xp_logs | Nathan and Angelo, Monday night

At the end of another working day, Nathan invites Angelo to stick around the boathouse for dinner, since Moira and Rachel are on Muir. The two of them set about cooking, while Angelo asks some questions about what he's been reading in the team files. The discussion is quite productive, but then Nathan gets a phone call that changes his plans for the week rather dramatically.

"... so that new report from Amnesty will be here by tomorrow," Juliette said tranquilly as she collected her purse and coat. "I've set up the registrations in the October conferences, and I found a hole in your schedule for that appointment Mr. Kooistra had to reschedule, Mr. Morrow. Was there anything else?"

"No, Juliette," Nathan muttered, and then mustered a grudging smile. "Thank you."

"Good night, then. Good night, Mr. Espinosa," Juliette said with a considerably warmer smile for Angelo as she headed for the door.

Nathan watched her go, the smile falling off his face. "She's too efficient," he muttered once she was safely outside. But the absurdity of the comment hit him an instant later, and his lips twitched suspiciously.

Angelo had also watched her go, and turned to eye Nathan. "Yeah, that'd be why you hired her. No scarin' this one away - not when she doesn't even mind Rachel."

"Don't nag me. I've been a perfectly good boss thus far." Mostly. His lips kept twitching, and he looked back down at the computer screen. "Besides, when I'm not, I just look over at your desk and get the Disapproving Stare of 'Act Your Age, Old Man'."

"An' that'd be what you hired me for", Angelo informed him serenely. "Along with the research skills an' the thing Amanda says I do with gettin' everybody to like me."

"Now you're just fishing for compliments."

"Maybe. But it's nothin' you didn't say last week."

"You must have caught me on a mellow day." There was, he thought, nothing quite as much fun as reaching the end of a productive working day - even if he'd been away for most of the afternoon teaching Russian - and indulging in a little light banter.

Angelo laughed, turning back to whatever he'd been doing before Juliette got up to leave. "Maybe I did. Still said it."

Nathan glanced at the clock on the wall, then slanted an amused look at Angelo. "Am I going to have to kick you out of the office again? Or offer to feed you dinner, just to get you away from the desk?"

"Hey, you haven't had to kick me out of the office for almost a fortnight. 's only just gone the end of the day. I'll go soon."

"I could still make dinner, though. Unless you wanted to head up to the mansion?" Moira and Ray were both on Muir this week, and the boathouse was overly quiet. Even Bella was more subdued than usual.

Angelo glanced around the building, then nodded. "Nah, I'm in no rush to head back up there. Suite's kind of quiet since Bobby moved out, so... dinner sounds good."

Nathan rose, going over to the sliding door in the partitions that separated the office from the living room and kitchen and pushing it aside. "I'll see what culinary masterpiece I can throw together, then," he said, over his shoulder. "Moira dragged me out grocery shopping this weekend before she headed off again. Apparently she's not convinced I'm eating properly during the days she's away."

"You sayin' she's wrong?" Angelo asked wryly, putting his file aside and getting up to follow. "I've seen your kitchen."

"Oh, bah. I'm not that bad anymore..." Nathan opened the fridge, rooting through it speculatively.

"So what was in there before Moira took you for groceries?" Angelo demanded lightly.

"An assortment of very nice condiments. And a head of lettuce that had gone very slightly brown. Oh! And a quarter of a loaf of bread. I took that out and fed it to the squirrels while Rachel watched and shrieked gleefully. I'll have you know there was no flinging."

"I think you just made my point for me. An' she's given up on throwin' the squirrels around, has she?"

"She still shows an unholy sort of interest in them, but she and the squirrel population appear to have made their peace. I still think they must have been thinking nasty things at her. She's certainly never reacted that way to any other kind of animal she's been around." Nathan found some chicken breast and some vegetables. "Stir fry it is," he pronounced, pushing the vegetables at Angelo. "Chop."

Angelo pulled the vegetables over in front of him and dutifully started chopping. "Always meant to ask how she took to Bella. Or vice versa."

"Well, apart from the tail-pulling incident back at the beginning, just fine. Bella likes to pretend she doesn't exist, though," Nathan said with a chuckle, looking up towards the upper floor for an instant before he turned his attention to the chicken. "Ours is a moderately tranquil home, all things considered."

"Sounds like it", Angelo said with a smile. "Still glad to be livin' down here an' not up in the mansion?"

"Well, with the telepathy back I'm remembered how nice the slight distance is, yet." Nathan gave Angelo a sideway look. "I've been meaning to ask you if you haven't been sleeping well or something. You've been yawning a little more than usual in the mornings lately."

"...oh." He grinned a little sheepishly. "Nah, I've been sleepin' fine when I do. 's just been this readin'. Takes up a lot of time, an' it's not like I can do it in office hours."

"Reading? Oh," Nathan said, realizing. He started to slice the chicken breasts into proper stir fry-sized chunks. "How are you finding that?" he asked, honestly curious. He hadn't been pushing much on the subject just yet, preferring to let Angelo form his own opinion about what the X-Men did without any editorial comments from him at this point.

