xp_logs | Unwell. Halfway there.

Angie sneaks outside, and Nate finds her. He takes some drastic measure and tries to fix the problem. It... sort of works. Kinda.

After two days, under the kind of isolation she was feeling, even with the paranoia, Marie-Ange had enough. Too much loud American football, too much bad greasy food, too much of Remy's version of French which was as far from French as ... well, as New Orleans was from France.

Logic does not come easily to distressed nightmarish precogs. And really, the only person who has been dead, dying or otherwise mangled lately had been Mr. Marko. So she thought, maybe it was over.

And she had to check - and so when Remy's back was turned, when he was in the bathroom, she crept down the stairs, and out of the boathouse. If nothing else, she still had to tell someone about Mr. Marko and the burning skeleton.

Nathan had, coincidentally, been on his way out to the boathouse to check on Angie - if 'check on' meant 'knock on the door and inquire after her well-being'. He had spent some time with Charles earlier working on his shields, but he wasn't confident that they were good enough to hold off... whatever had happened the last couple of times he'd been too close to Angie.

The sight of her heading surreptitiously towards the house nearly froze him in his tracks. "Angie!" he called out a bit hesitantly, not sure whether he should start towards her or not.

Nathan. That was Nathan, and he didn't -sound- angry or like he wanted to kill her. Which was a plus, and a positive change from the last time. "Nathan? " Marie-Ange asked quietly. It could, after all, be an illusion, or a shapeshifter.

Shields. He reinforced his even further, and started slowly towards her, hands outstretched, palms up, careful to mind his body language. "I didn't expect to see you out and around, mi'saevra," he said very gently. "How are you feeling?"

How was -she- feeling? "That is ... Nathan, Mr. Marko is some kind of monster.. I can feel better later when he is ... " Well, she didn't know what they were going to do, but big flaming skeletons were not -on-. Not at all.

"He's not really a flaming skeleton," Nathan said steadily, stopping well short of her. There was something... tugging at his mind. He could feel it. The Askani were roiling, agitated, flashes of light crossing that inner starry sky. "It's your precog... misfiring, or something like that. The line between what you see and what you See is getting blurred."

"Remy said that." Of course, she didn't actually believe it. Marie-Ange crossed her arms and frowned. And Remy hadn't said it quite like that. She took a step back and sighed. "You are just trying to get me to go back to the infirmary, and I do not want to be there. Dr. McCoy wants to vivisect me, I think."

"I think you're better out here for now," Nathan murmured, troubled. "Fewer people to set you off." Hesitantly, he took a few careful steps closer to her. "I wish I could explain what was happening," he sighed, "but I can't... put it into words. I... feel what's wrong--" And was feeling it more and more sharply the closer he got to her. What the hell had he done to them the other day? "But I don't know what to do about it."

"No one is setting me off.." Marie-Ange shook her head firmly. "It is not setting me off if there are dead Jamies all over the house!" She went pale and swallowed heavily. "What is wrong is that no one cares that everyone is -dying-. Fix that and I will be fine."

Nathan took another step closer, and taking a deep breath, closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. Not making contact, just taking a look, trying to see her as a collection of patterns, like the Askani had been trying to teach him.
There was something--off. Definitely off. Flickering edges that didn't match, patterns out of sync... some sort of intrusion? It was like a fault line, almost, and Nathan frowned deeply.

Very slowly, Marie-Ange went limp, almost like her tendons and muscles just stopped holding her up, and she slumped to the ground. "Too much. Hurts..." She wrapped her arms around her knees, and shivered. "Tired. Can't stop thinking... can't stop seeing .. " She whispered in French, almost mouthing the words silently.

It felt almost as if her thoughts were taut, drawn tightly around something, like skin stretched over a scar healed all wrong. Tearing and brusing and too-thin in some places, and knotted and thick in others.

Nathan opened his eyes and came over, sinking down beside her. "I know," he said quietly, letting his eyes close so that he could watch her on the telepathic level again. "I can see it, Angie... I just don't know how to fix it..."

"Not broken..." Marie-Ange shook her head. She couldn't be broken, broken things didn't work. They just sat there. "'s opposite. Not the same." She couldn't explain it, words weren't coming easily at all.. "Not the same at all, just not broken."

Her thoughts drifted out at him and Nathan frowned deeply. Scar tissue... Her precog was still in the process of emerging, and yet it had been so severely strained by everything that had happened, everything she'd seen. Was that the problem, or part of it? Psychic scar tissue?

The tight pulling in her head wasn't getting any better, nor was it getting much worse anymore. But it didn't make it any easier for Marie-Ange to get up, or move, or do much of anything other than whimper. "Nathan... ow. 'hurts." She pushed against the ground, trying to stand up, managed it for a half-second and then went toppling back down. "Make it stop?"

