Gray Spirits

Note from Alicia: This is not X-Project canon, but (the beginnings of) a fanfic adaptation of Nathan's arrival and the Mistra plotline. There are some substantial differences from game canon (hence the inspired by comment in my disclaimers) but a lot that will hopefully give those familiar with the game reason to smile as well.

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Hindu Kush,

One Week Ago

There was a pass they could have taken, of course. Narrow, treacherous, it would have been the stuff of tactical nightmares even had it not been so heavily guarded. There had been some grumbling about the climb, but no one had wanted to risk storming the pass and alerting those inside the guest house. The quickest way in was also the most efficient way to endanger the life of the scientist they were here to retrieve, and they weren't getting paid to bring back a corpse.

The lead climber paused, gray eyes narrowing as he assessed the route. The hesitation lasted only a moment before he was hauling himself upwards again. He made the difficult climb look easy, moving with a fluid grace startling in a man nearly six and a half feet in height when he was standing on terra firma. There was an easier way to do this, he reflected, but they didn't dare risk it. Not when they didn't know the nature of the house's passive security systems. Psi was on the EM spectrum, after all. Detectable if the tech was advanced enough.

Telekinesis wasn't always as useful as it should be. He paused again, spotting a likely belay point, and aimed for it, moving a little to the left on the rock face. The others were waiting, not at all patiently from what he could tell. He supposed he couldn't blame them. The weather was about as good as one would expect in Afghanistan in February - which was to say, fucking awful, and he was not looking forward to being mostly stationary for an indeterminate amount of time at the belay point while the rest of the team made their way up. But fair was fair, he supposed.

There had been joking on the plane before they'd made their jump about spending the fee for this operation on tickets to somewhere warm, maybe a nice beach house somewhere in the Caribbean. He hadn't joined in the banter, being too keyed up to find comfort in it as he usually did. That his nerves were drawn this tightly at this point in the operation was not a good sign.

But that had become an increasingly common problem for him these days, hadn't it? Pre-action nerves, of all the bloody dysfunctions. If this had been ten years ago...

Reaching for the next hold, he stopped, and not to assess the route this time. No, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. The moment of dizziness passed as quickly as it had come. Vertigo, he tried to tell himself. That was all. It had been a while since he'd done this sort of climbing, and...

Another wave of dizziness, stronger this time and accompanied by flickering blue lights in his peripheral vision. Not now, he thought doggedly, leaning against the rock face and taking a deep, shaky breath. Now was bad. Very bad. In fact, anytime within two days and a hundred miles of here was bad.

"D?" The voice in his earpiece sounded concerned. "Problem?"

He started to answer, not sure what he would say. Not knowing how he could explain this even if this had been the time and place to explain, but there wasn't time. All at once, his mind exploded from the inside, and there was too much. Too many voices and too many images, as if his shields had just gone down in the middle of a hysterical crowd and he was seeing through all their eyes, all at once.

He didn't feel himself lose his grip on the rock face. All he knew was the sensation of drowning in memories than weren't his. Dying. They were dying, being cut down by gunfire, and he was trapped by the sheer crush of bodies, unable to run, unable to fight back...

He fell backwards, limp as a rag doll, not even attempting a grab at the rock. Sixty meters below, the practiced reaction of the young woman on belay broke his fall at fifteen meters. Even so, his body slammed into the rock hard enough to have knocked him out had he not already been unconscious.

Throwing back the hood of his parka, GW Bridge knelt beside the motionless form that had been so carefully lowered to the the ground. His heart lurching in his chest, he laid a hand against the side of his friend's ashen face. "Nathan?" Nothing.

"Is he breathing?" Bridge looked around to meet violet eyes nearly frantic in a thin face otherwise rigidly composed, and nodded briefly. Dom exhaled audibly, then crouched down beside them. "Fuck," she said, the facade cracking enough to show some of the fear and anger beneath. The others were standing back, giving them some room now that Nathan was safely down, but Bridge saw the same emotions in them. "Fucking hell, GW. This has got to stop."

