xp_logs | Nathan and Alison, Monday night

On one of her nightly wanders, Alison finds Nathan working late in his office and he invites her in. The conversation turns to what happened with Domino and Haroun, and then Domino herself. Alison gets a better understanding of Nate and Dom's shared past, including some information that she finds a little disturbing.

He really shouldn't be in his office this late. But Moira was down in her office still, and Bella was in a bitchy mood, and at least his office was a nice, enclosed space in which he could pretend the rest of the world didn't exist for whole minutes at a time. Nathan rubbed his eyes, then squinted at the computer monitor as he continued to scroll down a new set of exercises for Hindi class. These definitely needed some revision...

There had been light peeking from underneath the door leading to Nathan's office, which she almost hadn't noticed with her own glow doing funny things to her night vision. (Night vision? What night vision?) But it was late at night and the mansion was, in a way, hers. And Nathan being up that late could only mean Moira was working a late shift again. Alison had a problem though. How, she wondered, did one knock on a door when knocking hurt too much to do so?

Nathan looked up as he sensed a presence outside the door. #Come in, Alison,# he sent quietly, unlocking the door telekinetically instead of rising from his chair. As the door swung open and she stepped in, he actually mustered a faint smile. "Out for a walk?"

"Because I can!" she answered, in a voice that had everything to do with being not just a little bit smug. She ventured into the office slowly, letting him take care of closing the door again, peering about for somewhere possibly not too uncomfortable to perch on. "Moira in the medlab?"

"Her office. Maddie took her off night shifts, but of course, that didn't stop her from deciding there were all kinds of test results she needed to go through tonight." Nathan asked, his smile turning humorless. "Although if she doesn't stop acting like she's got the flu, I'm going to start laying down the law in terms of the whole sleeping in her own bed and all that..." He pointed helpfully at the small couch standing against one wall. "Might be a little easier than my 'Sit there while I read you the riot act' chair there."

"Get Hank and Madelyn to gang up on her and make her rest?" it was the best way, of course. Ask the others in the medlab the rest of the time to make sure she got rest. "even if it's just for one night to start off with, better that than having her so tired she might make a mistake." Oooh, and wasn't that a nice looking couch. Alison gazed at it fondly before wandered to it, slowly settling down while trying to find the least uncomfortable way to do so.

"It may yet come to that," Nathan said dryly. "Although at this point, I try to tell her she's not getting enough rest and she tells me I'm a 'bloody hypocrite'."

Alison winced a bit at that, giving him a sympathetic look. "I'd pull a 'at least you can sleep without a telepath having to knock you out' routing on her, but she'd just give me that Look of hers and I'd try to find a way to run away screaming. And moving fast hurts."

"Don't tempt fate," Nathan advised her with a soft snort. "I'll come up with a strategy. Just give me time." He leaned back in his chair with a sigh, rubbing at the back of his neck. "At least my head's a little clearer today," he muttered.

Looking down for a moment, Alison considered the tip of her synthsilk clad feet. "Haroun told me he'd apologized to you, about what happened with Domino." She left it at that - open-ended and giving Nathan all the room to talk or not, as he pleased.

Nathan sighed again, slouching in the chair. "I don't know what the hell got into her. I don't know what the hell got into him, to believe it in the first place... I thought he knew me better than that."

"He thought better on his own afterwards when I went to see him," Alison said, gently. "I think it was more about Domino herself than anything about you, really." She certainly wasn't setting out to excuse Haroun though. "She's always seemed a little devil-may-care to me. But I hardly know her," Alison admitted with a small shrug. She winced and shifted a bit, the couch not exactly cooperating with her just yet.
"She's always been a little wild," Nathan said heavily. "Comes from having been all of eight years old when they dropped her in a fighting pit and made her perform every day to stay alive."

'Wild' and 'uncaring of the well-being of others in general except for a few exceptions and even there' were not quite the same thing, in Alison's book. "You could call it wild," she said softly, smiling a bit at him to show there was no rancor in the comment. "You've known her a long time, right? You've hinted as much before."

"For as long as I've known GW, short two months. He and I had just started to work together when we found her." His eyes went distant. "I saw her in the fighting pits and went to her owner to buy out her contract. I'm still not sure why. There were dozens of other fighters there that night, but... she was just so young."

Wounded sparrow syndrome. Oh so much. Alison nodded in understanding, settling back carefully, the couch no longer determined to be wildly uncomfortable it seemed. He had the reminiscing look on his face, which meant that if she was good and listened, it just might be story time. "She didn't believe it was any good at first, though. Right?"

Nathan shook his head. "So suspicious," he murmured. "Not to mention the fact that... well, she thought GW and I had bought her for the usual reasons." His voice had turned pained. "It took me the better part of a month to convince her that wasn't true."

It wasn't an unreasonable conclusion, considering the environment. "It's easier to think people are out to use you, in circumstances like that." And to isolate people who didn't want to use you in one category, and everyone else in the other category, whatever it might be.

