble seems to follow me around these days."

She shook her head at him. "You and Amanda are the trouble twins. As long as you don't go seeking trouble out. So what's up?"

Nathan tilted his head, regarding her for a long, contemplative moment. His first impression of this girl on the journals had been something along the lines of 'sweet, cute, and far too innocent'. Meeting her in person in the medlab, even in the state he'd been in, hadn't done much to disabuse him of the idea, although he had added 'bright' to the list. She had extracted those two promises from him with a combination of charm and determination.

But Charles and Lee had shown him the tapes of her dealing with some of Jamie's dupes last week, and he couldn't help but be concerned. She had dealt with the 'Skippies' with startling efficiency, and the fact that she had been lurking around since, doing her best to hide, was even more worrisome. Something was going on in that head, Nathan thought. Charles had said something about him being the best person to talk to her - Nathan wasn't sure why, but he was willing to try.

"I was worried about you," he said, quite honestly.

Jane tilted her head at him uncertainly. She didn't know Nathan all tha well, but Amanda held him in high regard. What had she done to make him worried about her, though, besides avoiding everyone and not posting on the journals and moping... okay, maybe that was it. But it seemed odd to her that it would be Nathan and not someone closer to her that would come and ask her what was wrong.

"I'm okay, really," she said.

It was on the tip of Nathan's tongue to tell her that he told people that all the time and they never believed him, but he didn't. "Jane, can I tell you a story?" he asked, leaning forward in his chair and smiling at her very kindly.

"Sure! I like stories." She closed and put aside her notebook and looked at him, bouncing a bit on her bed. It was nice to be told a story, she thought.

"It's a true story, too," Nathan said, his smile turning a little wry as he started to realize why Charles might have thought he was a good person to do this. "See, there was this boy who ran away from home, only to wind up someplace worse. Instead of just having parents that treated him badly, now he was in the care of people who wanted to teach him to use his mutant abilities to... fight, basically. To be a soldier."

That didn't sound good. Jane nodded for him to continue.

"They did things to him, and to other kids," Nathan said, keeping his voice very calm, almost conversational. "Things that changed the way they thought, how they reacted to situations where there was danger, or violence. It made them able to kill more easily. They didn't... really like that, but part of the changes also meant that they obeyed orders without question."

Jane looked away from him. There was an uneasy feeling growing inside of her. It was the dark place that Angelo had touched on when he said that mutants weren't human. She thought about how easy it had been for her to kill those dupes. She had reacted to their attack without thinking, instantly transforming and suffocating them. Jane wasn't sure that she liked Nathan's story.

Nathan noted the reaction, but went on, if a little more gently. "For a long time, the boy thought there was no way to change things. In a way, he didn't really want to, because of everything he'd been taught and what had been put into his head. So he lived the way he was told, fighting when he was told, killing when he was told, and tried to find a little happiness in between."

"What happened to him?" Her voice was small and she was sitting somewhat hunched over, as if protecting herself.

"His friends were killed, on a mission," Nathan said softly. Telling this in the third-person helped a little. Made it a little easier. "It... broke some of the things that had been put into his head, his... training. For the first time in years and years, he could make his own decisions again."

"Th-that's good." There was something about Nathan's story that resonated in that dark place inside of her. Jane was scared. She didn't want to know what was in that dark place.

"He took his wife and his son and tried to run away," Nathan murmured, not sure whether he should be telling her this part of the story. But then, if he expected her to be as honest as possible with him... "He was the only one who made it, and he had to keep running, for years." He forced a smile. "He stopped, finally. See, there was this woman who taught him how to feel again, and... well."

"So he's happy now? And doesn't have to think about the badness of his past anymore?" she asked him, hoping it was so.

"He's trying," Nathan said. "But not thinking about his past doesn't make it go away. Even in his happiest moments, it still influences how he thinks, how he reacts. Sometimes, at night..." He stopped for a long moment, swallowing. "He wakes up and forget how much things have changed for him. Part of him is still back there with the people who trained him, you see." A faint, sad smile tugged at his lips at the way Jane was looking at him. "You know this isn't just a story I'm telling you about someone else, right?"