Something twisted in his chest and he reached out, laying a hand over hers. "I can try," he said hesitantly, and touched her mind, all too aware that he was risking precisely what had happened on Saturday. But she was in pain, and he couldn't not try and help her. "Close your eyes," he murmured, and tried to soothe away the flickering instability.

It was all too easy to shut her eyes. Harder to keep them shut, the visions kept coming, worse without the world outside to shape them. The mansion, burnt to a shell. Her friends dead or dying around the grounds. Wave after wave of mechanical devices, sent to kill or capture mutants - or simply just those who supported them. A grey sky, scabbed with wrongly colored clouds, sickly greens and ochers, the signs of terrible destruction.

The images rippled through his mind like liquid fire, and Nathan stiffened, the patterns there suddenly overlaying everything - no, not everything, just the less personal visions, the ones of mass devastation. #Angie--# he sent in a bare whisper, barely able to form her name. There was more suddenly, images like looping strings of pearls, flinging themselves out into the darkness, forming the intricate spirals he knew so well... #Angie... breathe... focus on me...#

#Nathan?# Even trying to think -back- was hard, wanting more to hide or scream, or just pull her thoughts in over her like a blanket and curl up and go away forever. #Focusing hurts. Like ripping things up... #

She could see the clouds moving, twisting into the swirls of a hurricane, but without the sheets of rain or lightening strikes. The waves of killing machines slowed to a halt, gears grinding still with the groans of metal pulling itself apart. #What is that?# She asked, mental voice strained.

#Focus on here. Now.# Something... something was shifting, he could feel it. Changing in the patterns, and the images were flickering, altering. #Reach back for me,# he said, extending a mental hand. #Try... please?# It was like trying to speak through crackling static, almost like feedback, and it hurt. But he was reaching her, something was changing. He could feel it.

To Marie-Ange, that mental hand was big - far bigger than Nathan's real one. She couldn't grab it so much as cling to one of the fingers like a small child holds onto a parent's finger when they cannot hold hands. #It feels like an earthquake... # She said. #Like everything is shaking apart.#

She was focusing on him. On him, not the visions, and Nathan put more effort into what he was doing, holding tightly to that connection between them. #I think something is,# he forced the words out. #Focus, Angie. On me, on the here and now...# He tried to send new images to her. Everyday images, happy faces. It wasn't all catastrophe and despair, after all...

Nathan. That was Nathan and he was in love with Dr. MacTaggart and they were getting married. He was -not- going to drown her in the lake. She was not going to autopsy him while he was still alive. Dr. MacTaggart had hermit crabs, and koosh balls and bad, bad, bad coffee.

But it -hurt-, like being stretched all out of proportion to try to keep forcing that thought ahead of the others. To push it out in the front to try to push away all the horrible visions that were still trying to rebuild themselves, to take over her thoughts like creeping mold.

Angie's pain on top of his was almost too much, but Nathan set his jaw and poured everything he had into strengthening that connection, soothing the patterns he was seeing back into what he somehow knew they should be. He could feel her thoughts, even pain-edged, growing clearer, sharper. Cooler, in a strange way...

The pain was not so much lessening as growing easier to think past, becoming more of a constant ache and less like throbbing spikes of agony. The mental image of Nathan and Dr . MacTaggart was clearer. Smiling, and happy and proud of.. something. There was definitly something there - something Marie-Ange couldn't quite make out. A little cluster or somethings, all different and unique and.. She retreated, overwhelmed by the sheer number of images. #Too many. Too much at once.. #

#It's all right.# Nathan opened his eyes, blinking as his vision blurred, overlaid for a moment by the Askani patterns. Angie had a virtual halo of them, spinning around her with dizzying speed. #Breathe. Open your eyes and look at me - how do you feel?#

It took over a minute of Marie-Ange taking long slow breaths before she felt ready to open her eyes. When she did, it was with a sigh of relief. No more destroyed mansion, no more radioactive wasteland of a campus. She sat silently, watching Nathan for a while before she said anything, still not entirely convinced he wasn't going to suddenly turn into some kind of half-metal crazed lunatic or overpowered nonsense babbling thing.

#Not.. entirely here. But .. there are no bodies strewn everywhere... I think?# It was hard to tell. Everything looked too bright, and not nearly solid enough.

Nathan took another deep breath. His head was starting to pound, but he counted the headache a small price to pay for the fact that she was looking at him, seeing him. He'd done some good here, he realized. There was still instability there in her mind, he could see it, but less tension. Energy was flowing in something much closer to the directions it should be - and damn, I'm being vague. But maybe vagueness was okay, at least for now.

"Well," he said a bit raggedly. 'It's a start."