FIC: [Haven] CLOCKWORK, Chapter 7 (Audrey/Duke/Nathan, R)

[roseveare]

7.

Audrey had been imagining all sorts of goings-on in the room outside while she was in the shower, so she was a bit surprised and perhaps even disappointed when she emerged to discover Nathan sitting on the edge of the bed and Duke poking at his arm.

"--tightened up the shoulder, but this probably needs--" Duke broke off and they both stopped to look at her, both rather guiltily.

Well, that suggested that the things she'd been imagining might have been a feature after all. "Don't stop on my account."

"We're really close to done," Duke said.

Nathan averted his gaze and didn't say anything, as though all the metal on display was a problem for him. As she watched, Duke tapped his knuckles on a metal arm to get his attention, and Nathan darted a quick glance his way and nodded. Duke started screwing a panel back on.

Audrey rounded the bed with the dress she hadn't worn in her hand. She had decided to stick with the exercise pants and T-shirt provided by the police. The outfit seemed more appropriate for where they were now, and it would be easy to sleep in it.

She was going to have to crash sometime soon. Even if she did have an instinct, some kind of inner voice telling her she could trust Nathan and Duke, the three-way prospect seemed to call for a healthy dose of caution.

A pile of dented metal panels near the pillows made her frown. She could see, from her new angle, that a large portion of Nathan's back was uncovered. It might not be a gaping wound, but she could see inside to his internal workings and it gave her pause. "These are going back, aren't they?" she asked anxiously.

She watched some kind of airbag nestled between the complex gears and mechanisms inside the area directly beneath Nathan's throat inflate and deflate through the back of his shoulder as he said, "Yes."

"Gonna take them outside to try knock them back into shape," Duke said. "Ah, hell, should we call this a day here? Not a lot I can do with that arm right now, and it's not like we have to get you undressed for that. I'll deal with these--" He leaned over and scraped up the panels. "Then we can get the holes patched up. I am definitely not keen on leaving you to sit around like this for long. Maybe Audrey can fix that knee while I'm gone."

"All right," Nathan said. Audrey joined him in dubiously watching Duke leave.

After the door clicked shut, she plumped down on the bed next to him. "What's the matter with your knee?"

He leaned to roll up the leg of his pants. "The joint is loose. Duke's fingers were too big to reach inside to tighten it." His movements had gone even stiffer than usual, his face rigid and almost frozen. Audrey could hear, now that she knew it was there to listen for it, the soft, airy huff of that inflating airbag right before he spoke. He might not need to breathe to survive, but he needed air to form words.

"I'm... not going to hurt you, if Duke didn't." She tried to be reassuring, feeling mildly offended as she tentatively reached for his knee. "I fixed your hand, remember?"

"You can't hurt me," he said flatly. "Less now than ever." He turned a loose screw a few times with his fingertips and plucked it out, then pulled away the largest of the plates over his knee. "There's a sort of toggle, lodged right inside the joint. It needs rotating until everything tightens up again. Unless it's been sprained, in which case we need to replace it... somehow. I'll lock my leg out, so the mechanism can't close on your fingers."

His terseness and caution with her was dismaying. In fact, this whole situation was dismaying, and not just... in the obvious respects. When it had been the three of them seemingly thrown together as strangers who felt an odd connection to each other despite their different interests, she had felt like an equal member of their party. Now, with Duke and Nathan re-forged as a unit, the two men had such a closeness to each other that she felt like she had lost her place among them. She couldn't help but miss the camaraderie of them all being in, well, in the same boat.

She knew that was unfair. Their rediscovery of each other was a good thing, and their affection would enfold her, too, if she gave it a chance to, but right now that asked too much of her, needed the memory and history that she had lost.

Still, she now had access to those memories in the form of other people who knew who she should be. People who were demonstrably willing to risk themselves for her, and she didn't not trust them. It was just too fast, with they magically returned to themselves, and...

She needed time to adjust.

"Are you all right?" Nathan asked slowly, worry overtaking his awkwardness. He reached up and trailed his fingers over her arm, forgetting himself. Halfway down her arm, he flinched back and pulled a twisted face at his gloved metal hand.

"It's all right," Audrey said. "You can touch me. I don't mind if you're made of metal. I know you'll be careful."

"I wasn't, though," he said, eying her bruised hand, even though he'd inflicted it saving her life. "And usually I'm not. Not... careful and not made of metal. I'm flesh and-- I'm a man. I love you but you hardly know me at all. What you know of me now is as this -- this machine!" He made a noise that wasn't very automaton-like at all.

"Duke didn't seem to be having too much problem," Audrey said, as she ducked her head and knelt to examine his damaged knee joint.

He jerked his chin up as she slid her fingers inside. "Duke and I are different. Back on the ship, that wasn't even all that unusual. We're-- He's a..." His mouth twisted, grinding metal somewhere inside. "And I chose to be a police detective. And yet..."

"An epic tale of star-crossed romance," Audrey quipped lightly. "With added handcuffs." Her fingers found the toggle, and she tugged carefully, finding far too much give. Damn. They did not need this to be difficult to repair. She started to twist it slowly, making his knee shudder and his face steel all the more expressionlessly. Nathan placed a hand firmly on the leg to hold it in place.

