FIC: [Haven] House Divided - Mara/Nathan/William, Explicit (4/10)

[roseveare]

NOTE: Please be aware that this is the chapter responsible for the non-con warning.

Chapter 3

Mara wakes with conversations reverberating in her head which she has not had, words she never spoke but which feel so much hers that she can't deny them. She can't quite ever remember the words. They dissipate with the threads of her dreams, leaving ephemeral trails through her mind.

In the three days since their last visit to the mainland, an intense feeling of unrest has been pressing down upon her more and more, bringing shortness of breath, the edge of panic, a sense of urgency as though she might run out of time. She can't fathom the source of it. Is it an echo of something Dwight is planning? Whatever it is, she feels fiercely and unpleasantly that she is poised on the edge of disaster.

She hopes the voices in her head are merely an effect of the connection she shares with William, now that they're together again after so very long. She has no recollection of experiencing this before, but given the centuries that have passed, and that her memory is not what it once was... Certainly it's more comforting to tell herself that she and William have been talking to each other in their sleep than to entertain other possibilities.

Mara shakes her head and brings her attention back to the actual world, where a gentle hand curls over her belly while William breathes against her back. Nathan is a rigid line at the very edge of their large bed, placing a full foot of space between himself and the two of them, a sight which is saddening and unwelcome.

She had agreed to give William the opportunity to win Nathan around. He is subtler than she is. But three days have tested her patience with little indication of progress. She shared William's thoughts while he enticed Nathan to a kiss, amused by the result. But she grows weary of futilities such as watching William slide a knee between the legs of a man who cannot feel it, whose gaze is locked off into the distance, who endures the touch only because it allows him to place a limitation upon how much of them he has to endure.

Oh, she is sure William could do it, for he has great powers of persuasion, but she can see that it would take weeks, months, time that she does not have to waste. She should be in Haven sowing Troubles in preparation for her future reign. She will need more than Nathan and William and a cursed cook to make her position secure. She doesn't trust Dwight not to raise problems against her while they are preoccupied upon this island.

She has been intensely frustrated by the pattern set by Nathan. As soon as they give him any space, he seizes more. He has not slept in their bed, sometimes never lying down with them at all, she suspects, but sneaking back at dawn for an hour or two, then dragging himself up again on the pretext of a morning run. He pretends much of his early morning routine is not dedicated to talking down the cook from whatever new escape scenario she concocted during the night.

The cook may have been a mistake, because her presence is disruptive and it is Nathan who takes up the chore of controlling her. He could let the threat of reprisal do it for him -- he has power enough -- but he does not, so the discipline problem is perpetuated. Mara has grit her teeth and endured, trying not to tip the equilibrium sought by William for his program of sweeter enticements.

Sensing her dissatisfaction, William sleepily reaches out and trails his fingers very lightly over the back of Nathan's hair, the side where it's still fluffy. Even in his sleep, Nathan manages to shuffle closer to the edge of the bed. Any further and he'll be on the floor.

Annoyance rolls through Mara like a bout of sickness, heavy and unwanted. She does not want to be at this juncture, but she cannot wait forever for Nathan to get there on his own.

"How is the seduction going?" she asks William's sleepy mind.

"How do you think?" Even his inner voice is droll. "Yesterday I spent half an hour kneeling with my hands on his crotch while he stared down like a stone and held his jeans in a death-grip. Actually feeling it would have been a step too far." He hesitates. "Today I think I might actually return to the whiskey and kisses. It's the only time I've made him want something."

"No," Mara tells him, the heaviness only intensifying further. "I will deal with this today, once and for all."

There is resistance to the idea within her. Those parts which align themselves most closely to Audrey in the particular, but also pieces of her unmistakably Mara that do not want to risk blemishing Nathan's stubbornness and will, which she appreciates greatly when it isn't confounding her... and sometimes, despite herself, when it is.

Mara reaches out and prods her splayed fingertips into the bare planes of his back. "Nathan."

Whether he was asleep or not, he's aware enough to jolt at her touch. "Mara," he grunts from his huddle. "Let me sleep."

"How long have you been in bed?" she asks him sharply. His skin feels cold, slightly tacky, but he doesn't smell of sweat, he smells of soil and trees and rain. She was aware that he was not in bed when she went to sleep. Did he spend all night outside? To avoid them?

Anger boils up in her. She wants them to be united. She acknowledges that she cannot dispense with Nathan, but she will not tolerate him being the note of discordance pulling them apart. "Nathan, look at me. We are a family. You are mine. I will not have you sleep outside, do you hear me? Your place is here."

He turns to her willingly, then, with his eyes smouldering. "When you're not even awake to care, you still want to control what I do?"

When she's not awake to make him, he means he'll continue to do what he likes.

She senses something important is in danger of slipping away from her, though the phantoms of her dreams won't tell her more. She is not sure how to mend the situation with Nathan without breaking what she treasures... but if she acts upon this, she has to do it firmly and sure-handedly, and cannot let doubt intrude.

Mara can feel the pressure and heat of William's morning hardness against her thigh. She crawls closer to Nathan and flattens her palm against his cheek, focusing on the Trouble that binds him to her, calling it out, drawing his lust and need to the fore. He surges from the very edge of the bed, his absolute avoidance disintegrating, body worming close to her in a few swift kicks of movement. His hand goes to her hip, then he's trying to curl every part of himself around her, unheeding of William so close.

