xp_logs | Nathan and Saul, backdated to Monday afternoon

After these emails, Nathan heads out to the mall to buy a crib for the baby - and, oh, call his father on an easily disposable cell phone while he's at it. Saul is glad to hear from him. They talk a little about Mistra and take a walk down memory lane.

This was silly. More than silly, really. This was his father he was calling, not someone who was going to track him back to the source of the call and do terrible things to the school. Even if Alison and Haroun had insisted on adding him to the threat database. Grumbling a curse under his breath, Nathan tossed the packaging from the cheap cellphone into the nearest garbage can.

The mall was surprisingly crowded for a Monday afternoon. He'd been hoping it would be the opposite. Dialing from memory, he paused to check the mall directory. Yeah. I would have come in the entrance on the exact opposite end of the mall from the store I wanted... At least the little cellphone booth had been right there.

The phone rang twice before someone picked it up. "Samara Data Recovery," a pleasant female voice said. "How may I direct your call?"

"Uhh... I'd like to speak to Saul Morrow," Nathan said. "Tell him it's his son?"

There was enough of a pause at the other end to denote surprise. "Just one moment," the woman said again, a note of something else in her voice, although the cheerfulness was still there, too. He heard the phone ring again as she put his call through - this time, only once.

"Nathan?" Saul's voice came in over the line. "It's good to hear from you. If you'll give me one moment," the sound from the phone muffled briefly, muted by a hand over the mouthpiece. The faint rumblings of Saul's voice carried, murmurs of 'meeting is concluded, gentlemen...' and a few seconds of silence before his voice returned.

"I apologize, Nathan. Director reviews, but nothing that cannot be dismissed. I... how are you?" Saul asked, earnestness in his voice.

"Hey. Uh... still feeling a little sheepish over the mix-up with the email," Nathan said tentatively, dodging a pair of apparently identical twins who couldn't have been more than three years old, and then their harried-looking mother who kept calling to them to 'Wait for Mommy!' "I really should have just called. I'm sorry."

"There's no need for apology, Nathan," Saul explained. "I have been spending the last week trying to imagine what this has all been like for you. And I realize that as wonderful as it is for me to get to know you after all these years, how terrifying it must be for you on some levels." The sound of steps and a door closing carried over the phone, then a long sigh.

"Nathan," Saul continued, "I've done a great deal of thinking about things, about what you remember and how you remember it, and I... I can't begin to fathom how long you've had these... false memories. And I'm no psychologist, but I know how much of a role what we remember of things colors how we react to them. Whether or not that memory is the truth, that's how it is."

Nathan swallowed. Talk about hitting the nail right on the head... He kept walking towards his destination, knowing he was distracted and not paying as much attention to his surroundings as he should, but unable to quite help it.

"It's... getting in the way of sorting any of this out," he said, oddly reluctant suddenly. "The... fear, I mean. I know it's irrational, but I'm... I'm so used to acting on instinct with things like this. I've been trying to break that habit, but... it's hard."

"I'm glad that you're trying," Saul said quietly, barely audible over the cheap cell phone. "It... I can imagine it would be simple merely to write me off as this monster from your nightmares. But you've given me this chance to show you differently, to prove to you that I am not the man you remember me as." There was another long pause before Saul came back on the line, voice slightly choked. "Did you have a chance to look at the photographs?"

"I did. As soon as I got back, we--" He cut himself off, a flicker of caution kicking in. "I've... got them sitting on my desk, actually," he said more hesitantly. "I catch myself going through them every time I sit down. I remember... it's all familiar, what the pictures are showing me. But it's not triggering anything new." He couldn't quite keep the defeated tone out of his voice as he went on. "I had a chance to talk to the person who helps me with my telepathy. The gaps are blocks. I don't know what the reason is for... remembering what I do remember the way I do, but the holes are my own fault."

"I can't recall anything traumatic from your childhood that would have been blocked out," Saul mused. "No fights, no accidents, nothing of that sort. Might it have been..." Saul's voice grew quiet and somber, "...whatever it was those people did? Tried to take away the foundations of who you were, for whatever reason?"

People walking by him were giving him odd looks. Nathan blanked his expression, or got it as close to neutral as he could, and kept walking. "It could be part of it." The words came out sounding clipped, colder than he intended, and before he could stop himself the rest of the litany came out. "You don't have a home, or a family. Only them. They're the only ones who want you, the only ones who can teach you to be useful."

Saul could be heard practically seething from the other end of the line. "You always did, Nathan. No matter what they put in your head. No matter how far away they took you. It sounds..." The contempt and confusion mingled in Saul's reply, "it sounds as if they were training a pack of dogs, not people."

A hollow laugh slipped out before he could stop it. "That's a little too apt. A lot of the reactions they trained into us weren't... human reactions, per se." Fuck. He needed to get off this topic. Although it wasn't the topic itself - he'd chewed over it enough with Jack over the last year - but telling Saul, he suspected. Your son's a recovering attack dog. Glad you got that knock on the door from the FBI yet?