"It's not even kinky," Nathan said. "Well, not usu-- It's just sad, okay? This place, the new memories, just bring it into relief. Everything that happened on the Cape Rouge..."

Audrey didn't have to think hard about what in particular he was referring to. She hadn't doubted that he was real since the moment Duke stuck a pistol in his eye. But the incongruity now was greater, with an obvious human being talking to her, yet gaping holes in his torso revealing mechanics while her hand was lodged inside the clockwork of his knee.

"He's really upset about that," Audrey said, because she'd seen that. "He wouldn't have done it. He stopped before I stopped him."

"I know."

The knee gave a soft chuck around her hand and he said, "Ah."

For a moment, she was unsure if that was a positive sound or a warning one. Awkwardly, he said, "Can you--?" and following his gesture, she extracted her fingers. He flexed the joint and his metal jaw shaped a slight smile.

There had been at least a moment back on the airship, Audrey critiqued silently, where Nathan had not known. The moment that had given them what should have been a mere machine, in fear, and been enough to change both of their minds.

He was undoubtedly fixed, so Audrey straightened and left him alone to screw the panels back on his leg.

Duke and Nathan seemed to have just slung Nathan's clothes wherever they landed when they'd been doing their ‘maintenance' -- which either suggested parts of it had more resembled her thoughts of earlier, or that they were just men. She picked the clothes up, cataloguing the grass stains and tears, and figured that they were probably beyond repair, even if they were far better quality than the replacements Duke had bought.

"How are you?" he asked cautiously, flexing his knee as he put down the screwdriver, and turned his head to find her gaze. "Your head injury. They let you go, so... you must be all right. Did they say anything about your memories?"

"They said 'wait and see'." Audrey sighed. "Okay, there's really not that much that Duke didn't say, because there's really not much. All a bunch of hedging and 'we don't really understand these types of injuries fully' and 'the human brain is a funny thing'. I don't know." She clenched her fists in frustration "I wish I did. I want to know who I am, believe me." She watched his face soften. "What I am, what all of us are."

"I understand," he said, a bit wryly. He stared at his hands, then peeled off his glove from the right. The detail of the articulated joints was astonishing. Of course, this one was the broken one. The bandage remained on his wrist, and from the range of movement of the fingers, Duke had been able to do nothing to improve it, if he'd had chance to try. "The Troubles, that Duke told you about..." Nathan splayed his hand, reaching it out to her, and lifted his eyes with a question in them. "I have one. Even when I'm not like this."

Duke had told her he couldn't feel. There were a number of ways to interpret that statement, and she hadn't entirely understood what he meant, and the conversation had been interrupted before she could ask. She lifted her hand, matching it to his palm and pushing the immobile smallest finger into line with the others as she did. It seemed a small, harmless thing, for all that she'd been avoiding too much physical or any intimate contact with either man. But she watched him close his eyes and knew it wasn't small, even though she couldn't imagine how it could be so significant.

"What?" she asked, pushing sharpness into the question, wondering what he'd plied unwittingly from her.

"Like this, I don't have any nerve endings," he said, sounding so lost and confused she forgave him on the instant. "It's completely impossible. But I can still... feel you. Deep down."

She remembered, from before, his report of a tingle. "You know what it's about, now? What happens when I touch you?" She flexed her hand. The metal was growing warm from her own skin, that radiated heat after coming out from the hot water of the shower.

He nodded, and blinked his eyes open again. His face rearranged and he removed his hand of his own accord. "I'm sorry. I hadn't touched you, since... I had to check if what I remembered... It's still the same." He took a breath, air bag inflating. "I can't feel. Anything. Except you. Because you're immune."

"And we're in a relationship?" she asked, raising her eyebrows, rubbing her fingers against her palm contemplatively because that sounded horribly convenient. "Well, you and me and Duke, anyway. Can you--?" No, he'd just said it was only her. "Him, you can't feel?" she checked anyway, and reflected that that parsed slightly better, especially considering how into each other they'd obviously been when she walked out of the bathroom, and back in the police car before that.

"No." He shook his head. "Plenty of other history between me and Duke. Which this Trouble saw fit to erase." He looked pissed off. "I thought you should know, though, that when Duke says you're special, that fixing the Troubles is what you do... It's more. It's part of who you are. If you can't remember that, you need to understand it."

She shook her head, frustrated. What did it matter if she was 'special', if right now they remembered and she did not? "Right now, this is out of reach," she told him flatly.

"It's not," he came back unexpectedly. "Because there are physical effects. Don't you see?!" He aborted a grab for her hand. "And you need to know because we're going to walk back into that place, and Duke and I... we think the most likely scenario is... Duke and I are going to forget."

"He's right." Nathan's head jerked around guiltily at the sudden appearance of Duke, who dropped the metal plates one by one on the bed. They looked straighter, although possibly still not absolutely straight. "You're the immune one. I was going to do this after I'd slept."