"Patience," Mara purrs, sensing William's arousal spike, and to Nathan, "You, too." She peels him from her, pinning him on his back on the bed. Sense returns in stutters and fits to his hazy eyes, but she keeps enough of a hold over him that each time it quickly drifts away again. She reaches down and handles his cock in long, smooth strokes up from the base, completing his journey to physical arousal, then she moves so that his squirming hips find little satisfaction.

William is touching himself despite her orders and blinks at her guiltily as she turns.

"Soon," Mara promises him, peeling his hand away. Being in this position between the two of them, the sense of control she has bolsters her confidence and will, dispelling some of the shadows that greeted her awakening.

"Get the lubricant," she orders William, and smiles as she watches his ass while he crawls across the bed to retrieve it from the nightstand.

"Mara, I--" Sharpness in Nathan's voice as he fights to come back, but he's still gasping and half undone.

"You are trying my patience." She touches the tip of him, lightly, and watches him lose himself again. On one level it's satisfying. On another, it's a further frustration to witness him become not-himself as he goes under, because that isn't what she wants of him. She wants Nathan whole and full-hearted, not by this means.

Well, she will have him all by the end of this day, whether he wishes it or not.

It was always ambitious to hope her patience could last until he stopped resisting them naturally.

Mara tells him, "You shall be one with us. You ours and we... yours." Her lingering distaste for that part can still be heard in her voice, despite her efforts. "Nathan, you must let us love you. It is the only solution, and it hurts us so deeply, Nathan, when you don't."

"Fuck--" A return of her hand to his sex drives the incipient insult or profanity from his lips, leaving its opener an appropriate interjection. Mara smiles and moves him until he is splayed out below her, legs wide, arms sprawled, head rolled on the mattress, missing the pillows. She takes her hand from between his legs and leaves him groaning, trying not to writhe in place. A pink flush tinges his body, fiercest at his cheeks. His forcefield Trouble tries to kick in, but fizzles and dies at her nearness. It was never protection from her.

"What -- what are you going to do?" His chest heaves as he speaks.

"Only to affirm that you are ours," she tells him, "wholly and completely, in every possible way." She should have done this immediately; should have done it after they submitted to keeping him, to loving him, or at least after they got back to Haven and a place of relative safety. "You will have no doubts left, no room for apprehension, once we prove to you everything you are missing through this pointless fear."

William offers the lube, his eyes flicking from Nathan's face to Mara's. He perches on his knees and looks.... awkward, almost hesitating, but also fervently excited. Mara can feel his excitement thrumming through her, and thinks, feeling her lover's desire to possess Nathan again, that it is certainly past time to wring out that cooperation.

Nathan doesn't object as Mara's fingers slide inside him -- touch, after all, of the most intimate kind. He moans and melts and relaxes around it like that penetration is a thread of control, a puppet-string to his core.

William says, with a trace of anxiety. "I guess this blows my whole play out of the water."

Nathan is limp rags underneath her as she continues the work of her fingers. "I will have him deny you no longer. Do not worry, my love," she reassures him. A black sphere leaves the pouch on the night stand and hovers, ready, though it is not time yet, not by a long way. She needs to work up the closeness and the combined energy of the three of them, first.

She shifts her position to lie half on top of Nathan, hip rested on his sprawled-wide thigh, and tucks her newly shorn and straightened blonde hair against his chest. His warmth shivers beneath her. His arms curl unbidden around her. A breast succumbs to his grasping hand. "Good," Mara purrs, continuing to fuck him slowly with her fingers, pausing only once to withdraw and add further lubricant.

This would probably take a lot longer if she hadn't conditioned his body to have no resistance against her. As a consequence he is wide open very quickly.

William watches, his energy barely contained, twitchy and aroused. "Take him now," Mara says, pulling her fingers clear and dragging them across Nathan's thigh.

"Nathan... buddy..." William croons, leaning over on hands and knees. "Sorry, buddy, looks like the plan got escalated." He draws a shivering breath. "Man, you look so good there. You know I can't hold back, not when I see you like this? Can't stop now."

Mara narrows her eyes at him as he casts her as the villain. They are joined in spirit and he can't hide his thoughts from her, but he isn't even self-conscious about it. It isn't as if the pretence of being good for his word is not exactly that.

He gives her a shrug and the overriding thought comes back through the link: I love him. He already hates me enough.

"You appalling schemer," Mara calls him, fondly. Aloud, she says, "I love you both far too much to let this parody of intimacy continue unaddressed. We must not be so divided. We will show him how much better things will be when we are truly together."

Mara moves to allow William's access, curling by Nathan's side and stroking his face instead.

Nathan, touch deprived, sobs and shakes as William curls his mouth over his cock. It was not in Mara's plan to start this way, but she allows it, enjoying the sight of William's hands flattened to the planes of Nathan's spread thighs, and the bob of his head and curl of his filled lips. Nathan's body trembles. He makes noises that are pathetic, despite her soothing touch on his face.

Last time, they did this very quickly, and Mara was sure to distract Nathan thoroughly before they'd begun and continue to do so throughout. Now, she lets him rise to the surface of her control, to experience William's ministrations with almost full awareness of himself.

