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xp_logs2004-10-29 10:14 pm
x-cable.livejournal.com) wrote in xp_logs2004-10-29 10:14 pm
Nathan, Alison, Foley, and a couple of Pack cameos, Friday evening
With some help from the Pack, Alison and Nathan make to the safehouse in Leuven. Nathan finds heavier resistance than he expected, and Alison, trying to take the back way in, finds Foley. Who is, to put it mildly, in very bad shape.
The helicopter skimmed just over the treetops, and Nathan itched to tell David to pull it up a little. But that would just lead to bitching - David did not like backseat drivers - and it wasn't as if he hadn't cut it closer without disaster before. A certain mission in Serbia came back to mind, for starters. Nathan shook his head and turned back to Mina and Alison.
"Too many ways out of this safehouse," he said over the coms - the helicopter was a little on the loud side, obviously, so they were all wearing headsets already. "I got that much from that medic's memories. We can't cover them all, even with Speedy Gonzales up there, so we're going to have to take out any aircraft first of all, to make sure they don't make a run for it."
"I can do that," Mina responded immediately. "What are we looking at - helicopters, most likely?" Nathan nodded. "Then let me take care of that. Fry their onboard systems and they won't be going anywhere."
"I was hoping you'd say that," Nathan said with a tight smile. "Alison? You game for taking an exit on your own?"
"I can take back door if you feel like knocking on the front door to make the grand entrance," she replied, far more serenely than she actually felt. The flying didn't bother her in the least and she looked outside now and then with mild interest at the rather close vegetation whizzing by underneath - or beside them at times. Various possibilities as to what might away them came to mind but at this point, trying to plan things out would be of no use - this was the flying by the seat of their pants part. Mostly. The framework was still there, to a certain extent.
"I wasn't planning to knock, actually." He didn't like this. Going in without more than a basic idea of the setting... but he didn't know just how cracked Foley's conditioning was, how much or how little time it might take to 'fix'. It hadn't even taken them a night to repair his, after it had been nonoperational for years.
Alison didn't think he'd been planning on knocking, really. Not with the way he'd reacted to the Mistra field medic earlier. She waited until she caught his gaze, and then held it. "What I told you earlier still holds."
He stared flatly back at her. "I won't be going out of my way to slaughter people, Alison," he said brusquely. He was more in control than he had been back in Vermont. "But if there's a conditioning team in there, that's probably five telepaths and empaths. If they stay to fight, they get incapacitated in the fastest way possible. Too much of a risk otherwise."
"You can do that with limited casualties." She wasn't pushing but she sure as hell wasn't backing down either - and she hated the words 'limited casualties' with a passion. Alison knew better than to expect things to go so smoothly enough that they could go through this without even one casualty - but her flat loathing of the notion showed in her voice and showed in her thoughts and she didn't care in the least if it did or what the others might think.
Nathan tried not to grind his teeth. She wanted him to show mercy to a conditioning team? Unbelievable. But he needed her. More to the point, Foley needed her. She was the only one here who could complete negate his powers, and Nathan had seen Mick in action often enough to know that if it came to that, negating his powers before he turned everyone's brains into jelly would probably be a very good thing.
"Fine," he gritted, trying to keep his tone level.
"Stop kvetching, Nathan," David called back over the coms from the pilot seat. "More efficient this way. Besides, your judgement's never been all that good when it comes to Mistra."
That, Alison thought calmly, was something of an understatement. But she wasn't going to press - Nathan had agreed and hopefully he wouldn't lose it once they hit the safehouse. Hopefully.
"What's our ETA?" she asked David, and for a moment could think of nothing else than this sounded like something straight out of a movie, of all things. If they'd told me I'd be doing something like this, over a year ago...
"Ten minutes," David replied. "I'll set us down a little short of the place and we can go in the rest of the way on foot. Not willing to chance they've got perimeter defenses that could shoot us down."
Nathan turned his attention to checking his gear, inwardly seething at Alison still. What did she expect him to do? Be worried about the welfare of the people who were probably in there reconditioning Foley as they sat here?
"Mina, double-check the medkit," he said curtly. "Whatever shape he's in, I think the chances are pretty likely that we're going to need sedatives."
"I can keep us silent on the way in, if needed." She was still not charged up, the feeling being like energy crackling under her skin - not even close, just yet. She ignored Nathan manhandling his gear and absently tugged at the body armor she'd been given - the shoulder strap still dug in and Alison found that she missed her leathers far more acutely than she'd ever imagined.
"That'd be helpful, Alison," David called back. "Lets us get as close as possible."
"So long as no one happens to be looking out a window at that particular moment," Mina pointed out with a faint smile.
"Again," Nathan gritted. "Not a problem."
