Nathan and Haroun, Sunday late morning

[x-cable.livejournal.com]

Haroun comes across Nathan in the kitchen and apologizes for the incident with Dom and associated misconceptions from last night. Nathan is still a little shaken up by what happened with Angie and tells Haroun what's going on with his precognition. (Previous to the sending of this email.)



This was sad. Very, very sad. He couldn't even cut bread straight.

Nathan raised the knife, giving it a baleful look that he then directed at the loaf of bread. "Behave," he muttered fitfully, then tried to cut another slice. There was no one in the kitchen to hear him curse when it came out uneven, too.

Haroun had every intention of just ducking into the kitchen to grab a few things, then spend the rest of his day with Alison as he'd promised her. However, seeing Nathan there kiboshed the entire plan. "Bread thwarting you?" he asked the big man gently. "Want a hand with it?"

Nathan hesitated, then laid the knife down. "No, I'm okay..." His voice came out hoarse. He waved a hand limply at the two ragged slices. "See? Sandwich material. It doesn't have to look pretty."

"You sound like shit." he said helpfully. "And I need to sit down and talk with you. You got a few minutes?" he asked, sitting on his own stool and facing Nathan. "It's about yesterday." he added.

"I don't have anything but time," Nathan said dully. "I can't do anything for Amanda, and when I tried to check on Angie again last night, just being in the same room with her fired up my precog again." He looked up, focusing on Haroun. "Dom was out of line," he said quietly. "She won't do that again."

"Dom wasn't the only one out of line." said Haroun quietly. "I too was out of line, and I owe you and Moira both an apology. I really do have the fullest faith in you and the Doc. But Domino and I have some history, and when she answered the door all dishevelled, I jumped to a conclusion. The wrong one. I'm sorry." he said, spreading his hands in an apologetic gesture.

"History..." Nathan murmured, then decided he really didn't want to know. "Apology accepted. She told she didn't precisely do anything to disabuse you of the idea until you were in mid-beating the crap out of each other."

"Also true." he said. "I'll tell you the story sometime - it involved that big bidding process in Athens a few years back for the nuclear plant gig in the Sudan and a good friend of mine. It didn't end well." he said.

Nathan sighed, letting his head rest in his hand for a minute. "I don't really want to know," he muttered. "Unless, of course, you feel you really have to tell me..."

"Hey, if you don't want to know then you don't want to know. She was representing the Pack at the time, though." he said, hopping off his stool to browse through the fridge. "I'm sorry we interrupted your nap." he said. "You look like you could use another one."

"Representing the Pack... so what, that makes it my responsibility, whatever she did?" Nathan demanded a bit groggily. Haroun looked back at him, and Nathan grimaced. "Never mind," he said hoarsely, sliding down off the stool. "You're right... whatever she did, I did, the threads would have been too close together to really tell the difference..."

He was sitting on the kitchen floor. Why was he sitting on the kitchen floor, and when had that happened?

Haroun shot up to his feet and rushed to Nathan's side, to pick the big man up. "Ugh. Do I need to get you down to Medical? Most people can sit on barstools without missing, and you haven't had anything to drink. Come on, on your feet!"

"They can't do anything for her," Nathan said a bit dizzily as Haroun pulled him to his feet. "What makes you think they could do anything for me? None of them know anything, it's all shooting in the dark when it comes to precognition..."

Now he was sounding like Angie. Holding onto the edge of the counter, Nathan took a deep breath, wrestling himself back under control. At least the lights weren't back this morning. A few more deep breaths and he was feeling almost steady again.

Haroun wisely kept his thoughts on precognition unvoiced, but he was in physical contact with a telepath. His thoughts about seeing God's Divine Plan were unspoken but very, very ardent and passionate. "Come on, sit back down, that's it." he said, coaxing Nathan back onto the stool. "Precog acting up?" he asked, removing his hands from Nathan's person.

The room had stopped spinning. How nice. Nathan closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, focusing on answering Haroun's question as levelly as he could. "I tried to calm Marie-Ange down telepathically yesterday, when she flipped out and decided to start using me as a punching bag," he explained. "We got our wires crossed or something... suddenly I'm getting the same visual effects I was back when my precog was fully operational. Not to mention the damned patterns spinning in my head..." He took another deep breath. "It's not acting up," he murmured. "It's coming back."

Haroun's eyes went a little wide, but he didn't say anything right away. "Is that a good thing?" he said after a few moments of contemplation. "I thought you burned it out bringing your guests to our time."

"Psionic burnout can heal," Nathan said heavily, looking up at him finally. "And my precognition interacted big-time with my telepathy, so I don't know... I don't know if it's a good thing, either. I don't know what it's going to be... the Askani are here, after all. When I get these flashes, I'm not seeing them in the future anymore."

"So perhaps you're seeing our own timeline instead of theirs?" he inquired, not liking this conversation one _bit_. "Whatever it is, Allah reveals his plans grudgingly, and never clearly. So I am not surprised that both you and Marie-Ange are having problems with your powers."

"I don't know what I see. I just wish it would stop." He reached out with unsteady hands and started to return the bread to its bag. "Forget it," he said dispiritedly. "Maybe I'll luck out and this'll be temporary, because I was trying to help Angie. Trying being the operative word." He bit his lip. Haroun didn't need to hear any of this. "Are you going to insist on apologizing to Moira?" he asked, trying desperately to change the subject back to something relatively innocuous. "Because she's liable to give you a weird look..."

"Do you think I should? Does she even _know_? I was just trying to do the right thing, to atone for my error. If you would prefer I stay silent, I can do that easily." he said with a smile. "And as fun as this has been, I have a songbird waiting for me in her room. It's a movie day today, she's got to take things easy for a bit. She's pushing too hard."

"Just leave it," Nathan suggested with a sigh, twisting the tie on the bread bag closed. He'd have to tell her himself. She might have spent a miserable morning being sick - he hoped it wasn't the flu, although given how rundown she was getting he wouldn't be surprised - but she had picked up on the fact that something had happened. "Call it one of those unfortunate incidents that happen on a regular basis here. Dom didn't trash your cyberware and you didn't throttle her, so everything else is kind of secondary." He managed a faint smile and a shooing gesture. "Go. Pamper your girlfriend."

"I plan to." he said, absurdly pleased that he _had_ a girlfriend to pamper. "Just need to grab a few things here." he said, opening up the fridge to rescue a pitcher and a few odds-and-ends. "And Nathan? Thanks." he said gratefully once he had all the things he had planned on grabbing.

"Just try not to be such an easy mark next time. And yeah, that was me giving you advice on controlling your temper." The smile was a little more wry this time. "The world can end now."

"Yeah, well, she punched a button. Several of them." he admitted. "It's a failing of mine. I'm working on it. And the world is not allowed to end right now. Shai'tan can just _wait_." he said, making a near-instinctive gesture with his free hand to ward off evil. "It's not allowed to end until Alison gets better." he said firmly.

"The world's not actually going to end," Nathan said without really thinking. "At least I don't see any end anywhere soon... it feels like it goes on for quite some time."

"I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear that." Haroun said, sounding quite unrelieved in general. "Anyway, I have to be going. Talk to you later, man." he said, then beat as hasty an exit as he could and salvage some of his dignity.