William finally moves over him, lifts and manipulates his legs gently to ease himself down to target, and slides slowly in. Nathan's body gives great jolts as if he's trying to escape, even though they're not voluntary movements, even though Mara takes hold of his shoulders, pinning him down briefly with a stronger reassertion of her influence and William, arms woven under Nathan's knees, holds both his wrists, pulling them towards himself, pressing them to the bed.

Once his initial possession of Nathan's body is firmly established, William starts to move, so slowly and gently it only inflames a desperate need. Mara is pleased to witness that need arise, with the increasing flush and sweat-sheen over Nathan's body. He is curled up between them, head back, mouth open, gasping and groaning, reduced to a state of feeling and nothing else, backed into a place that allows no trace of resistance from his starved nerves.

Mara is delighted. Mara's compulsion is not doing this. She released him fully several minutes since. It's already hard to reconcile this with his usual self, so contrary and stubborn.

But she needs to reduce him more. She gestures William to withdraw and gently pulls Nathan back from the edge. Then she climbs onto him, careful not to reach for the control that has become a habit, and for satisfying long minutes rides him herself, before withholding her body, too, and they cool Nathan back from the brink again, laughing as he pants curses at them. This time, William lifts his thigh and guides it up over his own hip to enter Nathan anew. He takes him casually from a sprawled position, penetration shallow and teasing, both of them a mess of long limbs spilled over the top of the wrinkled bedclothes.

When Nathan is begging, "Please... Please...." with William moving very slow and sure inside him and refusing to allow him over the brink; when he is begging as himself, face pressed into the blankets in shame, but still begging, Mara judges the moment right.

She calls to her hand the waiting black sphere, and crushes her palm against the spot on Nathan's chest where she applied the prior Trouble, that first night in the void, engineering and amending even as she lowers her lips to Nathan's and kisses him so he cannot doubt she does this with love. With her palms still in place she rises and twists to kiss William, and with William buried deeply inside Nathan, the threefold bond is begun. She feels the Trouble twist and adjust under her palm, until it binds not two, but three.

Nathan comes finally under William, shouting something incoherent that could be last minute anger or resistance, but the deed is done. One of Nathan's arms flails out -- the other trapped between his body and William -- and he jerks, but can't escape the pinning weight.

William crushes Nathan back against him, too near the edge himself for niceties, and comes swiftly after, though as he falls into a limp sprawl atop Nathan, he makes soothing sounds and his hands pet gently, lovingly, conscious again of the inexperience of his partner.

The flatness in Nathan's turned away face dissolves as his gaze is pulled back to William, and Mara is pleased to see it become adoring. Nathan accepts William's embrace and presses in against him, arms circling William's ribs, accepting the kisses William trails around his jaw with a kind of sated wonder.

"Hah," says Mara, half-laugh, half... almost a sob. She is so relieved that it worked.

She lies down with them again, firmly disentangling one of each of their hands from the pile to drag between her legs to attend to her own neglected needs. Their fingers explore her together, and she knows that the foundation has been well established.

She does not acknowledge the thread of doubt that what she has done to Nathan here, as last time, overstepped some invisible line, a transgression she will pay for, but a payload that hasn't landed yet.

***

Nathan's brain stutters back to life, though it takes countless minutes to regain any sort of true functionality, processing what just happened. What's been done to him now. That he is in the circle of William's arms and feels no revulsion, no urge to pull away, and Mara, while she is there too, is not doing anything to directly cause it.

He makes a noise that doesn't involve his lips or his brain. He might no longer feel revulsion for William, but when he adds up what happened, he still knows what they did. He can, he discovers, still recoil from that.

"Off," he chokes. "Get off me."

"Shh." William's voice is soft and... there's a trace there of amusement and... soft hands envelop Nathan's face, stroking back through his choppy hair, enticing him to sink back into William's shoulder and breathe in and feel.

"Good. Good..." A hand rubs circles over his back. He feels Mara's hand drift between his legs again, and it seems he's spent long enough in limbo that his body starts to respond anew.

"Come on." It's all processing like dim snap-shots. Their voices seem distant, and he can't react to them in the moment. William sounds excited, eager. William is turning around, showing Nathan the long planes of his back.

Mara's hand, slick and gooey, rubs the slickness onto Nathan's hand, and guides his hand over William's ass, pushes his fingers into the crease, and lower. "Almost ready," she says, a soft whisper. "There... that's it, make him ready for you."

William gasps underneath him. The world flickers in and out, lacking choices or logic, and Nathan is aware of riding William, face pressed into the back of the other man's neck while his hips move in a new compulsion to lay claim. Mara's words and hands urge him on. Everything else disappears under William's tightness and heat and Mara's hands. He doesn't think he lasts long -- overloaded, overridden, all too new -- and after it's done William and Mara are all over him; kissing, whispering against his skin, licking, biting. They claim his lips, one of them after the other, and his nipples, one of them on either side, and they touch him all over, hands smoothing across his skin, mimicking love. The reality is only taunts and betrayal, Nathan thinks. Then the contact drugs him, shreds him, and scatters his pieces all over the bedchamber.

There's everything wrong with this. Unease inserts itself into his flickering consciousness and drives him to reconstruct thought with a sense of urgency. He can't afford this, the subconscious voice tells him, some distant part of him removed from the physical act of succumbing to William and Mara.

