Log [Alison, Nathan] After the dust has settled...

[x-dazzler.livejournal.com]

Backdated to early Saturday in the wee hours of the morning. Set after these logs. Proteus Aftermath. In the wee hours of the morning, after all is said and done, Alison and Nathan lean on a wall and talk quietly outside Miles' room as he sleeps.



There was a reassuring solidity to the wall behind her back, the stone floor she was sitting on. It was cold and unyielding; the natural dampness of a castle in Scotland making the various aches and stiffness in her body worse, but right now it was one of the best places to be. Well - there were others, but as they were unavailable, Alison was making do with what was at hand, and the castle itself was entirely appropriate that way, despite the fact that it had done anything but what it should have been doing earlier. Miles was sleeping, as exhausted little boys do after too much had happens all at once, and Haroun was off somewhere, though she knew he was all right. He'd been right there when she'd regained consciousness and she'd had time to make sure of that, for a few brief words before stumbling off to find her son.

Her hands were still shaking from the aftermath but the worse of it was over and she was now perfectly content with not moving, fatigue keeping her body limp and her mind as quiet as the waters surrounding the island at the moment, the mirrored surface reflecting the moon serenely.

It took him longer than it should have to track down Alison. In the end, he found her sitting on the floor, alone. He almost walked on, but there was something that made him think she maybe didn't... quite want to be left alone. Or maybe he was just imagining things. His vision was still a little uncertain, and his head was aching steadily. The less said about the legion of bruises, the better.

Dropping down beside her, Nathan said nothing for a long moment, letting the exhausted silence continue. "Miles is all right?" he finally asked.

"Yes. Sleeping now. Took a while to convince him it was okay to do so and I wasn't going away again though." Alison took another deep, cleansing breath - the air was real and tasted faintly of the sea, just as it should. She wasn't planning on moving for a few days really, at the very least. "How is Moira?" She'd known no one was seriously hurt, physically at least. But emotionally was something else entirely.

"Asleep." Nathan swallowed, then noticed he was rubbing at his bad leg and stopped. "I'm keeping her that way for a little while. She..." He stopped as his vision darkened for a moment. The effect reversed itself, and he turned to face Alison more head-on, hating the lack of peripheral vision. "I'll be there when she wakes up. I just... had to calm down, first." So he'd hissed at Haroun and tore strips off Shiro. Yeah. Good strategy there, Dayspring.

"Sleep is good. It'll give her time to process things, even if she's not really aware of it. Put some distance between what happened and herself. Just a bit." She took another of those soothing breaths, ignoring the still lingering construction around her ribs, the tension fading slowly despite stubborn attempts at remaining. Talking to someone was helping with centering. That was good. Building on that, she continued, idly noting that he seemed calm enough now, on the surface. "Heck of away for both of us to field test our powers." A bit early too. There would be a battery of tests awaiting the both of them when they returned to the mansion, no doubt about it.

"Isn't that always the way? Being thrown right into the deep end..." Nathan blinked and stared at her, his eyes a little unfocused. "Are you all right? You're..." He didn't elaborate. Wasn't sure what to say.

Either he was a bit burned out from what they'd just gone through (a bit being an understatement) or she had things settled down faster than she'd thought she could manage. Either way, she was fine. "I'm good. Bit worn out." A brief huff of breath escaped her at that - the closest she could come to a self-deprecating laugh. "I'm never going to take stone walls for granted again." She pressed one hand flat to the wall and patted it once, finding even more solidity there to brace her self upon as well.

"You're not okay. Ah, well," Nathan said, placing a hand on the wall himself, unconsciously echoing her gesture. "Neither am I. I think we're entitled."

"Yes, we are." A bit too fervent perhaps, but Alison felt the statement was entirely true. "Did you see Haroun? I think I heard him fly off a while ago, but-" she shook her head a bit, the back of it still firmly pressed to the wall.

"I talked to him. He's kicking himself pretty hard for being 'useless'." Nathan shook his head slowly. "How much more useful were we?" he asked with a sigh. "Able to fight at distance or not..."

"None of us stood a chance. Moira's best way to him was emotional. Proteus wanting a mother - it gave her the time she needed, something no one else had once he was off on a rampage. All we could do was hope to delay him long enough, and we did. That's all we could do." Her words were flat and precise. "This was the best way it could have turned out, really." No one was badly hurt and they had been frighteningly lucky there. A solo staying in the fight with no team training could have drawn them a lot of grief. She wasn't thinking about Shiro right now, though. That would be later. "Haroun..." she sighed a bit. There was a lot to say there, but she still wasn't sure how.

"He needs... I'm not sure what he needs," Nathan said with a sigh. "This isn't the first time I've heard things like this from him. It's just the first time immediately after a crisis situation. He keeps feeling useless and he's going to make himself useless."

"He needs to start working with what he has, instead of wanting what others have." There was a distant part of herself that was stunned at saying something so bluntly and so unemotionally, but the part that was looking at things analytically was matter of fact about it. "And it's probably tied into some other things but I don't know what they are." Her mind settled into seeking patterns, solutions. "Can't be fixed by anyone but him. Though there could be training exercises and I am working on those now..." A backwards way of showing him his strong points, something to build on. But that could only work if he was wiling to see it.

"He would say it's easy for us to say that," Nathan murmured, leaning his head against the wall. "You suppose, a body-swap?" A faint smile played on his lips. "Let him find out that it's not all it's cracked
up to be..."

Oh ow. The patterns had segued into nasty things at that thought. "Bad. Very bad that." She nodded calmly at her statement, and then sighed, slumping against the wall further. "Besides, I wouldn't wish blowing up on him ever. Even as a learning experience." And then, there was the ability to fly, which she didn't think he could give up without losing an essential part of himself. "You know, I went through reports on the mall thing for weeks. Just wanting to make sure they weren't hiding a dead body somewhere in there, to avoid the bad publicity. Still can't believe I didn't kill anyone."