"I know." Bridge's jaw clenched as he looked upwards at the path they had been meaning to take, then back down at Nathan. If this followed the usual pattern, he'd be stirring again soon. But not soon enough for the task at hand. He concentrated, making several quick adjustments to the tactical plan in his head. "Change of approach," he announced rather unnecessarily, and started giving orders.

They'd see the job through, get themselves and their charge out safely. Then, bro, Bridge thought, glancing back down at his best friend, the man he had considered family for the last seven years, you and I are going to have that talk.

~*~

Salem Center, New York

Now

The sub-basements of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters were an ever-present reminder that while this was a functional school - and one whose enrollment had tripled over the last year - things were not quite as they seemed in this place. Even setting aside the nature of the areas reserved for the X-Men, the whole atmosphere was different down here, the elegance of the mansion above replaced by stark functionality. Instead of rich wood paneling and strategically placed antiques - of the sturdier sort, of course - was smooth, gleaming metal, a decided lack of color, and a noticeable preference for the 'X' motif when it came to the design of doorways and so forth.

Moira MacTaggart had spent her first week here at the school twitting her old friend for what had seemed to her like a case of architectural egotism. When Charles had finally explained to her - over yet another cup of his bloody tea, of course - whose idea the design had been and how it actually referred to the X-factor, she had of course stopped teasing him. Harsh as her sense of humor had become over the years, there were certain old wounds she was not about to poke at. Especially as, deep down, she missed Erik as well.

It hadn't dawned on her until later that day what it meant that she had never seen the sub-basements in their current state. Ten years, Moira had found herself marveling. Was it really possible that it had been ten years since she'd last visited Charles here? Back then, he'd had only a handful of students, whose education he had attended to on his own.

Now it was truly a school, with close to eighty students - all young mutants, some of whom had no other home but this. And I'm living right in the bloody middle of it, the red-haired Scotswoman thought with a sigh, leaning back in her chair and wincing as her back protested the long hours bent over her computer studying test results. Even now, three months later, there were still times she wondered how she had permitted Charles to talk her into this.

It was a very long way from her research center on Muir Island. A world away, in more than just the physical sense. Although she had seen plenty of 'business' on Muir, the pace was different, the demands on her time more easily managed. She had been able to leave much of the day-to-day running of the center to Rory Campbell and the rest of her staff and pursue her own research, dealing with patients on the personal level only when it suited her to do so.

Here it was different. Almost a third of the eighty students came to her for powers training on a regular basis, and most of the rest came for regular consultation. Those with maladaptive mutations were, of course, her special responsibility.

Charles had lured her here with promises of research opportunities beyond her wildest dreams, and truthfully, the sheer range of mutations among the children here was nothing she would have seen on Muir had she stayed there another twenty years. But there were drawbacks. Old wounds of her own that bled, just a little, whenever she dealt with the children. Especially the little ones.

"Moira MacTaggart," came a gently remonstrating voice from the open door of her office, "do I need to have your desk moved to the front lawn to ensure you get some sun? I'm sure some of the children, not to mention your fellow staff, would be delighted to facilitate."

Moira looked up, raising an eyebrow as Charles Xavier moved forward into the room, the hum of his chair nearly inaudible. "You'll bloody well leave my desk where it is," Moira informed him with a trace of entirely put-upon aristocratic hauteur, "or I'll push your chair into the lake. I get an ample amount of sun."

"Only because the coffeemaker was moved upstairs." His bland expression didn't fool her for an instant. She knew this man too well, and had known him for too long, to not see the honest concern that lay beneath the gently bantering tone. Charles was concerned about her, she knew that. Prying her out of her lab on Muir had only been the first step in a much grander plan. "Call it a strategic decision on my part. We do enjoy seeing you out and about outside the lab, you realize."

Moira snorted at him, reaching out to close the file she had been studying. "This had better not be the prelude to yet another attempt to convince me to take a class, Charles," she warned him. For a man with such a subtle mind, he could be very predictable. "I don't have the patience for teaching. We've been through this."