He took a deep breath, forcing his voice back to something approaching normal. "It's possible. I know they'd mess with memories - not on a regular basis, but if it was necessary. And it's possible that they did more to me than they did to some of the others, given what I was..."

"They had said there were others," Saul replied. "Some that were able to return to as normal of lives as they could. Others... well, I'm sure you know more than they told me. I don't..." another deep breath "I admit to being curious, Nathan. But at the same time, a part of me doesn't want to even think about what they did to you. No parent wants to imagine their child becoming what they tried to make you. But what matters is that you are free of that now. In as much as you've been returned to me, you've been returned to yourself. That much I can understand."

Nathan felt a pang of horror at the sight of The Baby Place and how crowded the store appeared to be as he approached it. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea...

"The only problem," he said with a sigh, "is that who I am... or at least where I came from... I thought I knew that, at least. The fact that I don't anymore is throwing me for a loop."

"You know who you are, Nathan," Saul insisted. "This life you have built for yourself, whatever connections you choose to make, I believe that defines who you are. As for where you came from... I'll help you find it, if you'll let me." Saul paused for a while, and Nathan could almost hear the gears shifting in his brain.

"Pardon me, Nathan," Saul said after a while with a hint of amusement, "am I hearing small children?"

"Uhh... yeah. I'm in a mall, actually," Nathan confessed after a moment, flushing. "Picking up, um, a gift for someone. If it's too noisy I can..." What was he saying? "I don't usually babble like this," he said, a certain amount of self-directed exasperation in his voice. "I am in a mall. There are a terrifying number of children around suddenly."

"They're like rattlesnakes, Nathan," Saul said with an audible smile. "Just remember that they're as scared of you as you are of them."

"There's a whole horde of them." Nathan was silent for a moment as he walked into the store, heading for the cribs section. "There were... a number of kids at the settlement, weren't there?" The faces in his memory didn't all have names, but there were quite a number of them. "A couple dozen?"

"At least," Saul mentioned happily. "Eileen and David had the twins, they were a year older than you. You always loved fishing with them. You and your mother always tried to get me to go, but I never had much love for fishing." Saul gave a small sigh. "I tried taking it up after you left, you know. Still never was much of a hand at it."

Nathan stopped in the middle of the aisle, ignoring the indignant noise the woman behind him made as she moved around him. "I remember," he said slowly. "The fish, I mean. Not actually fishing, but cleaning them... smelling them cook, too." He started moving again, a bit more slowly. "The kitchen's... clear in my head."

"Your mother's cooking," Saul said softly. "Something I've never forgotten. It seems you take after her in a lot of respects."

Was that why he liked cooking? Nathan wondered a bit distractedly. He had always assumed that it was because it was... domestic, simple. Something entirely unlike how he usually spent his time.

"She... used vegetables out of the greenhouse. Didn't she?" he asked hesitantly, trying to chase down one of the more ghostly memories. Some of them seemed so... faded, for some reason. Usually the ones that weren't quite so bad. "I remember being in there with her. I think. Trying to see over the plants only I wasn't tall enough..."

"And coming back into the kitchen with potting soil under your fingernails, leaving dirty handprints everywhere," Saul laughed, deep and rich. "She used to always scold you with a smile. But you learned everything so fast. You were driving the tractor when you were eight years old, you built your first kayak at ten. You used to take it out on the lake with the boys from the settlement. Your mother always worried, because you took so long to learn to swim." His voice was hoarse with emotion. "But you always came back safe and dry, and you would tell her 'Mom, I know how to swim, you don't have to worry'. And we never did."

"I wish I remembered that." It slipped out, and he swallowed. Then something occurred to him, and he frowned. "So many of the memories I do have are of winter. Almost... all of them, actually." Of course there were more months of a year that were winter, in Alaska, but why would he be this fixated on the dark and cold?

"The summer months..." Saul said slowly, "even summer up where we were meant reasonably cold and still rather harsh. That was why we picked the area for the project, you see. Survivability. It's been," he paused, "my lord, years since it was canceled, but a few phone calls and I could provide you with all the information on it. I'm not even sure who would have the records, I know I didn't keep any."

"I'd appreciate that." Nathan paused, staring down at the pine crib in front of him. That one was nice. "Maybe there's no magic wand to fix my memory, but if I have the details... I can get it through my mind on the intellectual level, at least." One step at a time.

"If there is any way I can help, Nathan, you need only to ask," Saul offered. "Anything I can provide is yours."

"Thank you." There was a saleswoman advancing on him, giving him inquisitive looks. "I should probably go. This store is going to break my sanity if I don't get this... gift and get out of here. I'll... call again soon?" he said more hesitantly.

Saul chuckled lightly, "I'll look forward to it, son. You take care of yourself. I'll be thinking about you."

'Likewise' probably wasn't the best response here... "Bye," Nathan said a bit gruffly and hit the button to end the call. He stared down at the phone for a moment, remembering what Remy had said about dumping it after the call... but did he really need to do that? He shook his head once, sharply, and then pocketed it.

"Sir?" the saleswoman asked brightly, finally making her approach. "Can I help you?"

"Yeah. How much assembly does this one require?"