---
The surviving members of the retrieval team that had taken Foley from the Tournai safehouse turned out to be second-gens. A couple were older, more experienced, but that didn't make much difference to Nathan. None of them had powers that could stand up to his telekinesis, and Mina and David were more than a match for them as well. Nathan shielded against a plasma blast from a girl with spikey blonde hair who couldn't have been more than eighteen, and restrained himself somewhat as he lashed out and threw her against the wall. Operatives were one thing. He didn't particularly want to hurt them if he didn't have to.
He heard a crackling sound from somewhere off to the left, and then an explosion. "Whoops," he heard Mina said, laughing breathlessly over the coms. "One helicopter down. Very, very down."
"Don't get carried away, love," he heard David retort.
Ordinarily he would have smiled at the banter, even if he didn't particularly like chatter in situations like this. Not right now, though. He dropped a feral with a TK sledge-hammer blow to the head, and got a clear run at the main entrance of the safehouse. Which he took.
A couple of hostiles with conventional weaponry were waiting for him inside. He deflected a hail of bullets, slammed them both to the floor with one gesture, and ran onwards. Locking mentally on the unmistakable feel of other psionic minds, trying and failing to find Mick. But they could have him drugged, psychically anesthetized...
Children. He stopped, his eyes widening. There were children here, he could feel it. Alive! He started forward again - and went to his hands and knees with a strangled cry as a crackling bolt of crimson energy slammed into his shield and through it. He barely managed to keep himself from hitting the floor. His muscles were twitching, almost unresponsible, and he struggled to lift his head, his vision blurring as he spotted the figure coming down the hall at him, hands raised to let off another blast.
Distant. The children's minds were going distant, and Nathan frantically concentrated, lashing out with his telekinesis. The blurred figure hit the ground in a crumpled heap, and he hauled himself back to his feet, swaying dangerously as he tried to keep running in that direction. Kids, kids and Mick. He had to get there, had to help all of them...
Someone tackled him, bearing him to the floor, and Nathan let out a half-strangled cry of fury, grappling with his assailant. No time for this, no fucking time...
---
Get out. Get away. That was all Foley could think of to do when the alarms had started going off, and the telepath's control over him slipped. He had killed the telepath, he thought. Maybe. His head was spinning, and he wasn't absolutely sure where he was or who precisely had him. Run. That was the only thing left. Run, find someone... help?
It was horribly simple to trip someone up while they were looking over their shoulder, Alison thought, wincing a bit as he went flying. This was an unexpected windfall - she hadn't even had the time to go into the safehouse and here he was, running straight into her waiting arms. Or foot, as the case were.
Foley, briefly dazed by the fall, looked up in time to see the blonde woman staring at him. Blaire... shit! The absolute last X-Man a sound-manipulator should be anywhere near. Anything he'd throw at her would just feed her. He scrambled back to his feet and took off again, without a second thought for why there would be an X-Man here in the first place. Wherever here was.
It was pure reflex, really - without a second thought Alison sprinted after him, intent on not letting him get away no matter what. The hadn't come this far and gone through all this trouble only to lose him now and she'd be damned if she was the one to let him go.
Damn it, she's chasing me... Tactical imperatives screamed at the back of his mind and he kept heading for the edges of the woods. Lose himself in the trees. Come back at her physically. Not much other option. Close combat, or he was in deep shit indeed.
Ah, of course he'd run straight into the woods at night, she thought, not even considering giving up on the chase. And from the sounds lingering behind her in the safe house, Nathan and the others were clearly... busy. Here goes nothing. A brief moment to aim and she sent a low level laser lancing out towards the ground a bit in back of the man. The woods it was. She had to herd him deeper in the forest, where anything else stood far less chance of being witnessed by anyone than here out in the open, effectively cutting him off from other Mistra agents who might come out looking for him.
Foley swore, feeling and hearing the impact just behind him, and picked up the pace, making it to the trees. He ran onwards for a bit, then ducked behind one particularly large oak with a truck big enough to hide him, then focused on evening out his breathing and listening for her.
Don't lose him from sight, don't lose him from sight! The mantra ran through her head as she tailed him, doing so easily until she had to dodge a branch springing back from his own passage through the woods. Oh boy. Lost him. She came to a instant standstill. Waiting, keeping her breathing as quiet as possible.
What the hell was she doing, chasing him like this? Foley squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, listening to the tactical imperatives trying to assess the situation. He didn't know where he was, so he didn't know why the X-Men would be here. But the X-Men didn't generally kill unless pushed, and Blaire, if her profile was to be believed, wasn't the type to get carried away. So what did she want with him?
Engage her, the tactical imperatives instructed, and he knew they didn't mean hand-to-hand.
"Blaire," he said cautiously, stepping out into the open and spotting her. She didn't look angry. And the X-Men hadn't gotten into the house yet, they wouldn't have seen the bodies. A faint tremor crossed his features before he wrestled them back under control. "Why the fuck are you chasing me alone? Nathan's liable to kick your ass from here to Christmas." Was Nathan here? He got a funny feeling at the thought, a combination of hopefulness and wariness.