Angelo shrugged slightly. "Some of it's... easier to read than others. I, uh... read your file. The stuff about Youra, an' the rest of it."

"Ah-hah. Let me guess," Nathan said, pulling out a wok. "You went to my file first, didn't you?" He'd expected as much.

"Who else's would I read first?" he answered casually, concentrating on his vegetables more than they strictly needed. "Not like I really know any of the others on the team as well."

"True." Nathan was quiet for a moment himself as he kept preparing dinner. "So... what did you think of what you read?"

"Looks like most of your missions go pretty smooth", was the ungrudging admission. "But then... we get to Youra." A sideways glance. "An' the thing with the coatrack."

Nathan managed not to choke. "Um. Right. Well... you knew more or less about Youra. The thing with the coatrack..." He made a helpless gesture. "That was one of those bizarre one-time things. I swear."

"Did sound like it", Angelo agreed with an impressive deadpan. "An' you didn't sense it comin'...?"

Nathan took a deep breath and then let it out. "No, I didn't. I was trying to hold the telepathic switchboard when there were several hundred panicky people in that apartment building." Jim would have been able to manage much better than him in that situation, he suspected. "Was focused too much on that, and not on, um, random ballistic coatracks."

"...well, I guess random ballistic coatracks aren't what you'd expect", Angelo allowed. "An' you did survive it. Just."

"That's why we have a team, Angelo. So that there's someone to catch you when you fall off a building," Nathan offered a bit whimsically. The coatrack story really was much funnier in retrospect.

"Yeah, I know." He paused for a moment, looking down. "Read about the mission at the FoH headquarters, too."

"Well, that one was more than a little odd..." Nathan gave him another sideways look, waiting for him to elaborate. Something had clearly bothered him about that file.

"Didn't seem like the team were all that together on that one, 's all", he muttered. "An' I know, the place an' the guy in there were messin' with your heads, but..." He didn't really relish the idea of a teammate ever turning on him like that,.

"I wasn't all that crazy about what happened that night myself," Nathan said with a sigh. The chicken sizzled as it hit the wok. "I didn't think Logan was as out of it as he was, or I wouldn't have approached him in the way that I did."

"An' then... it took you a while to get him knocked out, it looked like from the readin'", Angelo said carefully.

"The void was messing up my powers, too," Nathan admitted, stirring the stir-fry. He gestured at Angelo to drop some of the vegetables in. "And carrying him, which I had to do anyway, was going to get in the way of helping anyone else. Especially after I got hurt."

"By him. Right?" He eyed the vegetables as he dumped them in the pan. "An' you couldn't leave him outside an' go back in?"

"We didn't know at the time where the door out was. If there was one. It wasn't a great situation," Nathan said, in a stunning example of understatement.

Angelo gave him a sideways look. "That'd be one way to put it, yeah."

"But that's not the sort of thing that happens regularly. I think you probably got a good idea of what the team actually does, doing that reading?" He hoped, at least.

"Yeah, I think I really did", he said with a real smile for the first time in the evening. "Still interested in joinin', anyway."

Nathan grinned. "Glad to hear that," he said honestly. "I'd been leaving you to yourself, to let you process all that information, but-" The phone rang - specifically, his cell phone, which was sitting on the kitchen table - and Nathan swore. "Here, watch the stir-fry," he said, and went over to answer.

Angelo glanced at the phone with a slight frown, then shrugged and went back to tending the meal.

"... hey, Dom. Thought you were going back to... what?" Nathan's voice changed from cheerful to tense in the space of a heartbeat.

That got his attention away from the food pretty effectively as his head snapped up sharply, though he cursed under his breath and turned back at the first smell of burning.

Nathan's face went increasingly pale as he listened to Domino on the other end of the phone, and there was something close to outright fear in his gray eyes for a moment as he looked up and met Angelo's gaze. "I'll go to the airport now," he said finally. "Don't let anyone do anything until I get there, all right?" He went silent. "Yeah," he said, and his voice cracked momentarily, "I hope so too." With that, he ended the call, and focused again on Angelo. "Something's happened," he said.

"Got that impression", the younger man said steadily, not looking away even as he reached to turn off the heat under the stir fry. "You gonna tell me what?"

"David was in Tajikistan. He missed his check-in. His driver finally showed up back in Khorog, saying they ran into trouble. An Afghan opium convoy, he's claiming. They were run off the road, there was shooting, and he has no idea where David is right now," Nathan said tightly, forcing himself to stop and take a deep breath before he flipped open his phone and started dialing the airport.

"...ah, hell." Angelo shot the food a rueful look - it looked like a good stir-fry - and then back to Nathan. "So you'll be goin' out to find him, then?"

"Yeah. I'm going to fly out to Tel Aviv tonight - we'll decide where we're going from there." As the call connected, Nathan gave Angelo a quick look. "Can you handle the office?" he asked.

"For a few days, a week? Yeah, I think I can handle that. Rollins'll help me, an' the others."

"I hope to hell it doesn't take us a week to find him," Nathan said, and then focused on the voice on the other end of the phone. "I need the El Al desk, please."