xp_logs | Nathan and Jack, Sunday afternoon

Jack finally arrives to see his patient, who isn't in a very good frame of mind following the memorial service the day before.

Jack hadn't actually been down in the medlab before, which might have been something of a surprise given the amount of damage his patient had incurred over the year. Or perhaps not - Nathan might have gotten hurt a lot, but he was also tough. Lucky, too. As the little red-haired Scottish girl left him at Nathan's door, Jack knocked lightly on it, calling out: "Nathan? It's Jack. Are you up for visitors?"

Nathan had been... drifting. His head was clearer today, but he was feeling detached in a different sort of way. But the familiar voice drew him back to a stronger awareness of his surroundings, and he swallowed, feeling oddly uncertain. The weekend already? He was losing track.

"Come in, Jack," he called back hoarsely.

"Twenty miles of bad road comes to mind," Jack said as he let himself in, taking in Nathan's battered appearance. "Or maybe fifty. How are you feeling?"

Nathan didn't answer immediately, not until Jack had sat down in the chair beside the bed. "Pretty lousy," he said finally, his voice low, almost inaudible even in the quiet of the room. "I'm getting very sick of staring up at this ceiling... it's very dull." The pictures were just one little patch of color, of something, in a sea of white. There was something very appropriate about the metaphor.

"Yes, well, it was a pretty crappy question to start with," Jack admitted with a wry face. From those few words he'd gotten a hint of Nathan's emotional state, and it wasn't good. "Can I get you anything? Some water?"

"Should be a glass with a straw... side table?" Nathan murmured, his voice flat. "Not sure, because I can't sit up. Guess this is going to either kill or cure me when it comes to the phobia about being restrained..." Jack held the glass so that he could take a sip; it did wonders for his throat, but even after he couldn't summon up a much louder voice. "Feel like I'm in a cage."

Setting the glass down and taking a seat, Jack looked at Nathan with nothing but understanding in his expression. "Have they told you how long you'll need that rig for?"

"Three, four weeks... something like that." He'd stopped thinking too hard about timeframes, after the morning - well, he'd thought it had been the morning, at least - when he'd laid here and starting dividing up those three or four weeks into days, hours, minutes, seconds... "Would have been longer, without Amanda. I'm very fortunate. No real neurological damage." It was almost a direct parroting of what Hank had said to him, only without the cheerfulness.

"Somehow I'm not getting the feeling you entirely agree with that, your good fortune," Jack said, tilting his head slightly. "Which part?"

"Oh. Where would I start." His voice stayed flat, expressionless, on words that really should have come out sounding sarcastic. "More than half the operatives I wanted to save are dead. Most of the rest are critically injured or brain-damaged. And I'm flat on my back in medlab. Again. It must be Tuesday."

"Remember what we talked about? About breaking the big things down into smaller bits so we could deal with them one at a time?" Jack asked, concerned by the lack of emotion. Understandable, in the wake of a life-shattering series of events, but concerning nonetheless. "Start with the medlab part," he suggested, knowing that was the smallest of the issues and therefore easier to talk about. "Do you feel this is getting to be a habit?"

"Of course it is." There was something else there besides the flatness, now, just a trace of angry resentment. "They're probably up there starting the clock. How long until Captain Sprains-His-Brain gets himself mangled again. My classes..." His throat was a little tight, suddenly, and he swallowed. "Why'd I even start teaching? Can't ever finish anything, because I keep winding up doing this... they know they can't rely on me..."

"Has any of them said that they can't rely on you?" Jack asked reasonably. "This is, as has been pointed out before, a unique situation. With so many of the staff being X-Men, I'm sure the students are used to the disruption. And there are contingencies in place to deal with them."

"And how many times have they needed to use them for me?" Nathan stared dully up at the ceiling, the flicker of unsettled emotion fading again. "How many times since New Year's alone?" If he'd been able to move his head, he would have looked away; Jack's expression hadn't changed one iota. "Just calling it the way I see it... how any of it happens doesn't matter. Not to them. Can't be what they need when I'm down here or off somewhere..." And what they needed was all that really mattered to them.

"And what about what you need to be?" Jack countered. "You don't do this for fun, or on purpose - I would have noticed self-injuring tendencies by now. So being out there, doing what you've been doing - it's important enough to risk the injury and the medlab time and the absence from class."