Oh, you'd be surprised at what Nathan might do. She didn't speak out loud however - he was talking to her. And there was still a fair distance between them. Enough, she hoped, in case he decided to turn this into a fight. "Why haven't you done something about it yet?" she answered instead, trigger-ready to react if he did just as she hoped he wouldn't. Oh, so very much.
"Something about it?" he repeated almost blankly, the tactical imperatives hissing at him. Can't shoot her, shoot the trees around her? Large falling blunt objects, definite possibility... "I don't know what you're talking about, but just... back off, okay? You're not part of my orders, we don't have to do this..."
"No. No, you're right," she breathed, keeping as still as she could. Don't be a threat; don't look like you're going to do anything, don't move, try not to breathe even, she told herself. She stood, hands loose at her sides, facing him without even the pretense of any fighting stance in the least. Wide open to anything he might do. "We don't have to do this." Alison kept her hands open, the fingertips firmly pointed at the ground on either side of her.
Foley gave a rattled, incredulous laugh. She was trying to talk him down. She was trying to talk him down so that she could do--what? This didn't make any sense. She couldn't possibly think that he would...
...she did. She knew... no, Nathan knew...
Take her out! the tactical imperatives demanded. And Foley hesitated. Only for a moment, but it was enough to trigger the obedience compulsions, the right kind of outright resistance, and Foley stumbled, a moan escaping him.
Now. There wouldn't be another chance. Both hands snapping up to meet before her, Alison listened to her instincts and solid light speared out to hit Foley in a solid strike meant to knock him out cold.
And Foley dodged, as soon as he saw her hands move. Pure instinct, the conditioning moving him rather than him moving himself. He hit the ground and rolled back to his feet, ducking behind another tree. Not firing off a return shot, and he gritted his teeth as pain built behind his eyes.
"I don't know what you're doing," he called back raggedly, "but fucking drop it, woman."
"I can't," she replied, very much wishing she could. And moved forward at a slow pace, not even bothering to try and be quit. "Look at the tree that was behind you. That wasn't a laser. I don't want to hurt you. Right now you could probably kill me... and I couldn't stop you," she said the last words softly, hoping to god she wasn't triggering something nasty in the process that would get her killed. "I'm just betting on you not wanting to do this. I'm betting on you being able to not kill me. Crazy, huh?"
If Nathan didn't have a coronary if she made it out of this, Alison suspected she might, even as she took another step, and then another. She didn't dare use a lightshow to try and calm him, not that she was sure she'd have managed that emotion now anyway to save her life.
"I don't--" His voice cracked as the pain swelled, almost unbearable. "Let me go," Foley forced out. "I don't want to kill you... just let me go, damn it, I have to report back in ..."
"No, you don't. You don't have to kill me. It's your choice to make." She took another step, ready to god to divert him in a tree if he attacked, and gave her the chance to do so. This reminded her of Nathan in the medlab, after being re-conditioned, far too much. She kept her voice soft and steady, the words a soothing sing song. "I'm giving you that choice. What do you want to do, Foley?"
"Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?" he snarled back unsteadily. "What do I want?" He straightened, trying to breathe deeply despite the pain. He could hear her coming closer, step by step...
He flung himself around the other side of the tree and went for her. Knock her out, wouldn't have to hurt her, just take her out of the equation and then run...
She had been, thankfully, expecting that - it would have been too much to hope he'd actually beat the training, manage to fend off that much conditioning no matter what was going on in his head right now. She sidestepped to the side as soon as he moved, putting a tree between the both of them and backing up steadily, forcing him to come to her.
Which he did. She was fast, obviously trained, moreso than the Shaw kid had been. She blocked his first few strikes, but a couple slipped through, the second enough to put her on her knees, gasping. Pained blue eyes flickered up to meet his.
And he froze, the memory of another pair of eyes, darker and much more frightened surimposing itself on the moment. He stumbled again, clutching at his head with a sob. Back there. He was back there again, the mansion in Columbia, the wife of the druglord he'd been sent to kill kneeling beside the body of her seven year-old son. The boy had run into his room, screaming for his father, and caught the edge of the sonic blast. Enough to be lethal. More than enough.
"~I didn't mean it... I didn't... I'm sorry,~" he gasped out in Spanish, tears leaking down his face. "~Oh God, I didn't see him, I'm so sorry--~"
Flashback of some sort, a cool voice in the back of her mind informed her, even as she tried to catch her breath and get back up now before he snapped out of it, not ready to use lasers on him yet. "~Who didn't you see?~" she asked between one ragged gasp and the next, finally hauling herself up and settling back into a stance. The footing in the woods was atrocious to say the least, but she squared herself as well as possibly considering the circumstances. And the answer to her question seemed oddly important considering she was trying to make sure he didn't kill her.
