tyler_gone | Office Hours, Monday, 3/9

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Office Hours, Monday, 3/9

It was Monday and a slightly bruised Tyler was in his office, idly mentally replaying the spars from the day before. He still couldn't believe someone actually wrestled a wolf; that was taking the whole man-vs-nature thing a little far for his tastes.

But he supposed hitting a teenage girl for fun was up there on the craziness scale, too.

The office door was open, and he was ready for any distraction.

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"It's always only time here," Tyler nodded, tilting his chin up to evaluate Nathan. (And taking a moment to be grateful he'd been clothed the one timme Nathan had seen him in a compromising situation.)

"Did it? I had a nice time." The tone was purposefully bland. "Looked like you got into it, with the hair-pulling."

"He started it," was Nathan's almost immediate reply, though it wasn't without a sense of bemusement to it. "I have to admit I wasn't expecting to find myself paired off against a student when I walked in there."

Nathan would have agreed quite profusely that it was a very great thing that Tyler had been clothed the one time he'd seen him in a compromising situation. He'd already seen Tony in the nude. That was enough for him, really.

"I suppose I should be thankful that my chosen partner wasn't Dinah."

"I think Ghanima has a sense of humor," came Tyler's dry comment. "Dinah was good for her age. And she at least asked if she could use telekinesis against me."

He leaned back in his chair. "She's a psychic. I don't like psychics."

Well, that was something Nathan hadn't been aware of. He quirked an eyebrow faintly, but appeared more or less unaffected by this knowledge.

"After Nazi bees, I really shouldn't be surprised," he replied, crossing his arms over his chest. "She's a good kid, anyhow. Or, at least, a good friend to her peers. She's approached me during Gun Club meetings to ask me to keep an eye out for someone in the past."

She'd also referred to him as 'Mr. Hot Algren,' which amused him to no end.

"Warning you about one of the other kids?" That made Tyler a little wary. "What was up?"

He scratched his jaw, realizing he should offer a brief explanation. "She called it 'touch telepathy.' I think she can only get anything if she's touching you, but I didn't ask a lot of questions."

Nathan thought about that for a moment, and then nodded slightly. It would seem that Fandom was going to leave him wary as to whose hands he shook from here on in. Go figure.

"I'm honestly not certain how thoroughly I ought to be explaining the situation," he confessed. "She's concerned for the health and safety of another student, because of her situation at home. I've spoken to this other student, of course, but she doesn't seem to think that there's anything the matter with the situation at all."

He shifted his weight uneasily, frowning.

"I found myself explaining to a student the reasons that her classmates would like to be made aware if she were to go home and... Not come back."

There was a sort of terse note in his voice on that last part, suggesting the 'not come back' was about as final as the phrase could possibly suggest.

"One of the soldiers?" Tyler guessed. "It's hard. Some of them are so much kids, but most of them really aren't. Our TA, Ino, she goes home for missions." He put a little bit of vitriol on the world mission. "I make her call me and tell me when she's leaving. She's been out since Friday."

"I suppose 'soldier' is a good term for it, yes," Nathan agreed. "I understand that there's a good number of students here who have dangerous other lives back home. And the student in question is perfectly content with the way her life away from Fandom seems to be going. I think I'm more concerned..."

He sighed and gave his head a shake.

"She doesn't understand the concept of people feeling an emotional attachment to her. That isn't why Dinah was concerned, no, but I found it unsettling that a high school student honestly believes that she ought to be completely forgettable."

Tyler frowned at that and started restlessly twirling a pen in his fingers. "Most people will say and do anything so they can't be invisible like that," he said. God knew he would. "Weird that she thinks it's her right."

"Not her right," Nathan corrected carefully. "She likes that people care for her. But she can't comprehend any notion beyond 'out of sight, out of mind.' She doesn't think being dead and gone is any different from being out of touch."

That pen was spinning even faster, now. "Do you think it's some weird religious thing for her?" Tyler asked carefully. "Like, if she dies she's in heaven and people shouldn't cry. That stuff."

Nathan shook his head, kind of wishing he'd brought a pen to fidget with, too. This was a very fidgety sort of conversation.

"The entire conversation was entirely too clinical to have any sort of basis in religion. By the time we'd finished talking, I was fully convinced that her thinking people might be inconvenienced by not knowing about her passing was somehow an improvement."

"Inconvenienced," Tyler repeated flatly. "Jesus fuck. I've had times when I was okay with dying, but that's ... beyond that."

"It's beyond that," Nathan agreed, straightening his posture some just to hide how much he wanted to deflate right about then. "Worse still, because of the situation she has back home, I'm not certain that I'd be doing her any favors by showing her that her classmates do care. And not because of plans to be made or favors she could potentially do for them. They just care for a friend."

It was kind of heartbreaking. And Nathan would never in a million years admit that.

"Not a high life expectancy on her, I'm guessing," Tyler said, trying to figure out which student they were talking about. "Yeah. That's ... I don't think I even have the words to say how much it sucks."

"Yeah. It... sucks." He made a bit of a face at using that word that way, but at least Nathan was making an effort to catch up on the lingo. "When I wound up with the teaching job, situations like this were possibly the last possibility on my mind."

Well. That and bees. And vampires.

"You're military," Tyler said, genuinely curious. "Doesn't that make it any easier? But yeah, it's hard to ... look at them, sometimes."

"My background doesn't make any of it any easier. Whiskey makes it easier." Nathan? Not so good at coping. With anything. Ever. At all. "Raising a gun and shooting a man is somehow easier than explaining to a young girl what it means to be cared about. I was surprised by the number of youths at the meeting last night. Too many of them were too good to be new to it, at that."

"I don't know if you can teach that," Tyler said. "I can teach someone to throw a punch. I started when I was about that age. But I'm not any good at playing mommy, and I won't pretend I am."

"I'm certainly not in this to be anyone's mother," Nathan agreed, sighing and seeking out a portion of wall to lean back against. "I'm here to teach, so that the people that leave this school don't make the same stupid mistakes as the ones I'm preaching about."

There was another pause, there, and Nathan almost found himself laughing. "They expect us to be the responsible ones with all of the answers. How did that happen?"

"We got to be the grown-ups," Tyler said, a tone of 'duh' in his voice. "This was easier when I was a kid. I was so sure I had everything all figured out, and I was going to get everyone to see things my way." A beat. "I was just scared."

"And then real life hit, I'm assuming?" Nathan didn't need details. He wasn't going to pry for any. "At their age, we all had it all figured out. And then, just when you're starting to see the world in the light you'd had it painted in all along, reality rears its ugly head. If that's what the kids want us to show them, I need a lot more practise."

"I had a story I was telling myself," Tyler said. "It was a lie. Real world came at me hard."

He shrugged. "I don't know if all the practice in the world will help. You should talk to Skywalker or Deadpool. They've been teaching here forever."

"Skywalker or Deadpool," Nathan repeated. And then he nodded faintly. "I might have to do just that. If I look long enough, someone might have some better insight on the situation with that one student than I'll ever come up with on my own."

A beat.

"Thank you, Tyler. For your own insights."

It was good to know that he wasn't the only one who didn't really have words for how much the situation... sucked.

"I had insights?" Tyler asked, then considered.

"Anakin is a good guy. Deadpool is ..." There weren't really words for Deadpool. "A good guy in a special way. I don't understand him, but I like him. But I'd talk to Anakin first."

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