"I think you do yourself a disservice," Charles countered, "having seen how effectively you interact with the students during powers training. But no," he went on, his smile very slightly rueful, "I really am not here to try and change your mind on that score. Today, at least."

"Oh, so this is simply a social call?" Moira told the part of her that was feeling somewhat sheepish to be off with itself. Charles could stand getting the rough side of her tongue every so often. He'd had years of practice, after all. "You really are just trying to lure me upstairs into the sunlight?"

"I thought you might enjoy a cup of tea."

How was it possible that the man could manage such an innocent look, at his age? Moira met his eyes levelly, a tiny, challenging smile flickering across her features. "So long as tea's all that's on the agenda. I could manage that, yes." And if it came down to dueling with their psychology degrees again, she could probably manage that, as well.

"Lovely. Shall we?"

~*~

"You're always so quick to leave."

Scott Summers pulled his shirt over his head, keeping his eyes tightly closed. That done, he put his glasses back on and then looked back over his shoulder at the woman in the bed with a faint smile. "Not by choice," he told her, his gaze moving down her body for a moment, almost involuntarily. "But I've got another test scenario to run with Bobby and Piotr. I told them if they weren't in the Danger Room and ready to go at nineteen hundred I was putting them on coms duty for the rest of their natural lives."

"Such a... hardass," Betsy said with one of those Mona Lisa smiles she did so very well. Elisabeth Braddock, Scott had noted early on in her tenure at the mansion, did not grin. Or smirk. Her reactions in general were deliberate, carefully formed. Maybe it was a holdover from her years as a model, or perhaps the work that had come after that, the work for the British government about which she dropped only the occasional tantalizing hint. "That is what I heard the boys calling you after their last scenario, I do believe?"

"You would know. You did their debriefing." Scott glanced back at the mirror, frowning. Disheveled. Definitely disheveled. He ran his fingers through his damp hair to get it to lie flat and left it at that. The shower had been on the hurried side, as he was running later than he'd like. He still had some adjustments to make to the scenario before he put his two victims through their paces and he'd intended to be in the control booth a full half-hour ahead of schedule.

Though, really, he should have known he would find himself making amendments to the plan as soon as Betsy had invited him to her suite for dinner. These "nice, quiet dinners" generally involved very little food, and tonight's had been no exception. Not that he was complaining.

1. Well, I should hope not, love,# was Betsy's telepathic reply. "From my perspective," she went on aloud, "that was a thoroughly pleasant way to spend the dinner hour. Especially," she said, wrinkling her nose, "after spending the entire afternoon immersed in my sophomore class's very odd and poor articulated ideas about Shakespeare. I'm going to have to hunt up another red pen before tomorrow."

Scott smiled, almost involuntarily. "This is why I prefer my physics class," he teased, watching her in the mirror as she sat up.

"But you also teach all our young energy-projectors," was her perfectly logical retort. "Personally, I'd rather be correcting comma splices and critiquing bizarre psychosexual theories about Hamlet than getting blown up by my students on a regular basis."

"Hey, it's been a month since the last incident--

"--which put you in the infirmary overnight, if I recall." She had been the one sitting with him that night, waking him up every hour and teasing him about his inability to duck.

Getting out of bed and pulling on her kimono, Betsy came over to stand beside him, resting a hand lightly between his shoulder blades. "The point stands," she said, looking up at him with eyes he knew were purple, even if he could never see their real color. "There are pros and cons to everything we find ourselves doing around here."

She was alluding to something that had absolutely nothing to do with marking, or even teaching in general, Scott knew, and coming from her, the implications didn't sting quite as much. Funny how that worked.

"Sometimes we can tell the cons to go to hell," he said, a bit more lightly than he really felt. "I'm here because I want to be here, Elisabeth."

