![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
x-viento.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsAfter last night, Nathan takes it upon himself to meet Sofia for coffee the next morning. They actually only crack jokes at the expense of other people for a very short period of time before learning a Very Valuable Lesson. Oh, and the first appearance of Sofia as a human being. Sort of.
He was making rather a habit of these weekend meetings at the UN. But people seemed to prefer having these 'informal' discussions on the weekend, when things were somewhat more quiet than during the week. He was also getting into the habit of this working behind the scenes thing, Nathan thought with a slight smile as he stepped out the doors and into the warm July sunlight. Today's meeting had been particularly productive, and he now had statistics straight from the horse's mouth - or to be more precise, the mouth of the Sudanese ambassador.
Smiling, he headed across the UN plaza towards the Ambassador Grill, pausing to check his watch. Precisely on time for the somewhat-overdue coffee and conversation... hell, I'm even getting punctual in my old age.
Sitting inside, Sofia glared at their waiter for the third time in five minutes, daring him to snottily point out that this was a high-class restaurant, with a minimum again. There were very few times she enjoyed being a Barret, but that had certainly been one of them. As a tall, distinctively male shape came towards her, Sofia let her eyes blissfully fall closed behind her sunglasses, and lifted her mug of coffee to her lips.
“You do realize you’ve just made a simple cup of coffee cost enough to feed me for a good three days,” she declared quietly, a hint of amusement in her breath. “Don’t even get me started on the ceiling. I feel like there should be golden poles around here somewhere.”
"Sorry," Nathan said, gray eyes dancing somewhat mischievously as he sat down. "It's proximity, rather than a preference for the opulent. I'm finding this place very handy. I actually got a member of the Egyptian delegation very drunk a couple of weeks ago and got all kinds of interesting information out of him." He extended a hand. "Nathan, obviously."
“I’ll remember to stick to coffee, then,” Sofia replied in kind, deadpan as was often the norm, as she firmly took his hand and shook it once. “I hope you don’t mind a more simple brew. I’ve had them leave a pot with orders to keep them coming. Sofia, equally obviously.”
"Short notice on the invitation, I know," Nathan said as he settled more comfortably into the chair, ignoring the way his back twinged - he'd been hunching over papers with the man from Sudan. "But we've been meaning to do this for a while, and I suspected today might be an opportune day." Oh, look, he was getting the hang of the diplo-speak, too. Jean would be so proud of him.
Sofia lowered her glasses just long enough to give him a look of ‘what is wrong with you?’ over them before pushing them back up her nose. “If you mean I’ve only been there two weeks and if I wasn’t such a calm, collected woman I’d be killing them in their sleep, then yes.”
Oh, he liked her. "They take some getting used to," he said with a perfectly straight face.
“It takes that long for the drugs to kick in, after all,” she quipped right back in an equally level tone.
Nathan smiled, an expression that somehow managed to combine equal parts 'wry ' and 'sympathetic'. "Challenging job, yours. Frost must have thought you were up to it, though."
Taking a sip of her coffee, Sofia allowed herself a moment to ponder how exactly to phrase her response. “They’re alright, really. Clearly drinking testosterone in concentrate and would benefit from researching your English phrase ‘shooting the messenger’, but otherwise, nothing worth storming out over.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Although, coffee outside the building today... does not go amiss.”
"Hence my phone call this morning." Nathan poured himself a cup of coffee, taking a sip of it before he went on. "Well, that and we have been meaning to do this for a while."
“You’re a brilliant man. I’ll be sure to call up a string quartet to serenade you after I’ve left,” she replied dryly, still hovering over her own coffee in a way that suggested she was trying to figure out how to stick her entire head in without looking silly. “Sorry about the hissing at you, by the way.”
"It was very dignified hissing," Nathan said. "And very impressive. I believe I'm singed in awkward places." He gave her his best 'I'm cute, don't kill me' grin.
Finishing the last finger, Sofia reached over to pour herself another mug, not bothering with cream until she had a mouthful going down already. “I have a bit of an unfair advantage, all that practice. I do hope your significant other is without mutation, either way, though. Or perhaps equal opportunity.”
"My wife is, thankfully, not blessed with the extra advantage of mutant powers. She's formidable enough without them." The way she was imbibing coffee suggested she'd been imbibing something else last night. Not that he could blame her. "Although I don't honestly think that I can be blamed entirely for our daughter flying before her first birthday..."
“And think, I was just about to request a transfer,” Sofia replied, carefully stirring her cream in so that the spoon wouldn’t ping against the sides. “Not that she’s not probably positively adorable, but at least I’ve handled lunatics before. Flying offspring, less so.”