Screaming, the mother was screaming and raging at him, tears pouring down her face, and Foley backed away, stumbling. "~No,~" he moaned, seeing the small still body, and suddenly, seeing five more. Children in bodybags, laid out on the floor of the Vermont safehouse's freezer. Our failed candidates, the head of the conditioning team was saying calmly, standing beside Tim. Higher losses than back in your day, gentlemen, but we are on a timeframe...
"~Who didn't you see?~" she asked again in the same language, knowing that this would come back to haunt her later. And moved in quick while he was still disoriented, wanting this to be done and over with and to take the man back to Nathan to get help now. Lashing out she struck his temple once, then twice for good measure.
Too lost in his own memories to even notice her advancing on him, Foley crumpled, unconscious before he hit the ground. The screaming chased him down into the darkness.
---
It had been a very long return trip from the woods. She couldn't break radio silence and ask for help - Foley weighed a ton for all that he didn't seem that bulky and hauling his body out of the forest had been a challenge. But he'd come to in a muzzy incoherent way a few meters out. Enough for Alison to get him on his feet and half-carry, half-drag the stumbling man to the front of the safehouse where she knew Nathan and the others would be. She concentrated on Foley's near incoherent babbling in Spanish, using that as an indicator of how far out there he was. And how safe that meant she was. Rounding the corner, the man's arm neatly wrapped around her shoulders and held place by a firm grip on his wrist, Alison hauled him along further.
Nathan had barely made it outside before stumbling off to find someplace to throw up. David and Mina were looking after clean-up, such as it was. He had to leave it to them, trust them to do it. He couldn't focus enough to help. Not after seeing what was in that safehouse. More bodybags too large for what they held...
A few minutes. He needed a few minutes. They didn't need him losing it and lashing out with his TK in the midst of a flashback.
Wiping his mouth, he looked up - and saw Alison coming out of the woods, supporting someone. No. Not someone. Foley. Foley? She'd found him? After the Mistra team had gotten away with the surviving children, he'd assumed they'd taken Foley with them too, but here he was... And only the fact that Alison looked relatively intact and Mick was clearly barely conscious kept him from sending him flying into the nearest tree just to make sure he was out.
"Alison," he said hoarsely, scrambling back to his feet and hurrying over, his own turbulent emotions being shoved aside in favor of urgency. "What the hell--" Foley looked up at him, and Nathan froze, seeing the tears on his face, the terrified, devastated look in his eyes. "Oh, shit," he breathed raggedly.
She looked up, focusing on something other than getting Foley from the forest to the safehouse for the first time since she'd knocked the man out. The look on Nathan's face stole her breath away for a moment and she had to take a moment to find a way to tell him what had happened. "He ran straight into me, in the back," she weaved a bit under Foley's weight as the man sagged against her again, murmuring lowly, the words chilling her blood. "He kept saying he didn't want to kill me and-" she stopped, staring up at Nathan, never once relinquishing her death grip on the Mistra agent she was holding.
Nathan reached out to take him from her, but Foley jerked away suddenly, from both of them. "No!" he raved, tottering, tears still pouring down his face. "No, not going back to the dead children--"
"Something happened in Columbia I think," she said, having deciphered that much from what he'd been mumbling about after waking up - and having no clue as to what the rest of the team had found in the safe house. "Haven't sorted it all out yet," she took a step back, shaking her head, "but it was... bad."
Nathan took a deep, shaky breath. Focus, he told himself. This wasn't like trying to talk down the kid in Vermont. A lot more risky. "I don't know what happened in Columbia," he said hoarsely, "but inside... they had more kids in there. More than in Vermont. They got away with two, maybe there... but there are eleven bodies in their morgue."
Foley fell to his knees, sobbing. "No more dead children..." It was a plea, anguished enough to cut Nathan right to the heart. "Make it s-stop..."
"Eleven..." it was all she could whisper before just staring down at Foley, unable to go further. "I brought him back," she said, numbly. "Can we crack the conditioning?" It was the only thing she could think of to do. See things through to the end, fulfill the goal of the mission.
"It's going already. Whatever they were doing to try and fix it, they didn't finish. I can see just looking at him." Nathan murmured, kneeing down in front of the other man and taking his face between his hands. "Mick, look at me--" Foley looked up at him, blinded by tears, and Nathan carefully extended the lightest of probes into his mind, examining what he found there.
Then he released him, leaned back, and landed a solid punch to his jaw. Foley toppled, hitting the grass without a sound, and Nathan looked up to see Alison staring at him.
"Can't do it out here," he said hoarsely. "Don't have anyway to restart his heart if he goes into cardiac arrest... I did." He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, remembering lying there in that safehouse in Hong Kong, memories from the mission in China running over and over in his mind...
