FIC: [Haven] CLOCKWORK, Chapter 6 (Audrey/Duke/Nathan, R)

[roseveare]

6.

Leaving Nathan at the hotel felt lousy, but it wasn't as if there was a whole lot else they could do. They needed to get him away from the cop and out of public sight. Even if that was a matter of abandoning him to an empty room, to sit and do nothing for however many hours it took to get Audrey's head injury and Duke's own injuries dealt with at the hospital. They absolutely could not risk taking Nathan there.

Duke dragged his aching body inside the hotel to sort out the booking and payment at reception, letting Nathan hide behind him and linger in the shadowy parts of the hallway. Then he accompanied Nathan up to the room to make sure he was safely settled, unaccosted by fearful or curious passers-by. He had a cursory glance around the room, then started to back out, until he noticed how Nathan was standing with his gaze nervously fixed on a large mirror on the wall.

"You going to be all right?" Duke asked. Reluctantly, because it was a shitty question to ask when a guy was metal and bolts.

"...Yeah." Nathan tore his eyes from the mirror and went to sit on the bed instead. It creaked, or maybe he did. "Yeah. I am okay."

Duke could tell he was feeling thoroughly useless, at the very least. "It sucks," he emphasized again. "This sucks, and we're going to sort it. For one thing, I do not accept that your ass is going to stay metal forever. Too much of a loss for humanity and for me." He offered a grin, and managed to get a hint of one back.

"Thanks, Duke," Nathan said. "Go take care of Audrey. I'll stay here and stay out of trouble." His face clunked as he frowned. "Get me that toolkit, if you can. Something with fine tuning instruments, like for fixing watches."

Duke pulled a face back at him and fled.

Honestly, it was just as well that it was Nathan. If it was him, he'd be going crazy just thinking. Being self-aware and in that body--

Maybe a good thing Nathan already couldn't feel, too. Duke could only imagine that would have been even weirder.

Duke went back to the car and the cop and his other assailed, amnesiac lover. This was insane. He often felt like he was the only sane person in Haven -- and hell, yes, that included Nathan and Audrey -- but this put a whole new spin on the phrase ‘straight man'.

This was probably how Audrey felt every time a Trouble swallowed up the both of them, in fact.

"He's okay," he reassured the two waiting as he swung into the back of the police car, a ride made no less unnerving by his intimate acquaintance with two cops. "He's fine. He'll clean that crap off and wait for us." He tried not to think about Nathan alone in a hotel room with his weird transformation as the car pulled out, tried not to think about those worst-case-scenarios where innate life and humanity weren't enough and his clockwork form just stopped.

Their friendly officer -- a lot friendlier than Officer Wuornos, point of fact -- dropped them at the medical centre and came inside briefly to establish to the centre's staff that the bullet wound had already been queried by the cops.

Then he was gone, and it was such a relief. Duke waited for about half a minute after his back had disappeared out of the door then collapsed into a waiting room chair. "Oh my God," he groaned at Audrey, who was still standing. "I have no idea how you did any of that. What is the source of your magical powers, Officer Parker?"

She frowned. "He wanted details. I have details." She dug into her pockets, which Duke had noticed were bulging enough to marr the curves of her ass, and took out--

Shit. Audrey Parker's wallet, bank cards, driving license... proofs of identity, of address... Also a mobile phone. The police badge was missing, but that would probably only have confused matters.

"What do you mean, 'Officer Parker'?" she asked sharply.

"Um." Oops. Duke forced a grin and said. "You might want to sit down. Or you might want to save the big reveal for later, when Nathan's around."

Her breath caught. "You know who I am. I knew that the two of you... that something changed, when we passed through that invisible wall. This place is nothing like where we were before. They have planes but not airships, nor sprawling cities, nor robot policemen... He was real, living, and kind, and he didn't recognise what Nathan was at all." She sat down side-on in the seat next to Duke and seized his arm, leaning in close. "What's happening, Duke? Who am I?"

"That question is actually the most incredibly complicated one you could ask," he said weakly. How the hell was he to--? Damn Nathan for squirreling out of this. "Okay, we'll take the direct explanation. Your name is Audrey Parker. You were an FBI officer who came to Haven and stayed to be a small town cop."

