xp_logs | Nathan and Jack Leary, Sunday afternoon

First session of the New Year, and they have rather a lot to talk about. Something of a breakthrough sneaks up on Nathan unexpectedly.

OOC: Thanks to Rossi for socking Jack again. :)

"Real coffee," Nathan said as he filled two cups and brought them over, handing one to Jack before he sat down in the other chair. "Of the drinkable sort, as opposed to Moira's. Although I think it's some weird flavor." He peered down into the cup a bit forlornly. "One of the students, at Christmas. I'm not sure who - I wasn't reading the cards, obviously..."

"Jamaica Blue, if I'm not wrong," Jack said, sipping from the cup with his eyes on Nathan the whole time. 'Jittery' didn't even begin to describe the man. "And you had the perfect excuse for not reading cards - blindness does make it a little difficult. How is your vision now? Fully recovered?"

"Mostly," Nathan murmured, wrapping his hands around the cup and continuing to stare down into it. Jack was peering at him. He could feel it. "Peripheral vision's a little iffy, still, and it all fades out if I push my powers too hard. I'm not sure when that'll stop, but Charles is optimistic." He looked up at Jack, a very small smile playing on his lips. "I doubt they told you what I was doing, apart from 'first aid'; I was telekinetically manipulating someone's DNA."

Jack blinked. And blinked again. "Okay," he said neutrally, not asking just what kind of first aid required that kind of level of TK. "I assume it was strictly necessary, otherwise you wouldn't have done it? Life or death situation?"

"He would have died," Nathan said. Amanda couldn't have bonded the gem-shards to Cain's DNA if he hadn't done his part first. "He was dying." He took a sip of his coffee and finally looked up, meeting Jack's eyes. "I'd do it again. Despite what happened afterwards, the blindness and the virus flaring up..." He couldn't help stiffening a little on his last words, though. But virus flare-ups always did that to him. A reminder of his own mortality, always lying there in wait.

"It must have been frightening, to have two such reminders of the fraility of us all. Blindness is something many people fear. And the virus... well, you know better than anyone what that can do."

"I can't remember the last time I felt more helpless than I did lying down in the medlab that week," Nathan said quietly, folding his hands around the coffee cup. "Funny. Helplessness. I've been thinking a lot about that lately."

"There's been something else that's exacerbated that feeling?" Jack asked. He wouldn't be surprised if there was - the school and those within it were lightning rods for disaster, it seemed - but he needed the story from Nathan first.

Did he really need to give Jack all the details? Sending his therapist running screaming out of the room would not be good. Yet Jack would know if he 'edited'; he was uncanny in his ability to pick that up. So Nathan took a deep breath and gave him the basics. Jack and Essex and that poor tortured boy, and then Amanda and Selene, coming so soon afterward...

"...so here I am," Nathan concluded, his voice flat, dull, as he made a dismissive gesture with his cup. "Not able to do a damned thing, for fear of bringing worse down on everyone. I'm beginning to realize that this is standard operating procedure around here."

Jack was silent for a long, long time, processing everything. "If I was a mercenary man, I could make a fortune from this place..." he murmured to himself, with a wry quirk of his lips. When he looked up at Nathan, it was real sympathy in his face and voice. "You're one hell of an individual, Nathan Dayspring. In your place, given what you've gone through in the past, what's happened most recently... lesser men would be mere blips on the horizon now. Or would be acting, and to hell with the consequences."

"I think... I might have been a blip, maybe. But there's nowhere to go, nowhere I could take Moira where I know she and the baby would be safe." He took a deep, somewhat shaky breath. "These last two incidents happened on Muir, not here. And I've known since May that Muir's not the safe place I used to think it was, but still..." He caught himself rubbing at his leg, where the bullet scar was, and forced himself to stop. "Mistra may still be watching the Pack in Berlin, even if MacInnis says they're not. Here is... well, here." Nathan shrugged, the gesture more apathetic than he really felt. "Nothing to do but stay and wait for the sky to fall." He managed a very tight, strained little smile. "And maybe try and enjoy the moments between disasters."

