xp_logs | Nathan and Rahne, Wednesday afternoon

Rahne shows up at the boathouse to do some work and finds Nathan reading the letters he brought back from San Francisco. Sometimes what you need to move on is simple, other times it's more complicated. The only important thing is finding it.

He'd been putting them in chronological order. Each yellowed envelope laid on the floor in front of him, the folded letters sitting on top. Occasionally he'd pick one up and reread them, lingering over each sentence, trying as hard as he could to read between the lines. Sometimes it wasn't hard at all, and more than once Nathan found himself blinking rapidly as he read, unable to deny the raw pain and anger and love beneath his mother's words.

He was very glad he hadn't burned them. Very glad.

Rahne let herself into the office, starting directly toward her desk and then pausing. The door to the living room was open, and she could see Nathan sitting on the floor... but she didn't hear Rachel from the same direction, which was unusual. She walked over that way instead. "Hi?"

Nathan started, having been so engrossed in the letters that he hadn't been paying much attention to his surroundings. "Oh... hi, Rahne," he said, looking back over his shoulder at her and giving her a slightly shaky smile. "Sorry. I was..." Words failed him for a moment, and he just waved at the letters, arranged so carefully on the floor in front of him. "Reading. The things I brought back from San Francisco."

"Ah," Rahne said, glancing over his shoulder at them. "From... Saul's house?"

Nathan nodded. "But they're not his letters," he said more softly. "They're hers, to him. My mother." He hesitated, then went over rather tentatively. "The two of then spent a lot of time apart, after I was sent to Mistra. She was... kind of impressively angry with him, to judge by what she said in these letters." His voice caught a little as he went on. "She looked for me. For years."

Rahne swallowed. "She should. I'm sorry 'twas in vain."

"I... am too. I think about how different things would have been if she'd found me, and I just..." He trailed off for a moment, then gave a sigh that sounded a little like a laugh. "On the other hand, I probably would never have met Moira, or wound up here. Do you ever think about the road not taken, Rahne?"

"Sometimes." She knelt by him on the floor. "Then again, I've not had so many... turning points as some."

"They cover fifteen years," Nathan said, touching the first letter and then the last. "It's... it's her, in them. I can actually see her for the first time." His voice sounded a little tight again. "It's not all up to imagination anymore."

She touched his arm lightly and spoke, soft-voiced. "What do you see, then?"

"She loved me. And him." So different from his warped memories, the fabrications that his mind had created to cover the holes Gideon had left. "I can't imagine how hard it was for her. In some of these letters, she's pleading with him. To make Gideon tell him where I was. I think... I actually think he might have tried, once. One of the letters..." His voice failed him, briefly. Nathan closed his eyes for a moment, wrestling for composure.

"I never thought about it," he went on finally, more steadily. "That he lived ten years without her, before I met him. Ten years is more than enough time to convince yourself... I think it might have been all that he had left, to think that he'd somehow done right by me. That all his choices had been for the greater good."

Rahne was silent for a long moment, absorbing. "Because he'd paid too much for them to admit they were not?"

"Do you think that makes sense? I think that makes sense..." Nathan trailed off again, reaching out to one of the later letters. He unfolded it gently, gazing down at the elegant handwriting. "They spent a lot of time apart," he said. "He was always trying to convince her to come home. And she did, sometimes." He looked at Rahne, his eyes still suspiciously bright. "She talks about Alaska, about their first years there, when I was a baby. It's as if that's the only time they were ever really happy, the two of them."

Rahne's mind flashed briefly on long-lived woods and bright snow. "Good memories," she said quietly. Even if those were the only ones.

Nathan gazed down at her intently for a moment, seeing the momentary distance in her eyes. But she was back with him almost immediately, and he swallowed, taking a deep breath and then letting it out.

"I don't think I can be angry with either of them anymore." The words seemed so strange to say, like it was someone else saying them. But as they were spoken aloud something seemed to ease in his chest, a knot of tension that had been there since his trip to San Francisco. Or since that lunch with Saul, a year and a half ago. One or the other. "Not even Saul, whatever stupid... hurtful choices he might have made. Because he paid for them. He paid so much for them, until the choice was all he had left." Nathan's throat tried to close again, and he laid the letter back down in this place. "I suppose I knew that already."

"Sometimes you have to say something before you finish knowing it," Rahne said slowly. She looked at him for a moment. "You feel better." Not quite a question.

"I do." His vision blurred for a moment, and Nathan rubbed at his eyes. "I can see them both," he said, almost inaudibly. "I can finally see them both." It was an incomplete picture, but there was truth in it, in the legacy neither of his parents had intended to leave. Despite everything, they had loved each other, and him.

And that meant more than he'd imagined it could. Nathan swallowed, still blinking, and smiled at Rahne.