"Then I tried to send her off to a nice boarding school. It didn't take it." Nathan shifted in his chair, his conscience stinging him yet again. "I still wish there had been some way to get her out of this life," he went on, sounding defeated, "but she was so determined. Hitchhiked hundreds of kilometres to get back to GW and I."

Young Domino. In a boarding school. It was a good thing she didn't howl at the thought out loud, though she did spare a very sympathetic thought for the instructors and her fellow classmates. "Mmm. Took the lifestyle that was forced on her and decided to make it her own?" Or rampant hero worship, at that.

"GW claims it's my fault and she fixated on me." Nathan shrugged irritably. "I sure as hell never gave her any reason to think that this life was something she wanted. At that point I was still borderline suicidal, for fuck's sake..."

Hero worship and girlish crush, all wrapped into one. The whole knight in armor charging in to the rescue thing, to boot. Oh boy. And clearly Nathan had serious guilt going on about the whole thing, still. "After finally being given the chance to make her own choices by you and GW, what makes you think it wasn't an educated one she did? I can't help but think that someone in her situation had to grow up fast."

"I don't think anyone could deny that. I just wish..." Nathan bit back the rest of it, shrugging unhappily. "She's good at what she does. It's not just the luck. I like to think I've taught her to be at least semi-ethical about the jobs she takes, too."

Other people had a hand in that long before Nathan did. Alison didn't voice her opinion on that one, just nodding, head tilted to the side as she listened.

"I really don't know why she would have gone that far with Haroun last night," Nathan muttered, his eyes moving restlessly around the office. "Of all the things to joke about..." A surge of helpless frustration, mixed with shame, choked off his next words, and he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to push it away.

GW was right. He was blaming himself for what had happened in Russia. Whatever that was. Something wasn't ringing right in all of this, but Alison was damned if she knew what it was. "Nathan?"

"Yeah?" Nathan said, opening his eyes and smiling a bit wanly at her, seeing the poorly disguised concern. "I'm just... a little oversensitive on the subject," he confessed. "Mostly because I did fuck up in that sense once, and I really haven't forgiven myself for it."

She was entirely non-judgemental as he spoke, ignoring the pinpricks of pain edging along her skin as they always did. Of course, the fact that she already knew a few details about the whole thing, never mind taking into account his disproportionate habit for self-blame... "We're usually our harshest critics."

"In this case it's justified," Nathan said a bit bitterly. "There's really not much excuse for sleeping with someone you basically raised."

She did not know he'd been shoved in a lake in Russia. Nope sir. After nearly a year of having Betsy in the back of her mind all the time, she was getting used to not thinking about certain things. It felt odd at times, though. And it was easy to focus on the self-blame, so sharp she could practically see him flaying himself alive over it. "Mmm. I can't help but think it's not that simple." It was, she knew, something that would have occured to her even if she hadn't known a bit more than he thought. That sunk below the surface as well, however. "I'm saying that based on knowing you, mind."

"I like to think I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been both hypothermic and drunk," Nathan said, striving for some semblance of a humorous tone. It was something of a joke on him, after all, or at least on his belief that he could draw appropriate boundaries on his own actions. "Not that I know what was going through my head at the time. I don't remember much after Dom dragging me back to the safehouse."

Quiet pool within. No ripples. Alison just nodded at that, keeping the wild racing of thoughts for later. Much later. Maybe Domino was lying and he'd just slept through the night. She was not going to speculate on the performance of someone under those physical conditions. And much less about Nathan in any condition. Because, ew. Now wasn't the time to be juvenile about that though.

"I am pretty damn sure you wouldn't have had you been in possession of your faculties even just a little bit," Alison offered. "Hypothermia leaves someone in a usually pretty nasty mental state, too." And Domino had not been suffering from hypothermia. Thinking about it more now was bad though. Concentrate on Nathan, she reminded herself.

"Me... more so than most people," Nathan said slowly, managing a ghost of a smile, his eyes going distant as he tried, for about the thousandth time, to sort out those few fragmentary memories from after he'd fallen through the ice. "Still. Pretty shitty way to repay her for saving my life that night, as far as I'm concerned..."

"Nathan? Just... bear with me here. We're talking about Domino, right? If she hadn't wanted any part of that, she'd have stopped you in your tracks. You were drunk and hypothermic. A mouse could have taken you out." She gave him a faint smile, not pushing it any further than that. "Just saying." Pieces of a puzzle were moving in and out of focus still. She was missing something.

"I don't remember the drinking, that's the thing," he said as wryly as he could. "Just the hangover in the morning and the empty vodka bottle. What she was doing letting me drink when I had hypothermia, I don't know. She's never really answered that question to my satisfaction, and to be honest..." He flushed, shifting in his chair a little. "I don't really want to know. I'm not sure I wasn't hallucinating by the time she got me back to the safehouse. I remember little... flashes. Thinking I was back in Alaska, out in the woods..."