"Well, as they say, there is no real safe place anywhere - you could be hit by a bus crossing the street tomorrow. But I have to say... this all goes well beyond the 'safe place' adage and into scary territory. I've never seen so many disasters in so short a time." Pinching the bridge of his nose, Jack sighed. "I wish I had some advice for you, Nathan, some degree of comfort, but apart from setting up home with Moira and the baby on a deserted island somewhere with a natural form of psi-shielding and never telling anyone else where you are... I'm tapped. This is an inhuman amount of stress for anyone to deal with - I'm surprised Leonard hasn't moved in. And you're dealing with it, as best you can."

"Deserted islands," Nathan said a bit wistfully, sipping at his coffee and falling silent for a long moment. "Jack," he said finally, "do I overintellectualize things?"

"How do you mean?" Jack asked, wanting to hear Nathan's theory first before answering the question.

Nathan waved a hand almost limply. "When I can't think of a way out of a situation... like the New Year's from hell, and the fact that the people responsible are still out there... it drives me insane, Jack. It's like I'm slamming my head into a brick wall over and over again, but nothing gives. I can't see a solution, or I can't risk the solution I see, rather, and I don't know how to react. I keep trying to think logically, find a way out, only it never makes any difference. And then it's like holding back the tide, emotionally speaking. Worse when it finally hits." Oh, yes, that had made a terrible amount of sense.

"I think perhaps you're putting off the emotional reaction by intellectualising the situation since you're still learning how to handle the emotional reaction," Jack said after a moment's thought. "With the conditioning, you were shut off from those reactions. Now you're pretty much at their mercy, and having to deal with them. Which in a normal situation wouldn't be a problem, since you'd have breathing space to actually do that between situations. But since you haven't had that time, perhaps you're having to find other ways instead."

"I'm afraid of having to make the hard decisions," Nathan said after a long moment, thinking about stopping by the roadside in Arizona and staring up at the stars, looking for answers. "I am weaker than I was. Or less ruthless, at least. Less willing to take risks..."

"You've got more to lose if you do," Jack pointed out. "It's a trade-off. Alone you're more able to take risks, make the hard decisions, but you've got less to fight for. When you do have something - or someone - to fight for, you're less inclined to take the steps that may put that at risk. In the end, you have to decide whether it's worth it or not." He smiled a little wryly. "And here I am putting another of those hard decisions in front of you."

He was getting a headache. Nathan sighed, resting his head in his free hand for a minute. "You know," he said finally, "I wonder sometimes if I'm going to be able to do this, adapt to what passes for a real life. I keep questioning whether I have it in me. I mean, I have nothing to go on. No time in my past that I can look back on and say 'Yes, I want to get back to living like that'." He bit his lip. "Not even my first marriage."

"Perhaps you should stop trying to recreate something that never happened, and focus on what makes you happy in the here and now," Jack pointed out. "And if that includes finding somewhere that does have something more resembling real life, well that may just have to happen."

Nathan managed a ghost of a smile. "Did I tell you I'm teaching some different courses this term?" he asked. "Cooking for the little kids... that one's probably the one that would blow your mind." Nice subject change, Dayspring, a voice in the back of his head congratulated him sardonically. Only it wasn't really a subject change, it was an answer.

Jack chuckled. "You did. And I think it's a very good idea - not that you should cast off every single aspect of your life before, but exploring more options? It's a good thing."

"Maybe the key is to get too busy to think?" Nathan suggested jokingly. "Between the teaching and the training, and possibly the going back to school..."

"Going back to school?" Jack asked. "What were you thinking of doing? And while I don't encourage distraction as a form of denial, you do need to experience the more mundane side of life. So you have that frame of reference to go by."