"Haven's a town about sixty miles up the coast," Audrey recalled. "There was a map on the wall in the police station, and talking to Officer Jackson confirmed it. My address in my wallet is The Grey Gull in Haven. But Haven didn't exist until we crossed the wall. I'd asked about it, I'd investigated." She frowned. "Why would the police be after me if I'm a cop?"

"That part, I don't know," Duke said. "But you stayed in Haven because... well, we have these things called the Troubles. They're like... really inconvenient personal magical or super powers, that people can't control. And you're immune to them. Which puts you in a really good position to help out."

"I'm immune?" She didn't question the 'magic' part. "That's my power?"

"Yeah, so when... when stuff gets screwed up... when someone decides it's gonna be Christmas in July or that they want to turn the whole town into a horror movie... You're the one who remembers, the one who stays normal and knows that that's not how things are supposed to be. Nathan and I? We get screwed over six ways from Sunday and end up sucking blood or made of spare parts or dressed in a Santa suit in the summer sunshine."

"But I don't remember anything," Audrey said. Her hand rose slowly to her head and the expression on her face flattened out. "I'm supposed to be the one who fixes this?"

Duke nodded, a little off balance because it wasn't where he'd expected her reaction to go.

"Then the people who are trying to kill me must be under the control of whoever did this and doesn't want it fixed," she said, determinedly. "That gives us something to work on."

Duke sighed. Sometimes Audrey and Nathan's work ethic was just depressing, combined or apart. "His name's Woody Malcove. Woodrow Malcove. Nathan pissed him off over health and safety paperwork."

He watched Audrey sit back and push her chin in to her hand and sink into thought.

"So people don't have airships... or high-rise towers, or... I wondered why it all felt so unfamiliar. I couldn't remember, but at the same time, some things were familiar and some were so..."

"It must have been confusing." Duke rubbed her arm. She was a bit cool about receiving the gesture and he decided he should probably step back and remember that this Audrey didn't know him intimately. Had only just met him, in fact. "And yeah, we have airships... a few, but not like those airships, and some places have high-rise towers, but not like Heppa's, and Haven doesn't have them at all, and the world is just... it's different. That other place is someone's fantasy, but it takes things out of the real world, and out of history, and out of science fiction and pure make-believe as well."

She nodded. "It all makes much more sense now. Thank you." Her attitude was a bit stiff. "You and Nathan are... well, obviously in the real world you're both human, and not a cop and a criminal, and you're lovers. I can see that much."

Duke choked. "Erm. Well, the criminal thing is kind of... And it's not just Nathan and me..." His heart did a weird flip-flop in his chest. He wasn't sure at all whether he should try to tell her. He chased the admission desperately: "Look, it's okay if you don't remember, we'll just keep our distance until you do remember, or until it's okay... and if it's not okay, then that's... okay." Though his heart was heavy saying it.

She stared at him for several seconds, clear blue eyes not letting up. "I'm dating a criminal and fraternizing with a fellow officer in some kind of three-way arrangement?"

"Probably better not to dwell on that right now," Duke said hurriedly, because if he were a woman with no memory and the two guys he'd -- she'd -- been hanging out with made that claim, he was pretty sure it would cross his mind that that was really suspicious.

Audrey shook her head. "Well, I do sort of feel something. Like I know both of you far better than I ought. In the other world, when you didn't know me, it was more obvious because of that disparity. Here, it's -- I'm sorry, it's like both of you suddenly know everything, and I know nothing, and I've already had three days of that, but this just cranked it up to a whole new level."

Duke couldn't help but give a snort of hurriedly-suppressed laughter, because that sounded all kinds of familiar to him. "Sorry." He'd probably earned that glare. "Sorry, okay? It's just I so know where you're coming from. Nathan and I, usually we're the ones--"

"So you guys are like my sidekicks?"

"Whoa! Who said sidekick? Allies and fellow fighters! Nathan's the Chief of Police, I'll have you know."

