Prometheus Bound (Nathan, GW, Madelyn)

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Nathan reaches out to the closest mind he can trust for help. He doesn't have to reach all the way to the mansion.


Bridge had been eating lunch in the hotel restaurant when the call had come. Not on his cell phone, but echoing in his mind, a broken plea for help that had been accompanied by a rapid flashfire sequence of images and then had been gone as quickly as it had come. He had paid his bill, swiftly and in silence, and gone right to his rental car in the hotel's parking garage, mentally reviewing the images as he went. It had been years since he'd spent any length of time in New York, but telepaths weren't the only people with photographic memories.

He drove, carefully but as quickly as he could without risking attention from the cops or anyone else, unless the scenery around him began to match what he'd seen in his mind. Twelve, maybe fourteen blocks from Times Square... how much further, in the time since he'd left the hotel? Nathan! GW thought silently, willing his friend to hear him. Nate, bro, you've got to tell me where you are!

He'd drive in circles if he had to. There were a limited number of times in the last nine years that he'd heard Nathan in his mind - up until his time at the mansion, Nathan had rarely used his telepathy that way - and although some of those times had been under pretty desperate circumstances, he had never heard Nathan sound so shattered.

Something tugged at his mind, though, as he turned a corner, intending to circle the block again, and Bridge aborted the turn better than halfway through, stepping on the gas. Horns blared angrily but he ignored them, pulling into an alleyway between two buildings and coming to an abrupt stop, his eyes going wide at the sight of the figure slumped against the wall.

He was out of the car like a shot, pausing only to grab the first-aid kit out of his duffel bag, and knelt at Nathan's side. "Shit," he hissed, seeing the bleeding cuts all over Nathan's arms. "Nate? You hurt anywhere else?"

There was no answer. Nathan was staring blankly at the opposite wall of the alley, his eyes unfocused and his face deathly pale. Shock, GW thought, his jaw clenching, and started to bandage the cuts as quickly as he could. "Talk to me," he said softly. "Nate, what happened?"

Nothing. Bridge got the worst of the cuts bandaged - not a great job, but it would do for now - and then reached out and took Nathan's face between his hands, hoping the physical contact might jar him into some level of alertness. It sometimes worked, just by virtue of forcing his telepathy to register something...

Nathan jerked, his eyes wild and his hands coming up to grab Bridge's arms. GW felt invisible forces start to push against him, but only for a moment. A quick sigh of relief escaped him. Although he'd had a certain amount of faith that Nathan wouldn't blow him into the opposite wall. There had been times like this before, and Nathan had always known that it was him.

"You with me, bro?" he asked softly.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Nathan nodded. "Help me up," he said raggedly. "We've got to get out of here. Back to the mansion."

"Let me finish-"

"No," Nathan said almost violently. "Back to the mansion. Now."

"Okay." If Nathan bled a little on the upholstery, it wouldn't be the first time. Bridge slid the less cut-up of Nathan's arms around his shoulders and managed to get him on his feet. "You can tell me what happened on the way."

But Nathan didn't respond. In fact, all the way back to the mansion, he was silent and shaking in the passenger's seat, and by the time the car turned onto Greymalkin Lane, GW was ready to chew through his lower lip in worry.

~*~


Bridge gets Nathan back to the mansion. At first, Nathan makes a beeline for the Box, but then manages to pull himself together. Madelyn finishes the first-aid job Bridge started and is the first at the mansion to find out what happened. Symmetry isn't always such a wonderful thing.


The Box. It was the only thought in Nathan's mind as he stumbled out of the car almost before GW had turned off the engine. He didn't remember whether or not it was fixed, wasn't thinking clearly enough to register anything but that the Box was safe. If he was in the Box, he wouldn't slip and hurt someone.

And he felt like he could slip. He was holding shields on the links with Moira and Rachel somehow, but nothing else was staying where it should be. All the patterns in his mind were fraying under the pressure, trying to fly apart. The Askani were a distant buzz in the background; he couldn't hear them, couldn't make out anything of what they were so obviously trying to shout at him.

Coming apart.

He needed the Box. Now.

If anyone had gotten in his way, he probably would have walked right into them, he was registering so little of his surroundings. He could sense GW behind him, trying to talk to him, but his words were the same unintelligible buzz as the Askani, if closer.

There were other presences becoming aware of him, too. The other telepaths? He could feel what he knew was Charles, hovering in concern, but he blotted it all out. Just the Box. Someplace safe. Where he couldn't...

