Xaviers!

Her leg might still be pretty busted up, but Nailah feels like the rest of her is just fine. Her journal said she'd been in the hospital but her shoulder feels fine which makes it hard to judge how bad her injuries had been. What she really wants to do is fly but she has to admit that it might not be the best idea to risk plummeting out of the sky or messing up the landing. She doesn't have to use her power to know that much. But at the same time she feels restless and this morning while reading through her journal she's gotten an idea stuck in her head that she wants to try. Muscle memory. She might still be able to improve and fight if she can teach her body what to do even if she can't consciously remember anything new. It'll be a slow process, which only makes her want to get started more.

And so she limps her way into the rec center and towards the wooden martial arts dummy. She props up her phone where she can see it and sets it to show a series of exercises on a loop. She finds a stance that works with her cast, which is to say it only hurts a little bit, and starts going through the motions shown on her phone. Punch, block, grab, punch, block, repeat. Without the perfect deja-vu steps from her power it's clumsy, but it reminds her of her first couple training sessions with Onyx and for a while things feel okay as she loses herself in the steady knock of knuckles and lower-arms against wood.


((open))

"You're favoring one side," comes a voice from over her shoulder after awhile.

"Hmm?" Nailah makes a noise and begins to spin around, catching herself a little too late and wincing when she puts a little too swift a movement on her leg after being startled. "Ow! Dagnabit!" she 'curses' as she grabs one of the dummy's arms to steady herself.

"Why are you doing this in your state?"

She leans against one of the weight racks, eyeing Nailah critically.

"Because." she says perhaps a bit defiantly. "I need to get back into shape."

"Your body is broken, little bird. Walk before you try to fly."

Not as broken as my mind.

"That's what I'm doing." she says, accompanied by the sound of shuffling feathers as her wings unfold a little and resettle. "I need to know I can still do this."

"You were not like this before."

"What happened?"

Nailah keeps up her defiant look for a couple seconds, then the fight seems to go out of her a little. "A lot. Too much. I saved a lot of people. I think. But I had to break my power to do it."

"And what makes you think it's broken?"

"It's no longer perfectly accurate, it hurts to use it and my long-term memory is all fudged up. It's all just... one big mess."

"If it was perfectly accurate, why did you have to break it?"

"Because the future it was accurate for was... wrong. So I changed it. I guess this is the price you pay for arguing with fate or destiny or whatever it is."

"We've talked about this before, whether you remember it or not."

"Let me give you an alternate interpretation."

"You broke out of a trap."

"That doesn't really change anything, does it? Trap, destiny, whatever it was, defying it left me like this..."

"You say it's not perfectly accurate anymore. You think that's a punishment?"

"No, it's part of the solution, I guess. There's no... punishment. Just consequences."

"One path is easy. Many paths means you have choices. That's harder."

"You thought you were choosing, but you ran out of choices. Now they're back. All of them. Even the ones you thought you discarded."

"Freedom can be scary, eh?"

"I guess..." she says a bit evasively. "I just feel lost. I can see all these possibilities but what good is it if I don't remember what happened yesterday."

"Don't be so quick to fashion a new trap for yourself."

"It's not like that. It is scary to not be sure what to do, but it's scarier to think that yesterday I went about doing... something. Who knows! I wrote some of it down, but... I dunno, that's why I'm here, I guess. I need to know if there's anything I can bring with me from today. Anything at all that's not words on a page."

"Have you told her what happened?"

"Told whom?"

"Your roommate."

"She's been concerned about you."

"I'm... not sure. I think so..."

"Check your notes when you can. She deserves to know."

"Maybe it will give her someone else to fuss over for awhile."

"I've probably told her... I'm not sure why I wouldn't have..." she says, awkwardly. "I don't wanna be fussed over though."

"Ah, because you're so tough, are you?"

"I stopped a super-villain while having a broken leg. I've been set on fire twice. Maybe I'm not tough by mutant standards, but I'm not weak!" she objects.

"You have a broken leg and head trauma. I could knock you over with a feather. I could knock you over with one of yours."

"Doesn't mean I need to be babied..." she says, bit less defiant and more pouty because, well, Isolde's right.

"You're not a baby, you're injured. Nobody would think less of you."

"Hey, wait a second, then why are you glad she might stop fussing over you if there's nothing wrong with it?"

"Do I look like I'm walking wounded?"

"Would you like it any more if you were?"

"I don't tend to have that problem."

"That's not really what I asked."

"I'm not... used to being fussed over," she admits.

"It's new to me."

"There you go then. It feels like yesterday I was saving people and chasing down a bad guy and now I'm like this. All... fragile and hurting and it stinks!"

"So it's not the fussing that frustrates you. It's needing it."