"I'd been toying with it for a while," Nathan admitted. "More work on the international affairs side of my education... I was actually a few courses into another degree, did I ever mention that? They might be portable. And I kind of like the idea of brushing up on ye olde credentials, maybe focusing on mutant issues in some of the less glamorous parts of the world I used to frequent." He laughed softly. "It might be a help to Charles, actually, to have someone who knows both when to quote the relevant statute and when to offer a bribe under the table."

"Not to mention it would give you a much wider range of options when dressing up in leather loses its appeal..."

"Right. The leather. It's hopelessly naive, you know," Nathan said after a long pause, his voice very soft. "Hopelessly naive, ridiculously impractical, probably doomed to a messy and tragic failure, all of this..." He waved a hand around at their surroundings. "But there's part of me that wants to believe it," he went on helplessly. "How warped is that? I'm not an idealist, the Spartan crap Mistra fed us aside... but I want to believe it. I want to find a way to make it work..."

"You are more than Mistra, Nathan. Always were - how else do you think you managed to get out in the first place?" Jack's tone was emphatic. "And perhaps it is naive, but I wouldn't write off the concept just yet. The school, at least, is achieving something. I'm sure kids like Angelo and Amanda and Kyle would agree with that."

Nathan nodded slowly, his eyes distant and his mind clearly elsewhere. "I feel like too many different people these days," he said, knowing that he was doing that erratic jumping from subject to subject thing again. This was going to be one of those sessions, apparently. "Too many different mes, heading off in fifteen different directions..."

"You have a lot of different roles to fulfill. I can see where the feeling would come from," Jack agreed. "Which yous do you feel most comfortable being?"

Oh, now, that one required some serious consideration. Nathan rested his chin in his hand, staring blankly at the wall. Jack didn't say or do a thing to break the silence. Giving him time to think, Nathan knew.

"When I'm with Moira," he finally said. "And in front of a class, which really shocks me. The rest..." He shrugged uneasily. "It's like I feel I've got to be more, but I don't know how to do it anymore. There are some many things driving me to fight, still, but I can't seem to reconcile what I need to do, to do that, with what I want to do."

"Consider the reasons why you feel you need to do certain things. Perhaps it turns out it's not as necessary as you think," Jack said. "And even if it is... you need balance. It's like what we were talking about before, the cost of having something to fight for making you more reluctant to risk. If what you feel you need to do overtakes what you want to do... well, you lose your motivation to actually do either."

Nathan's gaze sharpened suddenly, although he kept staring at the wall. Something had clicked, there. "You have to draw the lines for yourself," he said slowly.

Jack suppressed the urge to whoop. Breakthrough - he loved this moment. "Yes," he said quietly, not wanting to break Nathan's train of thought overmuch. "You can get advice, but in the end? It's you that has to make the distinctions. No-one else will."

Nathan frowned a little, fighting with a visceral rejection of the idea. Drawing a line that you wouldn't cross? Even if you could, or should... but who defined should? "It was always all or nothing," he muttered, troubled. "Reach the objective, pull out all the stops..."

"That was because you were expendable," Jack reminded him. "You're not now. You have a reason to come back. Lots of them, in fact."

"But don't I owe it to them to--" Nathan cut himself off, shifting a little in his chair, wrestling with an odd agitation. Thinking about all the things Alison and Haroun and Scott and so many of the others had said about him burning himself out, how that wasn't acceptable, even in a good cause. It wasn't as if he hadn't listened, hadn't heard them, but it had always seemed to him that they said one thing and meant another. If you believed strongly enough, especially if you'd done the sort of things he'd done, weren't you supposed to...

"I... need to think about this," he muttered suddenly, making himself look back at Jack.

"Thinking is good." Jack nodded. "Something for next time, perhaps?" It was best to make it clear he expected Nathan to think about this. And come up with something to say on the matter.

Nathan nodded slowly. "Time to fill up a few more pages in my paper journal, I suppose," he said with a faint, strained smile. "I always do better working these things out on paper."