Over The Hills And Far Away

Note from Alicia: Some of you knew I was working on this, but I decided tonight that I really needed to finish. :) For the rest of you, this is the story behind this post - what happened in Tajikistan when Nathan and the Pack went looking for David.

---

"Nathan?"

Nathan made a noise that might have been assent, might have been something else entirely, but didn't turn away from the window. "Hell of a view," he said quietly, staring out at the sun setting over the mountains. There was snow here and there, white on bare rock. Browns and grays. The only green were the trees here and there in Khorog's narrow valley. This far up into the Pamirs, the world was very nearly a moonscape. Barren.

Beautiful.

Domino joined him at the window, and he felt the pressure of her eyes on his face for a moment, like a physical touch. Poke, poke. Nathan, are you with us? "Gavin and Izzy are getting our gear. Theo took the boys and Ani to get something to eat."

Only Dom would include Ian as one of the 'boys'. Nathan nodded, still staring somewhat blankly out at the mountains. He was tired, that was the problem. From Westchester to Tel Aviv to Dunshabe had been close to seventy-two hours and far too many time zones, and he hadn't slept a wink on any of the planes. "And the others?" he asked finally. She was obviously waiting for some kind of reply.

"Down the road in that chaikana we passed on the way in. Listening to gossip, I think." A hand rested on his arm for a moment, and Nathan made himself look down at her. "You're not actually helping the situation, you know," Domino said, her voice soft but something faintly chiding in her violet eyes. "We need you to be Mr. Confident, not Mr. Space Case. Why don't you take a nap or something? It's not like we can head out of here until morning."

She had a point. Nathan turned away from the window, but instead of moving into the room, merely leaned back against the wall beside the window, his gaze moving tiredly over the spartan - hah-bloody-hah - interior of the room. Khorog's 'State Hotel' was still resolutely Communist in its decor.

"I could kill that driver," he said abruptly. "What the hell do we pay him for?"

"To drive?" Dom asked with a sigh, walking over and flopping down into the room's single, threadbare chair. "It's not like he was David's bodyguard, Nathan."

True. Ex-Mossad agents with superhuman speed didn't usually need bodyguards, did they? "Still." Although to be fair, had he been the poor benighted bastard, he probably would have turned around and run from an opium convoy too. Those shipments were so damned damaging, he thought with a sudden flash of frustration. This part of Tajikistan was relatively peaceful, and trying so hard to get back on its feet. Leave it to Afghanistan to fuck things up for its neighbors.

"I thought Mina was going to insist on coming with us," Domino said. Abruptly, she yawned hugely, then clapped a hand over her mouth, giving him a wry look.

Nathan just shook his head at her. "She wasn't going to leave the baby," he said under his breath. "She and David made a deal, remember." That one of them would stay out of the field, even the 'field' as Elpis knew it, because one of them had to put the baby first. Always. He'd wondered, when David had first told him about it, if he and Moira would have been able to do the same thing if they had been in David and Mina's places.

"And I figured it would last all of five minutes, with him actually missing."

"Well, you figured wrong." He really was in a foul mood. Nathan went over and sat down on the bed, kicking off his boots and then stretching out, staring up at the cracks in the plaster of the ceiling. "He's cute."

"Your namesake? He's adorable. He's got David's scowl down pat already."

Nathan grimaced, shifting on the bed at the memory of that tiny, fearsome scowl on little Nathan George Rabin's wrinkled face. "I'm sure David's been tutoring him on the sly," he muttered almost inaudibly.

"Most likely." The lightness in Dom's tone was beginning to sound a little forced. "I was always amazed that you and David and GW together never reached a critical mass of crankiness."

The pretense at normality was beginning to wear on him. "That would have entertained you too much," Nathan muttered again, closing his eyes.

"Pbbth."

Sleep came with surprising speed, falling over him like a curtain. It did not, however, stop the worry, which slipped into his dreams, filling them with images of David and GW. His two best friends, as they had been ten years ago. Five. Two. Last Christmas, the last time they'd all been together. The memories were hard enough, but then there were other images, as well. Figments of his anxiety. A corpse lying by the side of the mountain road, under the painfully blue sky. Gravestones and flowers and a baby crying for his father...

When he woke up hours later, his face wet with tears, the room was dark and he was alone.