He's aware of the passage of time -- a lot of it; even to the point where either William or Mara have been absent for periods since this began, taking care of needs that they deny him while they complete this... this overpowering of him. He thinks it must be hours, the whole morning perhaps. The light levels have shifted.

In a clear space, with voices in the background announcing further plans for his body that indicate the respite won't last, he turns his face into the pillows and tries to muster physical power and mental self-determination enough to push himself up and stagger from the room. Maybe if he's away from this place, from this bed that seems to have blended outwards across space and time to become his whole existence, then he could remember fully the situation that's nagging on his mind, telling him there is something that needs to be addressed. He knows the castle far better than William and Mara. If he can hide from them long enough to just think...

He makes it so far as one foot on the floor, his ass perched on the edge of the bed, striving for the power to rise while his limbs shake. Then William's hands catch the back of his neck and shoulders. Not roughly, but in soft, massaging trails. And William says, "Don't go."

Nathan sags back unresisting, just like with Mara.

Like with Mara. His reasoning mind puts together what they've done to him.

"No," he says, with numb lips.

Looking up from lying on his back, William seems to tower a mile above him. William is on his knees between Nathan's sprawled legs. There was a transition there, but Nathan can't put together how much time passed in the moments he lost. William's hands slide up his thighs, then down again, just teasing, warming the area around his genitals, holding off straying to more intimate territory.

Mara's head appears over William's shoulder. Her face is pale and critical and she says, "He's not ready yet."

William turns his head and says something, and places his hand over Nathan's cock, which twitches hard as his hips jerk into William's palm.

"Oh, that's ready, true enough," Mara says, with a dismissive laugh.

It seems peculiar to Nathan -- an observation that will be mostly made piecing this together later, retracing the steps -- that Mara seems tight and strained and unhappy, even while she stretches and skews him to remake him as something more in keeping with what she wants.

William slides a finger into his ass, testing and stroking, finding his prostate. He has to hold Nathan down as he all but sobs with each stroke. Mara inserts herself between them and climbs across Nathan's chest without disturbing William's fingers.

"I don't want to." Incoherent with sensation, Nathan whispers into Audrey's face where it hangs above him. "Please." There won't be anything left of him by the time they're satisfied. Maybe Audrey can revive him, he thinks, but Audrey's face blurs into Mara's and he remembers.

He should have gone with Duke. If they use sex here and now to make a mindless slave of him, what purpose did staying serve?

"...Stop. I want to stop." Vocalising his desires doesn't gain him any traction. With William's hand inside him and Mara's weight atop him, he can't even move. Mara kisses him and slides her body lower. He feels her fingers working between her legs, guiding herself down where too many body parts press too tightly together for her to see what she's doing.

"Soon," she promises between kisses, as he's engulfed and lost. "You're doing well, Nathan. Just try a little more. Don't be so uptight. All it takes to free yourself forever is love us back."

Mara pulls him on top of her, rolling their bodies, and the world almost reels away from him again. The pressure of the fingers inside him withdraws. "William," Mara begins, but even before she's finished speaking, Nathan feels the weight on his back. He dimly realises that they're positioned the same as they were that first time in the worlds of the void before William slides effortlessly inside him.

Nathan's mouth stretches open, soundless, gulping for breath. With Mara encompassing him from the front, and his body might by now be so used to being penetrated that it puts up no resistance to William's smooth entry, but his nerves aren't... He feels like he's going to combust from the heat that rages through him with the press of all this contact. He feels like he'll die.

William rolls his hips, hand curled around Nathan's hip to carry him with the movement so his cock barely withdraws, fucking Nathan into Mara. Nathan tries to brace on the shifting bedclothes, struggling to roll free of them, but he's too thoroughly pinned on either side to move. Mara wraps her legs around both of them, ankles tangling behind William's hips, trapping him further. Her arms curl past Nathan's ears to wrap around William's neck.

"You will be ours," she says. "You already are. Say it for me, Nathan. I want to hear you say it. Tell me you're ours. Tell William how much you want him." Her pupils seem to have swelled to make her eyes bright black beads staring too eagerly into his.

"Fuck--" That's far too raw a choice of wording. Nathan seals his lips, but after that he blanks for a long time and has no idea what she might have gotten out of him.

When he returns to himself, Mara is lying a few feet away, watching. William is still pushing slowly into him, and as slowly withdrawing again, while harsh breaths from both of them fill the air. Nathan's thighs are sticky and his body is spent. He can only feel that at all because so much of William is pressed so close. He's slewed on his side again, William's arm under one of his knees forcing that leg high.

Nathan groans as he feels William climax inside him and, softening length still lodged, William lowers himself so they lie together in that ungainly sprawl. He holds tightly to Nathan, cuddling him with an arm squeezing like a bar still under his raised knee, and breathes an impossible, "I love you," into his neck.

Nathan chokes on his bitter laughter as warm fluff engulfs his head and he can't... can't deny William. Mara's hand snakes out from between their bodies. He wasn't aware of her approach, or her hand delving in, palm searching out his chest again, but the result slams over him as he lifts his head. He gets overcome by the closeness of William, by a new sense of intimacy with the body next to him, inside him.

Next thing he knows, he's moving over and placing his mouth on William, kissing William of his own accord.

"Oh, well done," William croons, between the kisses he returns like he's been starving for them forever.

He's talking to Mara.

