Amanda and Nathan, Friday afternoon

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Backdated to Friday. Nathan finally goes to see Amanda while she's awake and they deal at last with what happened at Columbia, although they don't do much actual talking.



Nathan hesitated outside Amanda's door, but raised his hand and knocked lightly. #Amanda?# he called out tentatively, half-wishing to find that she was asleep. As much as he did want to see her, part of him just... no. His jaw clenched as he wrestled himself back under control.

It was just as well Nathan pinged her telepathically, since Amanda had herself plugged into her headphones with the Ramones cranked up beyond ear-shattering. People had been telling her they were there if she needed to talk, but she didn't want to talk, she wanted to forget what she'd seen, sleep without seeing those people burning before her eyes. But at Nathan's telepathic 'knock', she looked up almost expectantly, with a feeling of odd relief. Slipping off her headphones, she called out in the new, slightly-husky voice: "Come in."

Nathan opened the door and saw her sitting at the desk, half-swiveled around in the chair so that she could watch him come in. "Hi," he said with a very faint smile, sticking his good hand in his pocket so she wouldn't see how it, at least, was trembling. She looked better, he told himself almost fiercely. That was the important thing. "Told you I'd be down when you were awake."

"Good timin' - if yer'd come any later, I'd be havin' the one-thirty nap," she replied with her own small, wry smile. "You look like shite. Again."

"You should have seen me a couple of days ago," Nathan said dryly, still lingering just inside the door, feeling uneasy. "Or hell, a couple of days before that. Apparently I was doing a very good impression of the walking dead." The joke fell a little flat and he gave a one-shouldered shrug. "I haven't had much to do besides sit around this week, though. It's helped."

"Don't say that too loud, the aliens'll land," Amanda said, fingers playing nervously with the headphones lying on the desk in front of her, threatening to topple the uneven stack of CDs and books to the side of her computer. The usual spread of open spell books had been turned into a neat stack shoved into a corner, obviously untouched. "You doin' all right?"

Nathan opened his mouth to answer, then paused, swallowing. "No," he finally said, very quietly, before he could lose his nerve. She deserved the truth. "I'm not. You?"

Amanda dropped her eyes. "Not really," she said in a small voice. "'M sorry."

Nathan stared at her in something close to outright horror for a long, stunned moment. Then he strode across the room, kneeling down in front of her chair. "Don't," he pleaded. "You have nothing to be sorry about. Nothing." His voice rose a little as he went on; he couldn't help himself. "You shouldn't have been there. Shouldn't have been put in that position in the first place, and I--" He cut himself off desperately, feeling his control slipping. "I'm sorry, Amanda," he said more softly, unsteadily. "I'm so sorry you had to go through any of that."

"But I was there, an' you wouldn't have been there but for me, an' I tried so hard t'do somethin' t'stop it..." Amanda clamped down hard, both on her emotions and on Nathan's hands, ignoring the sharp stabs of pain as scabs cracked and opened. "I keep dreamin' 'bout them," she said a little more steadily. "All those people. They were dyin', Nate, an' I couldn't do fuck-all."

Nathan knew he should be trying to detach her, to check on what she was doing to her hands, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. She was holding on as if for dear life, and the look in her eyes was heartbreaking. "You can't blame yourself," he said, his voice catching again. "You can't, Amanda."

"I ain't, I just..." Her voice cracked painfully and she swallowed, grimacing. "Things keep happenin', and there's nothin' I can do t'stop it. An' people around me keep gettin' hurt, you keep gettin' hurt."

Nathan ducked his head, suddenly completely unable to bring himself ot meet her eyes. The pain in her voice... "If it hadn't been there," he said hoarsely, forcing himself to focus on something besides the fact that he was hurting her again, "it would have been somewhere else. They were coming for me, Amanda, one way or the other."

"I know, an' it scares the fuck out of me." Her grip tightened on his hands again, regardless of the warm stickiness of blood from the opened grazes. "I don't wanna lose you, Nate. I don't wanna see you hurt, an' I don't wanna have t'watch you give yerself up t'them 'cause they're fuckin' cowards who fight dirty."

He did detach her this time, very gently, reaching out with his telekinesis to the bathroom and locating a washcloth hanging on the towel rack, identifying it by size and shape and running it under the faucet for a moment before floating it out into the bedroom. "I don't want you to worry about that," he said very softly, starting to clean the blood off her hands. "Pete and Dom and I are going to talk this weekend. We'll figure out what to do." He tried to smile, to convey some sense that he was confident that they'd find a solution.

Dumbly, Amanda nodded, watching him clean her hands with a touch far gentler than someone could imagine him being capable of. "Yer'd think I'd be better at this," she said at last, not wincing even as the cloth stung. Pain was good - it was real, something she could hold onto when it seemed everything else she was crumbled and failed. "I get enough practice."

Nathan froze in mid-motion, Amanda's thoughts clear and anguished as they echoed in his mind. He leaned back a little, almost instinctively, and his balance abruptly deserted him. He sat down hard on the floor, the impact enough to be jarring. "Practice at what?" he asked, his voice still low but almost wild.

"Dealin' with shit. Gettin' hurt, bein' in the middle of every fuckin' drama. Clarice said somethin' in me journal 'bout not doin' anythin' else stupid, an' I thought she meant bein' there, gettin' hurt." Caught up in what she was saying, what she was feeling, Amanda didn't immediately react to Nathan pulled back. Then it registered, and she slipped from the chair to kneel next to him, the blood-spotted washcloth falling unheeded to the floor. "Fuck, Nate, don't hurt yerself. Please, don't." Don't pull away, her thoughts practically screamed at him. Don't leave me.

Ignoring the twinge of pain in his shoulder and the stinging in his eyes, Nathan enfolded her in a tight embrace, hating himself even as part of him knew that she needed this. He should be getting up, backing away, putting distance between them. He should. All he could do was get her hurt, he'd proved that. He ought to be more worried about what was best for her.

But he couldn't make himself let go. "I thought--" His voice broke, but he tried again, forcing the words out. "If anything had happened to you--" His imagination supplied him with the horrific image of Amanda burned and broken like so many of the bodies he'd seen in and around the parking lot that day, and he choked back what would have been a sob. "I lost them, Amanda, I lost both of them like that, and if they'd taken you, too..."

Maybe it was traces of Manuel's power, maybe Nate's shields had well and truly slipped, but Amanda caught a flash of what he was thinking, saw her own face on one of the victims, and she shuddered violently, clutching at the front of Nate's shirt. It was every dream, every nightmare she'd had since it happened. The tears came then, forcing themselves out despite her best efforts. "It's always me... somethin' t'do with me, an' I can't... 's just too much, Nate, 's too fuckin' much..."

"Shh," Nathan whispered raggedly, holding her close. "It's not you, it's just--" Poor choice of people she cared about? Bad luck? Neither was the truth, and he couldn't have said them to her even if they had been. He stared blindly ahead at her desk, and the words came out on their own, words he never should have said aloud to her, not after Saturday. But they felt so right. "It doesn't matter," he said, strength entering his voice from somewhere. "Even if it was true, which it is, it wouldn't matter. I am not leaving you or Moira. Not ever. I love you both too much, and if they try to hurt either of you ever again..." His arms tightened around her protectively, and he swallowed past a lump in his throat. "Not ever. It'll be okay. I'll make it okay."

There was only one word that really registered, one word that mattered, and it stabbed the part of her that had experienced far too much abuse and neglect, even as it warmed the rest of her. There wasn't anything she could say, or do, but cry then, so that's what she did, her face buried in his shirt front and her battered hands leaving small bloody marks on the sleeves.