She smiled rather beatifically and stressed the word, "Sidekicks. But neither of you are immune. Obviously..." Her face twisted. "Nathan's in a pretty bad way. For that to happen to a living person--"

Duke see-sawed his hand on the air. "Well, for one, we're kind of used to it, and for another, Nathan can't feel his body. It may be a blessing in this instance. That's his Trouble. That's why he gets all weird about it when you touch him, I guess. Even though he's metal parts, he must still be getting some echo of your immunity."

"It's all weird." Audrey voice carried a rush of... perhaps relief more than anything. "I thought I was going crazy."

"Oh, that's that Haven feeling, for sure," Duke reassured her. "But we're all okay and in one piece, and that means we can--"

She hushed him and stood up sharply. An ER doctor was coming toward them with a clipboard. "Audrey Parker?"

"Yes." She got up and cast a last look back over her shoulder at Duke which was both full of questions and the promise that he was going to answer them later. Duke sagged back in the chair and thought that, overall, it could have gone worse.

He sat there in a daze until he was called in. Balancing two sets of memories was peculiar, and he hoped that walking out of this Trouble while it was still in full flow, still half under its influence, hadn't done anything permanent to him, or to Nathan.

The ER doctors dressed the bullet wound and wanted to do x-rays, particularly of his bruised-black wrist, but he was pretty sure it wasn't broken and since his resources weren't unlimited and he had other things to do besides, he declined. When he came out, Audrey still wasn't finished yet, though. He set about trying to get a bead on where she was or how long things were likely to take. But this wasn't Haven and he hadn't dated half the nurses, and they weren't inclined to be helpful to a scruffy stranger dressed in layers of scuffed and oil-stained clothes, so in the end he left a message for Audrey at the desk and headed out to try his luck at finding the things they needed in the neighbouring shopping street.

There was a garage a stone's throw away where he managed to negotiate hiring a car. In the other direction, where the shops were clustered, he got hold of changes of clothes for himself and Nathan, opting for suits that he figured could pass in either world, though they were going to look dolled up to the nines for Cawbrook. He'd just about abandoned hope of finding anything suitable for Audrey when he spotted a dress in the window of a costume shop that had the right kind of bodice-and-floofiness for Malcove's steampunk world.

He grabbed some other bits and pieces at the hardware and general store, including Nathan's toolkit. He wasn't sure if the implements would be delicate enough, so after a thought, threw some crafting tools into the pile as well.

Then he really had to think about getting back, but made one more stop to grab some ready prepared food -- pre-packed sandwiches and salads -- and soda. They had to eat at some point today, and it would be kinder and cheaper not to leave Nathan alone in the hotel room again to do that. Duke wasn't sure if the little establishment did room service.

Audrey still wasn't out when he got back, and after going through the rounds of questions once again with the uncooperative staff, he ended up kicking his heels anyway. He was just about going out of his mind by the time she finally appeared.

She looked annoyed, and hassled, and he winced a bit but went to her and prodded for news with heroic resolve.

"They need to wait for the expert to look at the scans," she said. "All they can tell me in the meantime is that my memory could come back all at once in a cascade -- the most likely -- or else in dribs and drabs over time, or else not at all. They don't think I'm in any other danger from the effects of the head injury, so I guess at least it's good to know I won't collapse from a brain haemorrhage."

Duke winced again. He'd not been thinking of that, but... "Definitely good to know."

"We can go," she said, making it sound more like a disguised, Let's get out of here as fast as fucking possible. "They have my cellphone number, but I'm supposed to call in tomorrow."

Duke said, "Then let's split. I got us a car and some food and a bunch of stuff already. We can be back at the hotel in less than ten minutes."

***

Duke tapped on the door and called, "Nathan, it's us," before he opened it, but he still found Nathan greeting him from a ready pose by the side of the door. He shook his head and sighed, just unspeakably relieved that Nathan was still ticking.

Nathan's eyes zeroed in on Audrey. "Are you all right? What did the doctors say?"

"They're not sure about the memory loss." She was eying Nathan back more intently than earlier. "So... You're a real person?"

Nathan looked pained and his, "Yes, I am," was a bit sharp.

