xp_logs | Nathan and Madelyn, Saturday afternoon

Remember those databases from the Mistra facility on Youra? They turn out to have some unexpected information about Nathan, and Madelyn's the one who gets to pass it along from the taskforce.

He could honestly say that he'd missed his office. An odd thing to say, but he'd made himself rather at home in here over the course of the year. Nathan glanced in the direction of the bookshelves, extending a hand, and ignored the slight feeling of strain as one of the atlases floated over to the desk. Still well within his weight limit.

Madelyn hadn't expected to find Nathan in his office, but when she thought about it, it made sense. He loved teaching, he really did - some of his guilt stemmed from the feeling he'd failed his students. Knocking on the doorframe (but waiting until he'd floated the book to where he wanted it), she gave him a brief smile as he looked up. "Got a minute? I've got some news from the taskforce you need to hear."

Nathan looked up, blinking. For a moment, his mind jumped towards less happy conclusions - something wrong with Nash or Cole or one of the other injured operatives - but Maddie didn't look like she was bearing bad news. "Just... killing time, I guess," he said a bit hesitantly, setting the atlas aside. "Come in."

"It's nothing to do with the operatives," she hastened to reassure him, coming in and closing the door behind her. "I really need to work on my entrances," she said with a wry smile. "Giving people a heart attack? Not a good thing, even if I am a doctor." She took a seat and thought a moment before coming out with it: "You know the taskforce has been going through the data we retrieved from Youra, yes?"

Nathan nodded, relaxing a little. "I gather decryption's been quite a chore with the databases?"

"And then some," Madelyn said, rolling her eyes a little. "I've been tempted to bring Doug and Kitty in, but considering some of the material, that's not such a good idea." Another pause for thought. "One of the things they've managed to decrypt are the personal files for all operatives and trainees."

"Well, that's good news," Nathan said, cheered by the thought. "It's been good to know that so many of the kids are being placed back with family, but hopefully this means that they can dig up surviving family for the..." He stopped, his eyes widening slightly. Nathan was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a slow man, painkillers or no painkillers. "Wait. Mine, too?"

Madelyn nodded. "Yours too," she said quietly. "Do you want me to tell you?"

He wavered, for a moment, uncertain. Given that he had no idea what could be in it... even as field commander, he hadn't had access to his own file. If there was... but it was better to know, wasn't it? "Yeah," he said, a little hesitantly. "Please do?"

"You were born in Alaska in 1966, to Saul and Esther Morrow," Madelyn said gently, watching his reaction carefully. "Dayspring isn't your real name - the alias they signed you up for college under, ironically enough, was your actual name."

Nathan stared at her blankly for a long moment. "Morrow?" he finally said. "But I remember..." Only he'd never really quite believed that 'Dayspring' had been his father's actual last name, had he? It had had the sound of something made-up all along, some alias he'd taken on for life in the commune. "Irony is right," he muttered, his mind spinning. "And... Esther?" His voice shook a little. "I never knew her name..."

Leaning forward, she reached for his hands. "There's a scan of your birth certificate on the file. It's been checked with existing records, and it's correct. I don't know how they got hold of that information when you didn't know it, but then again, they had a lot of resources. We're still discovering the extent of their operations."

Her grip on his hands was steadying, and he took a deep, careful breath. "Wow. I actually have a birth certificate?" He summoned up an unsteady smile from somewhere. "I suppose I always assumed I'd been unregistered, given, you know, the whole cult-thing..." Then it struck him, and his eyes widened. "Oh, Jack's going to be frustrated. He's been looking for Daysprings all this time."

Madelyn chuckled a little. "I think Jack's accepted it as it being your role in life to frustrate him," she teased gently. "But yes, an actual birth certificate. Well, a scan of one, but I could get you a hard copy it you like."

"Could you? I--" He flushed. "Well, I was starting to worry about it, in terms of the wedding. I know we probably could have gotten the paperwork through anyway, but still..." Nathan shook his head. "Morrow," he said. "I always just figured that was Mistra making a bad wordplay on Dayspring." A bitter edge crept into his voice as he went on. "I imagine there were directors snickering behind their hands at the irony."

"They certainly are putting a strain on my Hippocratic Oath," Madelyn said with a frown. "The more I read from these files, the more I want to do something horrible to them. And I can't find it in me to be terribly sorry many of them are dead." She banished the thought and squeezed his hands again. "I'll sort the certificate out, and anything else you need - of course, you'll be the first one to get whatever else we manage to decrypt."

"Thank you." He managed another smile, but couldn't quite hide the tension between it. His actual birth certificate, his parents' real names... he wasn't sure he was actually ready to go where that was leading just yet. Jack's continuing lack of success had been oddly reassuring. "Interesting, you know," he said, striving for a lighter tone. "In a way, what the taskforce is doing now is just as important as what we did on Youra. You can give someone their freedom back, but that's not finishing the job, really... they stole our lives in a sense, too. Not just our will."

Nodding, Madelyn gave his hands another squeeze, and then sat back. "It's important that we finish this properly, do the best we can by everyone damaged by Mistra," she said quietly, a certain sadness in her tone. "Especially when it's the government's fault all this happened, originally. We have a duty to do our best for the ones we failed. Or letting the parents know the fate of their children." Because that was another part of the taskforce - tracking down the families of the operatives killed in training, or after.

Nathan couldn't help a wince. But neither could he help responding to her other words, either, and a faint, wistful smile tugged at his lips. "You'll all cure me of my government-related paranoia yet, you know. In fact, I feel it dwindling by the day." Even if he'd been inclined to cherish the mistrust, the taskforce was doing too much, taking their responsibilities too seriously. There was no making amends, but there was doing what you could. And that was what was important.