"Can't have it both ways. Maybe I'm starting to see that." Only Mistra was gone, now, and maybe his career as an X-Man, too. He didn't really know for sure how well his back was going to heal up, whatever they said. Walking was one thing. Doing the sort of thing he was used to doing - that was another. Jack just sat there, waiting patiently, and that tightness in his throat came back suddenly. "Don't listen to me. Just feeling kind of apathetic at the moment..." Apathetic. Well, that was one word.

"It's a common reaction, after a significant amount of trauma. Physical and emotional. It's like the body shuts down emotional response, in order to deal with the magnitude of it all." Jack considered the battered profile in front of him. "The memorial service... that was yesterday, right?"

"Yeah..." Nathan trailed off, staring up blankly at the ceiling. Not thinking about the time with Ani and Isabel and Ian afterwards. Conversations like that weren't for sharing, not even with your therapist. "Moira was there. So I watched. It was... pretty, I guess." Alison singing and Anika scattering the ashes into the lake. "There's a gravestone," he said after a long moment of silence. "On the hill. I... picked the epitaph. Don't think they really got it. The one from Thermopylae? 'Go tell the Spartans'?"

"It's appropos." Jack smiled a little. "Letting go... it's hard to do at the best of times. Even harder when you can't make your own farewells. Watching wasn't the same, was it?"

"I was there with them when they died." His eyes were stinging steadily, even though the words still came out flat and dead. "Doesn't really matter if I saw their ashes get scattered, I guess..." Not that there had been much time for farewells in that hallway.

"Seeing and feeling them die is different to letting them go," Jack said gently. "Why do you think we have funeral services, Nathan? For the dead? It's for the living. A way to say goodbye since it's very rarely we get the chance at the time."

"I've been dreaming about them." A bit of desolation crept through, there. "All week. Every time I close my eyes. Sometimes it's from the past... years ago, or just recently." Those were the good dreams. "Sometimes it's my subconscious... trying to make me miserable or something. They tell me I killed them. Or that I never should have made them believe they could have real lives."

"You feel like you failed them." It was a statement, not a question - Jack was well-acquainted with Nathan's sense of guilt. "Tell me, Nathan, was there anything else you could have done that you didn't do?"

The answer was so obvious. "Fought to kill," Nathan said, no emotion at all in his voice. "Could have killed every triggered second-gen in the hallway. Easily. If I'd wanted to." Tim and Mick could have, too. He wondered suddenly if it had occurred to them, at any moment during that last few frantic minutes of battle in front of the doors of the training barracks.

"So could they," Jack pointed out, apparently becoming telepathic. "You were all trained to kill, and none of you did. Why was that?"

"Because it wasn't their fault." So obvious. Why was Jack asking him obvious questions? "They were victims. Just like the kids behind the door we were trying to hold. So we were trying not to kill them." Just trying to knock them down, over and over and over. "Too many of them, though. Then when I got the Trojan Horse to work..." He swallowed. "It broke their minds. I felt it. Nothing left except the imperatives, and it smashed them. So everything I did... everything Mick and Tim did, trying not to kill them... I undid." Irony. High fucking irony, and contemplating it was almost too much.

"Was it you that triggered the imperatives?" Jack asked patiently. "Was it you that rewrote their minds so there was nothing there without the conditioning?"

"No. Doesn't change the fact that I left them vegetables," he said, and couldn't quite keep the dull self-loathing out of his voice. Action, reaction. It was that simple. "I felt it. Their minds just... splintered. Almost thirty of them, even by then..."

"And what would have happened to them if you hadn't triggered the Trojan Horse?" Jack asked pointedly. "Besides them overrunning your defences, killing you and Alison, and then killing those fifty-odd children in the barracks?"

"Then they would have turned on each other." The imperatives had been so blindingly clear, even in the midst of all that. "Did I mention Saturday really sucked?" His voice wobbled, breaking, and he squeezed his eyes shut, fighting with the anguish trying stubbornly to surface out of the dull haze. Damn it, no. He was not going to do this, lie here unable to do anything but feel...