"How then? When? Where?" She was desperately relieved that there was no way to do so now - and then paused, paling. "Safehouse is equipped, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Nathan said hoarsely, beginning to realize precisely what he was going to have to do as he continued to process what he'd seen in Mick's mind. "Equipped with everything we need, Alison."
The helicopter skimmed just over the treetops, and Nathan itched to tell David to pull it up a little. But that would just lead to bitching - David did not like backseat drivers - and it wasn't as if he hadn't cut it closer without disaster before. A certain mission in Serbia came back to mind, for starters. Nathan shook his head and turned back to Mina and Alison.
"Too many ways out of this safehouse," he said over the coms - the helicopter was a little on the loud side, obviously, so they were all wearing headsets already. "I got that much from that medic's memories. We can't cover them all, even with Speedy Gonzales up there, so we're going to have to take out any aircraft first of all, to make sure they don't make a run for it."
"I can do that," Mina responded immediately. "What are we looking at - helicopters, most likely?" Nathan nodded. "Then let me take care of that. Fry their onboard systems and they won't be going anywhere."
"I was hoping you'd say that," Nathan said with a tight smile. "Alison? You game for taking an exit on your own?"
"I can take back door if you feel like knocking on the front door to make the grand entrance," she replied, far more serenely than she actually felt. The flying didn't bother her in the least and she looked outside now and then with mild interest at the rather close vegetation whizzing by underneath - or beside them at times. Various possibilities as to what might away them came to mind but at this point, trying to plan things out would be of no use - this was the flying by the seat of their pants part. Mostly. The framework was still there, to a certain extent.
"I wasn't planning to knock, actually." He didn't like this. Going in without more than a basic idea of the setting... but he didn't know just how cracked Foley's conditioning was, how much or how little time it might take to 'fix'. It hadn't even taken them a night to repair his, after it had been nonoperational for years.
Alison didn't think he'd been planning on knocking, really. Not with the way he'd reacted to the Mistra field medic earlier. She waited until she caught his gaze, and then held it. "What I told you earlier still holds."
He stared flatly back at her. "I won't be going out of my way to slaughter people, Alison," he said brusquely. He was more in control than he had been back in Vermont. "But if there's a conditioning team in there, that's probably five telepaths and empaths. If they stay to fight, they get incapacitated in the fastest way possible. Too much of a risk otherwise."
"You can do that with limited casualties." She wasn't pushing but she sure as hell wasn't backing down either - and she hated the words 'limited casualties' with a passion. Alison knew better than to expect things to go so smoothly enough that they could go through this without even one casualty - but her flat loathing of the notion showed in her voice and showed in her thoughts and she didn't care in the least if it did or what the others might think.
Nathan tried not to grind his teeth. She wanted him to show mercy to a conditioning team? Unbelievable. But he needed her. More to the point, Foley needed her. She was the only one here who could complete negate his powers, and Nathan had seen Mick in action often enough to know that if it came to that, negating his powers before he turned everyone's brains into jelly would probably be a very good thing.
"Fine," he gritted, trying to keep his tone level.
"Stop kvetching, Nathan," David called back over the coms from the pilot seat. "More efficient this way. Besides, your judgement's never been all that good when it comes to Mistra."
That, Alison thought calmly, was something of an understatement. But she wasn't going to press - Nathan had agreed and hopefully he wouldn't lose it once they hit the safehouse. Hopefully.
"What's our ETA?" she asked David, and for a moment could think of nothing else than this sounded like something straight out of a movie, of all things. If they'd told me I'd be doing something like this, over a year ago...
"Ten minutes," David replied. "I'll set us down a little short of the place and we can go in the rest of the way on foot. Not willing to chance they've got perimeter defenses that could shoot us down."
Nathan turned his attention to checking his gear, inwardly seething at Alison still. What did she expect him to do? Be worried about the welfare of the people who were probably in there reconditioning Foley as they sat here?
"Mina, double-check the medkit," he said curtly. "Whatever shape he's in, I think the chances are pretty likely that we're going to need sedatives."
"I can keep us silent on the way in, if needed." She was still not charged up, the feeling being like energy crackling under her skin - not even close, just yet. She ignored Nathan manhandling his gear and absently tugged at the body armor she'd been given - the shoulder strap still dug in and Alison found that she missed her leathers far more acutely than she'd ever imagined.
"That'd be helpful, Alison," David called back. "Lets us get as close as possible."
"So long as no one happens to be looking out a window at that particular moment," Mina pointed out with a faint smile.
"Again," Nathan gritted. "Not a problem."
---
The surviving members of the retrieval team that had taken Foley from the Tournai safehouse turned out to be second-gens. A couple were older, more experienced, but that didn't make much difference to Nathan. None of them had powers that could stand up to his telekinesis, and Mina and David were more than a match for them as well. Nathan shielded against a plasma blast from a girl with spikey blonde hair who couldn't have been more than eighteen, and restrained himself somewhat as he lashed out and threw her against the wall. Operatives were one thing. He didn't particularly want to hurt them if he didn't have to.
