Nathan and Illyana, Thursday afternoon

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Nathan and Illyana have a chat in the library on Thursday. The incident at Columbia comes up, and they discuss certain aspects of it.


Sitting at one of the library's larger tables, Nathan stared out at the grounds, the books in front of him forgotten. The sunlight, the green of the grass and trees, the sparkle of the lake... it was a perfectly picturesque view, and he felt strangely lost in it, as if his mind had taken this excuse to wander and quite enjoyed it.

Illyana hadn't been to see Nathan since the incident on Saturday, and she was hesitant to interrupt him now -- she'd been dropping off her Brief History of Contemporary Russia in favour of something a little less dry, and noticed him going through the English drama section on her way to international affairs. "Nice view," she said, after some indecision, her voice quiet and even. If he didn't want to be disturbed, no harm done, she supposed.

Nathan looked around at her, mustering a smile. "Nice, undemanding view," he said a bit wryly. "I think my mind is trying to tell me something when it wanders away like that. Unfortunately, it's not here while it's doing it, so..." He trailed off, shaking his head as his smile turned a bit quizzical. "Sorry. Rambling. How are you?"

"Oh, fine," she said lightly, because it was true, in the way that it was true when she didn't think about it. She took in his injuries coolly, one look that was neither subtle nor surprised, before going back to his face. "But then I haven't been earning our doctors their salaries this week, either. How's it going for you?"

"Lousy," he said candidly. There was something about her that always seemed to make him give up on the whole 'beating around the bush' technique. "I apparently can't have four functional limbs at once for more than a few weeks at a time." He lifted his tightly-wrapped wrist.

"I thought as much," she said, sounding more sympathetic than anything. If there was one thing she knew, it was battle injuries. "Getting the hell beaten out of you will do that. Is it just sprained or actually broken? Not that one's much better than the other, really."

"Broken. One of the people after me on Saturday had enhanced strength and a desire to make a point." Nathan's eyes went distant for a moment, and he smiled again, more bitterly. "Funny, given that he was telling me I was sick and needed help at the time."

She leaned against a bookcase, raised an eyebrow. "That's an interesting point of view, although from your current state I can say with some confidence that you probably did need a hand out of the way of the crazy person." She paused for a moment, then smiled slightly. "People with power are generally not the best ones to judge what's good for others."

"That's an interesting point of view as well," Nathan said, almost managing the bantering tone. "They do seem to be the ones making the decisions most of the time, though, don't you?" He blinked down at the books strewn in front of him, reaching out with his good hand to start shifting them into some semblance of order. "As for the crazy person... it's as good a description as any, I suppose. None of them are precisely sane. They didn't wire us that way."

"Well," she said dryly, "you're talking to the girl who nearly got herself sacrificed by a demon lord, so I'm probably not the best person to talk to about the balance of power and responsibility." She looked confused for a moment, then said, "I'm sorry -- did you say wire you? Or them? There was a plural involved, I'm just not really sure I understand."

Nathan managed not to blink, but filed away the demon lord comment for future reference. "I wasn't particularly clear," he said, and paused for a moment, debating what to say. "I think I told you once that I'd been a soldier since I was fourteen years old. I don't think that I mentioned I hadn't entered the life voluntarily."

She shook her head. "No, you do seem to have left that bit out," she said mildly, not wanting to push (all the gods knew she hated that), but curious nonetheless.

"It was a government program that took unwanted mutant children with valuable abilities and trained them as soldiers," Nathan said, glad that his voice stayed level. He had found himself in the position of explaining this to a number of people this week, though. Practice makes perfect. "Part of our training involved having our minds rewritten. Psionic conditioning."

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak until she could be sure that nothing interesting was going to stray from her lips. Didn't that sound familiar, too damn familiar if she was being honest with herself. "Which made you better at certain things they wanted you to do," she ventured quietly at last, unable to sound like she didn't know what she was talking about, "not to mention prisoners to what they wanted you to do?"

Oh, very interesting reaction. Nathan kept his expression and voice absolutely level, even as he felt a spark of... curiosity, or compassion, directed straight at the girl. For a moment, the events of Saturday receded a little into the distance as he focused on Illyana. "Made us more effective killers," he said seriously. "More loyal. Less concerned with morality. Also, very, very obedient. Have you ever heard of the Spartans?"

She had to think about that. Her classical education -- such as it had been -- hadn't been very thorough in some areas. "In passing," she said. "Greeks or Turks or something, weren't they?"

"It was a Greek city-state in the classical period," he said with a nod. "Their social life was focused around military service. Every boy was trained to become a soldier, and served until the age of sixty. The training, the discipline, was absolutely rigorous. The Spartans are among the finest soldiers in history. It's said that Spartan mothers used to tell their sons, as they were heading off to war, to 'come back with your shield or on it.'" He smiled, very faintly. "The program I was in programmed us to be latter-day Spartans. Even used the symbology, the culture."

"Ah," she murmured. "So -- they were crazy violent people who kidnapped young mutants and trained them to act like dead Greeks? In a nutshell?"

Nathan wondered why the hell he was smiling. "In a nutshell, yeah. You do have a way with words, Illyana."

She smiled. "I do try," she said. She looked down at his bandaged wrist. "And those same crazy violent people were after you on Saturday, I assume? Because you're not -- wired, was it? -- anymore?"

