Doug and Nathan, Tuesday evening

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Doug comes over to visit Nathan, and chat about John Lense due to Emma's desire to install him as White Knight.



Doug rapped his knuckles on the doorjamb of Nathan's office. He felt an oddness, the sense of being a quasi-adult coming over for business purposes when it hadn't been so long ago that he'd been a young teenager with Nathan leaning over his shoulder while they attempted to get Dom out of Russia. Now Nathan was a father and he was a young professional. He shook his head and snorted at himself.

#Door's open, Doug,# was the telepathic response, and as Doug opened the door into the Elpis offices, it was fairly obviously that Nathan was the only one at work this morning. Rather alarmingly, however, Rachel was sitting in Juliette's usual chair, spinning it around every so often with a push of telekinesis and making 'vroom-vroom' noises that may have been intended to sound like a car, or perhaps an airplane. Nathan, meanwhile, was sitting at his desk keeping one eye on his computer screen and the other on his daughter.

"Dom is off charming bureaucrats at the UN. Or possibly intimidating them," he said. "Sometimes it's a fine line. Except - oh, you're not here to see her, are you?"

Doug shook his head and smiled. "Not that I don't want to see her before she heads back to the back end of beyond," he said, very carefully watching his language given that Rachel was in the room. "But I have some...business...questions I was hoping to ask you." He flicked his eyes toward Rachel apologetically. This wasn't the sort of conversation to have with a young child in the room, though.

Rachel gave a gusty sigh. "Booooooooring," she pronounced. Nathan raised an eyebrow at her as she slid down off Juliette's chat. "I'm going to play, Dad."

"You feel free to do that," Nathan said, perfectly evenly. She stuck her tongue out at Doug as she headed for the open door into the living room, and Nathan shook his head. "Sorry," he said, giving the door a telekinetic nudge shut. "She tends to get rather proprietary of my time when it's just the two of us here."

Doug stuck his tongue right back at Rachel as she headed out. Just because this was a conversation small children shouldn't be privy to didn't mean that he had to be an adult, either. "No, I'm sorry. It's just..." He shrugged, getting the impression both Nathan and Rachel had understood without him having to say anything. The joys of being around telepaths. Even with excellent shields for a non-psi, some things tended to slip out.

"I should teach her how to run the photocopier," Nathan said dryly, gesturing to the chair on the other side of his desk. A quick mental touch established that Rachel was indeed headed into her room in search of the pink party dress, so that she could 'play princess' properly. "What can I do for you, Doug?"

Doug chuckled. "Heaven help you when she learns about child labor laws in that case," he quipped. He settled into a chair and crossed his legs at the ankles. "I wanted to pick your brain about John Lense," he said somewhat slowly.

Nathan's eyebrow went up again. "Ah," he said after a moment.

The eyebrow and 'ah' were a rather clear 'and why do you want to know?' to Doug. He debated staying silent in his chair and trying to wait Nathan out, but that way lay a likely very long staredown. He'd put his odds at about fifty-fifty, but it didn't bother him all that much to elaborate. "Let's just say I might wind up...crossing swords with him in Emma's...service," he said obliquely.

"I see." Now, here was an interesting conundrum. Nathan picked up his coffee mug and took a sip, setting it back down and rotating it a quarter-turn before he continued. "I hope by crossing swords, you're speaking either figuratively or very, very literally."

"Well, I certainly don't mean it in the 'who's got a bigger one' way. He's not my type." Doug quirked one corner of his mouth in a wry half-smile. "It's possible it may be literally, as Manuel's been helping me with my bladework in preparation for whatever testing I may be put through." He paused. Nathan looked...almost conflicted, which threw Doug for a bit of a loop, given what he already knew of their history from the X-Men files. "I've read a bit, but if there's one thing Remy and Pete have tried to drill into all of our heads, it's that there's no substitute for human intel."

"Oh, so I'm a source now, am I?" Nathan sounded grimly amused. The very un-Doug-like crassness would have had him blinking, under other circumstances. I wonder if he's subconsciously trying to remind me that he's an adult now. "Your handy guide to... let me guess, your soon-to-be opposite number?"

Doug shook his head. "'Source' makes you sound like someone who's...expendable. Or something. Not a friend." He leaned forward and folded his hands together. "Mostly I just wanted to know the sorts of things that don't tend to get into a file. The little things. That and I was hoping to spend some time saying hello to Dom at some point."

"She should be back soon," Nathan said. "There was talk of bringing Rachel and myself some lunch from the city, since off-campus trips are something of a dicey proposition these days." He eyed Doug. "There is a complete tactical work-up on John in the team database, not to mention some of the files Scott conned out of Val Cooper last summer. Psychological assessments and the like. So tell me what sort of things you're looking for, that they didn't give you?"

There was a strange testiness to Nathan's tone, and Doug didn't miss the use of Lense's first name. "I don't know, really," Doug answered carefully. "I guess...just a sense of what he's like. How he reacts under pressure. Personality, things that wouldn't be in a psych profile."

It was only right to give Doug some insight, Nathan told himself. A dead Doug would be a bad thing. He knew there had to be rules, about how the Inner Circle's courts interacted. But he somehow doubted that Shaw had entirely broken John of the habit of taking the gloves off.

"He's angry," he finally said, not quite curtly, "and lonely. He's capable of restraining himself, even when he would really prefer to kill someone, but I would be very, very careful about the sort of power-gaming I imagine is implicit in interacting with members of the opposite Court. You're younger than he is - he'll see you as less experienced, so don't play 'who's the alpha' unless you've got some backup. I put him in a hospital bed no less than four times back at Mistra because he kept challenging my authority."

Doug nodded slowly. "Okay. I don't need to play alpha games," he said. He had woken up in a cold sweat a few times from nightmares of what Mistra could have done with him if they'd gotten to him before Xavier's. Thankfully it was only in the realm of nightmares. "Anything else? How does he normally react socially? Any buttons I should stay away from pushing?"

Nathan shrugged uneasily. "Hard to sum that up," he said. "He's... prickly. Always has been. Something you should keep in mind is that he's convinced himself that he doesn't regret his time at Mistra - that he liked his life there. Honestly, I think it's a front. But he's very gung-ho about it." Nathan paused, smiling very faintly. "I don't think it's much of a leap to draw conclusions about how that's liable to affect his interaction with anyone but those he's taking orders from."

That meshed with some of the assumptions Doug had been making from talking to Emma about recent Court business, but it was good to hear it from someone who had the most experience with the man in question. "So what I really need to worry about is Shaw ordering him to mess with me," he concluded. Just because Shaw tended towards overt displays of power didn't mean he couldn't be devious.

"I would say so. I doubt he's going to do anything Shaw would seriously disapprove of - he needs his position in the Hellfire Club for something." Nathan's lips twisted. "Not sure what. If you find out, share, okay? It has to be more than just Taygetos."

"Absolutely." Just because he was about to jump into the deep end of intrigue didn't mean that Doug was interested in playing those sorts of games with friends and people he respected. "I'll keep an ear to the ground."

And with business concluded, he relaxed backward in his chair. "So what sort of trouble has Dom been getting herself into?" he asked with a grin.