He shifts and his exhausted cock withdraws. Instead, he curls to wrap his arms and legs around Nathan, who finds he has no impulse to shy from the touch. Mara and William are the only ones who can give him sensation, give him life.

He is also fully aware now of what they have done, and as his brain starts to process it, he becomes increasingly angry, dissatisfaction tearing away at the enforced impulse to let himself love and be loved.

William must feel him tense up. He clutches tighter. "Shh," he croons. "I know what you want. It was too cruel of us to afflict you with such a Trouble, denying you all of this for so long. I'll fuck you again soon. Let's just lie here like this until things perk up, eh?"

Nathan wants to. He wants to stay with both of them in this bed forever. He has no desire to move at all, no desires left that don't include them. His anger struggles to stay alive.

There's still something else...

A chink inserts itself into the edge of his consciousness. It's more than a niggle, a doubt from within, this is something exterior. His awareness is always at least a little fragmented on some level, these days. He guards the castle -- or his creations do, and they have a permanent line directly through to him.

That's a line that's been blocked, sidelined and sealed from him by the antics of William and Mara for hours now, inasmuch as he can judge of the passage of time.

"Oh, you assholes," he grunts, rolling over, scrambling out of William's grip, evading Mara at the edge of the bed, who stares at him while he hits the floor and trips over his own feet. She's wondering why it didn't work, and her thoughts on that are, from what he can tell, a very mixed bag.

But it didn't not-work, did it? What drives him even now is the urge to protect them. They're his, and the island has been wide open all morning. Duke, Dwight, the whole damned Guard could be lined up outside...

Nathan staggers to the nearest wall and leans against it, buries his face against his arm as he tries to reach the web of his shadow officers, with their flat, pitiless awarenesses that scan the landscape. No activity... He breathes easier with each flood of images, each report back. No activity... no-one... nothing...

William gets it, and shifts off the bed to pad a few steps closer, tentative but amused. "I sent up my people to the watch tower," he says mollifyingly. "The island's as safe as it can be without you watching over us. You don't need to worry about our safety. You can have a break."

Except one of the last reports is filtering in from inside the castle itself, and Nathan swears violently and almost falls again in his haste to make for the door, pushing off from the wall and lunging. Mara indignantly yells his name, filling the cry with compulsion, but either this is one of those times it just can't find any traction in him or she's acting on habit and it doesn't work anymore after the changes she made to that Trouble to make him love William.

"You're about to lose your cook!" he growls back at them. As he did before, with Duke and Jennifer's visit, he sends stand down vibes like crazy through the link, but his control is limited, beyond giving them orders face to face. He isn't telepathic. The reports he receives from them are predominantly visual flashes.

His feet pound the stone floors, probably taking damage as he runs headlong down the stone staircases without watching out for his path. The endless, intensive sensations he's been washed in all morning are gone now, leaving his old familiar numbness.

He can hear them following, but he's faster. All they ever do is sleep and fuck. Since they came here, after he was burned so badly, after exhausting himself creating the castle, he's been doing morning runs around the island headland to try and regain his fitness levels.

He might just be fast enough to save Sophie.

She's cowering before the poised death blow of a shadow officer whose actions have turned sluggish in a partial response to Nathan's screaming at it inside his head. Once again, he puts himself between the shadow and its intended victim, adjusting its prior programming in desperate shouts.

He manages to make it dissipate, then he half-collapses, hands rested to knees, bended over on trembling legs. It's maybe ten seconds before he's paying any attention to the whimpering behind him.

"Sophie--" He starts to turn, to ask if she's all right.

She squeaks and huddles back into the corner between wall and door. There's a broken wire, which Nathan guesses came off some implement from the kitchen, embedded in the lock of the door. Nathan registers that both her squeak and the look on her face now aren't entirely products of fear.

Some of the sentiment in there is more like scandal.

Nathan realises not only is he naked, but the sweat and other expressions of their activities are still on his skin. He can smell them, so surely she must. She stares up at him wide-eyed as Mara and William arrive. "What -- what -- what do you d-d-do here?" Sophie babbles, eyes fixed on Nathan's body and clutching her arms tighter around her own.

Mara managed to grab a sheet to weave around herself as they left the bedroom to give chase. William did not. William is half erect again, and honestly Nathan wants to know if there's some trick he can pull with those black spheres to make them send his dick into hyperdrive, after the rest of the morning already.

"They're not going to touch you," Nathan stutters, backing off in an uneven lurch, as he realises how close he's standing to the captive woman and the level her head is at. "You're not here for that."

William grabs for him as he almost trips. It's not what Nathan needs or wants, knowing that the next time William touches him, he'll be ready to leap into coitus with him again. It's not abhorrent to him, and it doesn't worry him, but the intellectual awareness of where the lack of abhorrence has come from does.

Mara is rolling her eyes. "Get up," she says to Sophie with disgust. She takes off her sheet and pushes it into Nathan's arms. "Go get dressed, both of you. I will deal with this."

"No," Nathan grits. Being naked shouldn't be a barrier to protecting the girl, he tells himself, he reasons, however much he wants to crawl away and never come out at the thought of someone else witnessing this. He knows he should drop the sheet so better to oppose Mara and whatever she plans to do, but can't make his hand release its clutching grip, holding one edge of it at chest height to at least curtain his genitals from Sophie's view, along with the worst of the fluids drying on his body. "You don't hurt her."

