xp_logs | Nathan and Alison, Thursday afternoon (Reply)

After helping Marie-Ange the previous night, Nathan has a breakthrough with his own precognition with help from Alison and her very, very sneaky Askani tutor.

He was at Alison's door before he really knew where he was going. Nathan paused, frowning a bit fitfully at the door and trying to ignore the sparkling lights in his peripheral vision. It was not just her, but Audrai... or what Audrai had told her, rather. That was why he was here. Because he couldn't get it from the horse's mouth, and Alison had seemed to understand, know something more...

The Askani were curiously muted in the back of his mind, their voices audible but indistinguishable, and that inner starry sky was flashing with light again. Something very odd was going on. Had been going on since he'd helped Angie last night.

He raised a hand to knock.

The door opened before his hand ever touched the door, Alison stopping in mid-step to go outside with a slightly guilty expression, which was soon hidden underneath mingled amusement and curiosity. "Erm. Hi!" Voice still near drowned out by the sound dampener, Alison was nonetheless audible enough and not glowing One Bit. Her tanned features were burnished, her good mood radiating through for all to see and startlingly blue eyes peered up at Nathan as she smiled.

He managed an only slightly strained smile in return. "Sneaking out?" She really was extremely tanned, he reflected a bit wryly. "Could I stall you for a few minutes?" he went on. "I could really use some advice that I think you might be able to give..."

"Not much! Just a little bit!" She held out a hand, fingers barely an inch apart. And then closed them up further, without quite touching. "But hey, since I'm not sneaking out, we can talk." Backing up, Alison gave him access to enter the room, hand hovering over the handle but not touching it unless she had to. "I'd be glad to help any way I can." Which was a far cry of how she might have answered this coming from him months ago.

Nathan smiled again, a bit more faintly, and moved past her and into the room, carefully to leave plenty of space between them. "It's good to see you not glowing," he said, knowing it was an attempt to stall as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Alison just waited, looking patient, and he sighed softly. "Have you... talked much to Audrai, lately?"

She stared at him for a moment, pondering the question. "She visited a few times since I've been allowed to start going out of the medlab, yes. Not long most of the time, from what I remember. She showed me some new meditation patterns last week - that was the longest she's stayed at any one time." Shifted her weight slightly, still not used to the way things had started changing in how her body was reacting to pain since the previous day, Alison tried not to look too concerned at the look on his face. "Why are you asking?"

"I just--" Nathan stopped, the smile a bit wan now. "Mind if I sit down?" She nodded, and he went over to the nearest chair, trying not to flop too noticeably. "Angie and I had another... talk, last night. If you want to call it that. I actually managed to help her, at least a little. The visions aren't so horrific anymore. There were--" He paused, making a helpless gesture. "Problems, with the patterns of energy in her mind. I stabilized them at least partway, gave her something else to focus on. But I think I did something to myself in the process. Again."

Alison frowned at that, not in discontentment but more in thought than anything else. Nathan doing something like that was not exactly new but if it had been an emergency he wouldn't be here asking her about Audrai. "What do you mean, exactly?" She walked to her bed slowly and then took her time sitting down and finding a less uncomfortable way to curl up there while giving him time to think over his answer.

"I have to create a connection with her, right? To do anything. A telepathic connection." Alison nodded slowly. "I'd been... trying to avoid that, since the weekend, because something was happening even just with proximity, let alone me actually touching her mind. But she was in so much pain last night..." He paused, frowning again. "But it's like being in contact with what she sees triggers something in me. I was seeing her visions, through her eyes, and then I was seeing other things..." He thought of the images stretching out like strings of pearls, forming the Askani patterns.

She was missing more than a few pieces, and it all had to do with Nathan knowing it and feeling it, but not being able to translate it in words because there were likely no words for it. "Nathan..." Sighing patiently, Alison shifted, sitting down cross-legged while ignoring the protests her body made at the change of position. "Why don't you show me what you mean?" The slight emphasis on the word 'show' was easy for him to pick up on, really.

Nathan took a deep breath. "All right," he said a bit hesitantly and reached out to her, establishing a solid if gentle connection with her mind. #This,# he sent, and stopped trying to resist the patterns. They blazed into incandescence in his mind, spinning out onto - not the astral plane? he thought suddenly, bewildered by the sudden flash of insight. How was that possible? They seemed to grow more complicated with each passing moment that he didn't fight them, glowing blue overlaying glowing gold. In a way, it was one of the most beautiful things he'd ever seen...