"It's you. And I'm glad that you're trying to be happy, trying to put your past behind you." She smiled sadly at him. Her past was completely behind her, and she'd wanted to know what was in it for as long as she could remember, but now she wasn't so sure. Her past seemed to be tied to the dark place deep inside her. Jane got off the bed and went to hug Nathan. "This is a good place," she said, and then pulled away. "I'm glad you can be happy here."

"I want you to be happy here too, Jane," Nathan said, looking up at her, his expression very serious. "But something's getting in the way this week, isn't it?"

"Yeah, everyone is upset over what happened, and some people are upset over things other people said. This is a good place, but sometimes bad things happen. And everyone here is trying to help, so that makes it all better." Jane went to sit back down on her bed. She plucked at some loose stitching on her blanket, thinking. Nathan was probably here because he was helping out with talking to everyone about what had happened. That made sense. "I was scared, that day, you know," she admitted.

"Jane..." He paused, then decided to be direct. "I know what happened," he said very gently. "The Professor and Mr. Lee showed me the security tapes."

Jane paled. "Sec-security tapes?"

Nathan nodded. "It shows what you had to do, when Jamie's dupes cornered you," he said just as softly.

Jane closed her eyes. "I didn't know," she whispered. "I didn't know I could do that. It was just... just. I did it and it was like I already knew how, and it was so fast. I didn't think until it was over. It was... reflex." She bowed her head, breating fast, wishing that it had never happened.

"I didn't tell you my story just to get a hug, you know," Nathan said with a faint smile. "I wanted you to know that I understood what it was like to find yourself in a situation like that. To react on reflex." Nathan leaned forward in his chair again, watching her sympathetically. "No one's angry or upset, Jane," he told her. "We're just worried. When you can do something like that, especially when you don't remember your past, it suggests that someone may have done something to you. Something like what was done to me, maybe."

"I've been so scared. Scared of myself. I can't remember anything, but sometimes someone will say something or I'll... I'll DO something... I want to remember. But I don't. I don't know!" Jane slammed her hand down on her bed in frustration. "I don't know who I am, and now I'm not sure that I want to know! What if... what if I was a bad person before?" Her voice, which had been rising, dropped to a thready whisper again. "If I can do that. If I can do that so easily, without thinking. If my body remembers how to kill. I probably have. Before. Killed." With that last word, the tears that had been threatening finally broke out. Jane pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes, but they just kept coming.

Nathan levitated himself up out of the chair, floating over to the bed and sitting down beside her. "Shh," he murmured, enfolding her very carefully in a hug. "The past is the past, whether you can remember it or not. What's important is that you're here, with people who want to help you make whatever kind of future you want." She shivered, crying silently, and he said nothing more for a moment. "I won't lie to you," he went on finally, reluctantly. "From what I saw on the tapes, there are probably... experiences in your past of the sort you're worried about. But that doesn't have to change anything for you, Jane. It doesn't have to get in the way of you making a fresh start."

"It's just... I've wanted to know so much. So that I could be like other people. And now. Even if I knew, it would probably be horrible. But. But I still want to know, you know?" She hiccupped. "I need a tissue."

He floated the kleenex box over to her lap, still keeping an arm around her. It seemed to comfort her, from what he could sense. "If I were in your position, I'd want to know, too," Nathan told her. "You remember how I disappeared for that weekend, back at the beginning of the month? It just about drove me mad, not to know what happened while I was gone. I know it wasn't good, but I still wish I knew. And that was just a weekend, Jane, not a whole life." He smiled humorlessly. "People who say it's better not to know don't know what they're talking about."

Jane plucked out a tissue and blew her nose. She smiled up at him wanly. "No, they don't, do they? I guess you understand, a bit anyway. I just feel so... alone sometimes. Like, people have bad things in their pasts, but at least they HAVE a past, you know? At least they know. I don't. And it may be better not to know, but." She sighed. "I have to believe that it'll all work out. I think that happiness is possible. I mean, I have been so happy here! At the institution, I was just... drifting. I was never scared, but I was also never happy. I was never much of anything there. Here, there is so much! You're right. The past is the past and I can move on, make a fresh start." She still wanted to know, though. Even if it was bad.