Duke could see he'd been restless. The top of the bedcovers were disturbed by a few heavy dents, the hard chair at the dresser had been moved, the window had been opened, and the plush chair near the wardrobe looked a bit squashed. There were two paperback books strewn propped open on their pages, one on the bed, one on the plush chair.

Duke leaned down outside the door for his bags of purchases, and brought them inside to ditch on the bed. "I got more clothes for us... Won't be so well tailored as what you're wearing, Nate, but I figure that has a few too many bullet holes to be inconspicuous."

Nathan pulled a face, sort of. "You don't want to know what the alternate me spent to look like this. I wanted to be taken seriously, not taken for a freak."

"Sorry," Duke shrugged, "but a vest and a nice shirt aren't going to help there in any universe."

Nathan's head jerked up and his eyes narrowed, and Duke wanted to kiss him badly, to take the sting of the words away. He'd have done that, or some other affectionate gesture, automatically, before... So he stepped into Nathan's space and set his hands on Nathan's arms and did kiss him, although he made it a peck on the lips because metal and woodpaint taste and a hard texture fought against the illusion of shutting his eyes and pretending.

"Duke," Nathan said, with his surprised, fake, kissed lips. Duke caved and wrapped his arms around him properly in an affectionate embrace. This close up, he could hear clanks and whirrs and a constant clockwork tick-tick-tick. Could feel the complicated rhythms racing around inside Nathan vibrate inside his own chest where they were pressed close.

It also felt cold, and hard, and echoing, but he tried to ignore that. He scrubbed a hand through Nathan's hair -- at least that was soft -- and Nathan very carefully reached up with his gloved metal fingers to touch Duke's face.

"I can't feel like this, either. It's worse than usual, even. Before, I always had some sort of a chemical sense when my body was touched, hurting, happy. Now it's down to function and motion. My fingers have a kind of pressure sensor on the tips, using sliding levers, so I can do fine work, but not very well."

"I bet that's not true," Duke said with a sideways grin.

"I'm not risking your body with that kind of experimentation," Nathan said brusquely. "We have to behave until this is sorted out."

"Yeah, I mean, ow," Duke said quickly. "For the best."

Nathan rolled his eyes and pulled away, his limbs groaning of their own accord as he moved.

Audrey was watching them closely. Duke figured it should be pretty damn clear by now that the part about he and Nathan wasn't a lie. But she only said, "Do you mind if I hit the shower first?"

"Go ahead." Duke shrugged. "Washing regularly is kind of an optional experience for my counterpart so, you know, maybe later, but I'm not really feeling the need when I only just got this bandaged up." He lifted his scored arm and pointed to it.

She wrinkled her nose and slipped through the door into the adjoining bathroom.

Nathan's eyes followed her worriedly, and stayed on the door for several seconds after she'd closed it behind her. "She's giving us space."

"Yeah, and we can not impose ourselves in hers, Nathan," Duke reminded him. "She doesn't remember loving us."

"This is going to get better, isn't it?" Nathan's fixed attention turned to Duke, full of exasperation, and fear, and other things that should not have fit on a painted, mechanically driven expression. "It's enough thinking we might lose her when the Hunter comes, we can't have lost what time we had left!"

Duke shushed him. "We do not want to get into that part of the explanation. It's enough having to sell the Troubles. The way we all are, the three of us together? To sell that to her afresh is a problem. I'm hoping like hell she remembers, too," he added. He eyed the shut door and the equally closed-off nature of Nathan's body language, and ached internally. "Come on," he prodded. "Let's do your maintenance while she's out of the way, huh?"

Nathan tipped his head on one side a moment, then shook it and reluctantly started to unfasten his vest and shirt. "I'd rather do it myself, but--"

"But you've only got one fully functional hand and even aside from that, there are gonna be places you can't reach," Duke finished. He caught the collar of the shirt and vest and drew them back, over Nathan's obediently stretched-back arms. His own arm twinged. "I'm better at the mechanical stuff, anyway. Should've been me last time, but..."

"Your alternate's an ass," Nathan concluded, then averted his gaze.

