xp_logs | Nathan and Haroun, Monday morning

Nathan is doing his weights exercise in the Danger Room when Haroun arrives early for his own session. It rapidly degenerates into a full-out training session and Haroun trying to Make A Point. Nathan is pissy, Haroun is unrepentant, and it all ends in a headache.

There were probably better uses for Danger Room time than this. He could do this in the weight room, after all - but then, the weights were regular sizes and shapes, and Moira was being fairly persistent about him making a concerted effort to vary practice objects. She probably had meant that for later, once he was sure he was back at full strength, but there was nothing wrong with getting an early start, was there?

The weights the Room had generated for him weren't as varied as they could be, but they would do for a beginning. He had all thirty-six of them up in the air at the moment, moving in elliptical orbit around him as he sat cross-legged on the floor. It was several hundred pounds, maybe, nothing significant. His head was aching a little, but just a little.

Haroun walked in, dressed in his full X-Men uniform - plus a new set of tight black leather gloves to go with everything else. "Not bad." he said, looking at all the irregular heavy things floating through the air.

Nathan opened his eyes, a bit perplexed by Haroun's arrival. "Am I running overtime?" he asked dubiously, sure he couldn't have been here an hour already.

"No, you're good for the next seven minutes. I'm a little early. Was going to do some stretching, try to get the rest of the kinks out of my back. Man cannot live on tiger balm and massage alone." Haroun said with a grin. "The uniform is more like habit than anything else."

Nathan made a thoughtful noise, trying to shift the orbits of his weights. As soon as he pulled them out of a pattern, his grip on them faltered, and one actually hit the floor. He grimaced, muttering a curse under his breath, and pushed it back up into the air to join the others.

"Taking my advice. Good." he said, sitting on the ground to begin stretching out as best he could given the pain in his lower back. "How much weight are you up to now?"

"About seven hundred pounds. Baby stuff, still." Nathan's jaw tightened as he forced the weights into random zig-zags, each charting a different course. "If all I was doing was levitating it, at least," he confessed, sweat starting to stand out on his forehead.

Haroun grinned, and then stood up. "Well, keep working at it." he said, then kicked his flight power into gear and headed straight at Nathan.

Staring up at one of the weights, Nathan wasn't looking at Haroun as he moved. But he caught the flash out of the corner of his eye and instinctively threw up a shield, letting the weights drop.

Haroun jacknifed skyward before he collided bodily with Nathan and his barrier. "You dropped the weights!" he said with a laugh as he rocketed skywards, letting his backwash splash against Nathan's shield. "Why?"

Nathan rose to his feet, frowning at the other man, but keeping the shield up. The impact of Haron's backwash felt... strange. "Why not?" he countered. "No reason to keep them up. Every reason to focus on the shield."

"You're supposed to be training!" he said from about thirty feet up. "What if those were living beings you were lifting to safety? Or reactor control rods you were trying to insert? What then?"

"Except that they aren't," Nathan said, his eyes narrowing as he pulled them back up into the air. "I wouldn't have dropped people."

Haroun looked at all the weights on the ground. "Could have fooled me." he said. "I see a whole lot of objects that used to be in the air on the ground. Sloppy, old man. Sloppy."

"I'm not a total neophyte, Haroun," Nathan snapped, pulling the rest of the weights back into the air and into another set of elliptical orbits. "I've been on both the receiving and giving end of 'Let's shake the training exercise up a little'. But they're practice weights. No one was standing under them, and I had no reason either within or beyond the exercise to keep them in the air."

Haroun tisked. "Maybe it's just me, but when I train, I treat it like I'm Out There." he said. "Not just like it's an exercise." He then landed, and sat down promptly to rest his back.

Since Haroun didn't seem like he was prepared to claim the room right away - and damn it, he owed him a few extra minutes after this - Nathan kept juggling the weights, not sure why he was this aggravated. "If I'd been treating it like I was out there, I would have bounced you off the wall. Or worse. Didn't we talk about this?"

"So why didn't you?" Haroun asked curiously. "I'm a big boy, I've got the armor on." He started stretching again, paying extra attention to his poor abused spine.

"I... don't know," Nathan muttered, sending half the weights to orbit around Haroun. The pattern was harder when he wasn't at the center of it.

"Might want to give it some thought. Personally, I treat In Here like it's Out There. Prevents my thinking from getting sloppy. And isn't that what we talked about? Sloppy thinking and old habits?"

"So what would have been the optimum response there?" Nathan gritted. Turnabout was fair play. "You really wanted an introduction to the wall, armor or no armor?" He pulled the weights back and shredded them, breaking them down into metal flecks and creating a fractal pattern above their heads, taking up nearly the whole length and wide of the Danger Room.

"Not especially." Haroun said. "You had the right idea with the shield, but I would have kept the other patterns going - not to let a sudden distraction deter you from what you had going on previous to the distraction. You can split your attention that many ways, right?" he asked with a grin.

"Why don't we see?" Nathan asked tightly, drawing the metal flecks back together into a single solid mass and then hurling it into a corner. "Any ideas?"

