Madelyn, Nathan - Tueday evening

[x-madelyn.livejournal.com]

In the wake of this IM conversation and talking to Pete, Nate makes good the plan and goes to speak to Madelyn. It turns out Agent Bartlet isn't so buried after all, and there are personal issues with this sort of situation.



The door to Madelyn's suite was half-open, but Nathan still knocked, not wanting to barge in. "Maddie?" he called quietly. "You busy in there?"

"Depends who's asking and why," Madelyn called back with a hint of a chuckle in her voice. There was a light thump and the sound of someone shuffling over to the door in slippers, and then Madelyn herself appeared, glasses propped up on her head, dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a green sweater that looked hand-knitted. The shuffling came from the over-sized Garfield slippers on her feet. "Just catching up on a few things. What can I do for you, Nathan? You didn't sprain that brain of yours again?" Yep, she'd definitely been spending too much time with Alison lately.

"No spraining," he assured her, his voice still low, and managed a faint, somewhat strained smile. "I've got something I need to talk to you about, though. Or, to be more precise, a situation in which I could use your professional help... and I don't just mean your MD."

"Come in," she said, instantly switching from Madelyn-the-person to Madelyn-the-professional. She closed the door behind Nathan as he came in, noting the tension in the man's posture, the stern expression on his face. "Did something happen? Is Moira all right? The kids?"

Nathan sat down as she indicated a chair. "Moira's fine," he said. "All the kids here are fine. There are six others in a Mistra training facility in Vermont that I'm a little more worried about at the moment." He laughed weakly at the look in her face. "Yeah. I think I had a similar expression when I opened the letter from MacInnis. But apparently my older employers have started scattering training cells, for security reasons, and one of them wound up just about in our backyard. None of MacInnis' people can get here anytime in the near future, and apparently the conditioning process has already started..."

"And you're going in to extract them." It was a statement, not a question, and suddenly Nathan's manner made perfect sense. "You're taking a team in, I take it?"

Nathan nodded. "Pete and I, with Sam piloting the helicopter. Paige has agreed to come along to help with the kids once we get them out, but if you'd consider it... we could really use you on-site." His gaze went distant for a moment, bleak and almost frightened as old memories resurfaced. "They're... they're not liable to be in good shape. We'll almost certainly have to sedate them. They won't have been out of the cells except for conditioning sessions for the better part of eight weeks."

"Of course." It came out without Madelyn even thinking about it - it was logical, when she did consider it. Hank was away, and Nathan wouldn't want to risk Moira in a potentially dangerous situation. And Madelyn had the training. "What sort of security are you looking at? Any idea of how many personnel the place has?" It was strange, how easy the shift back to Agent Bartlet was. Already she was mentally calculating the risks, what kind of injuries could be expected, what shape the kids might be in after eight weeks of conditioning...

"The intelligence I got - " This was assuming he could trust MacInnis, and he hadn't needed Pete's customary paranoia to plant seeds of doubt in his own mind. " - suggests light security. Eight to ten trained security personnel, but baseline humans, no mutants. Then probably four or five empaths and telepaths, possible six to eight medical support personnel. Nothing Pete and I can't handle."

"Empaths?" Madelyn asked, raising her eyebrow. She knew fully well about Nathan's issues with empaths, and whilst the triggers were gone along with the rest of the conditioning, there was still the psychological response. "Are you going to be okay with that?" She knew Pete would probably have raised any doubts about this source of Nathan's, and so left that question out.

"Six kids," Nathan said very quietly. "None of them over the age of fourteen, Madelyn. Eight weeks in, they'd already have destroyed and rebuilt their natural emotional responses." That flinty rage came flooding back and he met her eyes without flinching. "If any of them get in my way," he said, his voice still very low, "I'll go through them. Besides," he said with a faint smile, "the Askani have been teaching me some empathic shielding techniques."

She nodded, accepting what he'd said. She'd seen him after he'd been reactivated, had comforted Moira during the stress of all that... There was no way in hell she'd see that happen to a bunch of kids, not if there was something to be done about it. "When do we leave?" she asked. She'd have to get her tranq gun back from Moira, and see if there was a spare Kevlar vest in the armoury...

"Tomorrow afternoon, so that we'll get to the coordinates in Vermont just after dark. Pete's arranged for a helicopter, since they might need the Blackbird here to go after Scott." Nathan paused. "Pete and I are not going in there with the aim of taking Mistra personnel prisoner," he said quietly. "We're not going in there to amass a body count, but we won't be using kid gloves either."

Madelyn nodded. "Extracting the kids is the important thing," she said. She paused, then said softly. "When I was on my first placement, after training at the Bureau... We got called in to a... cult, I suppose you could call it. End of the world survivalist types. The DEA had word that they were stockpiling illegal weapons at their compound, and when they tried to go in, there were a couple of deaths. There was a standoff, we got called in, and eventually we managed to storm the place after days of negotiating without a lot of success. Complete firefight. A lot of the people there seemed to prefer death to arrest, and didn't give us a lot of choice about it." She drew a deep breath. "When we had secured the area, we found a room. Every woman and child under the age of twelve had been herded in there and locked in. There weren't any windows, and the door was sealed. There were some pipes, connected to the diesel generator exhaust." Madelyn's hands tightened into fists, the knuckles white. "They'd been dead for a few days. All that negotiating, pretending to want to surrender themselves... they'd been stalling us."

Nathan reached out and laid a hand over Madelyn's, flinching inwardly at the images in her mind. "Let's focus on getting a happier ending this time, then," he suggested almost gently before his expression hardened again. "This was a calculated risk on Mistra's part, scattering training cells like this. It's about to blow up in their faces."

"Things must be falling apart for them if they're taking risks like this... It'll make them sloppy, but it'll also make them more dangerous," Madelyn said, turning her hand around to give Nathan's a quick, grateful squeeze before pulling it away. "You _will_ be careful, yes? All of you?"

Nathan smiled suddenly. "This is the sort of thing Pete and I do, Maddie. We wouldn't have lived to be grumpy old men if we weren't careful. But we'll be especially careful this time," he said, his expression turning more serious again. "Bringing out important packages and all."

"Had to be said, if only so Moira doesn't want my head on a pike if you blow yourselves up or something," Madelyn said with a brief answering grin. As it faded, she added. "I should go start putting together the emergency kit - Moira's got notes on the sort of drugs I can expect to have been used, doesn't she? And I should probably speak to someone about borrowing some Kevlar. Not that I'm planning to be involved in any situations where it might be needed, but you know me, every the good little Girl Scout," she added hastily.

"Moira's got the list. She had the opportunity to run blood tests on me twice, remember... after MacInnis' people had me back in May. Then in August, of course..." He trailed off, staring at Madelyn's coffee table for a moment before he shook himself and got up. No dwelling. Absolutely none, or this wasn't going to work. "I'll let you make your arrangements and get back to mine," he said, meeting her eyes. "Thank you, Maddie," he went on more quietly. "I'm glad you'll be there."

She watched him drift off, then pull himself back together. Oh, this wasn't good for him at all. It was too soon. But maybe if they got the kids out... No, not if, _when_. "When the time comes, I'll be ready," she replied, getting up as well. There was too much to do all of a sudden. "We'll get them out," she added softly. "It won't happen again, not to these kids."

"No," Nathan said, just as softly but even more forcefully. "It won't." Whatever he had to do to make sure of that.