He heard a crackling sound from somewhere off to the left, and then an explosion. "Whoops," he heard Mina said, laughing breathlessly over the coms. "One helicopter down. Very, very down."
"Don't get carried away, love," he heard David retort.
Ordinarily he would have smiled at the banter, even if he didn't particularly like chatter in situations like this. Not right now, though. He dropped a feral with a TK sledge-hammer blow to the head, and got a clear run at the main entrance of the safehouse. Which he took.
A couple of hostiles with conventional weaponry were waiting for him inside. He deflected a hail of bullets, slammed them both to the floor with one gesture, and ran onwards. Locking mentally on the unmistakable feel of other psionic minds, trying and failing to find Mick. But they could have him drugged, psychically anesthetized...
Children. He stopped, his eyes widening. There were children here, he could feel it. Alive! He started forward again - and went to his hands and knees with a strangled cry as a crackling bolt of crimson energy slammed into his shield and through it. He barely managed to keep himself from hitting the floor. His muscles were twitching, almost unresponsible, and he struggled to lift his head, his vision blurring as he spotted the figure coming down the hall at him, hands raised to let off another blast.
Distant. The children's minds were going distant, and Nathan frantically concentrated, lashing out with his telekinesis. The blurred figure hit the ground in a crumpled heap, and he hauled himself back to his feet, swaying dangerously as he tried to keep running in that direction. Kids, kids and Mick. He had to get there, had to help all of them...
Someone tackled him, bearing him to the floor, and Nathan let out a half-strangled cry of fury, grappling with his assailant. No time for this, no fucking time...
---
Get out. Get away. That was all Foley could think of to do when the alarms had started going off, and the telepath's control over him slipped. He had killed the telepath, he thought. Maybe. His head was spinning, and he wasn't absolutely sure where he was or who precisely had him. Run. That was the only thing left. Run, find someone... help?
It was horribly simple to trip someone up while they were looking over their shoulder, Alison thought, wincing a bit as he went flying. This was an unexpected windfall - she hadn't even had the time to go into the safehouse and here he was, running straight into her waiting arms. Or foot, as the case were.
Foley, briefly dazed by the fall, looked up in time to see the blonde woman staring at him. Blaire... shit! The absolute last X-Man a sound-manipulator should be anywhere near. Anything he'd throw at her would just feed her. He scrambled back to his feet and took off again, without a second thought for why there would be an X-Man here in the first place. Wherever here was.
It was pure reflex, really - without a second thought Alison sprinted after him, intent on not letting him get away no matter what. The hadn't come this far and gone through all this trouble only to lose him now and she'd be damned if she was the one to let him go.
Damn it, she's chasing me... Tactical imperatives screamed at the back of his mind and he kept heading for the edges of the woods. Lose himself in the trees. Come back at her physically. Not much other option. Close combat, or he was in deep shit indeed.
Ah, of course he'd run straight into the woods at night, she thought, not even considering giving up on the chase. And from the sounds lingering behind her in the safe house, Nathan and the others were clearly... busy. Here goes nothing. A brief moment to aim and she sent a low level laser lancing out towards the ground a bit in back of the man. The woods it was. She had to herd him deeper in the forest, where anything else stood far less chance of being witnessed by anyone than here out in the open, effectively cutting him off from other Mistra agents who might come out looking for him.
Foley swore, feeling and hearing the impact just behind him, and picked up the pace, making it to the trees. He ran onwards for a bit, then ducked behind one particularly large oak with a truck big enough to hide him, then focused on evening out his breathing and listening for her.
Don't lose him from sight, don't lose him from sight! The mantra ran through her head as she tailed him, doing so easily until she had to dodge a branch springing back from his own passage through the woods. Oh boy. Lost him. She came to a instant standstill. Waiting, keeping her breathing as quiet as possible.
What the hell was she doing, chasing him like this? Foley squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, listening to the tactical imperatives trying to assess the situation. He didn't know where he was, so he didn't know why the X-Men would be here. But the X-Men didn't generally kill unless pushed, and Blaire, if her profile was to be believed, wasn't the type to get carried away. So what did she want with him?
Engage her, the tactical imperatives instructed, and he knew they didn't mean hand-to-hand.
"Blaire," he said cautiously, stepping out into the open and spotting her. She didn't look angry. And the X-Men hadn't gotten into the house yet, they wouldn't have seen the bodies. A faint tremor crossed his features before he wrestled them back under control. "Why the fuck are you chasing me alone? Nathan's liable to kick your ass from here to Christmas." Was Nathan here? He got a funny feeling at the thought, a combination of hopefulness and wariness.
