"I know I said it before, but you really should be sleepin'."

Saphirus had installed a coffee maker in the security office. It was one of many additions, but it really just didn't make sense to walk downstairs to the kitchen, you know? He walked around another addition, the playpen with the sleeping toddler in it.

He poured his third cup, and looked over to the only other awake person in the room. Right, no coffee for her. More for him. The older mutant walked on over to the security chair and took a seat. "I dunno... I guess she just sorta... Wasn't prepared for it all. Can't say I blame her. She's a kid. She's at a point in her life where her main goal is to... y'know... @#$^off, explore herself and all that shit... And here I am tellin her she has a baby to raise, a husband." He resumed the conversation they had been having before as he turned toward the screens and gave them all a once over.

At night, they focused on exterior cameras and motion detection in the hallways. His run on security was a lot more lax than, say, Silver Streak's back in the day. Mainly it was focused on stopping kids from having dangerous mutant power brawls, and making sure no one was trying to attack, or sneak out at night to get into trouble.

It was a job someone could get done while taking care of a toddler most of the time. "She looked like she was tryin to convince herself to try, but... It doesn't seem fair to me."

"If you could turn off the voices in my head, I would."

She was still growing used to a lot of aspects of her power but by far the troublesome diet and always hearing all of her spider's mindless chatter was the worst. She imagined that her older self had grown used to them enough that she could tune them out during sleep, but... The younger version of herself wasn't there yet. As such, she snuck in naps whenever possible and cranked out at the very least two or three hours of sleep every night. She knew she liked to accentuate them with shades of dark makeup, but her dark under-eye circles were well earned.

All of that aside, the teen finished re-reading a paragraph in her history book and idly flipped to the next without looking up to the older man. A mentor of sorts, a friend, a... feeling in her chest she didn't really have a name for.

Saph.

He settled down with his steaming cup of coffee and she finally looked up at him. "To be fair to her..." Megan started, moving one of her legs a little to get some feeling back into it. She was settled in a chair beside him, with books and papers scattered about on any surfaces she could steal without getting in the way of the job. She was in Pj's that rightly fit the teen body she was in and didn't at all match the outfits she normally wore during the day. "...I don't think any of us were." She stopped chewing on the pencil in her mouth a moment later, choosing to drop it into the crease of her book to keep the pages flat.

"To be fair to you; The only way to find anything out and try to get some semblance of control over your own life again, you had to burst her bubble. She chose to ignore all of the signs, and it really wouldn't have been fair to you or Jr. if you have just let her continue to ignore it."

"Eh, Can't say I know how to do that... I just hit stuff." He got settled in, kicking his feet up, but taking care to avoid her homework. The veteran superhero looked over to his young old friend as she looked up at him, locking eyes for a second, and then returning to the screens.

"Yeah... Though it was different for me. I was young for... What, a few weeks? She's not turning back. Like I said, I can't blame her; I wouldn't even try." He leaned back to look at the ceiling for a second, as if some form of advice would be up there for him. For now, he just had the surprisingly wise young Megan to speak to.

She'd been joining him on more shifts like this, figuring she wasn't sleeping anyway, and her ability really did lend itself well to what he did. She wanted to learn more about the old her, he was more than willing to have someone with her mindset to talk to, so he ended up sort of taking her on as a bit of a security understudy. Also, she was a really good babysitter. He wouldn't have thought that, knowing the older her, but at this point she was one of the few people he trusted to watch over the tyke.

"Yeah... I dunno. I guess I had this image in my head of how it would go, y'know? In some ways, it went better, but... That feeling. How do you ask someone who doesn't know you to jump into your life again? Raise a kid they've just met?" He grabbed his coffee and set it on his chest, blowing on it gently before looking to a screen showing the front gates. "I couldn't do it."

He paused for a long moment, still watching the monitor. "You're draggin ass on that readin."

Her gaze went a bit distance when he brought up changing back because if she were honest that was something she struggled with personally as well. She couldn't remember much from the night she had woken up in that bar other than being in the middle of a fight and Lenna appearing from the smoke to pretty much save her ass.

She did often find herself wondering if or when she would have a change of her own, and if she even really wanted it.

"Blame is a complicated thing. You can blame someone for certain parts of something, without blaming them for the whole problem." Megan didn't have a side here. She was as impartial as she could be while standing outside the bubble of his relationship drama and offering her thoughts when it seemed he wanted them.

"I wouldn't blame someone for their reaction to trauma, because that is what I feel like de-aging was to many people. But... I do feel like she should have tried to work through it, rather than hide. Hiding ultimately prolonged the pain, without resolving anything." Megan was aware of what Shelby had known... Saph hadn't kept it a secret that the pink-haired woman had been keeping tabs on what her older self had been up to. When it came down to it, she had chosen flight over the fight in that scenario, but then never came back up from under the rock she had found.