"So's... yours." Duke barely got the words out. There was a lot of metal on show on Nathan, all of a sudden, that took his attention instead. Took his breath away. Duke threw the damaged shirt and vest across the bed, staring at Nathan's fine shoulders reworked in burnished metal. The illusion of humanity ended at the nape of his neck: below that, the shapes were right enough to pass when covered by clothing, but there had been no effort made to paint, or cover up, the joints. Most of the plates overlapped across his shoulders, and down the curve of his spine and around his back, so there weren't gaps to see into the workings unless Nathan bent at an extreme and fully extended his form's capacity for movement. A quiver went through him, some sort of psychosomatic shudder of unease, and with the movement Duke saw how the plates in the left side of his back and shoulder were looser than the rest, making his sides look asymmetrical.

Duke rounded to the front of Nathan and gave in to the urge to touch. "This is crazy."

Nathan's chest rippled, the interlocking plates flowing away from Duke's fingers in a flinch. Nathan shot him a quelling look.

"No, I mean it's... crazy-amazing. Crazy-impossible. You're a freakin' beautiful piece of machinery, man!"

"You were going to behave," Nathan warned him, and confirmed again that he could still roll his clockwork eyes.

"Not like that. I meant-- Damn it." Duke scrubbed his hands through his hair. "You need anything winding up? And no, that is not a come-on." It faintly killed him to remember trying to hold Nathan's function hostage, to remember being ready to put a bullet through his glass eye, the weak path into his otherwise protected brain.

"I did that ten times over while I was waiting for you both." Nathan sank down on the edge of the bed.

Duke knelt and pulled off Nathan's shoes, revealing metal feet that were a little more scarred and damaged than the rest, a match to Nathan's real feet, which had picked up injuries and twisted toes when he was eight years old and running around unable to feel for the better part of a year.

"I'd rather do this in two halves," Nathan said, intently.

Oh-- "No, man. Your back is -- you can't see it, those plates go right down into your butt and they're all... they're all interlocked like a puzzle. I can already see they're loose down the left from when you crashed to the deck. I need to look at them as a whole. Besides, I want to see! Come on, Nathan, throw me a bone."

"This does not end in you indulging in either machine geek experimentation or clockwork sex acts," Nathan emphasized again, before spreading his arms back and lifting his hips to allow Duke access to unfasten his pants. After argument, Duke did leave the archaic underwear in place. He figured he could work around it, much as he was fascinated to know how things had been translated into metal and clockwork down there.

The right knee joint clunked as Duke pulled the pants off over it, and it was immediately obvious that there was another problem there. Duke winced at the memory of cataloguing weaknesses like these. The knowledge that Heppa's police automata were brutal in a one-to-one fight but if you got them off balance, pushed them over something or off something, their own weight would work against them. That fucking memory of putting a stolen pistol to the eyeball of a regular patrol officer -- one of the blank metal faces -- and watching him fall as the bullet mashed through glass and crystal lenses into the core of function. That Duke Crocker had been a sixteen year old street kid selling drugs to avoid starving to death... Which, yeah, okay, kind of had a parallel in his own life, though he'd have had the state, he could've gone to the state, even if he'd never trusted the state. But, Jesus, he'd never killed a cop! There might be the odd lowlife here and there that he'd taken a shot at, and avoided checking up on afterward, back before his Trouble came out and the others, but nothing like...

"What's the matter?" asked Nathan, probably wondering why Duke was staring so hard at his knee.

But Duke was the real Duke Crocker, now, and fuck it, he hadn't killed that cop, and he hadn't killed Nathan, so he shoved the useless memories aside and set to work making use of the rest, the ones that knew how these guys ticked, because if he could pull them apart, he could put them back together, alright? He could use that now.

"Nothing's the matter. Lie down." He felt the clockwork beat when he put his palm in the centre of Nathan's chest, pressing his body to uncurl back onto the king size bed. There was definitely reluctance there beyond the odd click or crunch as the damaged plates and joints caught, but he got Nathan sprawled out staring at the ceiling with his arms stretched away from his torso.

His head jerked up again as soon as it touched down. "Maybe we should leave this. I'm functional enough."