"Telekinetic and telepathic, and something of a handful. But fiendishly cute, yes." Nathan raised the cup to his lips again. "And really, I doubt the school's much to be preferred, from your viewpoint. There's a reason the Professor is bald, and Leonard - Doctor Samson, the lucky therapist who work with the kids, is some sort of supernatural creature to have managed to stay sane and relatively happy after two years."
“I’ve never had to live and work with my clients before,” Sofia pointed out, pausing the mug at her lips to remind herself that really, she’d never been a therapist before either, before placing it back down on the table and running her tongue over her teeth. “It will just take some getting used to.”
"I imagine the proximity complicates things. I wasn't being facetious, saying Frost must think highly of you, to throw you into the shark-infested waters like that." Nathan paused, with a quizzical smile. "I'm actually very fond of a number of your current clients. I should say that up front. But I also have no illusions."
Tilting her head just slightly to the side, Sofia gave him one of her small smiles in return, little more than a quiver at the corner of her mouth; it might possibly have been a thanks. “The window thing is all fun and games, don’t worry. I probably wouldn’t let them hit the ground or anything.”
"I tend to throw people in the lake." Nathan blinked at her, gray eyes very wide. "Seriously. There's this nice big lake, at the school... I've found it unbearably handy, really."
“It sounds like it. I’ll see if I can’t set up a bake sale to fund putting a smaller one in nearby.” Pushing her sunglasses up into her hair, Sofia rubbed at the darkness under her eyes, which had at least gone from black to a grey-rose. “We’d save a ton of money on the water bills in the apartments in the first couple months.”
Nathan tilted his head, the smile turning slightly sympathetic again. "You know, if I'd known it would be cruel to drag you out into the sunlight, I might have suggested coffee tonight..."
“Nonsense. First of all, you’re assuming that I’m still going to be alive tonight, I have that meeting with Amanda in a little while after all, and second, I’d much prefer to be a Frankenstein with you, than her.” Sofia quirked her eyebrow just so. “I even brought some spare change in case I needed to pay for the drycleaning of whatever suit I might throw coffee at.”
Nathan's head-tilt grew more pronounced as he tried to sort that out. Frankenstein... vampire, maybe? He'd been thinking English maybe wasn't her first language - there was something about the very preciseness of the way she spoke that gave him that impression. He filed it away for later thought, however. "Amanda won't eat you," he promised, his lips twitching. "Really."
Sofia blinked, somehow even managing to make that part of her dry personality. “No, of course not. I might get tired of listening to her monologues and have her for lunch, though. Food poisoning.” The finger that came up to rub at her temple, almost in preparation, was the only sign that jokes aside, she could see herself getting tired of having pitchforks thrust at her. “Let’s be honest. I don’t know how to deal with several paragraphs on why I am a bad, bad woman. Spit in my eye, short, threatening notes on my door step, rocks through windows, chats through Plexiglas with a telephone, those I can do, but this being told, in long, sarcastic spiels. I need a sign, I really do.”
"Would it help to know a little bit about the medium that was being used?" Nathan offered. "The journal system was something created at the school. It was a project of sorts... oh, ages before I got there. Something one of the teachers cooked up to 'facilitate in-school communication'. Of course," he said wryly, refilling his own cup, "it's since very often been used as a soapbox, or as a way of carrying on little personal wars with 'no consequences', because of course you don't have to actually see the person you're arguing with. The headmaster at the school's threatened to unplug it half a dozen times since I've been there."
"Someone like Amanda," Nathan went on, "who was a student, is probably still approaching the journal system with a certain mindset. In her case it's complicated by the fact that she doesn't argue well in a text format... yet often can't resist doing it, for whatever reason. It's a recurring pattern."
“Even though, technically, I could be in the next room?” Sofia asked, though, she already knew the answer. “Fascinating. It makes perfect sense, really, I wrote an article... I had no idea that the basic formula could be used in this situation, however, given our proximity and familiarity with each other.”
“You’re going to make an optimist out of me, you know,” she added, suddenly. “Everyone will be very confused.”
"Amanda, much as she'd probably dislike this description, is very much a product of the school in a lot of ways. Both bad and good," Nathan said after a moment, thoughtfully. "As is Doug, really. It might not hurt for you to come up some afternoon, get a look at the place and the people. It might help you understand why you're dealing with some of things you're dealing with." He smiled a bit ruefully. "I'll emphasize the bad and good, because you'll probably hear a lot more about the bad. Or at least the crazy."
“Oddly enough, they didn’t cover the intricacies of mutant academies in my classes, no.” Lowering her eyes, Sofia watched the contents of her mug for a moment, breathing in a notedly even way. “I’ll think about it.”