She listed to him and was aware of the pain in his voice that many might not know was there. It hurt, she didn't expect it any too... and he was in a position where it couldn't really show how much it hurt to a lot of people.

"I don't blame you, nobody should. Anyone who does is an asshole." She tapped a sort, black painted nail against a page and sighed. "It's natural to want to go back to what's familiar. In the end, this isn't a situation you can 'win' in any sense. You can just try and hope for the best, whatever the best might be."

He pointed out her lack of interest in her homework, and she full-on sneered at him.

"This is the second time in my life I have studies this particular subject, and since I passed the first time around with flying colors I'm sure I'll be fine now."

Saph found himself staring down at his black cup of coffee as Megan spoke on blame. Man, in what world did any 15 year old have any business being this wise? Just... sitting in this room and chatting was better than talking to that bug shrink... Partially because the bug shrink looked exactly like someone he'd spent the better part of a year trying to kill.

"Yeah... I guess... What I'm sayin is I ain't mad. I can't be. I don't even know where to start, though." He couldn't bring himself to be angry at Shelby for running. Rubbing his tired eyes and taking another sip of coffee, he listened to her talk about trauma. She would know, honestly. She was in Shelby's shoes in a way. Still, where his wife had run away, she was running toward herself, trying to figure out more. "I mean, say we give it a go again? I'm not even the person the old her fell in love with anymore."

They had different things to be a afraid of, looking at their past adult selves. For Shelby it was him, their son, being locked in a family life she didn't choose, and for Megan, it was a struggle with her humanity... the fear of losing it.

"Hey, I dunno, I hear I'm pretty easy to blame for things." He spoke, of course, of the media's tendency to paint him in a bad light, and his overall reputation as a grumpy asshole. He set his coffee to the side on the metal countertop, and placed his hands behind his head, smirking as she sneered at him.

"Heh heh, that's two more times than I studied it. Yeah, I'm sure you'll do fine. You're a smart kid." He looked her way, frowning a bit as he let himself get lost in thought just a little. "A lot musta happened to you... It's like... you're still you. I know you pretty well... But this you... You're so much more... Together? I didn't wanna say it, but both of the yous I know before were sorta doomed in their own ways... This you... I feel like you're gonna be fine." He shrugged. It was a strange tangent, but he couldn't help pointing it out. Wait, had he mentioned the strange future vision to her yet?

"Well, for one, you don't seem inherently comfortable with how this is all going... so don't push yourself? You wouldn't pressure her into anything, so don't pressure yourself either." She paused, looking at him through her lashes, "... if you both do agree to try, then don't look at it like you're putting a puzzle together again. You're both different. Maybe treat it like you've never met before, and work on getting to know each other first?"

She scowled at his comment, knowing what he was talking about. She was adept enough with social media to see how he was portrayed online. It irked her to see it, seeing as she knew the real him and he wasn't anything like the media claimed. She liked a lot about him, in some ways she couldn't quite figure out. It wasn't fair and it sucked. "Uh, yeah, by assholes." She left it at that.

The topic shifted and she closed her book altogether, saving her place with the pencil. It was true, he knew her well. Her older self that is. She had apparently told him some things about her past at some point too, but he wasn't aware of the things she had done at her current age or prior... or at least he never mentioned then if he had.

... She wondered if it was time to tell him that she'd discovered her older selves apartment... or that she had tracked down one of her old contacts to figure out where all of her money came from.

But, before that, a comment caused her to look at him and tilt her head a bit.

"... both of the me's you knew?" That was a first. She'd never heard him reference another her before. Was he talking about the her he knew before they went after the cockroach?

"I am aware of the stark difference between me you are talking to now, and the reports of what my older self was apparently like. After connecting the dots I can only assume sometime after I dropped of high school I went in a direction that knocked me off of the course I had been on, into a different one." She paused again momentarily, thinking, and then added, "Or, my other theory, is that I am different now because when I was last this age I wasn't dealing with the various aspects of my power I had later in life. Warped DNA and all."

She wondered if she should feel even more sorry for him than she already did. He'd lost his wife already, and she hadn't even thought about how he'd also lost the friendship he'd had with older Megan.

He let out an acknowledging grunt at her advice once more. She was right... He just didn't know what he could do about the fact that she was right. "Here'd the thing. I dunno that she would be agreeing to try because she wants to, or because she's convincing herself it's the right thing to do. I just don't want to put her in that place where her life is ruined because of the decisions we made when she was someone else and jesus @#$^in christ this conversation is giving me a head ache."

He chuckled and raised his coffee in toast at her assholes comment, and took another sip of the lifegiving bean juice.