Oh, you'd be surprised at what Nathan might do. She didn't speak out loud however - he was talking to her. And there was still a fair distance between them. Enough, she hoped, in case he decided to turn this into a fight. "Why haven't you done something about it yet?" she answered instead, trigger-ready to react if he did just as she hoped he wouldn't. Oh, so very much.
"Something about it?" he repeated almost blankly, the tactical imperatives hissing at him. Can't shoot her, shoot the trees around her? Large falling blunt objects, definite possibility... "I don't know what you're talking about, but just... back off, okay? You're not part of my orders, we don't have to do this..."
"No. No, you're right," she breathed, keeping as still as she could. Don't be a threat; don't look like you're going to do anything, don't move, try not to breathe even, she told herself. She stood, hands loose at her sides, facing him without even the pretense of any fighting stance in the least. Wide open to anything he might do. "We don't have to do this." Alison kept her hands open, the fingertips firmly pointed at the ground on either side of her.
Foley gave a rattled, incredulous laugh. She was trying to talk him down. She was trying to talk him down so that she could do--what? This didn't make any sense. She couldn't possibly think that he would...
...she did. She knew... no, Nathan knew...
Take her out! the tactical imperatives demanded. And Foley hesitated. Only for a moment, but it was enough to trigger the obedience compulsions, the right kind of outright resistance, and Foley stumbled, a moan escaping him.
Now. There wouldn't be another chance. Both hands snapping up to meet before her, Alison listened to her instincts and solid light speared out to hit Foley in a solid strike meant to knock him out cold.
And Foley dodged, as soon as he saw her hands move. Pure instinct, the conditioning moving him rather than him moving himself. He hit the ground and rolled back to his feet, ducking behind another tree. Not firing off a return shot, and he gritted his teeth as pain built behind his eyes.
"I don't know what you're doing," he called back raggedly, "but fucking drop it, woman."
"I can't," she replied, very much wishing she could. And moved forward at a slow pace, not even bothering to try and be quit. "Look at the tree that was behind you. That wasn't a laser. I don't want to hurt you. Right now you could probably kill me... and I couldn't stop you," she said the last words softly, hoping to god she wasn't triggering something nasty in the process that would get her killed. "I'm just betting on you not wanting to do this. I'm betting on you being able to not kill me. Crazy, huh?"
If Nathan didn't have a coronary if she made it out of this, Alison suspected she might, even as she took another step, and then another. She didn't dare use a lightshow to try and calm him, not that she was sure she'd have managed that emotion now anyway to save her life.
"I don't--" His voice cracked as the pain swelled, almost unbearable. "Let me go," Foley forced out. "I don't want to kill you... just let me go, damn it, I have to report back in ..."
"No, you don't. You don't have to kill me. It's your choice to make." She took another step, ready to god to divert him in a tree if he attacked, and gave her the chance to do so. This reminded her of Nathan in the medlab, after being re-conditioned, far too much. She kept her voice soft and steady, the words a soothing sing song. "I'm giving you that choice. What do you want to do, Foley?"
"Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?" he snarled back unsteadily. "What do I want?" He straightened, trying to breathe deeply despite the pain. He could hear her coming closer, step by step...
He flung himself around the other side of the tree and went for her. Knock her out, wouldn't have to hurt her, just take her out of the equation and then run...
She had been, thankfully, expecting that - it would have been too much to hope he'd actually beat the training, manage to fend off that much conditioning no matter what was going on in his head right now. She sidestepped to the side as soon as he moved, putting a tree between the both of them and backing up steadily, forcing him to come to her.
Which he did. She was fast, obviously trained, moreso than the Shaw kid had been. She blocked his first few strikes, but a couple slipped through, the second enough to put her on her knees, gasping. Pained blue eyes flickered up to meet his.
And he froze, the memory of another pair of eyes, darker and much more frightened surimposing itself on the moment. He stumbled again, clutching at his head with a sob. Back there. He was back there again, the mansion in Columbia, the wife of the druglord he'd been sent to kill kneeling beside the body of her seven year-old son. The boy had run into his room, screaming for his father, and caught the edge of the sonic blast. Enough to be lethal. More than enough.
"~I didn't mean it... I didn't... I'm sorry,~" he gasped out in Spanish, tears leaking down his face. "~Oh God, I didn't see him, I'm so sorry--~"
Flashback of some sort, a cool voice in the back of her mind informed her, even as she tried to catch her breath and get back up now before he snapped out of it, not ready to use lasers on him yet. "~Who didn't you see?~" she asked between one ragged gasp and the next, finally hauling herself up and settling back into a stance. The footing in the woods was atrocious to say the least, but she squared herself as well as possibly considering the circumstances. And the answer to her question seemed oddly important considering she was trying to make sure he didn't kill her.