---

He hadn't expected to find the Jeep. But the damage to the front end - it had hit a rock outcropping and hit it hard - made it perfectly obvious why no one had made off with it in the intervening week. It had been quite comprehensively scavenged for parts, however. More than once, Nathan suspected, walking around the hulk of the vehicle to where Anika was sniffing at the upholstery.

"Anything?"

"Blood," the blonde feral said, clear blue eyes looking up at him unhappily. "David's."

There was nothing left of any of David's gear, of course. What did you expect, Nathan? A clue? "Well," Nathan murmured very quietly, "I did notice the bullet holes in the door." Rather a lot of them. The driver had said that the lead vehicle on the convoy had opened fire without warning. "Any chance of a trail?"

"After this long?" But she turned slowly, her nose still twitching as she paced off the immediate area. Nathan watched her, knowing it was unlikely. Even in a climate like this, it had been more than a week, and it had snowed here, since. Ani's nose was good, but not that good.

"I'm going to take a look from the top of that ridge," he said, and left her to it. It was a thin excuse, but he knew enough to give a feral space in a situation like this.

Besides. He wanted a sense of the area. Could David have gotten away? Nathan thought as he reached the ridgetop and shielded his eyes from the sun as he looked out on terrain that was the very definition of rugged. Surely if he'd made a break for it, the drugrunners wouldn't have chased him. Wouldn't have been able to chase him. Unless one of those bullets caught him in the leg...

"You're being pessimistic."

Nathan froze, then let his hand fall slowly to his side. "I... am like that, you know," he said slowly. Very slowly. Almost as slowly as he let his head turned, so that he could see the man standing beside him.

GW gazed back at him calmly for a moment, then shook his head slowly, turning back to study their surroundings. Or maybe just admire the view. "Don't beat yourself up, Nathan. You're doing all you can."

His throat felt impossibly tight. "Doesn't feel like it," he forced out, swallowing hard.

"Does it ever?"

"Rarely," Nathan said with a sudden flash of desperate humor. His eyes were stinging, and he blinked rapidly, then squeezed them shut for a moment. When he opened them, GW was still there. Still standing right beside him, as solid-seeming as he would have been a year ago.

"You need to be ready," GW went on. Slowly and deliberately, the way he talked when he was introducing a subject he knew would be touchy, but one that needed to be dealt with. His patient, 'don't you blow up at me, Dayspring, or I'll kick your ass' voice. "It's been a week, Nathan. If he was shot, think of the odds."

Nathan nearly choked on his reply. "No. I don't-"

"Stop." There was not a hand on his shoulder. He was just imagining it, Nathan told himself fiercely. "All I'm telling you is that you need to be ready," GW went on in a much gentler voice. "He wouldn't want you blaming yourself for this. You know he wouldn't."

"Stop it," Nathan all but hissed, jerking away. His jaw was trembling and he clenched it, hard. "I am not going back and telling Mina," he said more disjointedly. "I am not telling that baby, when he's older... that is not an option, so don't even-"

"You'll do what you have to, when you have to. Isn't that the story of your life, bro?"

He tottered briefly, suddenly light-headed, and his vision blurred. When it cleared, he was alone on the ridge. Nathan took a deep, shaking breath, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

"I'm not," he whispered raggedly. Then Anika was yelling up to him to come back down, and Nathan wiped the distraught look off his face and concentrated on getting back down to the road.

---

The Pamir Highway was the second highest in the world. Only the Karakoram Highway ran through higher altitudes, but the two roads were very different. The Karakoram was paved, well-maintained; the Pamir was not. For all its pedigree as part of the Silk Road, it was barely more than a dirt track in most places. They'd detoured around three landslides already, and if those clouds in the distance meant snow, the trip was going to be even more difficult on the way back down to Khorog.

But he could cope with that, Nathan told himself grimly. So long as they came back with something useful. Two days and they had nothing but this one lead, the slim possibility that had led them here. The opium convoys didn't run straight into Kyrgyzstan, after all. They needed to stop. To refuel, if nothing else.

"You're glowering again," Nash said in that soft basso rumble, leaning over from the back seat of the jeep. He could have squeezed into the passenger's seat in the front, but it would have involved some very literal squeezing. It was easy to forgot just how large he and Theo were.