Nathan nodded slowly. "You know," he said after a moment, "I killed six people in that warehouse back in August. Five Mistra operatives, and Simon... it's hard not to dwell on things like that."

"And all it takes is just... doing so. You know, I've read the articles going on about this, about how it's no different than someone using a gun, powers or not...  But it is in a way. It's more personal. It makes you the weapon, instead of someone using a tool." She wasn't being specific enough, but she thought Nathan would understand, nonetheless. "It's right there, at your fingertips." And if she could have killed Proteus herself, she would have done it. She'd certainly tried her best, at the last.

"I don't think someone who's not in that position can really understand that, either," Nathan said after another pause. "Or at least, anyone who's not trained themselves to be a weapon in more conventional ways... GW always understood." A wistful note slipped into his voice, and for a moment he wondered at it, wondered at it and raged at himself. What, did he want GW there to have someone to rant at or something?

"GW didn't have obscured vision by feeling inadequate because he couldn't blow up a crater the size of Manhattan on his own." She sighed, wishing Haroun could somehow be made to see all he did
bring to the team. "I'm going to have to talk to Haroun about this. And speaking of smoking craters, I'm going to have to talk to Shiro as well."

"I know. That's what I..." What had he meant? Nathan sighed, letting his head sag sideways against the wall. "Shiro," he muttered. "I found him in the kitchen. I really can't believe that he..." He stopped, his jaw clenching. "He's mad with arrogance," he said abruptly. "And apparently I'm a preachy bastard who doesn't appreciate that he saved us all. And a madman."

Oh, yeah. There was the anger. Nathan sank his head into his hands for a moment, breathing deeply. "I don't care," he said under his breath, his voice shaking, growing wild as he went on. "I don't care if he did help. He was so... blithe about it, as if it was simple, some fucking game, and I could have lost them, Alison, and I couldn't--" He clenched his jaw hard, squeezing his eyes shut and fighting for control.

There were so many things touched upon in those few words that Alison wasn't sure which one to deal with first. But while he'd had anger as a reaction, Alison had had her own coping (or lack of) mechanism and she knew what he meant - not just the almost of now, but the had been of yesterday that hovered in his memories as a reminder of how much he'd already lost, too. She just reached out and rested a hand lightly over his, still feeling most of the weariness and numbness, but feeling a measure of calm as well - she's just talked herself through this, after all. "You didn't lose them. And we did what was needed."

Nathan concentrated on breathing for a moment, the barely-there pressure of Alison's hand on his grounding him. "Insult to injury," he said, his voice still low and strained, if a bit steadier. "Bad enough that this happen, but to happen here... this is her home, it's supposed to be--" He cut himself off, shaking his head. "Things like this aren't supposed to happen at all, I know that. I just..." He trailed off this time, helplessly, then turned his hand so that he could squeeze Alison's back gently.

"We are... extraordinary people in an extraordinary world." She hoped he'd forgive her the bad pun - and knew he'd understand the meaning she was giving to the word, too. "And Moira is just as much as we are, by the life choices she's made - before and since meeting you." Just as Alison herself was here, by way of her own choices. "And we all have something to fight for, to protect." That was their edge, really. "Some fight for money or for power. What pushes us along, Nathan?"

"Fighting for something and protecting it aren't always the same thing," Nathan said tiredly, thinking about Joe, about Essex. "You'd think with how long I've lived with... the grays that I'd understand it can't be anything but complicated. Only in some ways it was so much simpler before." And now he was rambling.

Which had been the point, and Alison couldn't help but give him a small smile. "Nathan. Shades of grey and one's reaction to people hurting your loved ones don't exactly always go hand in hand." She shrugged. The entire incident with Magneto had given her a perspective, of sorts, on that particular subject matter. And she'd had time to think about it, too.

Nathan shook his head. "I know," he muttered, rubbing at his eyes. "I know they don't, I just... I'm just tired." And the anger was gone again. Which probably meant that he should take advantage of it and go back to Moira, see if she was ready to wake up yet. Since there was no keeping her asleep until she could wake up to find out this hadn't happened... "Are you going to be all right?" he asked, looking up at Alison, knowing she'd catch the different emphasis.

"Probably won't sleep much tonight." She glanced down the hallway, towards one of the narrow windows inset in the stone. "Day. Today. But I'll keel over like a rock tomorrow night probably." It told him a lot, she knew - and said a lot that she even admitted to that much, as well. It was as close to that as she wanted, or could, get just now too. But for now there was watching over Miles' sleep and warding off nightmares, and waiting for Haroun to come back from that flight as well.

"Let me know if Haroun doesn't get back shortly," Nathan said, getting to his feet a bit unsteadily. "If I have to, I'll go out looking for him. The weather could close in again." He gazed down at her for a moment, then managed a faint, tired smile. "I suppose we did not-badly, given that we were a little the worse for wear going in."

"He'll be back soon. I'll send a light flare up to get his attention if it takes him too long." She wasn't sending Nathan out nor going herself - Haroun wouldn't be too far off - just because things had quieted down didn't mean there might not be something else, some back-up plan, even though that was giving Joe far too much credit in her opinion. Either way, anyone else leaving the island right now wasn't happening. "We did what was needed and that's good enough for me. Go rest - you look like you need it." And she'd tell him about Scott's email regarding their training tomorrow, or maybe once they were back at the mansion, at that. It seemed they were both ready for it, after all.

"Try and at least rest, if you don't sleep," was Nathan's advice as he turned away, swaying a little. "~The mind if not the body,~" he muttered, unconsciously slipping into Askani. "~No running in circles if you can avoid it...~"