Screaming, the mother was screaming and raging at him, tears pouring down her face, and Foley backed away, stumbling. "~No,~" he moaned, seeing the small still body, and suddenly, seeing five more. Children in bodybags, laid out on the floor of the Vermont safehouse's freezer. Our failed candidates, the head of the conditioning team was saying calmly, standing beside Tim. Higher losses than back in your day, gentlemen, but we are on a timeframe...
"~Who didn't you see?~" she asked again in the same language, knowing that this would come back to haunt her later. And moved in quick while he was still disoriented, wanting this to be done and over with and to take the man back to Nathan to get help now. Lashing out she struck his temple once, then twice for good measure.
Too lost in his own memories to even notice her advancing on him, Foley crumpled, unconscious before he hit the ground. The screaming chased him down into the darkness.
---
It had been a very long return trip from the woods. She couldn't break radio silence and ask for help - Foley weighed a ton for all that he didn't seem that bulky and hauling his body out of the forest had been a challenge. But he'd come to in a muzzy incoherent way a few meters out. Enough for Alison to get him on his feet and half-carry, half-drag the stumbling man to the front of the safehouse where she knew Nathan and the others would be. She concentrated on Foley's near incoherent babbling in Spanish, using that as an indicator of how far out there he was. And how safe that meant she was. Rounding the corner, the man's arm neatly wrapped around her shoulders and held place by a firm grip on his wrist, Alison hauled him along further.
Nathan had barely made it outside before stumbling off to find someplace to throw up. David and Mina were looking after clean-up, such as it was. He had to leave it to them, trust them to do it. He couldn't focus enough to help. Not after seeing what was in that safehouse. More bodybags too large for what they held...
A few minutes. He needed a few minutes. They didn't need him losing it and lashing out with his TK in the midst of a flashback.
Wiping his mouth, he looked up - and saw Alison coming out of the woods, supporting someone. No. Not someone. Foley. Foley? She'd found him? After the Mistra team had gotten away with the surviving children, he'd assumed they'd taken Foley with them too, but here he was... And only the fact that Alison looked relatively intact and Mick was clearly barely conscious kept him from sending him flying into the nearest tree just to make sure he was out.
"Alison," he said hoarsely, scrambling back to his feet and hurrying over, his own turbulent emotions being shoved aside in favor of urgency. "What the hell--" Foley looked up at him, and Nathan froze, seeing the tears on his face, the terrified, devastated look in his eyes. "Oh, shit," he breathed raggedly.
She looked up, focusing on something other than getting Foley from the forest to the safehouse for the first time since she'd knocked the man out. The look on Nathan's face stole her breath away for a moment and she had to take a moment to find a way to tell him what had happened. "He ran straight into me, in the back," she weaved a bit under Foley's weight as the man sagged against her again, murmuring lowly, the words chilling her blood. "He kept saying he didn't want to kill me and-" she stopped, staring up at Nathan, never once relinquishing her death grip on the Mistra agent she was holding.
Nathan reached out to take him from her, but Foley jerked away suddenly, from both of them. "No!" he raved, tottering, tears still pouring down his face. "No, not going back to the dead children--"
"Something happened in Columbia I think," she said, having deciphered that much from what he'd been mumbling about after waking up - and having no clue as to what the rest of the team had found in the safe house. "Haven't sorted it all out yet," she took a step back, shaking her head, "but it was... bad."
Nathan took a deep, shaky breath. Focus, he told himself. This wasn't like trying to talk down the kid in Vermont. A lot more risky. "I don't know what happened in Columbia," he said hoarsely, "but inside... they had more kids in there. More than in Vermont. They got away with two, maybe there... but there are eleven bodies in their morgue."
Foley fell to his knees, sobbing. "No more dead children..." It was a plea, anguished enough to cut Nathan right to the heart. "Make it s-stop..."
"Eleven..." it was all she could whisper before just staring down at Foley, unable to go further. "I brought him back," she said, numbly. "Can we crack the conditioning?" It was the only thing she could think of to do. See things through to the end, fulfill the goal of the mission.
"It's going already. Whatever they were doing to try and fix it, they didn't finish. I can see just looking at him." Nathan murmured, kneeing down in front of the other man and taking his face between his hands. "Mick, look at me--" Foley looked up at him, blinded by tears, and Nathan carefully extended the lightest of probes into his mind, examining what he found there.
Then he released him, leaned back, and landed a solid punch to his jaw. Foley toppled, hitting the grass without a sound, and Nathan looked up to see Alison staring at him.
"Can't do it out here," he said hoarsely. "Don't have anyway to restart his heart if he goes into cardiac arrest... I did." He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, remembering lying there in that safehouse in Hong Kong, memories from the mission in China running over and over in his mind...
"How then? When? Where?" She was desperately relieved that there was no way to do so now - and then paused, paling. "Safehouse is equipped, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Nathan said hoarsely, beginning to realize precisely what he was going to have to do as he continued to process what he'd seen in Mick's mind. "Equipped with everything we need, Alison."