... where he wouldn't...

His hand froze inches from the door. Walk in, and fall apart in safety. Fall apart, he thought faintly, watching his hand shake. Let them break him?

Moira and Rachel. They needed him. Out here, not in there.

Nathan squeezed his eyes shut, something close to a whimper slipping out. But if he stayed out here, wasn't he... weren't they winning, too? Being strong was what they wanted, why they'd done this to him...

"Nathan?" A hand fell on his shoulder, squeezing gently. GW.

In or out, Nathan thought disjointedly, and realized that he was sliding down the wall. His legs making the choice for him? No, he thought, his breath catching in his chest. Choice. It was a choice. In was selfish. Too much to do out here. Too much reason to be out here.

But it hurt. It hurt, and even if he managed not to explode, he couldn't put the patterns back together the way they should be. Not the same. It would never be the same again.

Bridge stared down at Nathan's slumped figure for a moment longer, reassured that there wouldn't be any explosions. That alarming, prickly feeling to the air was gone. "Stay put," GW said softly. "I'll just go... fetch whoever's on duty. I want someone to look at those dressings." He'd done them in something of a hurry, after all.

Heading back into the main area of the medlab, he saw Madelyn appear out of one door, a clipboard in her hand and a puzzled look on her face. "Hi," GW said without preamble, then tilted his head in the direction he'd left Nate. "Help?"

Madelyn followed his glance and frowned. "Must be Tuesday," she murmured to herself, seeing Nathan in a state that could only be described as 'damaged'. "Can you get him into an exam room?" she asked, equally without preamble, indicating the door she'd just left. "All the stuff I'll need's in there."

Bridge nodded briskly and went over, all but hauling Nathan back to his feet. "Come on, bro," he said softly, wincing a bit at how heavily Nate leaned on him. "Get those cuts looked after properly, and then we can talk..." He steered Nathan after Madelyn, sighing a little as the doctor gave him a questioning look. "From what I understand, he went through a window trying to get away from his father." He'd been thinking hard about the images he'd gotten from Nate in that telepathic call for help, and that, at least, he'd managed to decipher.

"His father?" A dozen questions were on the tip of her tongue, but Madelyn reminded herself there were priorities here. Patient first, questions after. "No, don't answer that yet - let's get him patched up first. Just here on the table is fine." As GW helped Nathan sit up on the table, Madelyn was bustling around gather antiseptic, bandages and sutures. "Do you know if he hit his head at all?"

GW shook his head. "Nate?" he asked, and Nathan finally focused on him, at least a little. The look in his eyes was still mostly blank, though, and GW's heart twisted in his chest. He had never seen Nathan this bad. Not even when he'd pulled him out of New Mexico after he'd destroyed the Mistra home facility, nine years ago. And to see him like this now, after all the progress he'd made over the last year and a half, when GW had begun to believe that his friend was finally healing... "I know you jumped. Did you land all right?"

"Think so," Nathan said after a moment, his voice low and ragged. "Was forty-seven stories, so if I hadn't been concentrating I would have gone splat."

"And Moira would have had something to say about that." Madelyn came back and lifted Nathan's chin, shining the penlight in his eyes any way. He was sounding too befuddled for her tastes. "Nathan, focus for me here. Do you know where you are?"

"At the mansion." He flinched, at the touch as much as at the light. It struck him that this was Madelyn, the redhead shining lights at him and asking him questions, and he sucked in a sharp breath. "I should have been more careful," he said, something close to grief surfacing in his voice for a moment before it was swallowed beneath the shock again. "You were right."

She winced a little at that - right then she would have given anything to have been wrong, the shock and grief in his expression heartbreaking. "I'm sorry, hon," she said softly, even as she felt his head for lumps. Finding none, she turned her attention to the cuts on his arms. "Let's get you patched up and we'll deal with the rest, okay?"

"I did what I could with the supplies in the car," Bridge explained, "but he insisted that we had to get back here." He hovered anxiously, watching Nathan more than Madelyn.

"Thought I needed to be in the Box," Nathan murmured as Madelyn started to check the dressings GW had done. "But I can't. Lose it. Need to keep it together for Moira and Rachel..."

"You did well, for a rush job," Madelyn said to GW, before unwrapping the largest of the dressings to reveal a slowly-bleeding cut underneath. Her hands moved quickly, cleaning the wound, adding a couple of sutures to hold it together. She paused, not wanting to push, but worried enough by the security implications of Saul having been to the school to need to ask. "Can you talk about it? Or would you rather save it for Charles?"