It was that simple, whatever Ororo or Logan or Bobby and Marie, or any of the rest of the staff or students thought. He was here, with her, for the same reason. Because he wanted to be here. Because he enjoyed her company, valued her insight and experience, and had gotten sick and tired of being alone. The next person who tried to put a timeframe on his grieving process could go to hell.

"And as I keep telling you, that's good enough for me." Betsy wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him soundly. "Now," she murmured, drawing back reluctantly, "get out of here before I decide to keep you for the night, Summers. Breakfast tomorrow?"

"Yes, but in the dining hall," Scott said, and couldn't help a grin at the little disappointed face she made. "I want to go over the list of summer courses with you and see if there's anything you'd like to teach."

"Very determined to wear me out, aren't you?" was Betsy's teasing retort as she headed for the shower.

Scott couldn't quite resist watching until the bathroom door closed behind her.

~*~

"Hey!"

Marie Decanto looked up from her psychology textbook, blinking at the rather alarmed-looking boy standing in the doorway of the suite she shared with Jubilee, Kitty, and the recently arrived Paige Guthrie. "Can I help you, sugar?" she asked, not recognizing the youngster. This was sad, she told herself, when there were students here she couldn't even call by name. Meant she was paying far too much attention to her classes and to training, and not enough to what was going on around her. She'd have to work on that.

"There's–they're arguing," he said vaguely, waving a hand in the direction of the grand staircase. Marie frowned and listened, her eyes widening a little as she did indeed heard muffled voices, voices that had to be pretty damned loud if she was hearing them from here.

Sighing, she closed her textbook and rose. She was the Xavier's School equivalent of a residence advisor - one of the Professor's ideas to help cope with the explosive growth in the size of the student body - and given that the boy had come to her door, none of the others must be available. "Let's go see what all the fuss is about, then," she told him comfortingly, not bothering to close the suite door as she left. Whatever this was, surely it wouldn't take long. Tempers were a little raw around here because of the crowding, and she and the other older students were more than used to smoothing down ruffled feathers.

There was a crowd gathered at the top of the stairs, watching the shouting match going on just below. Spotting her, they immediately part, and Marie sighed again, more heavily this time as she saw just who was doing the shouting. Not much of a surprise here.

"-and you can sod off and stay out of me fuckin' head!" snarled the deceptively tiny-looking girl with the multiple piercings. "Less you want to wake up minus those pieces you think so much of, you bastard!"

"Are you threatening me?" her sparring partner asked incredulously, looking unspeakably affronted. Manuel de la Rocha had a good six inches on the girl facing him, but all things being equal, which they unfortunately weren't, Marie wouldn't have given much for his chances. Amanda Sefton had been here for all of two weeks and was already outpacing the Spaniard in the 'problem child' category. Which, she reflected wearily, took some considerable doing.

"I know a spell that'll shrivel them good," Amanda shouted back vindictively. "Not that there's much t' shrivel, I'd lay money-"

"Chupame la verga, puta," Manuel invited, turning crimson with rage, "and see for yourself!"

"All right, that's enough!" Marie snapped, exasperated, as she pushed past the last few bystanders and started down the stairs. She knew enough Spanish to know what Manuel had just said, and that was just not appropriate. "Settle down, both of you. What's this all about?"

Amanda folded her arms across her chest and looked rebellious. Manuel sniffed, looking down on her with only partially-veiled contempt, but decided to answer Marie. "I merely made her an offer. She wants me," he said haughtily, "I can feel it. Then she was shrieking, assaulting me-"

"Amanda, did you hit him?" Marie asked immediately, raising an eyebrow. The younger girl shook her head vehemently, and Manuel rolled his eyes.

"With her emotions," he said, as if explaining the situation to a pair of three year-olds. "We empaths are very sensitive, and my shields, as you know, are not good." Manuel had come to them from an asylum in his native Spain, where he'd been undergoing "treatment" that had been more like torture designed to exploit his empathic abilities. He was pretty messed up, to put it mildly, and his lack of control had already been causing problems.