Light flared up in Alison's mind. Not the burning fire she had known when her power had gone wild, though this was just as exquisite in its own way. It was natural to slip into a serene state of mind, all the meditation she'd been doing of late being a familiar state of being, even with the pain still on the edges of her awareness. There was a knowing, along with a whispery laugh echoing in the back of her mind. The patterns Audrai had shown her fit with all of this somehow, she realized - and it was easy to conjure up light of her own here at least, with no repercussion whatsoever for herself. #There.# Intersections in time. Points of anchor.

Understanding flashed through him all at once. Intersections. And he hadn't seen them - of course, he was in the middle of the patterns. Hard to see the trees for the forest? Nathan reached out for them tentatively, grasping one at a time, as if he was balancing himself in the center of some exquisitely complicated web. Each contact sent a not-unpleasant chill through him, like a blast of cold, crisp air.

#I have a weird feeling,# he sent a bit shakily. #I think... I'm... ~leaping the abyss, sister.~#

Considering his words for a moment, Alison hesitated. And then a subtle, familiar touch sent reassurance and she smiled faintly to herself before concentrating further - the exercises she'd spent months upon with little results were near instantaneous in their results here, solid light shimmering into being, another pattern springing around them both in interlocking circles and spires of light, locking down with unshakable solidity. #~Here is Now. That will not change.~#

Spirals. Spires. Castles? Memory cathedrals, why was that image coming back to mind all of a sudden... #~They say it's just a matter of remembering the future,~# he sent back a bit dizzily.

And then, with a snap that was also a wrench, but surprisingly painless for all of that, it all fell into place. Nathan went rigid, a choked gasp of wonder escaping him, and the patterns were there in the room suddenly, shining blue and gold in the visible spectrum, all weaving around him, reaching out to him.

He could see it. The interconnections, the different threads. Strings of pearls, each an image, a moment... an event? Stretching out into infinity, and for a moment, he could see it all, see all the ends, all the beginnings, cause and effect...

It was beautiful. Beautiful and terrible, and yet he wasn't afraid of it. For all that he'd feared his precog the last couple of years, regarding it as dysfunctional, dangerous, almost malevolent in its effects, there was nothing to be afraid of here. Something had changed. It had changed. Now it was just an additional sense, just like his telepathy, his telekinesis, and it fit so seamlessly with them that the sense of rightness was overwhelming.

A small, disappointed noise escaped him as the farther reaches of the patterns dimmed, as if a gauzy curtain had fallen over them. He could still see, to a point, could still feel it all, but... no, this was right, too. His mind wasn't made to hold that much. Too deep a connection would burn out his mind, and he had flirted with that once. Once was more than enough.

Nothing changed from Alison's perspective, other than the sense that Nathan was still there if focused elsewhere, the patterns still whirling before her in ever-changing variations with the intersecting points the only constancy she could find. That and herself, anchored in light in the middle of it all. There was a realization there, though she kept it quiet for now, the barest of approvals lingering faintly and then fading back into the background as she waited for Nathan to resurface.

It was like coming up from underwater, breaking the surface into the sunlight. Nathan took a deep breath, then another, and the patterns seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat. He released his grip on them gently, amazed when the base patterns, the ones that Alison had shown him, merely sank into his mind as if embedding themselves there.

Holding the rest of it together. He could feel the anchor points, and he smiled suddenly, letting his breath out on a sigh as he finally focused again on her.

"That," he said, blinking a bit rapidly, "was... something else." A helpless smile tugged at his lips. "Sneaky, sneaky Audrai..."

"Sneaky is not the word." Alison slowly opened her eyes as well, a mixture of lingering amazement, annoyance and fondness deep within. It made perfect sense to have prepared the ground this way, though, combining the fact that to them Alison was the only other Clan adult for Nathan to rely upon, with the fact that... he trusted her. That much. Audrai had even made certain that Alison might not try to use her own power inadvertantly, making her practice in the dreamscape only until she could summon up the lacework without even having to think about it overmuch. And if there was one thing Alison knew to start with, it was light. It wasn't just the patterns though. But that was for later. Maybe.

"You're not afraid anymore." It was stating what they both already, but it was worth saying out loud, Alison thought.

"No," Nathan said quietly, marveling at it. "I'm not afraid." They sat there in peaceable silence for a few minutes, until there was a gentle tug at his mind in the form of a request from Charles. Nathan rose, formal words of thanks in Askani slipping out almost of their own accord. Alison's grave response was note-perfect, as if she'd been speaking the battle language all her life.

As he left her suite and headed down to Charles' office, the sense of rightness didn't diminish in the slightest. He felt...

Whole.