"Audrey and I saw the doctors," Duke tutted. "You be brave, too. Though I guess you've no use for candy even if I had any."

"Doctor Duke," Nathan muttered in disgust as Duke climbed onto the bed beside him and rolled to grab the toolkit. "And his bag of tricks."

"I could make it naked maintenance," Duke suggested. "And since you can't feel anything anyway, you do have the option of lying back and pretending I'm doing sexually intimate and dirty, dirty things to you."

"I'm pretty sure it'll be like that anyway," Nathan murmured, "because it's you." His eyes strayed worriedly to the closed bathroom door. "But, clothes, Duke. Audrey doesn't remember being with us. If she walks out and finds you naked--"

"Okay, okay," Duke sighed. "Way to kill the mood." The Audrey situation was just depressing and made him want to cling to Nathan all the more. What if she never remembered? What if she couldn't come to love them again? Rejected them, this time around? Hell, it hadn't exactly been a great introduction.

Though he should be more worried that she had a head wound bad enough to make her lose her memory than what a shit deal that was for him. Especially considering all the other things that seemed to have been done to her memory before. What if the damage was...

"Sorry to kill it further," Nathan said, "and this is going to sound weird, but... I'm going to try and step back into being him. The clockwork version. He knows more about this body than I do."

"Me, too," Duke admitted. "I mean, the other Duke knows a few things about you guys... police automata. Dragged up the bad way, you know?"

Nathan cast him a disturbed look, but shook it off. "If you could hold off the innuendos, or anything else, anyway. It could be... jarring. From that other perspective."

"Yeah, for both of us, but you're still a spoilsport." Duke pulled a face. "However we do this, Audrey's gonna walk out of there and think it's something dirty."

"Just because you would."

"He was more of a spoilsport than you are," Duke added, just in case Nathan didn't know, because he kind of felt that Nathan should know. "I don't know what Malcove's Trouble did with your sense of humour."

"You didn't get to see it," Nathan bitched. "Because you had me in cuffs the whole time. Speaking of which, I'm remembering that, and you owe me back in kind when we're normal again."

Uh-oh. Still, it could be fun. Duke shrugged and trailed a hand over Nathan's metal thigh toward the sort of weird Victorian boxers. "You going to show me what's under this, then?"

If Nathan had been flesh and blood, he'd have blushed furiously. "No. There's no damage under there. I can promise that. Duke, focus." He flicked his eyes back to the bathroom.

"Okay. Time to get serious in the no-fun sense." Duke sighed. "Are you... you're not ashamed of what Audrey sees, are you?"

Nathan only glared, so Duke picked a likely tool from the kit to unscrew the panels and looked for the best place to begin. He was both repulsed and weirdly fascinated by the task ahead of him. Fascinated as he'd be over any intricate machine... repulsed because this was Nathan's body. Also a little bit fascinated because it was Nathan's body.

"Start at the upper chest plates. This might be easier on a more solid surface."

"Not for my knees." Duke wasn't sitting on the floor for an hour or more after the punishment his body had taken today. Everything already ached enough. "So, those chest plates... Damn, this is awkward and so weird..."

Nathan's glass eyes watched over the movements of Duke's hands. While he was silent, Duke carried on, assuming his guesses were right ones. He started at what seemed an obvious top plate, directly over the left pectoral, and set it aside carefully with the screws that had fixed it in place cradled in its concave interior. Duke had half expected some sort of heart, but the mechanism had no central core, just lots of interconnected gears and pulleys. The inside of Nathan's chest cavity clicked and whirred disturbingly. While he lay still, it wasn't doing anything more than ticking over, cogs jogging in a back and forth rhythm that was still sort of like a heartbeat.

"Move your arm," Duke said, voice hushed and fascinated, almost a whisper. Nathan narrowed his eyes but complied, bending the limb inward at the shoulder. Duke watched all the gears whirr in a definite direction, radiating out from the shoulder, bigger levers pumping deep in the chest cavity to prompt the heavy movement. "Holy crap."

"I'm sure I'm fantastic," Nathan snapped.