He was tuning in to her, now, Marie figured, to judge by how he was calming down. She was perfectly content to let him do that. "Why did I say about propositioning the girls?" she asked Manuel very calmly.

"She wanted it!" he protested, the picture of offended dignity.

"I bloody well did not!" Angry tears glittered in Amanda's eyes and she swiped at them with the back of her hand. "I'm walkin' along mindin' me own bleedin' business, and he decides to start askin' me how I like it-"

"You were watching me-"

"I was NOT!"

Marie raised her hands, and amazingly, they both fell silent. "You," she told Manuel, "need to talk to the Professor. Maybe she wasn't right to go off on you like that-" She gave Amanda a warning look when the girl started to say something, and then continued. "-but you've got to learn some manners, Manny. You can't be walking up to people and saying things like that to them."

That, of course, provoked a diatribe in both Spanish and English, on how he was a de la Rocha and needed no tutoring in manners from Americans, and how if women weren't willing to admit to what they wanted that perhaps they ought to find the nearest convent. Which was of course like waving a red flag in front of a bull, since Amanda was unashamedly pagan and somewhat militant about it. A whole five seconds, and they were both shouting. Again.

By the time Marie finally got the two of them separated and calmed down, and got back to her suite, she had a pounding headache and was so far away from the proper headspace for studying psychology that she wasn't even in the same galaxy. Paige's suggestion, when she came in to hear the story of the latest hallway drama, that Manuel just needed "a little bit of gelding, and he'd settle right down" provoked five solid minutes of hysterical laughter on Marie's part.

"But there's no such thing as a little bit of gelding!" she protested, once she was able to speak again.

Paige's cornflower-blue eyes were utterly innocent. "Well, we could pretend..."

~*~

Harry's Hideway, the local watering hole, was a fifteen minute walk from the school even when you were blind drunk, something Pete Wisdom was willing to admit that he'd tested a few too many times. He spent enough time down here to see that the place was certainly reaping the benefits of the increased traffic from Xavier's staff and graduate students. Mostly because we poor sods feel the need to escape from the madhouse on a regular basis, he thought, nodding and smiling briefly as Meg, one of the more attractive of Harry's waitresses, brought him another scotch.

Sadly, she was also the proprietor's niece, which was one of Pete's primary reasons for never responding to her obvious interest. One didn't offend the man who sold you the drinks. It was one of his cardinal rules, so he only broke it on special occasions.

Which this wasn't. No, just another day in purgatory. Three months ago now, he'd made the supremely stupid mistake of being a little too honest during a debriefing. He'd been coming off a particularly rough mission, the last in a series of them as a matter of fact, and he'd been too bloody tired to keep up the act. The results had been predictable, and he really only had himself to blame. The debriefing report had made its way through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of British Intelligence and landed in the hand of someone with a psychology degree and too much time on her hands.

As a result, here he was. On rest leave as far as the official record was concerned, but with the caveat that he was here to 'observe and advise'. Xavier's star was on the rise with both the British and American governments, and the X-Men were getting involved in all kinds of things where the fetish gear-wearing amateurs needed a little guidance if they were aiming not to make a royal mess of the proceedings.

All right, so he wasn't being entirely fair. But he figured he was entitled.

A cold draft from the direction of the door drew him out of his own thoughts, and he looked up. A giggling young couple had claimed his usual booth and he hadn't had the heart to kick them out, so he'd picked another. It was in a different corner, but still facing the door, so he was in a perfect position to see the man who walked in, sniffed once, and then focused unerringly on him.

Perfect. Just bloody perfect. Pete raised his glass in mock salute as Logan came over and sat down without so much as a token inquiry as to whether he was actually looking for company. "Shouldn't you be back at the house pretending to teach... whatever it is you're pretending to teach this term?"

"Self-defense," was the dry reply as Logan nodded to Meg, who immediately headed off to fetch his usual. "Fancy meeting you here, Wisdom. You'd think you made a habit of sitting down here every night and getting drunk." Meg arrived with his beer and he gave her a crooked grin that made her giggle and blush.