"Sometimes," Mara says fake-sweetly, "Pets need to be trained. You know that, don't you, Nathan? Go with William. Can't you see he's almost ready for you again?"

Nathan can feel it against his hip. He feels hollow. Is that all they want him to be? He had thought Mara had other uses for him. Build a castle. Guard her against the world.

Hollow... He takes inspiration from that, clutching at straws. He has to keep something of himself, and if he's going to do that, he needs a break to gather his thoughts and think of something, anything, that can offer a true defence. A last bastion before they drown him between them. "I need to eat,” he says desperately. It's afternoon by now. He's had nothing since last night. And he has expended a lot of energy. Not the least in that mad run... which could explain why he's wavering and clumsy on his feet now, even if he can't feel the hunger itself. He asserts, "I think I'm dizzy."

The truth of it rolls over him as soon as he voices it. He was going to stand up to Mara for Sophie's sake. Suddenly he can barely keep his legs under him.

Mara curses.

"I'd better take him to the kitchen," William says. "We have worked him pretty hard. There's still pizza," he adds, with a trace of ridiculous enthusiasm. His hand slides across Nathan's hip and stays there.

"I've not finished--" Mara looks between Nathan and Sophie. "All right. But we all need to resume as soon as possible, else risk what we've achieved being undone. Either way, it will require more effort to finish this the longer we wait."

"No hardship for me," William cracks with a crooked smile and a mischievous tip of his eyes to his groin.

Nathan only half absorbs the joke from William and the rest of Mara's report on the status of his sanity in their grasp. His mind is on the woman his Trouble almost killed. "Don't give Sophie any more Troubles. She's been scared out of her mind already, you don't need to do more."

"What kind of lesson is escaping punishment?" Mara reasons. "She was told clearly enough."

Nathan's vision is greying. Despite himself, he lets William drag him away.

"Hey, hey, hey," says William, pressing him against the door jamb in the kitchen, feeding him a morsel in between kisses, while Nathan grunts futile resistance to the kisses. "We need to keep up the momentum, you know? You heard her." The sheet is in William's hands, then a moment later, it's on the floor. The wall turns into cold stone actuality against Nathan's back as most of William presses skin-to-skin along his front.

"Just let me eat," Nathan says, trying to claw his hands around William's biceps to stop his hands.

"Don't you love me?" William asks, pressing upon him another kiss and a chunk of the softer part of a slice of oven pizza.

"I know it's not real," Nathan manages through grit teeth, turning his face from William's sticky fingers.

"Does that matter?" William asks. He trails the backs of his fingers over Nathan's jaw. "If you want it to be real, that makes it real, and I think you want it to be real. I think you want it all and then some, the way you responded to me up there. Making up for lost time, eh? And if you're going to refuse the food, we should just return to bed."

Nathan wants to feed himself. He manages to punch William's arms away -- the pizza chunk takes flight -- and stagger to the table, grabbing at the rest of what William took out of the cold store. After a few mouthfuls under his own steam, standing up unencumbered, it crashes over him that Mara is still outside with the girl. That if he's doing anything, it should be stopping her. He slams a fist into the table and spins to head back out of the door, shouldering William from his path.

"Nathan!" William sounds panicked -- Nathan remembers that sometimes he is afraid of Mara. "Hey, come on, who cares about the cook?!"

Nathan cares. She's in danger because of him. He allowed Mara to come back to Haven. He interrupted the cycle in the first place. He left William alone in town. William won't stop him now, physically or with his assertion that a human being is no more than a toy for Mara to experiment upon.

Outside in the corridor is a frozen tableau, but it's nothing like the one he was expecting.

Mara stands with her black palm extended. Nathan prepares to launch forward when he sees Sophie move, scrambling away past Mara. Mara... fails to react at all.

"S-something's wrong," Sophie stutters, and raises her hands. "I didn't do it!"

"Of course you didn't." The curl of a sneer in William's words is briefly contemptuous, but gains anxiety as he steps forward, to become the one pushing Nathan aside in his rush to get closer to Mara. Nathan hangs behind him, knocked off balance more than just physically, unsure what this is.

Mara's body is frozen and her gaze fixed, her eyes like glass. William reaches out to catch her shoulders, but she still doesn't react. His plaintive "Honey?" sounds so lost and strange upon the air. He shakes her more vigorously and she only lolls like a catatonic.

William looks back at Nathan like a lost little boy and begs him, "Help me! I've never seen her like this before. What's wrong with her?!"

That might just be the craziest flip Nathan's life has taken so far.

***

They put Mara to bed. Nathan strips the sheets and replaces them with clean ones while William holds her and tries to bring her around with soothing words and petting... not so far removed from what he's been doing to Nathan most of the morning. Once the bed's made and Mara is in it, Nathan sits and watches, still feeling hollow and the fact he didn't eat very much in the end little to do with that. William sits on the pillows and continues to hold Mara.

Nathan manages to produce a small amount of saliva to wet a clean corner of the sheets he pulled off the bed and robotically start to rub his skin down, removing the excretions of sex and exertion from his stomach and thighs. He rubs hard enough to turn the skin even redder.

"You've done this before," he accuses a William who's not much interested now. "This... claiming people. Brainwashing them."

