Kaiten: Looking At Ashes (Nathan/Medusa)

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Nathan and Medusa head over to take a look at the office in daylight, knowing a little more now about what didn't cause the explosion, thanks to Pete. Nathan is pensive, and Medusa starts to understand a little bit more about her friend and the way his mind works.


It was an oppressively nice day, that was the only way to put it. Nathan raised one hand from the steering wheel to adjust his sunglasses, wishing he knew why he felt like he had a hangover when he hadn't had a drop to drink in weeks. "If there are any uniformed types still at the scene," he said, since that was a likelihood even three days later, "we'll stay well back. So that they don't get any ideas that we're trampling on evidence." He just needed to see the office again, in the daylight this time.

Medusa nodded, red hair tightly wound into a bun at the nape of her neck to avoid agitated strands from moving around. She'd never seen the Tel Aviv office prior to the bombing and she knew it wouldn't be a pretty picture now, but she couldn't imagine how hard it would be for Nathan to see a place he'd set up destroyed. "Are you ready for this?" she asked quietly. "If we are able to look over the property."

"I've seen bombed-out buildings before, Medusa," Nathan said quietly, taking the next left. "Bombed a number of them myself. But no, I'm not particularly ready. I'll handle it, though," he said, with a little more certainty than he actually felt.

"Seeing a bombed out building and seeing your bombed out building is not precisely the same matter," Medusa pointed out, careful to keep her voice gentle. "Just let me know what you need from me or if you need to leave. It will still be there later."

Nathan nodded slowly. "I just need to see it," he murmured. "See how much damage there is, whether there's any point to rebuilding..." He wanted a look at the blast pattern, too. What Pete had told him, about what hadn't been found at the scene... If they didn't use conventional explosives, what the hell did they use?

"Without looking at it, I can tell you there is point to rebuilding," Medusa said. "And that I know you and your team well enough to be sure it will happen."

There was still debris on the street. Well, it was a crime scene. Nathan pulled over and stopped the car, leaning on the steering wheel for a moment, his expression oddly contemplative. It wasn't quite a mask. "I don't sense any press in the area," he said after another long moment. "Although I'd keep your hair looking as ordinary as possible, just in case."

Medusa smiled at him and reached into her bag, pulling out a floppy hat she'd bought at one of the markets. Designed to block the sun, it also had the added benefit of covering her unnaturally red hair. "We definitely do not want to attract any unnecessary attention." Opening her door, she stepped out and waited to follow Nathan's lead.

Nathan blinked at the floppy hat, and then gave one of the first real smiles he'd managed all week. Getting out of the car, he locked it behind him and headed around the car to join Medusa. They went as far as they could on the sidewalk before they had to stop, the debris having spilled out across the sidewalk and the road alike.

"Looks worse in daylight," Nathan said very quietly, after a moment.

Medusa just stood quietly, surveying the damage. It was bad and she realized that Elpis had been fairly lucky with their casualties. A glint caught her eye and she leaned down, lifting a broken picture frame from the rest of the debris, smiling faces obscured with dust.

Nathan forced himself to look away from the ruins, at what she'd picked up. "That's a picture from the wedding. Mine and Moira's, I mean," he said, staring down at it. "Someone must have had it on their desk." He looked back at the building - frowning, just a little. "I don't understand what happened here," he said after a long moment.

Medusa carefully tucked the picture into her bag, pulling out a camera at the same time. Snapping a few shots of the debris, she took a few steps forward before glancing at Nate's frown. "What do you mean?" she asked; since he obviously knew what had happened, there was something bothering him about it.

"The damage." He tilted his head, studying the building carefully. "I've seen a lot of buildings in this state." But what he was seeing didn't make sense. "But... this is unusual. I thought it looked like a car bomb when I passed it in the dark, but... it doesn't."

Medusa frowned, taking a few more pictures. She wasn't sure what Nathan was looking at that let him know something was off, but she trusted his judgment. "Atypical blast pattern?" she asked.

"Odd, at the very least. And knowing there were no traces of any of the usual explosives... damn," he muttered. "It would be nice to have something to go on, here." There was nothing to be done on that front right now, though, so he pushed the concern aside, just for now. And made himself stop looking at the ruined office as a puzzle.

Which only made looking at it harder.

"It was a beautiful building, you know," he said more quietly. "Well, you do know - you've seen the pictures on the website."

"It will be beautiful again," she said, slipping the camera back into her bag. "Once you decide exactly how you want to rebuild."

"Do you know why I picked it?" Nathan went on, his voice oddly distant, before Medusa could answer. "Because it was a mixture of old and new. The modern additions and renovations added to the building, but respected its historic character. The old and the new coexisting, in a harmonious way." He'd thought that was so fitting, for what Elpis was, what it was hoping to do.

Medusa wondered if that wasn't how Nathan viewed himself sometimes. The slow, careful way he had revealed pieces of his past to her implied a certain concern as to how she would view it - but at the same time, it was obvious how important his past was to him and how Nathan had done the same thing to himself that he'd wanted to do to this building - mixing the old and the new to become something he could live with being. "When you rebuild, you can still pay homage to the old, even if it is not there at the start."

"I have the right psi-construct for this sort of thing, don't I?" Nathan murmured a bit ironically. "You know... we have pictures, back in New York, of all the... people we lost. Juliette took them when she handled their paperwork. We'll need... something, to remember them. However and whatever we rebuild here." He blinked a bit rapidly, looking away from the ruins. "I hate losing remarkable people," he said, his voice tight, the only thing that betrayed how hard he was struggling for control.

"There is nothing that makes that easy," Medusa said. "Though I think it would make sense to incorporate some sort of memorial to the people who lost their lives in the blast." She paused, glancing over at him. "And perhaps even a memorial to those who lost their lives in the other centers as well."

"From the looks of what's going on in Budapest this week, we won't be the only ones. To come up with something like that." Nathan paused, coughing, and the little wince as he laid his hand on his chest afterwards was hard to miss. "They really missed the point, didn't they? The people who did this. You don't set mutant-human integration back by attacking the people working for it. That's just an excuse for renewed enthusiasm. I wish people would learn from history. I really do."

"Perhaps we should return to the villa," Medusa said, watching the look of pain cross his fast. "You are still recovering and this stress may be exacerbating your illness." She reached up to touch her hat as her hair shifted underneath, before adding, "People rarely learn from history as they should. That is why we must show them time and again that acts like these will fail."

"Price you pay for fighting where the whole world can see you," Nathan muttered almost distractedly, then shook his head, focusing again on Medusa. "You're right, we should go back. There's nothing to do here, not right now." But there would be again.