"Standing offer. I'll even throw in a personal tour if you like. Although," Nathan conceded, "I seem to be spending as much time in the city as I do at the school these days. That'll change come fall. I'll be teaching languages."
That caught her attention again, and she flicked her gaze back up. “What do you speak, then?”
"German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Farsi, Serbo-Croatian, Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi and Kazakh fluently," Nathan said. "I've got traveler’s fluency in several others, although my Turkish and Pashtun are getting closer to real fluency. I've been making a concerted effort because I have a number of ongoing concerns in those areas of the world."
“Not bad,” Sofia admitted with a quick nod. “I’m impressed, anyway. Somehow the logic that was pushed on me that a good number of those weren’t worth learning never stuck entirely, after all.”
"It makes the work of learning worth it, the first time you're stuck in a situation where speaking the language means the difference between having a good day and a very, very bad one," Nathan said. "Not to mention that I just like languages. I'm going to take a stab here and hazard a guess that your first isn't English?"
Sofia offered him another one of her looks, this time on a pretty silver platter with filigreed edges. “I’m in the presence of a genius. No, it wasn’t. Spanish first, then English, then Russian and Latin and I’m working on Mandarin now. Passable French, German and Italian. You’ll take it with a grain of wheat the knowledge that I was never expected to use anything from the area where India is located; any skills for language I have are on a level of necessity as opposed to personal enjoyment.”
"Most of my original languages learned were learned by necessity," Nathan said. "My original employers were big on the ability to blend in as much as possible. Which was, of course, rather more feasible for me in Europe and the former USSR."
“This is going to be a long story, isn’t it?” Sofia said, more than asked, her sunglasses still in her hair allowing the more amber tones in her eyes to light up in amusement. “I warn you, you hear personal retellings of why a little boy thought it was necessary to kill his younger sister with a baseball bat, it renders you completely incapable of crying ever again. Maybe we should save it for a night when I order a salad with onions in it.”
Nathan laughed at her - softly, in deference to the hangover. "Not to worry. I'll say I did government work and leave it at that. I much prefer my current occupation... occupations. Much more fulfilling. And less traumatizing. Most of the time."
Sofia gestured at him with her mug, swallowing. “Remind me to get the card of your therapist before I go. If nothing else, I’d like to send him a Christmas cake. Maybe a small, uninhabited island.” With her mug already up, she held it at him in a toast-worthy position. “To less trauma.”
"I'll drink to that."
He was making rather a habit of these weekend meetings at the UN. But people seemed to prefer having these 'informal' discussions on the weekend, when things were somewhat more quiet than during the week. He was also getting into the habit of this working behind the scenes thing, Nathan thought with a slight smile as he stepped out the doors and into the warm July sunlight. Today's meeting had been particularly productive, and he now had statistics straight from the horse's mouth - or to be more precise, the mouth of the Sudanese ambassador.
Smiling, he headed across the UN plaza towards the Ambassador Grill, pausing to check his watch. Precisely on time for the somewhat-overdue coffee and conversation... hell, I'm even getting punctual in my old age.
Sitting inside, Sofia glared at their waiter for the third time in five minutes, daring him to snottily point out that this was a high-class restaurant, with a minimum again. There were very few times she enjoyed being a Barret, but that had certainly been one of them. As a tall, distinctively male shape came towards her, Sofia let her eyes blissfully fall closed behind her sunglasses, and lifted her mug of coffee to her lips.
“You do realize you’ve just made a simple cup of coffee cost enough to feed me for a good three days,” she declared quietly, a hint of amusement in her breath. “Don’t even get me started on the ceiling. I feel like there should be golden poles around here somewhere.”
"Sorry," Nathan said, gray eyes dancing somewhat mischievously as he sat down. "It's proximity, rather than a preference for the opulent. I'm finding this place very handy. I actually got a member of the Egyptian delegation very drunk a couple of weeks ago and got all kinds of interesting information out of him." He extended a hand. "Nathan, obviously."
“I’ll remember to stick to coffee, then,” Sofia replied in kind, deadpan as was often the norm, as she firmly took his hand and shook it once. “I hope you don’t mind a more simple brew. I’ve had them leave a pot with orders to keep them coming. Sofia, equally obviously.”
"Short notice on the invitation, I know," Nathan said as he settled more comfortably into the chair, ignoring the way his back twinged - he'd been hunching over papers with the man from Sudan. "But we've been meaning to do this for a while, and I suspected today might be an opportune day." Oh, look, he was getting the hang of the diplo-speak, too. Jean would be so proud of him.