He froze mid sip at her response to his statement about the both of hers he knew. Setting the drink down, he dropped his feet, and sat forward. "Oh, eh... Yeah. I guess you wouldn't know about any of that... None of you guys would." He looked up, thinking about how to start explaining the strange collective world dream all of New York'd had.

"So... Everyone, including you, sorta... experienced a world where... It was sorta like a dream, but the world had pretty much ended. Nukes goin off everywhere, but the one meant to kill everyone here... didn't go off. So we all had memories of a few years we lived in this world. It was bad. I was burnt from head to toe.... My wife at the time became a... well... a monster. Roach ran a pit where people fought to the death, and... You..." He was looking at the floor, and he found himself smiling a bit as he talked to mostly himself. "You were the only good thing." He self realized after a second. "Eh, you and I teamed up... You sorta... pulled be back to humanity, I guess. I couldn't see, cause fire, but I knew it was you. When the dream ended, I went to see you, and you were... Well, different than you. I knew that, but I guess I thought I would see something I hadn't before. But then we went after Roach, and I saw it again. You." He nodded to himself, finalizing his thoughts in his head.

"Guess what I'm saying, is I've known three yous, and all of them have been different. But all of them are that same good person, deep down." He smiled a bit, looking up at her again. Hey, just because he was in the dumps, didn't mean he couldn't brighten up someone else's day, right?

Well, now he certainly had her attention. She sat up a little straighter as he sat forward. If it was serious enough that he'd set his coffee down, it had to be some pretty juicy info, right?

He launched into a simplified story of this 'Dream' and it did indeed sound horrible. Nukes and the end of the world scenario? Hard pass for her. It was interesting to hear that his last wife had become a monster, apparently, as she knew who his ex-wife was and she seemed almost too nice to be real. Like of like Xavier.

Megan absolutely did not miss the little smile on the older man's face, and for the first time in a long while felt her cheeks heat up a little. She didn't get to see that kind of expression on him often. Mostly when he was with Jr., or when his daughter swung by to visit.

The fact that he was smiling like that because of one of her older selves?

... She didn't quite know how to feel about it... but something in her chest felt heavy all of the sudden.

After he had finished, she was deep in thought. Three versions of her that he'd met, and through all of them he'd managed to come to the same conclusion. Despite everything she was going through, everything she had gone through... she'd be fine. Deep down she'd be okay.

Maybe that was enough.

"Despite how overtly dramatic that all sounds, it's... nice... to know that you haven't met a me that lost all of her humanity." She still wasn't quite sure what to think about all of the little clues she was seeing and if her hunch was correct, but part of her enjoyment out of being around Saph was poking at him incessantly whenever she found things that could potentially be made fun of.

A hobby, if you will.

"How many years were dream you and I in love, then? 'A few' is awfully vague for something as important as that." She tapped at her chin with a finger, still thinking, "... it's also nice to hear that there might be some potential for romance for me in the future still if my older self was able to form connections like that with all of this going on. I had just about given up home after-" She trailed off, cleared her throat, and very determinedly tried not to think f beautiful blue eyes and pouty quirked lips.

Nope! Not right now!

Damnit, she was blushing now. Stupid hormones!

"Must have been hard for you coming out of that into a world where it didn't exist, I assume, considering I've never heard of such a thing in any of the papers of media. I imagine there would be a whole slew of articles on it."

She looked reassured. He knew that the poor kid was more than a little distressed with the progression of her mutation. She tried to hide it, sure, but it was hard to miss when you spent any real time with her. He nodded to her statement, and leaned back, picking up his coffee again to take a sip.

She asked how long dream them had been in love. He quietly spit his coffee back into his cup, hiding a sputter before wiping his face, and taking a breath. "Eh... I never said anything like that... It's just..." He looked at her for a second, and shook his head a bit. She was too clever for her own good. "I don't know... The dream lasted two years. We... didn't really speak it. Not til the last few hours before our deaths." And they had died quite brutally, too. He didn't mention that.


"Can't underestimate the human need to bond, right? And that's what you are. Human, even if you don't always feel like it-" He raised an eyebrow at her trailing off. Huh. Well, it was none of his business!

He shrugged at her as she mentioned the dream again. "Can't say it was too hard. Most of my existence in that world was pain. Honestly, it really put my life in this world into perspective... Well, almost, because I hit a bit of a rough patch soon after. Anyway, you can see a lotta crazy theories about it if you look it up, but most people say it's a sorta mass hallucination or somethin."

Jr. Stirred. Saph locked in place, looking to Megan to make sure she did the same. It was critical to remain silent when he woke up just a little, so that he would go back to sleep, and therefor sleep through the night.