"No," Nathan said more quietly, "the crazy violent people sent some of their kidnapped, brainwashed young mutants after me. I'd feel somewhat less lousy if I'd been fighting them, instead of other people who had the misfortune to wind up in the same situation as I did." He paused, then went on, a bit more reluctantly. "And I'm not totally... unwired. Just managed to break the obedience compulsions, several years ago..."

She nodded slowly, understanding. "Never could abide by those who can't do their own dirty work," she said, slightly unsteadily. Bloody hell, this place just wouldn't let her forget. "Harder than hell fighting people who don't know what they're doing and can't stop," she added, quiet but much more intense than she intended to be.

Nathan gazed steadily at her, beginning to understand something himself. Even if the details were still a mystery, there were certain truths emerging, at least to those who knew how to look. "The man leading the team was a student of mine," he said quietly. "A friend. He led the last group of people who came to take me back, too. I killed all of them but him. When I was standing over him, I... couldn't do it. I wondered, when I saw him again on Saturday, if I'd made the right decision." He smiled very tightly. "There's no room for gratitude in his mind, so he didn't hesitate. Well, except when I turned one of his teammates into class. Then he made with the strategic retreat real quick."

"Sensible of him," Illyana said, keeping her voice quiet until she was sure she could control it again. Something about Nathan made her much more honest than she really liked being, and it was disconcerting at best. "Sounds like it's difficult to deal with now, though, to be honest. If you don't mind my saying so, sir." She kept her tone simple, even non-judgemental, but there was something in Nathan's story that resonated in her -- so much similarity where she hadn't expected any, moral ambiguity and all -- that she was kept from making light of it or blowing it off as unimportant.

"I'm a fucking mess, yes," he admitted freely. "Which is why I'm not teaching this week, even though my voice is mostly back." He regarded her for a long moment, choosing his next words carefully. "I'm having... a great deal of difficulty, knowing how many innocent people died on Saturday. The number haunts me. But there's part of me that adds five more to the forty-six. I know very few people would mourn the ones responsible for all that carnage, but... I do."

Illyana considered this for a moment. "From what you tell me, they were innocent people who were forced into doing some very bloody horrible things." She wasn't sure how they'd got so far in this conversation, since normally, under any other circumstance, she'd have avoided it like the bubonic plague. "I would, too. Mourn them. It's not wrong to regret that people who didn't have any chance at all died." She stopped, shrugged uncomfortably. "I don't think so, anyway, but then the general consensus is that the emotional part of my brain was lobotomized somewhere between age seven and now, so take it for what it's worth."

Nathan tried to flex the hand attached to the broken wrist, grimacing at the pain. "The general consensus," he said with a sigh, thinking about those emails he'd exchanged with Piotr, then putting them out of his mind. Wasted time, wasted effort. "Hate that very concept. Like poison. I think because of my pseudo-Spartan background... once you break free of the idea of the common good of the group being the highest priority, you start to get really fond of the idea of independent thought."

"Understandable," she said, with a slight smile. "I just spent rather a lot of time talking to myself over the years, and when your only company is a bunch of demons -- well, the general consensus tends to be along the lines of 'eat her', so I stopped paying much attention. Besides, tact is overrated."

"Mmm," Nathan said, mentally filing away that piece of information, too. It was good this conversation was happening now and not a couple of days earlier, because he doubted he'd have been able to mask his own reactions this effectively. And the conversation was becoming far too informative to risk scaring her off by looking too interested. "I've been avoiding the general consensus like the plague this week. I really don't want to know what the student body at large thinks about having one of their language teachers splashed all over the news turning people into glass."

"The student body at large does not, in my experience, think," she said, rolling her eyes. "But they have mostly been amazingly calm about the whole thing -- I was a bit impressed, really."

"Learning from past experiences, I suppose," Nathan said, shrugging with his good shoulder. "Probably helped that there wasn't much they could have done. It was all over very quickly."

"On this end, yes," she said. "I imagine it didn't seem quite so fast for everyone else."

Nathan thought about that for a moment. "Subjective versus objective time," he mused. "There's a tricky, if valuable concept. From my perspective, it took me about an hour to get from one side of that parking lot to the other. I'm guessing that it was more like a minute."

"Time is a strange little human invention," Illyana said quietly, with a slight smile. "Not something that takes experience into account, I think."

The Askani were giggling at him. It was actually very disturbing, Nathan reflected absently. "I think we need different measurements of time, really," he suggested. "Different scales of time, running at the same time but at different rates, to account for the dissonance."

"Now that's an interesting idea," she said, tilting her head and considering it. "Taking relativity into account, not just all the usual movement-of-the-universe physics stuff. Makes sense for a human concept to apply to humans specifically, really."

"You ought to read some philosophy," Nathan suggested. "There's a Persian philosopher, Avicenna, who argued in the... eleventh century, I think, that there was no such thing as physical time. He claimed that time exists only in the mind, based on memory and expectation."

"Interesting," she said thoughtfully, putting it on her list of things to think about later. She paused, then flashed him a rare full smile. "Sounds like good summer reading. Don't tell anyone I said so, though. It ruins my dumb blonde act."

"Your secret's safe with me," Nathan said dryly, then shook his head at his own pile of books. "I've been trying to do some reading of my own - I've got a new class in mind for the fall. I'm constantly disheartened by the general lack of knowledge about Eastern Europe and Western Asia among most Westerners. And the knowledge-level of the students here is particularly low."

"Well, America's the center of the world, remember," she said, voice dry. "Not that I'm the leading expert on the world at any rate, but having been under the impression that the Aztecs were still thriving happily for most of my life, I don't think I'm doing too badly."