Nathan looked up, even in his haze catching the distinctly worried thought. "They're not coming," he said hoarsely. "Neither of them. He let me see that much. They have no reason to interfere, he said. We're... fascinating to them, what we do. What we are."

"Them?" GW asked with a frown. "Your father and...?"

"Gideon. My uncle."

Shock flashed across GW's features. "That bastard from Chad? The one Dom said almost killed you?"

"Told her he wasn't trying to kill me," Nathan muttered. "Just trying... to test me." A semi-hysterical laugh slipped out. "I was right. I was right all along, I knew what I knew after all..."

"Easy, Nathan," Madelyn murmured, even as her mind was processing a millon miles an hour. Gideon, his uncle. "Testing?" she asked softly, hands moving automatically to uncover, sterilise, re-bandage a series of smaller cuts. "What kind of testing, Nathan? For what?"

Nathan focused on her suddenly, his thoughts coming into too-sharp focus. "Do you remember," he said a bit unevenly, "those files you showed me, the old ones that the taskforce dug up about how Mistra was set up? There was a think-tank in Albuquerque that consulted on the program, during the first few years. VULCAN... I can't remember what the acronym stood for." He swallowed, watching her tending to his cuts. "Gideon was part of VULCAN. I didn't wind up at Mistra by accident."

"Oh God..." Madelyn's hands stilled, face paling. Bad enough that he'd been taken and used by Mistra, but to have been given to them? By his family? "But why? Why on earth would someone do that? To their own flesh and blood?" And then the rest fell into place. Saul. "Saul let it happen, didn't he?"

Nathan's words were flat, emotionless, and he was far too lost in his own thoughts to notice Madelyn's shock and horror, or the increasingly set expression GW was wearing. "I was a success, he said. When I survived Mistra. Apparently my father is proud of me."

"Proud?" Madelyn took a deep breath. Patient first. She resumed her work, but there was a tightness in her movements, and when she looked up and met GW's eyes, his anger was reflected in her own. "Social Darwinists. I remember," she said, voice tightly controlled. "What do they want now?"

"I don't know. To watch?" Nathan closed his eyes, as if trying to summon up the shreds of his composure. "To see what I do, maybe." He gave a broken laugh. "The experiment's still ongoing, isn't it?"

Right then and there, GW could have broken something, if there'd been something close at hand to break. He briefly considering hitting the wall, but Madelyn was busy and didn't need to be tending to him, too.

He laid a hand on Nathan's shoulder, instead. "You're not a fucking experiment," he said, under his breath. "Don't even talk like that."

"Bastards." The word was soft, but said with feeling as Madelyn struggled with her own composure. And the feeling that if she hadn't pushed, if she hadn't dug up his history, none of this would have happened. Hadn't Nathan suffered enough manipulation? "Listen to him," she said quietly, finishing up on the last cut. "You're a man, not a machine, not an experiment. And they are just going to have to realise that."

Nathan opened his eyes. "I know," he said, and if it didn't sound entirely convincing, at least he was saying it, and not huddled in a corner in the Box, lost in his own shock and sense of betrayal and anger. He looked down at his arms, the patchwork of bandages. "I do. I think? And I've got to talk to Charles." He was starting to slump, adrenalin finally letting him down.

"Rest first, I think," Madelyn said, catching the slump. She glanced at GW. "I'll help you get him back up to his suite," she continued, raising a brief expression of surprise from both men. "I think familiar surroundings that aren't clinical would be much better, yes?"

Nathan's head jerked upwards suddenly. "Rachel's... in the nursery." The shielded nursery. "It'll be okay, then," he said tiredly as GW and Madelyn helped him down from the exam table. "Just... can't upset her."

"You're not going to upset her," GW said, keeping his voice low and soothing. "And I can talk to Moira, if you want."

"No, I'll tell her. Have to. She thought something was wrong, too." A tremor crossed Nathan's features. "You were all right."

"Hush, hon. That doesn't matter." Madelyn would personally beat the crap out of anyone who had the gall to tell Nathan they told him so, too. Even Haroun. "I'll ask Charles to keep an eye on Rachel, and explanations can wait, but right now? You need the people who love you. No matter what." She slipped under his other arm, GW already doing the same. "Lean on us, okay? We'll see you home."