"You're a fucking work of art," Duke said. He smacked himself in the face with his open hand and scrubbed it over there a few times. This wasn't an engineering project. This wasn't his boat, or a piece of diving equipment. "You know what's ironic?" He laughed suddenly. "I'm pretty sure it's the other guy responsible for the boner." All those years working out how to destroy the most complex machines he'd ever see--

No. Duke stopped the train of thought again.

"Duke," Nathan berated, and okay, he really did have to get his head in the game, because if Nathan got pissed, this shot of maintenance was going to end right here, along with any other chance to try it, and who knew what state human-Nathan would be in if he got changed back without repairs?

"Shit. Sorry. I'm working. Working head is on now." He tried to ignore the ache of the other head in his pants.

Duke focused his attention as promised. He took the panels off in clusters, then fixed anything inside that didn't seem quite right, following Nathan's guidance. Tightened joints that were awkward to access, that he had to fucking straddle Nathan and press his hand right inside the chest cavity to reach. He got the shoulder rotating properly again, and the hip joint working, and only accompanied the latter with one joke about whole new levels of penetration.

Nathan was curt about that, but Duke was politely ignoring how dreamy his glass eyes were getting while he watched Duke work.

This was definitely the other guys, Duke decided.

Some of the panels were bent, resisting when he tried to take them off. The mechanisms inside that allowed complex movement looked alarmingly fragile compared with the hard exterior, but that didn't freak Duke out nearly so much as when Nathan saw he was struggling and clamped his fingers around a panel to disengage it with a strong tug.

"I've done this before," Nathan said, as Duke spluttered and snatched back the bent panel, checking it and then the place it had been yanked from frantically for damage.

"No. You haven't."

"All right, but my memory has."

"And we're not wholly in that world right now, so how about we show more fucking caution?"

Nathan just scowled. Duke frowned at the plate. "I'm gonna get us chucked out of the hotel if I try to hammer this back into shape here."

"Put it to one side, then, and fix all the bent ones outside in the yard later."

So Duke put the rest back into place and worked around the problem. He'd nearly done Nathan's front, and since he'd tackled tightening the damaged joints from the front, which had been the bitch of a job, it shouldn't take so long to do the back. The knee proved trickier than shoulder and thigh, because the casing was smaller, and he couldn't get his fingers into the tight space to get the grip. "Okay if we get Audrey to try this?" he asked dubiously. "Smaller hands."

"Okay."

Duke put the undamaged panels back on, fairly loosely, and patted Nathan's hip. "Okay, turn over. I have to see your iron butt."

"You're enjoying this," Nathan grumbled, but he turned. He even let Duke pull down the pseudo-Victorian-undies to what would have been the crease of his ass, to deal with the metal plates that feathered down through his buttocks to allow complete range of movement of his spine. But that became more alarming than anything else, because the left side was dented all to hell. "Where I bounced off the deck," Nathan said, with that disturbing void of emotional connection with the damage, looking over his shoulder.

Duke sighed and stripped all the plates off, and put them with the others he needed to tackle outside. Some loose gears clunked inside Nathan as he shifted and Duke groaned and set about retrieving them from the workings with tweezers and figuring out where the hell they were supposed to be. He reattached a last few levers that had come adrift, and sat back to let Nathan move experimentally.

"How is it?"

"It's better," Nathan said, with some surprise.

"Are you gonna be all right, being left with that much wide open?" Duke asked, concerned, and gestured to the pile of dented plates. "'Cause all of those need attention."

"It's not going to be for long, and nobody's going to be shooting at me." He shrugged it off.

All in all, it was really, really fortunate that Nathan was naturally of a somewhat macabre bent, but Duke couldn't help wincing over it for him.

The other side of Nathan's back was fine, which just left the busted knee and the arm that was in need of new parts, which Duke hadn't tackled. "I figure you should at least get your pants and the vest back on to cover those gaps, before we horrify Audrey, then," Duke said.

"She won't be horrified," Nathan said tersely, but he was still pretty quick about pulling the clothes on.

He'd barely got the new pants over his hips and sunk down on the edge of the bed again when she walked out of the bathroom.

***