William stares up vaguely, but his attention is quickly lost. "She didn't want to do that to you." His voice is blank, so many things lurking unexpressed. "Look. I didn't, either. Ish."

"Because Mara loves me," Nathan mocks, still scrubbing his skin with the sheet. "Because you love me." He can't hate William, can't really hate either of them the way his head's been screwed up, but the bitter contradiction makes his stomach roil psychosomatically. Unless that's anxiety for Mara's health.

"That's right."

"Ish?"

"I had fun." William shrugs. "It's been a while. I miss old times."

It's ironic Nathan can't be grateful for the reprieve because he can't contemplate wishing ill on Mara. On two counts, since Mara's state might have repercussions for the phantom of Audrey. He resists the concern for Mara; reminds himself that Mara had said she wasn't finished, and if he's only partially... brain-fucked... he still has more freedom than she'd intended. Perhaps if he's only partially indoctrinated he can unpick what they've tried to do. He doesn't intend to be anyone's toy.

"So much for your 'deal'," he tells William.

That gains him the other man's attention again. "Wasn't my decision..." and then they both glance down at Mara.

She doesn't look like she's sleeping. She doesn't look peaceful. Her open eyes sometimes flicker or tremble, even blink. There's tension in the set of her face, and every so often, it shifts. That's more responsive than she was half an hour ago.

"Some kind of locked-in syndrome," Nathan had guessed, downstairs, in response to William's panicking. Nathan has entertained a casual interest in medical curiosities since he became one. "Perhaps it's like a memory cascade? She's said before that she still had memories from all those other past lives that she was waiting to absorb. Maybe it just happened." It still seems the most reasonable theory. It's scary to watch her, usually so animated and fierce, turned blank. Almost as scary when it's just Mara as when he blinks and looks again, or catches a sideways glimpse, or otherwise allows his thoughts to drift and starts all of a sudden thinking of her as Audrey.

"We need a doctor," William says, gaining a little more life. "Nathan, you need to go to town and fetch a doctor."

Gloria will be just delighted to have him turn up on her doorstep, Nathan is sure.

...Perhaps not Gloria.

"We need to wait," Nathan says. "Give her time to come out of it." There's no good way to get an injured or ill person to the mainland on their tiny boat, and Nathan isn't damned well going to sink to William's depths of kidnapping innocent citizens yet. Getting an airlift ambulance to respond... Well, it may be possible, but he doubts that the risks that will come out of it are less than waiting and hoping. Besides which, who knows if this is something regular doctors can treat?

"We need to do something!"

Nathan stays quiet. He can feel the same nervous, frantic energy William's expressing. They orbit around her, both of them, and are bereft of a purpose with her suddenly gone. He doesn't know what to do other than this -- wherever he steps, someone or something he cares about is endangered. It's easier to stay. That may change. His hand scrubs, all but forgotten.

Unbidden, his mind turns back to the original question. "Who were they?"

It comes out like jealousy. In some corner of his psyche, it is jealousy. William looks at him blankly until he spits out, "The others, you bastard. The ones you kept before."

"Nothing," William answers, his brow furrowing as if he can't understand why Nathan would ask such a thing. "They were nothing."

The matter of fact way he says it alights Nathan's rage into a blaze. That probably wasn't William's intention. Nathan feels like killing him, but it only takes him halfway to William before the rush of contrary affection prevails and he splutters and spins helplessly, swearing.

"I'm not like them!" he hurls at William, choking on anger and love and hate.

"Of course you're not." Now William sounds irritated. His mouth is such a long, unhappy line it almost bisects his face. "It doesn't matter, Nathan! Look at her!" He flails his long arms. "Mara matters!"

"I fucking love you," Nathan shouts in disgust. "She did that to me, you did that to me, and it doesn't matter!" This time he makes it across the bed to set his hand to William's throat. He manages to start a good squeezing pressure between his fingers, at which point William is forced to raise both hands to fight him off, and Mara slips from her resting position over William's knees, slumping between them.

They both freeze. But there was nothing voluntary to the movement. Mara's state hasn't changed.

"It wasn't the end goal to make you like they were," William says tightly, with Nathan's fist loosening around his throat. "We're caught up in this toge--"

"What was your 'end goal', then?" Nathan's other hand automatically goes down to straighten and steady Mara's body, the same time as one of William's hands returns from her other side. Nathan despises the moment of unity. He could kill William, he thinks. In passion, he could kill William even now, and break his own heart in so doing, but he could do it.

Break his heart twice -- thrice -- over.

Because they're linked. Mara, Audrey...

Staring down at her absent face, he's almost forgotten that he asked William another question by the time the other man answers. "Connection," William says dully, and Nathan lets his hand fall from the other man's neck, more from surprise than anything else. It isn't applying pressure anymore anyway. "You. Me. Mara."

Nathan stares at him. "Like you and her? That's not possible." If they succeeded at that, he couldn't hide Audrey's presence from them. He'd doom her.

If they succeeded at that, he'd never be free from William and Mara.

"We're not like you." William smiles wryly. "But between the two of us--" he clings to Mara "--we should be able to do it. We want to do it," he adds, earnestly. "You'll live a long time. We could heal you when you got hurt. You could consider it an honour." He says that last like it's a very pointed suggestion, like he wants Nathan's fucking gratitude that they chose him.