He was saying so damn much and he really didn't have a clue to it, Alison thought contemplatively, the odd calm still blanking her thoughts held there only from training and not much else. The pain was a good way to ground too, though she had to be careful not to push it - she didn't want him to pick up on the fact that it had been intensifying slowly of late. And there was really only one person who knew the entire story, that was clear. "Hey. No flashbacks now, huh?" Her voice was soft and low and she offered him a small, crooked smile along with the opening to take the conversation in an entirely different line if he wanted to.

The smile was a little easier to manage this time. "No, no flashbacks," he said quietly, then shrugged. "I suppose all this nonsense with her and Haroun has just reminded me that I never really came to terms with apparently losing my mind and sleeping with my twenty year-old protege. It just... made things so difficult, for so long. Nothing like doing my best for five years, to try and make her believe that she could rely on me, that I wasn't like the men who used and abused her... and then I turn around and do that. Calling it giving her mixed signals is overly charitable." He took a deep breath. "I think she's forgiven me for it, though... that night and the mess I made of things after the fact. Guess it's time for me to start forgiving myself?" He tried to smile again. "This is really one of those things I ought to be bringing up with Jack, I suppose. But at least now you know why I was so fucking furious those first few months I was here anytime Manuel made a comment about me lusting after Amanda."

Alison didn't twitch, thoughts remaining as pleasantly calm as ever, expression unchanging. Later though, would be something else, because what he was saying was screaming out that Something was going on. People always gave you hints and signals if you knew what to look for, and Nathan was fairly screaming some at her without realizing it. The other side of the puzzle was still missing, though. The one that would get all the pieces to fit. Maybe.

"Nathan. You had every right to be furious regardless of anything else." First, get that clear. And then reinforce, just a bit. "Talking to Jack about what you've just told me would probably be a good idea..."

"Generally, anytime I think that I need to talk to Jack about something, I do," Nathan said with a strained chuckle. "At least, that's what he tells me. Admitting the problem is half the battle with me, or so he keeps saying." The smile wavered a little, and Nathan tried to tell himself to drop the subject, let it go... but it had been bothering him ever since Saturday, and it all seemed to tie back into all the other questions about control. "I just... it still really stings, Alison, that I let myself do that to her. Sure, it didn't turn out as badly as it could have, but for fuck's sake, I'm almost twice her age and I was supposed to be..." He stopped, making a tiny, helpless gesture. "You'd think I didn't want control of my life, if I could throw away self-control like that."

She almost slipped up for a moment, lost her hold on the calm that was so far still at the surface of her thoughts. "You know..." She couldn't imply anything. Didn't know anything but what GW had told her, and what Nathan was blaming himself for - neither of which were all of the facts, she knew. There was still information that was missing. And Nathan didn't know what GW had told her. "Hypothermia. You know the symptoms, know what that does. Add in being drunk, which wasn't something you set out to do?" He had said Domino had been the one to start that after all... "Remember the bit where you mentionned forgiving yourself? Talk to Jack. Work it out slowly. Maybe he'll have a perspective on it that'll help."

"Sounds like a plan," Nathan said more softly, staring down at his hands for a moment. "Like I said, I just started thinking about it again, after what happened with her and Haroun... I'm really sorry for that, by the way," he said a bit more sheepishly, meeting her eyes. "I mean, bad enough that I occasionally bruise your boyfriend, or get him in barfights..."

A snort greeted that comment, Alison wincing a bit afterwards. "Please. Haroun gets himself in trouble just fine on his own. He got in a brawl in London and broke his nose, for one thing." Being responsible for getting Haroun in barfights was one notion Nathan had better let go of right now. "I vandalized his medkit. It's got graffiti on it now. Ask him about it."

"Oh, now I'm curious," Nathan bantered a bit weakly, then gave her a closer look. "You're starting to hurt more," he said quietly. "Are you sure you shouldn't be in your room?"

"Make him show you." It was only fair, after all. And the smiley making a face was very cute, in her admitedly biased opinion. She hadn't been planning to head back to her room yet, but if it meant getting him out of his office, she could do that. And just take another walk later, maybe. "Okay." Alison grinned a bit, nodding agreeably.

"I'll have to do that. Then again, it'll probably happen anyway - I can't imagine he and I won't be getting up close and personal with his medkit at some point." Nathan shut down his computer, rearranging some of the things on his desk. He really was tired, he reflected somewhat ruefully. It was that sort of bone-deep, cumulative exhaustion, too. No wonder he was fussing over past mistakes, idiotic as they might have been.

Alison spared him a somewhat wry glance - she still didn't get the notion of beating each other up to the point of requiring medical attention and being unable to actually be on call for a few days, when there were people out there perfectly willing to do that for you who weren't your friends. Oh well, it made sense to her, anyway, when put that way. "I won't think too much about that one, mmm?" She had somehow extricated herself from the couch while he was closing down his computer, eyes narrowing a bit at the obvious signs of fatigue.

"It's a guy thing," Nathan said with a faint smile, rising. "Don't think about it too hard, you'll hurt your brain."