Of course, the fact that Gavin was built like your average sequoia was why he was along on this little jaunt. Sometimes it was necessary to be very, very obvious.

Nathan smiled tightly. "Now I'm curious. How can you tell that I'm glowering when you're looking at the back of my head, Gavin?" he asked, slowing the Jeep as the road took another sharp curve. They didn't want to waste time, but they also wanted to arrive intact. Slow and steady wins the race... who am I kidding.

"It's something about your posture. It's a dead giveaway," the gray-skinned man said mildly, then waved a very large hand at the road ahead. "Hey. There we are."

It was the Tajik equivalent of a rest stop. A couple of ramshackle buildings, seemingly growing right out of the rock face, and several canisters of natural gas for refilling vehicles. There was clearly something of a crowd inside, to judge by the variety of vehicles parked outside. Ancient Soviet-era cars, a couple of trucks, one modern-looking 4WD... which of these things is not like the other? Nathan pulled the Jeep over beside the all-too-shiny vehicle, eyeing it darkly.

"It could just be a particularly rich trekker," Gavin pointed out.

"It's too tacky. Look at the paint job. Flames on the side, for fuck's sake." Nathan shook his head. "Someone's come into money and isn't afraid to flaunt it."

"Our local contact?"

"Their local contact," Nathan corrected Gavin stonily. "Our soon-to-be source."

His fellow former ex-Mistra operative chuckled a bit wryly as he clambered out of the Jeep. "You always worry me when you start talking like that."

"Never mind. Just back me up."

"Always."

Inside, the chaikana was dim, poorly lit and smoky. Nathan had been in countless establishments of its type over the years. Tourists would stand out like a sore thumb in a place like this. He and Gavin would, too - and did, every pair of eyes in the place fastening on them as soon as they walked through the door.

He was only interested in one. It wasn't just tourists who stood out. There was a young man, Tajik by his features, and the owner of the 4WD, to judge by his equally new, Western-style clothing. Nathan focused on him, and smiled a cold, unpleasant smile as the younger man did a double-take - not at Nathan himself but at Gavin, so tall that he had to stoop slightly to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. Either way, he looked sufficiently intimidated, and Nathan walked right over and sat down at the table with him.

"~Evening,~" he said, pitching his accent and pronunciation towards the Tajik instead of the Dari. Farsi was such a useful language in this part of the world, with all of its mutually intelligible variants. "~You wouldn't be able to tell us anything about an opium convoy on its way north about a week ago, would you?~"

He heard a muffled snort from Gavin, who didn't bother sitting down, as none of the chairs around this table would have held him. #Nothing wrong with being direct,# he sent coolly.

If you decide to beat it out of him, Gavin thought back at him, just give me some warning so that I can cover your back.

The young man blinked at Nathan, then laughed, a bit nervously, his eyes flickering to Gavin again. "~Fuck off, old man. I don't know what you're talking about.~"

His posture, his expression, his completely unguarded mind... all of it screamed the lie. Nathan straightened slightly in his chair, his hands twitching as he wrestled down the desire to do precisely what Gavin had just joked about and beat the truth out of the kid. Why did people insist on getting in his way at times like this?

"I know that look of righteous indignation. You ought to warn everyone else to duck." Sitting in the third empty chair at the table, Timothy Morgan slouched, grinning crookedly at Nathan. "Be nice, old man. If you let him live, he might learn."

Nathan went very still in his chair. The young man kept dividing his attention between him and Gavin, his expression shifting back and forth between contempt and anxiety. Tim just kept grinning. This is very odd. But Nathan shook his head, telling himself to keep his mind on the task at hand. It wasn't as if he'd never seen one of his dead friends before. It wasn't the first time he'd seen one of his dead friends on this trip.

It was just one of those weeks.

"Concentrate on the kid, Nate. Not on me."

"~I don't think I'll be fucking off,~" Nathan said, and if his voice wasn't quite as steady as it should have been at first, it grew firmer as he went on. "~I don't think you belong here, you with your new clothes and your new car. I think money like that only come from one source out here, which means that you have information I need.~"

"~I don't care what you think,~" the kid said derisively. "~You're the one who doesn't belong here. And I see no need to continue this conversation,~" he said with a grandiose gesture that was definitely covering nervousness.