"Yeah. Separate our the weights. Do the patterns thing, but mix it up pretty hard - make it difficult on yourself." Haroun said. "Then I'll see if I can shake your concentration."

"Fine." Nathan tugged at the mass of metal with his mind, splitting it back into something approaching its original components. Then, after a moment, he split each of the original weights into unequal halfs. Same weight, just more objects to keep track of. Once he was done that, he started some of them back into an elliptical orbit, others in circles, others zigzagging on random paths. "This what you had in mind?" he asked through gritted teeth. All right. Now he was officially pushing it.

"It will do for starters." Haroun said. "Can you vary the speeds as well as the patterns?"

Nathan's jaw clenched tighter, feeling the tension between his eyes as he did. Not a whole lot of variation in speed - about five different tempos, for lack of a better word, but they were noticeable. "There."

"Not too shabby. Now I get evil." he said, then stood up and kicked on the power. But instead of charging straight for Nathan, he aimed higher, looking to grab Nathan and pick him up off the ground to go for a joyride.

Nathan saw the difference in his trajectory, guessing at what he was planning. He tried to change the placement of his shield to compensate, but it was harder than it should have been, and the weights dipped in the air in reaction.

Haroun grinned and bearhugged Nathan, to get him and the shield that he had most likely thrown up to defend himself. He then rocketed up into the air, laughing like a loon the entire time. "Enjoy gravity!" he yelled, then dropped Nathan at the top of his arc - to see how he'd handle the weights, the personal shield, and cushioning his own fall.

He should have been able to bounce Haroun off the shield with no difficulty at all, but... well, clearly he was out of shape in a serious way, that was blatantly obvious, Nathan thought as he fell. He kept the weights aloft, if barely, although their motion slowed and some of the ones on individual paths stopped entirely, and concentrated hard on the image of... bungee cords, he finally decided at the last minute.

Haroun turned around in midair to watch how Nathan handled his fall - and to catch him if he lost it. "Sloppy!" he cried out as he watched ther weights stagnate and stagger in their rotations. "I thought you said you were good at this!" he taunted.

Nathan gritted his teeth, reforming the patterns and shifting the speeds the weights were moving at. "You talk this much, Out There?" he growled.

Haroun just grinned, and then dove again at Nathan - not right at him, but to see how close he could possibly come without actually colliding with him. Give him a nice stinky warm feeling, he thought with a mental smirk.

Keep the weights up, don't give him an excuse to yammer at you... try making him one of them? Nathan's eyes narrowed as Haroun dove at him, knowing this was probably an idiotic thing to do. But still... he reached out, the image of a giant fist in his mind, and closed it around Haroun.

Haroun felt the telekinesis press against him, and grinned. NOW he was thinking in the right way! Haroun changed trajectory instantly, trying to wiggle out of the telekinetic grip Nathan had on him. He'd also stagger-thrust his power - push hard in one direction, then shift and try to see if he could finesse his way out another. He knew Nathan wouldn't let him drop, so he didn't worry too much about maintaining altitude.

Ow. Half the weights drifted to a stop, but Nathan kicked them back into their rotations, even as he struggled to keep his grip on Haroun. The irregular stop-and-start push of his thrust was more of a strain than he'd expected, and the tension behind his eyes built rapidly. Not quitting, though, Nathan thought savagely and yanked Haroun into an elliptical orbit of his own.

Haroun laughed out loud as Nathan decided to take the kid gloves off and yank him out of his flight plan. Instead of fighting the telekinetic shove - he worked _with_ it, adding its own momentum to his own as he blasted _hard_ to get out of the grip. He couldn't keep that high of a burn up for long, but a few seconds should do the trick. Besides, his back was starting to tell him to Knock It The Fuck Off, in no uncertain terms.

Too much. The weights hit the ground and so did he, right down to his knees, only an act of will keeping him from going farther. The tension behind his eyes ballooned into pain, and Nathan bit back a cry. The sound of Haroun's blasting was distant all at once, as if he were miles away.

Haroun watched Nathan drop to his knees, and instantly dropped the flight power, rushing over to Nathan's side. "Shit." he said, expertly checking Nathan for signs of exterior trauma. "I'd better get you to Medical."

"No.... no, I'm okay," Nathan said hoarsely, trying to take stock. "No nosebleed... there'd be one right away if I'd really pushed too hard." He took a deep, unsteady breath, looking up at Haroun through watering eyes. "Pain's already easing back a bit, too..."

"I think we're done here. Want some help getting back to your room?" Haroun asked, honest worry writ large all over his features.

Nathan laughed weakly. "That I'd take, yeah," he said. He wouldn't be able to say for sure that he was okay until it was fifteen minutes from now and he still wasn't falling over bleeding from the head. "Fuck, I'm out of shape for only having been TK-less for a week..."

"We'll work on it. We've got this whole thing on tape, we'll have Moira take a look at it." Haroun reassured. "Now come on, let's get you some downtime."