"I'm told that not all of the second gens are permanently damaged. Some, with some intensive therapy, will recover." Jack continued to push gently, knowing that the longer Nathan held onto the guilt, the harder it would be to dislodge. "So. On the one hand certain death, probably painful and messy. Plus the deaths of those children, all of the first gens, yourself included, and anyone who got in the way. On the other, a chance of recovery for some, and those that do not being cared for as long as they need it and at least a peaceful end. Tell me again how it is you destroyed them." He paused, sympathy in his voice but overlaid with a certain sternness. "I won't let you do this to yourself, Nathan. You had a really shitty deal, and you did the best you could."

"It wasn't enough." It felt like a vice was closing around his chest, cutting off his breath and yet paradoxically forcing the words out, too. "Should have known. That'd they have something up their sleeves, some way to make it all fall apart..." Mistra always did. Always. But he'd let himself hope. Should have known better.

"Why should you have known? No-one else did. Not any of the experts, or the other former operatives. Not even MacInnis, who you tell me was a director at one point. Why is it always down to you, Nathan?"

"Because." His voice was getting more ragged now; he couldn't help it. "Because it always was down to me. To protect them. From the directors. From the enemy. From themselves. Because I was supposed to do that, and I didn't... I left them." And no matter what Tim had said in his letter about not blaming him for leaving, no matter what Mick had said in his about how all that mattered was that he had come back, it didn't change anything.

"Nathan..." Jack paused, considering his words. This was going to be difficult. It always was when characteristics that were generally considered good - loyalty, protectiveness, love - had been twisted around to become harmful. "You're only one man. No matter what the training, what the powers you have, in the end, that's what you are. One man. One man who did the best he could. And no, it wasn't enough, because it was always going to be too much for one man. It was unfair of anyone to put you in that position, including yourself, because you were always going to be set up to fail."

His eyes were burning, the ceiling blurring in his sight. "There were too many. Just too many." His voice broke as he told Jack about Tim and Mick and Anika falling, about trying to hold them back from the door, then from Alison's shield. "... then something hit me and I couldn't get back up. I tried the Trojan Horse again, and it worked, but there were so many minds missing. So many that should have been there... most of Nash's team were dead by then. That's almost w-worse than Mick and Tim. They had to pretend for weeks that their conditioning was still... and then we couldn't get them out. So unfair..."

"Nothing about this business has been," Jack said sadly, reaching out and placing his hand briefly over Nathan's. "But it's not your fault. You need to see that."

"I keep trying to think of the kids. I felt them. But I didn't see them, and I don't see them when I close my eyes..." He saw the hallway. The second-gens rushing the door, Mick and Tim and Ani falling... "And I'm stuck here, can't do anything but think about it..."

"How's your telepathy?" Jack asked, apparently out of the blue and in connection with nothing. His next words clarified his thought processes, though. "Would you be able to see through Alison's memories of the children?"

"Yeah." Nathan took a deep, ragged breath, ignoring the stab of pain in his side. "And Cain says there's... footage. Do you think... if I saw it, I'd stop seeing the rest as much...?"

"I think so, yes. Being stuck here, without much in the way of stimulation... of course you're going to be going over what happened in your mind, over and over. New information would help you process it. Give it some other perspective, as it were. I'm not saying it's not important, but there is a bigger picture here, and you need to be able to see more of it."

Pictures. Nathan stared up at the ceiling, at the picture of Moira and the one of the baby. "Did you see those, up there?" he asked, knowing he was changing the topic a little. "Hank brought them down for me..."

Jack shifted in his chair so he could see the pictures, and smiled, allowing the subject change. Nathan was thinking about it at least - that was enough. "Much better scenery than the white ceiling," he agreed. "Is that... that's the baby, yes? The ultrasound photo?"

"Yeah..." Nathan stared up at the ultrasound picture. "Hank's sneaky," he said wearily. "Enough other people have been trying to tell me... or just wanting me to cheer up. None of them had visual aids for their pep talks, though..."

"I don't think it's so much wanting you to cheer up so much as being worried about you and trying to help you feel better by pointing out what you have to live for. Death, severe injury... they make people feel helpless. And platitudes sometimes are the best thing we can think of to say, which doesn't really help." He smiled at the pictures. "Visual aids. Hank is indeed very sneaky." And it had given him an idea for giving Nathan a connection back with the school.

Nathan's eyes moved to Jack, narrowing a little. "You have that look," he murmured. "What? I'm still a little fuzzy-headed but lightbulb moments are hard to miss..."

"If I told you, you wouldn't have something to try and figure out, would you?" Jack replied with a grin. "You'll see."