"~I'm sorry. Did you think this was the beginning of a negotiation?~" The mood among the other patrons was interesting. Watchful, but no one was making any move to intervene.

"Because he's not one of them, Nate," Tim said logically. "They tolerate him, but he's an outside. What outsiders do between themselves is no business of theirs. You've spent enough time in this part of the world to know that."

"Makes sense," Nathan muttered, in English, his eyes straying to Tim.

The moment's distraction nearly cost him. Gavin was standing a few steps away, looming but not close enough to intervene. But distracted or not, Nathan heard the familiar click - and moved like lightning.

A flicker of carefully applied telekinesis jammed the gun - so easy, even as rusty as he was, but then, it had been one of the first finesse tricks he'd ever been taught. Another, less focused bit of TK flung the table aside, and Nathan had the kid up against the wall, holding him by the throat, before the little bastard could do more than boggle at the fact that the trigger of his gun wasn't moving.

"Gun in the pants," Tim said with a snort. "What a punk."

Gavin was right there at his shoulder, growling under his breath. "Sorry," he grated, sounding angry with himself. "Your wife would kill me if I let you get shot."

"Tell him not to worry," Tim volunteered helpfully. "She'd be too busy putting you out of your misery to worry about Gavin."

Nathan opened his mouth and then closed it again, flustered. The kid's face was flushed, his eyes bulging as he gasped for breath. "~I think we should take this outside now,~" he said, and Tim, standing on his other side now, laughed.

"He's not going to tell you."

"Yes, he will."

"Nathan?" Gavin asked steadily, sounding a little concerned now.

Nathan shook his head. "Nothing," he muttered, his eyes flickering to Gavin for a moment as his grip slackened just enough so that the kid wouldn't pass out. "Outside for the rest of this?"

"Sounds like a plan."

--

"... taking an awful risk, aren't they? Tajikistan's fairly diligent about their anti-opium efforts."

"Diligent, yes. 100% successful, no. And there's a lot of very vertical country around here."

"They need to stop and repackage the shit somewhere, after all. Can't do that safely in Afghanistan these days."

He ought to be paying more attention to the conversation, Nathan thought dimly, slumped in the chair by the window. Most of the others were gathered around the table, poring over maps to pin down the exact spot his unwilling informant had identified as a transshipping depot for the opium convoys coming north out of Afghanistan.

"Damn, it's almost on the Kyrgyz border."

"Yeah, and nowhere near any of the major roads. Such as they are."

"So we hike in from the highway? Or a helicopter?"

Nathan closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. Which would be best? They were fairly sure David was there. The kid in the chaikana had heard rumors of someone picked up around the same time and in the same area that David had gone missing. A UNODC agent, he'd claimed the rumors had said, and one using an NGO cover.

"He was very cooperative, wasn't he? Of course, a good beating does wonders."

Nathan opened his eyes and stared flatly at Carmella Ruiz, sitting in the chair across from his and smiling very slightly. The Mistra director tilted her head at him, studying him with that calmly assessing gaze that had always made him feel like he was an insect. An insect or a laboratory experiment. Not human, in any case. Beneath her notice, or almost. Because he had been useful, and that had been the only thing that distinguished him from...

"Nothing?" Her smile grew, amused.

She looked very good for a woman who had been executed by the US government over a year ago, he thought. "We hike," Nathan said, loudly enough for the others to hear him.

There was a moment of silence. "All right, then," Domino said briskly, and the conversation picked up again, integrating his decision as seamlessly as if he was standing over at the table directing things.

"They hardly need you at all, do they?" Ruiz asked mildly. Nathan stiffened slightly in the chair, hating her for that too-acute assessment, and she laughed softly. "Now, Nathan, you shouldn't be surprised. Two and a half years is a long time. They've moved on." The smile turned cruel. "You're just the one who shows up occasionally and wrings his hands when they die."

--

Sixty people at the transshipping depot. Not all were armed, although many were. There was a lab on the site as well, a processing facility for the raw opium. Not all that surprising; Tajikistan was one of the major hubs for the Central Asian drug trade, and it was much easier to ship the processed product. The extra security was inevitable.

