Nathan (and Nathan?), sometime Friday. Or maybe Saturday morning.

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Sometime after his surgery, a still very woozy Nathan has a conversation - with himself. Or gets lectured. Something along those lines. His subconscious likes to growl, too.


This didn't actually feel like consciousness. He'd been peripherally aware of a few things... today? Had it been a day? The last thing he remembered clearly was Hank telling him that it would be over before he knew it. After that there'd been long blank periods, interspersed with brief, usually quite painful moments of semi-awareness. Nathan remembered Moira telling him that everything had gone just fine... or maybe that had been Jean. He honestly wasn't sure. Which was kind of alarming.

He'd been awake enough at one point to stare up at his ceiling for a little while. Everything had been blurry, though, everything except the double glyph Alison had put up there, the glyph for remembrance cradled inside the one for light. After Jean had come back in and added something to his IV, the glyph had started wiggling across the ceiling. He'd decided to close his eyes again at that point. Not just because it was moving, but because it was shifting. And he didn't want to see what it turned into.

"You do get the strangest things stuck in your head at times."

This brought whole new levels of meaning to the phrase 'talking to yourself', Nathan thought, hearing the comment made in a familiar gruff voice. Nathan cracked an eye open, giving the him sitting beside the bed a dubious look. The other Nathan smiled wryly in response.

"It's like you still expect the world to change if you blink for too long," the other him went on, his gaze almost speculative. "Or at the very least the walls to shift."

He didn't want to talk about shifting walls. Too much like the nightmares he still had sometimes, even now. Nathan closed his eyes again, willing the other him away.

"The shaky grasp on reality could be taken entirely the wrong way, you realize."

Great. Now his subconscious was taking form and lecturing him. Nathan wndered dimly what he'd done to deserve that.

"Why is it that you think you did something to deserve it? I thought you'd stopped looking for punishment?"

Nathan opened his eyes, fully intending to argue with his other self, despite the fact that he still couldn't quite see straight, and they'd locked him back up in the cage. He couldn't find his voice, though, and the other Nathan just shook his head.

"You're just a little envious," he said. "Because I'm standing up, walking around. Because I'm free."

"I'm free too." The words came out slurred, in a hoarse, cracked whisper.

"That's the thing about freedom, Nate. It can be standing there like a guest at the door, but it'll stay out in the cold forever if you don't invite it in." The other Nathan raised an eyebrow. "You should be glad for this time," he said, almost warningly. "It makes you think. It makes you choose. If you'd been unhurt, you'd have been able to lose yourself in something else, put off the decisions you need to make."

Losing himself? But before he could vocalize his confusion, he thought of jumping on the Blackbird to go save Shiro back in August, barely two weeks after being rescued from Mistra. And what he could have, maybe should have been doing this time. Pete... He'd promised Amanda that he wouldn't have a role in protecting Alphonso - an easy enough promise to make, his very involvement would only have given Shaw more of an excuse if it all went badly - but there would have been other things, other...

...ways to lose himself. There were always things that needed doing, and he was capable, when he was whole and healthy, of a great many of them.

"But right now, what needs doing is all in your head," the other him said. "No less important, but it's something only you can do. You need to pick up the pieces, Nate."

He felt... guilty, vaguely. Guilty and helpless and... useless. He hated feeling useless.

"Sometimes you have to be selfish. I know it's a difficult concept, but try and wrap your mind around it." The other Nathan smiled faintly. "Fortunately, you have nothing but time."

"Time-out?" He wasn't sure why the image had come to mind, but the other him nodded immediately.

"Precisely. Time-out. To pick up the pieces and decide how you want to get back in the game." The other Nathan paused. "Or if."

If. The word wormed its way into his brain, sinuous with doubt, and Nathan winced exhaustedly. He'd been thinking about that, since the conversation with Haroun earlier in the week. And he wasn't sure, didn't know...

"There are any number of ways," the other him said brusquely, "and any number of games." He gave that faint, familiar smile again. "But some things don't change. You weren't made for a life of leisure."

No, he wasn't. Even before Mistra, he'd been made for the struggle.

"But the right kind of struggle, Nate."

The other him might have said something else after that, Nathan wasn't sure. But that was the last thing in his mind as he drifted off again, the thought that accompanied him back down into a surprisingly dreamless sleep.