"And if you die, so do I?" Nathan completes, flatly. "Jesus Christ, why the fuck would I want that?"

"Well," William says, rolling his tongue around his mouth, "I guess that kind of attitude was why we didn't bother to ask." It's bordering on sarcasm.

Which just about sums up everything anyone needs to know about William, Nathan figures.

"It was something we talked about as a last resort," William adds, a bit desperately. "She woke up cranky today. She's been struggling with all those people in her head. She needs to feel safe and loved, and you throwing a fit every time we got intimate was... well. It was wearing. That's all. C'mon, Nathan... Not that you're not cute as can be as a mindless love kitten, but why the hell would we want you that way? I mean, look at the practical issues. You run this place! You made this place! You're our army. Your brain is not dispensable. We just needed a certain level of -- love, trust, closeness, blah, blah -- to initiate the link, and you're so damn squirmy."

"You think I'm ever going to trust you?" He'd be laughing if it wasn't so insane. Mara and William want to entangle him in their crazy loved-up mind-bond connection? He thinks it would kill him. Nathan has always been protective of his privacy.

"She needs us now." William jerks his chin down. He gathers up Mara. Nathan makes to extract his hands but they end up straying back to her skin. "The rest, we have to put that aside." William stares into him with an earnestness that is new, and Nathan can't really doubt that he's genuinely scared.

A jerky nod climbs Nathan's neck, sneaking up on him. He logs it as forced compassion for William. It isn't nearly so annoying as the way his hand strays to squeeze the other man's shoulder.

Nathan removes himself to sit at the foot of the bed. He consciously looks the other way, but out of the corner of his eye, can't help but keep straying back to watch William stroke Mara's face.

He stinks and he wants a shower. He's not sure he can drag himself to do anything so banal while Mara is like this, and Audrey's fate uncertain.

After a while, he makes himself get up and drag jeans and a shirt on. "I'm going to tidy up downstairs," he says to William, who greets the declaration with no interest whatsoever.

Nathan can hear William talking to Mara softly again, chivvying and compassionate, trying to guide her back to wakefulness, even while he's stomping his feet down the steps.

***

Mara drifts while the memories tumble around her, unable to find purchase on any of them, unable to make choices. She has become so many people that she no longer knows who she wants to be.

Perhaps it's fitting irony to be defeated by her own over-abundance of choices after raising her hand to take all of Nathan's away. But sympathy for him remains a fallacy, after Audrey Parker gave her to him, unwilling, body and spirit. Love him? She never had her choice over that! Sympathy for him, pity for him, mercy for him? No. If she must accept him, he will be hers on her terms.

Yet it seems that was the point upon which something in her rebelled.

It rose and paralysed her. From stripping down Nathan for a re-definition of what lay between them, she felt the rebellion rising from her core. She thought she had conquered it, but the surge resumed in the quiet, without her men there. She'd been so blithely confident in her control, standing before the frightened girl. Raised her hand to inflict the punishment that would make the woman regret her disobedience, and--

Where did the aether go from her palm? she wonders. It's an uneasy thought to surface out of the roiling confusion.

There are too many other voices inside her. Did one of them just seize aether in the very moment of its activation? Considering that the biggest part of her ranks are faded and used up, dark, seething, nagging, ignorable voices, there is only one real suspect from her gallery of traitors.

It's paranoia to consider it, because it should not be possible.

It should not be.

She is Audrey Parker. Audrey never was, a set of memories pasted over her soul, not a real woman with her own drive and will and anima. If something inside her is fighting her, when all that is and can be inside her is herself...

...Then something is very, very wrong.

Time passes. She hears William's voice. She hears Nathan, arguing. As ever, arguing. She did not quash him. More than the traitor half of her is pleased by this. Knowing that William and Nathan are there gives her renewed strength. Knowing Nathan is still stubborn perversely invigorates her. It was satisfying to have him malleable, but also disconcerting. She truly did not mean it. She loves his determination best.

She can only see them when the angle allows. Even if she wants to look at them, her body won't obey. Sometimes the capacity to see deserts her entirely and she lies in darkness even with her eyes still open, as though rendered blind. Her body is a battleground where no-one occupies enough key positions to push for victory. Only when one side or the other prevails will she regain capacity to move and speak and cast her eyes where she wishes again.

She is aware of them fighting, and then Nathan leaves. She is aware of William, calling to her, his voice creating a light to guide her back. It is good that Nathan left, she realises, because Nathan empowers the other far more than he does her. William is the one who gives her strength.

Self is a tricky, deceptive arena for combat, where everything -- enemy, ally, battlefield, weapon -- is some variation of I. Thus, she doesn't recognise fully that the I suddenly rising up is not the one who started out in control.

Instead, she feels the giddy euphoria of victory as the other half of her sinks back and disappears beneath the dark surface of the mental waters.

She wakes slowly, and the comfort of being held and loved turns unpleasant in gradual steps. Imaginary spiders' feet crawl up her spine. She opens her eyes with heavy dread to affirm visually what lies behind the contrasts of chill air and warm hands on her skin.

"Oh my God." Bypassing thought, the words emerge in disgust, because she's naked in William's arms, and there is not enough revulsion in the world.

He gapes down into her face; his features stricken, his frozen expression far more stupid than she knows him to be. And him? He knows instantly, shaping her name on his lips in a horrified whisper.

"A...Audrey?"