"We don't all have healing factors. And some of us rather enjoy getting drunk." Pete sipped at his scotch and wondered what Romany would have said about whatever sins he'd committed in a past life to deserve his current circumstances. "Takes the edge off."

The other man gave a bark of laughter, and Pete eyed him darkly. To say that he had been surprised to read his briefing material and discover this man among Xavier's well-intentioned crusaders would be a significant understatement. When he'd pressed Charlie on it, the bald git had smiled, said something about the proper set of motivations working wonders, and offered him another cup of tea.

"Good to get out of the craziness," Logan offered after a long moment of silence.

"Mmm." Was the man trying to make conversation? Pete wasn't particularly in the mood. His pocket abruptly vibrated and he frowned, pulling out his cell phone. "Bloody things," he muttered. "Don't know why I don't drop it in the lake..."

It was a text message, at least, not a call. Pete hit the appropriate button - and frowned, his eyebrows heading for his hairline as he scanned the single line of text. It was gibberish to anyone who didn't know what they were reading. To him, it was a basic cipher, combined with a personal code he knew very well, and he begged a pen from Meg, then scrawled on the napkin, ignoring Logan's poorly-veiled interest.

The message was as short as the enciphered original.

'nate missing. call me. -dom'

"Oh, hell..."

"Problem?" Logan inquired, his posture relaxed but his eyes very sharp.

"Yeah," Pete said sourly, and tossed back the rest of his scotch. "But not yours."

~*~

She was really going to have to do something about the suite, Moira thought, laying her robe over the chair beside the window and slipping into bed, not reaching out to turn off the bedside light just yet. Three months and she hadn't made a single change to her living quarters here. Bedroom, living room, all of it still had the same bland decor it had possessed the day she'd moved in.

She missed her castle. Of course, she'd changed very little about the family wing since her father's day. The wings that had been turned into the labs and clinic had been thoroughly modernized, of course, but the older parts of the castle had always been beautiful and they had grown old gracefully. Each room had a personality all its own. Not like the so-recently-renovated staff wing, where you could still smell the paint, even now.

I ought to have brought over more than clothes and books, Moira thought with a sigh as she settled against the pillows. Perhaps one of the antique clocks her father had so loved. Something to make the place feel a little more like home. Rory would ship over anything she wanted, of course. She'd have to give it some thought, draw up a list. It was looking more and more like she would be here for some time, with how deeply involved she was becoming in the lives of these children. Past time to stop living out of a suitcase.

She was just reaching out to turn off her bedside lamp when her cell phone rang. Frowning, Moira slipped back out of bed and went over to the dresser where she'd left it. It was a new phone, of course, one she'd gotten when she came to the States, and the only calls she generally received on it were from people here when she was off-campus. If there was an emergency here, the house phone in the living room of the suite would have rung, or her pager would have alerted her. And it was too late at night to be Rory...

"Hello?"

A pause and a crackle of static. "Moira?" a familiar voice, rough with weariness, asked. "Why are your calls being forwarded to another number?"

Moira's eyes went wide and she went over and sat down on the edge of the bed while her legs would still hold her. "Good God," she breathed, nearly overwhelmed by a sudden rush of pure joy and relief. Of all the voices to hear on the end of the phone, after all these months of waiting and fearing the worst. "Nathan? I'm in the States... where are you?"

"The States?" There was a trace of despair in the tired, gruff voice for a moment. "Why aren't you on Muir? Shit."

"Are you all right?" No answer, and Moira bit her lip, hard. "Nathan Dayspring," she said, more sternly, "you tell me where you are, right now. I'll come to you." Because he was in trouble of some kind, she could hear it in his voice.

And the only trouble he would call her directly about was medical. The possibilities made her chest tighten, and she took a deep, steadying breath. He wouldn't have called unless it was serious, which meant that she needed to get to wherever he was, now.

Another pause. "Liechtenstein," was the hesitant response. "Moira, I don't think..."

"Don't think," she instructed him briskly. "Just give me the address."