Nathan smiled down at her, much more warmly. "You're very brave, you know," he said, without a trace of condescension as he handed her a fresh tissue. "Whatever's in your past, Jane, if you come at it with that kind of attitude you will get through it. And we're all going to be here to give you all the help you need."

Jane dried her tears with a tissue. She wasn't brave, not really. She was scared of so many things! Brave was a word for soldiers and police officers and firefighters. "I'm glad I'm here. Everyone here is so great!" Jane readjusted herself so she could hug Nathan back. "Like you. It must have hurt you to tell me your story, but you did it to show me you understand, right? It helps. Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said very quietly, the smile still playing on his lips. "I'm just glad it helped. And you know, when I first got here, I could hardly stand anyone touching me?" He chuckled. "You tend to make a lot of progress in this place, Jane. We'll get this all sorted out. You'll see."

It was sad to think that someone as strong as Nathan was had been hurt so much. Jane was beginning to think that everyone here was hurt in some way. She had expected it at the institution, after all, everyone there was wrong in the head in some way. But here, with all these beautiful, shining, powerful people, it just seemed weird to think that they were all broken in some way, too. The more she discovered about everyone, though, the more she found it was so. Maybe... maybe she really wasn't all that different from everyone else after all? It certainly seemed that no matter how "fine" people seemed on the outside, on the inside, they could be hurting. Jane decided that she wanted to know about people, why and how they hurt, so that she could help them.

"Nathan?" Jane snuggled against him, taking comfort in his presence and hoping he was doing the same with her. "I want to... well, everyone here has helped me out so much, you know? I want to, um, help you and everyone else." She petted his leg gently. "I mean, like you. You help people. I want to, too. Do you know how I can?"

Nathan gave her question some serious thought. Brushing her off by telling her she did help, just by bringing a little joy to the house, wasn't really fair, however true it might be. "It depends on how you want to help," he said thoughtfully. "Do you mean the people here, or people in general?"

"I. Um, I don't know," she said uncertainly. "I guess both."

"You help people here already," he told her. "Just by caring about them, and listening to them when they need to talk. If you want to do more outside the house, though..." He stopped, thinking, aware that Jane's particular circumstances did circumscribe what she could do. "There are classes you could take here," he said. "Psychology and so forth, things that would let you understand how people do get hurt and what can be done. Then there's volunteer work, helping out people who need it... you might want to talk to Dr. Samson about that. He might have some suggestions, or at least be able to tell you if that's a good idea for you."

"Yeah, I should tell the Doc all about everything that I've been thinking about lately, at least, that is what he's always telling me I should do." She grinned. Jane was very fond of Doc Samson and eternally greatful to him for getting her out of the mental institution. "As for psychology stuff, well, I know lots about it already from living where I did. But I guess taking a class couldn't hurt." Jane thought for a moment and then smiled. "So I should just care about people and listen to them? That's not hard. Okay! So, I am listening. I will help you, like you helped me." She focused on Nathan and waited for him to speak.

Nathan blinked at her. She was quite the little force of nature at times, he decided, bemused. "I'm, um, not sure what to say," he confessed.

"Oh. Well, um, you don't have to say anything. I know! If you're not in the mood to talk, we should go do something fun!" Jane had read Nathan's post about Memorial Day, so she knew that he must still be feeling down about everything and she figured that some fun might help a bit. "Have you ever played on the Playstation? Angelo showed me this cool game called Bomberman. You get to be these cute little guys who lay bombs and blow up blocks, and you try to blow up each other, and if you get blown up you go to this little cart and you can keep throwing bombs at everyone else. There are other games, too, I think, if that doesn't appeal."

"I like blowing stuff up," Nathan said, grinning suddenly. "Why don't you show me this game..."