Sofia lowered her glasses just long enough to give him a look of ‘what is wrong with you?’ over them before pushing them back up her nose. “If you mean I’ve only been there two weeks and if I wasn’t such a calm, collected woman I’d be killing them in their sleep, then yes.”
Oh, he liked her. "They take some getting used to," he said with a perfectly straight face.
“It takes that long for the drugs to kick in, after all,” she quipped right back in an equally level tone.
Nathan smiled, an expression that somehow managed to combine equal parts 'wry ' and 'sympathetic'. "Challenging job, yours. Frost must have thought you were up to it, though."
Taking a sip of her coffee, Sofia allowed herself a moment to ponder how exactly to phrase her response. “They’re alright, really. Clearly drinking testosterone in concentrate and would benefit from researching your English phrase ‘shooting the messenger’, but otherwise, nothing worth storming out over.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Although, coffee outside the building today... does not go amiss.”
"Hence my phone call this morning." Nathan poured himself a cup of coffee, taking a sip of it before he went on. "Well, that and we have been meaning to do this for a while."
“You’re a brilliant man. I’ll be sure to call up a string quartet to serenade you after I’ve left,” she replied dryly, still hovering over her own coffee in a way that suggested she was trying to figure out how to stick her entire head in without looking silly. “Sorry about the hissing at you, by the way.”
"It was very dignified hissing," Nathan said. "And very impressive. I believe I'm singed in awkward places." He gave her his best 'I'm cute, don't kill me' grin.
Finishing the last finger, Sofia reached over to pour herself another mug, not bothering with cream until she had a mouthful going down already. “I have a bit of an unfair advantage, all that practice. I do hope your significant other is without mutation, either way, though. Or perhaps equal opportunity.”
"My wife is, thankfully, not blessed with the extra advantage of mutant powers. She's formidable enough without them." The way she was imbibing coffee suggested she'd been imbibing something else last night. Not that he could blame her. "Although I don't honestly think that I can be blamed entirely for our daughter flying before her first birthday..."
“And think, I was just about to request a transfer,” Sofia replied, carefully stirring her cream in so that the spoon wouldn’t ping against the sides. “Not that she’s not probably positively adorable, but at least I’ve handled lunatics before. Flying offspring, less so.”
"Telekinetic and telepathic, and something of a handful. But fiendishly cute, yes." Nathan raised the cup to his lips again. "And really, I doubt the school's much to be preferred, from your viewpoint. There's a reason the Professor is bald, and Leonard - Doctor Samson, the lucky therapist who work with the kids, is some sort of supernatural creature to have managed to stay sane and relatively happy after two years."
“I’ve never had to live and work with my clients before,” Sofia pointed out, pausing the mug at her lips to remind herself that really, she’d never been a therapist before either, before placing it back down on the table and running her tongue over her teeth. “It will just take some getting used to.”
"I imagine the proximity complicates things. I wasn't being facetious, saying Frost must think highly of you, to throw you into the shark-infested waters like that." Nathan paused, with a quizzical smile. "I'm actually very fond of a number of your current clients. I should say that up front. But I also have no illusions."
Tilting her head just slightly to the side, Sofia gave him one of her small smiles in return, little more than a quiver at the corner of her mouth; it might possibly have been a thanks. “The window thing is all fun and games, don’t worry. I probably wouldn’t let them hit the ground or anything.”
"I tend to throw people in the lake." Nathan blinked at her, gray eyes very wide. "Seriously. There's this nice big lake, at the school... I've found it unbearably handy, really."
“It sounds like it. I’ll see if I can’t set up a bake sale to fund putting a smaller one in nearby.” Pushing her sunglasses up into her hair, Sofia rubbed at the darkness under her eyes, which had at least gone from black to a grey-rose. “We’d save a ton of money on the water bills in the apartments in the first couple months.”
Nathan tilted his head, the smile turning slightly sympathetic again. "You know, if I'd known it would be cruel to drag you out into the sunlight, I might have suggested coffee tonight..."
“Nonsense. First of all, you’re assuming that I’m still going to be alive tonight, I have that meeting with Amanda in a little while after all, and second, I’d much prefer to be a Frankenstein with you, than her.” Sofia quirked her eyebrow just so. “I even brought some spare change in case I needed to pay for the drycleaning of whatever suit I might throw coffee at.”
Nathan's head-tilt grew more pronounced as he tried to sort that out. Frankenstein... vampire, maybe? He'd been thinking English maybe wasn't her first language - there was something about the very preciseness of the way she spoke that gave him that impression. He filed it away for later thought, however. "Amanda won't eat you," he promised, his lips twitching. "Really."