It made no difference in the end. Nathan had given specific instructions to the others - Ruiz's snide comments had driven him up out of his chair and over to the table to cut through the table and come up with a workable plan. They couldn't simply storm the place. Leaving bodies on the ground was not an option. They weren't a mercenary outfit anymore, and it had been David who had negotiated Elpis its comparatively warm welcome in Israel. There had been conditions to that welcome.

So they had to be subtle - comparatively, at least.

It took less than fifteen minutes. Domino's team set off the charges at the north end of the valley, drawing the bulk of the armed guards away. At the south end, Nathan made his way down to the tent where he'd identified David's mental signature, letting Ani, Ian, Gavin and Isabel cover him. None of the remaining guards saw the black-clad shapes of his team melt out of the night before they were left unconscious on the ground. The skill gap between Afghan drugrunners and ex-Mistra operatives was colossal. And his fellow former Spartans were far from rusty.

There was one guard in the tent. He pulled a gun as Nathan came through the door - and was then flying backwards, hitting the ground like a sack of potatoes. Nathan ignored him and went over to kneel beside the man on the stretcher.

"Hi." His voice shook, just a little. Alive. He's alive.

David was pale and sweating, the bandage on his leg soaked through with blood. But he managed a smile, and his grip was surprisingly strong as Nathan clasped his hand. "What took you so long?" he asked hoarsely.

"Well, you had to go missing several hundred klicks from nowhere," Nathan said gruffly. GW, kneeling beside the stretcher on the other side, grinned, his whole face alight with relief. Nathan gave him a vexed look. "We still need to get out of here," he said pointedly.

"Oh, I know," GW said immediately, looking mildly repentant. "But you will."

"Optimism," Nathan said disjointedly. He wasn't feeling well. 'Dizzy with relief' should be a better feeling than this. And it hurt to look at GW, like his eyes couldn't quite focus.

"Well, no shit," David said with a weak laugh, pushing himself up on his elbows. "I can handle the indignity of being slung over your shoulder, I think."

"It wouldn't be the first time," GW pointed out cheerfully. "Remember Caracas?"

"Quiet," Nathan growled and pulled David up off the stretcher - carefully. Focus. He would focus, and get David out of here. Climbing the mountain meant nothing if you didn't make it back down.

He found something closer to his usual bantering tone. "I'll have you out of here momentarily. Dom's in charge of the diversion and it's suitably dramatic."

"Oh, of course."

---

"I expected David to be in worse shape, after a week up there when they thought he was UNODC," MacInnis observed idly, sinking into the chair on the other side of the table.

Nathan would have pointed out that he had come down to the hotel bar for some quiet time, if he'd had any expectation that saying that would have gotten the old rat bastard to go away. He slouched in his chair, his eyes fixed on the tabletop. It was wood, marked by cigarette burns. He ran a finger over one of the burns. "Some of my scars match the table," he muttered.

MacInnis raised an eyebrow. "That's a hell of a non sequitur." He shook his head, then went on more briskly. "Apparently they were waiting for someone a little higher up in the food chain to arrive to start asking David questions. It's a good thing we got there when we did, from the sounds of it."

"Yeah, well, hurray for the foul weather, then," Nathan muttered, picking up his glass and sipping at his vodka. He wasn't sure what he would have done if he'd broken into that tent and found David being tortured or some such thing.

"Not handled it very well," the woman sitting next to him said softly. "I know you, Nathan. You would have snapped and done something appalling." She reached up, pushing wavy brown hair behind one ear.

"I'm not like that anymore," Nathan said, his throat tight. More vodka was necessary. Definitely more vodka. "It's been a long time since I did that sort of thing."

MacInnis, his own glass halfway to his mouth, paused, giving him a quizzical look. "I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing." Nathan signaled the bartender for a refill. "Have you ever noticed that the vodka here tastes strange? It's like they don't know quite how to make it properly." He sounded odd, he thought. Rattled.

"Manic, I think is the word." Aliya leaned forward, laying her hand over his. Her hand was cold. Icy. That wasn't right at all, Nathan thought a bit desperately. "You always get that way under stress."

"Nathan." MacInnis had that carefully controlled 'I'm concerned, but not ready to show it' face on. "Are you all right? I know it's been a hell of a week..."

"Fine. Just fine," Nathan said, his voice sounding choked now. "You're right. It's been a hell of a week. I'm just tired." He was so not explaining to the old rat bastard that Aliya was sitting beside him.