Sofia blinked, somehow even managing to make that part of her dry personality. “No, of course not. I might get tired of listening to her monologues and have her for lunch, though. Food poisoning.” The finger that came up to rub at her temple, almost in preparation, was the only sign that jokes aside, she could see herself getting tired of having pitchforks thrust at her. “Let’s be honest. I don’t know how to deal with several paragraphs on why I am a bad, bad woman. Spit in my eye, short, threatening notes on my door step, rocks through windows, chats through Plexiglas with a telephone, those I can do, but this being told, in long, sarcastic spiels. I need a sign, I really do.”
"Would it help to know a little bit about the medium that was being used?" Nathan offered. "The journal system was something created at the school. It was a project of sorts... oh, ages before I got there. Something one of the teachers cooked up to 'facilitate in-school communication'. Of course," he said wryly, refilling his own cup, "it's since very often been used as a soapbox, or as a way of carrying on little personal wars with 'no consequences', because of course you don't have to actually see the person you're arguing with. The headmaster at the school's threatened to unplug it half a dozen times since I've been there."
"Someone like Amanda," Nathan went on, "who was a student, is probably still approaching the journal system with a certain mindset. In her case it's complicated by the fact that she doesn't argue well in a text format... yet often can't resist doing it, for whatever reason. It's a recurring pattern."
“Even though, technically, I could be in the next room?” Sofia asked, though, she already knew the answer. “Fascinating. It makes perfect sense, really, I wrote an article... I had no idea that the basic formula could be used in this situation, however, given our proximity and familiarity with each other.”
“You’re going to make an optimist out of me, you know,” she added, suddenly. “Everyone will be very confused.”
"Amanda, much as she'd probably dislike this description, is very much a product of the school in a lot of ways. Both bad and good," Nathan said after a moment, thoughtfully. "As is Doug, really. It might not hurt for you to come up some afternoon, get a look at the place and the people. It might help you understand why you're dealing with some of things you're dealing with." He smiled a bit ruefully. "I'll emphasize the bad and good, because you'll probably hear a lot more about the bad. Or at least the crazy."
“Oddly enough, they didn’t cover the intricacies of mutant academies in my classes, no.” Lowering her eyes, Sofia watched the contents of her mug for a moment, breathing in a notedly even way. “I’ll think about it.”
"Standing offer. I'll even throw in a personal tour if you like. Although," Nathan conceded, "I seem to be spending as much time in the city as I do at the school these days. That'll change come fall. I'll be teaching languages."
That caught her attention again, and she flicked her gaze back up. “What do you speak, then?”
"German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Farsi, Serbo-Croatian, Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi and Kazakh fluently," Nathan said. "I've got traveler’s fluency in several others, although my Turkish and Pashtun are getting closer to real fluency. I've been making a concerted effort because I have a number of ongoing concerns in those areas of the world."
“Not bad,” Sofia admitted with a quick nod. “I’m impressed, anyway. Somehow the logic that was pushed on me that a good number of those weren’t worth learning never stuck entirely, after all.”
"It makes the work of learning worth it, the first time you're stuck in a situation where speaking the language means the difference between having a good day and a very, very bad one," Nathan said. "Not to mention that I just like languages. I'm going to take a stab here and hazard a guess that your first isn't English?"
Sofia offered him another one of her looks, this time on a pretty silver platter with filigreed edges. “I’m in the presence of a genius. No, it wasn’t. Spanish first, then English, then Russian and Latin and I’m working on Mandarin now. Passable French, German and Italian. You’ll take it with a grain of wheat the knowledge that I was never expected to use anything from the area where India is located; any skills for language I have are on a level of necessity as opposed to personal enjoyment.”
"Most of my original languages learned were learned by necessity," Nathan said. "My original employers were big on the ability to blend in as much as possible. Which was, of course, rather more feasible for me in Europe and the former USSR."
“This is going to be a long story, isn’t it?” Sofia said, more than asked, her sunglasses still in her hair allowing the more amber tones in her eyes to light up in amusement. “I warn you, you hear personal retellings of why a little boy thought it was necessary to kill his younger sister with a baseball bat, it renders you completely incapable of crying ever again. Maybe we should save it for a night when I order a salad with onions in it.”
Nathan laughed at her - softly, in deference to the hangover. "Not to worry. I'll say I did government work and leave it at that. I much prefer my current occupation... occupations. Much more fulfilling. And less traumatizing. Most of the time."
Sofia gestured at him with her mug, swallowing. “Remind me to get the card of your therapist before I go. If nothing else, I’d like to send him a Christmas cake. Maybe a small, uninhabited island.” With her mug already up, she held it at him in a toast-worthy position. “To less trauma.”
"I'll drink to that."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}