"Why not? He buried me, remember... I should thank him for that."

"Stop it." It was a plea, almost a moan. MacInnis straightened in his chair, and this time there was open worry on his face. Nathan sucked in a shaky breath and went on, the words spilling out too quickly. "You know, Mac, there's been something I wanted to say to you for oh, two months now." Change the subject, change the subject... His chest hurt. Iron bands, closing around it.

"Oh?" MacInnis's voice was odd. Wary.

"Yes. You're... very annoying," Nathan said, his voice cracking on the last word. It hadn't been what he'd meant to say. There was a whole speech at the back of his mind, one he'd been writing since San Diego. But his photographic memory was failing him, and all he could see was the blank page.

"...that's it?"

"I could have thought of better words," Aliya said wisely, her eyes nearly amber in the morning light from the window. "Criminally negligent. Heartless. An accomplice to mass murder, late-life fit of remorse or not. Why don't you reach out and give the old rat bastard a heart attack, Nathan?" She leaned forward, her eyes locked on his, hardening. He had forgotten that she was hard, but of course she was. She'd had to be, to teach operatives. "So easy. Remember how?"

Nathan jerked in his chair like she'd struck him, pushing away the images that flooded his mind, the remembered feel of delivering that innocuous internal pinch. "I don't want... it's always something with you, Colin, isn't it? One secret or another..." He was so angry suddenly, angry and desperate to cut through all of the things that made no sense. His head was pounding, pain stabbing behind his eyes in a steady rhythm. "I don't want to hate you. Why do you do these things that make me hate you?"

Aliya folded her arms across her chest, sighing. "If this was a decade ago, you stubborn ass, I would be sending you for punishment measures for being such an idiot. Why do you want so much not to be angry with him?"

"Because I like my twisted father figures, okay?"

Another hand came down on his. The other hand, the one Aliya hadn't touched. It was a different hand, age-roughened and callused. Warm, though. "Nathan... son." MacInnis's voice was tight, unsteady. "Who are you talking to?"

It didn't even occur to him to lie. "Aliya." His voice broke and he looked away. "She can't figure out why I want to forgive you, and she's right. It's stupid. I should hate you, for keeping the truth from me."

Life and death. The important things. He never had any say, never any choice. The people he wanted to live long and happy lives... didn't. He lost them one by one, and Nathan shuddered, straightening in his chair. Terrified, suddenly, that he was going to wake up in his hotel room upstairs and find out that none of this was real. That they'd never found David, or that he'd been gone when they got there...

"Don't worry, love," Aliya said soothingly. "Since when do you dream happy endings?"

Nathan slumped abruptly in his chair. "Make her go away. I don't feel well," he whispered. When had MacInnis come over to stand beside his chair?

"I'd kind of guessed that, son." The hand on his arm was firm, grounding somehow. "As for making her go away... I think we need to get David and you back down to Dunshabe promptly."

"Why?"

"Well, him to a proper doctor to get checked over. And you," MacInnis said quietly, his voice reassuring, "down to a lower altitude."

Nathan looked up at him, staring. "Altitude sickness?" he asked after a long moment. It wasn't. Was it? Hallucinations... cerebral edema. "Shit."

"Given everything you've put your brain through this summer," MacInnis said reasonably, "plus the fact that you're had problems with it before..." He stopped, shrugging. "Dom tells stories," he explained.

"Does she..."

"She does indeed. You can scold her later. On your feet, soldier," MacInnis said, urging him up to his feet. Nathan managed not to faceplant on the table, but walking was going to be difficult. His knees felt wobbly. "They're getting David ready to go. I'm going to tell them you and I are going on ahead."

"Okay." One step at a time. MacInnis was right there at his elbow, and Nathan leaned on him unashamedly. "I... I hadn't thought of this, you know," he said dizzily, rambling. "I see them sometimes..."

But MacInnis didn't answer. They were nearly to the door before he spoke again. "So you don't want to hate me?" he asked very quietly.

Nathan swallowed, closing his eyes as they stepped out into the sunlight. The light hurt his eyes. Maybe once he was in the car, he could sleep. "Don't make fun of me," he muttered.

"I'm not." There was another long silence as MacInnis steered him towards the Jeep. Then, almost inaudibly: "It's good to know, son."