Nathan's face shifted grimly, and Audrey could see what they meant, because Duke's movements were lined increasingly with exhaustion and there were dark smudges beneath his eyes. He'd been up thirty-six hours straight that she could attest to, and she remembered keenly what that felt like.

"We also need to, I don't know, write letters for ourselves, for each other, that we know we'll understand later." He dug into a bag abandoned on the dresser and pulled out two pads of notepaper and a pack of cheap ballpoint pens, and passed one of the notepads at Nathan, fishing a pen from the packet to throw after it.

"We might not forget," Nathan said, looking at the stationary and backtracking stolidly. "And Audrey will remember."

"Write it or don't write it." Duke's temper sounded short. "Write something to yourself, if you don't want to write to me. But given what you're like, and I'd say the 'other you' except it's really not, it'd make things for the rest of us a whole lot easier if you could manage to put down something convincing."

Their being pissy with each other was telling Audrey so much more than their lovey-dovey actions of earlier. And oddly, her familiarity with being with them like this was far stronger. "So we need to... remember... to fix the 'Trouble'?" she checked, throwing in an air quote. "But I'll remember anyway, even if I've forgotten everything else?"

"Nothing changed for you when we crossed out of the steampunk world," Duke said. "Your memory loss is down to a head injury. We, on the other hand, have both been affected by a Trouble. When we cross back, chances are we'll be affected again. We're vulnerable to that, and it is frustrating, so, you know, don't think that we don't get that. But it's also happened before."

"You were hurt by someone who knew you could fix this," Nathan said dangerously. "When I find them..."

"Yeah, if it's Malcove, he needs to start praying," Duke agreed. "But right now, chill." He tapped the plates he'd dropped on the bed. "I should put these back, since I don't want to elbow you in the gears and knock half your insides loose during the night."

Nathan reached for the buttons of his vest, then looked at Audrey.

She raised her hands, and turned her back. "If I stand like this, can we keep talking about my memory and the things you're not telling me?"

"I didn't mean to--" Nathan stuttered, at the same time as Duke griped, "You could have waited until we were all together."

"You can look," Nathan said. "I -- it's just that I didn't want to embarrass or... disgust you."

Duke was rolling his eyes as she turned back around. He'd already peeled one side of Nathan's vest away and the holes through his chest cavity were bigger.

"It's not disgusting," Audrey told him. "It's just strange." It would probably be stranger still if she remembered him as a human, living man, if she really knew him the way he did her. "But back on subject. The subject of me."

"It's not that we're not telling you," Duke said, groaning. "It's just beyond complicated. And ongoing. We don't know all the answers ourselves." He turned to Nathan for aid, but ended up swearing over a thread of the vest caught in Nathan's mechanisms and was distracted helping to tug the garment clear while Nathan looked mortified. "The Troubles are... cyclical. Every twenty-seven years a woman appears who's immune to them and helps fix them. For another twenty-seven years, until they start, uh, bleeding through again."

"That's a pretty good summary." Nathan gathered up plates for his chest that Duke flung into his lap and snapped them into place with a very fixed focus while Duke went to work covering the huge exposed cavity down his left side.

"It doesn't explain anything!" Audrey protested. "That's supposed to be me? Who am I? Why do I appear? Why am I immune? Why are you all so, so magically afflicted anyway?!"

"Exactly." Duke clicked his fingers and gave a defiant smile, and she wanted to punch him. Which must have come through in her expression. "Okay, all right! But the simple fact is, we can't tell you the answers because the real you is more like a bundle of questions!"

"But we love you," Nathan said intently, shocking her again with the fact he so easily said it. "We know you. And that's enough."

"And when he's finished freaking you out..." Duke swatted the back of Nathan's head and contorted his mouth silently as he hurt his hand. "Nate, I need your ass."

Audrey couldn't help but raise her eyebrows and quash the start of a giggle as Nathan turned around with a sucked-lemon face. Duke waved a metal plate which had a distinctive buttock-curve to it.

"This is you guys," she said, and she got it. Not earlier, when they'd been in shock, silenced by their surroundings, panicked and strained, screwed up by guilt. This was why she'd felt better on the airship with them harping at each other. "Between the two worlds, you're basically the same."

Nathan's jaw clanked as it fell. "I resent that."

"Oh, come on," Duke said. "We're in this mess in the first place because you froze Malcove on not having his paperwork in order. Now you're a literal metal-assed stiff that can't say 'boo' to a regulation."

"You said Malcove wasn't my fault."

"I changed my mind." Duke tugged him upright and yanked his pants down to half-mast. All Audrey saw was overly long undergarments. Nathan was twisting from the shoulder to look around at Duke, not paying her any attention. He looked pissed as hell.

"Even if I'd known he'd change me into this," Nathan rapped, "I'd still not let him get away with trying to hold a public event on premises that didn't hold up to fire and crowd safety standards and then trying to bribe me."

"Oh, come on." Duke wrenched the screwdriver around to punctuate each word, tightening the plates in-position. "Greasing the wheels is how the world moves, it doesn't make him evil incarnate--"

"It would have made it corruption if I'd accepted!"

"--and yes, Nathan, this is so much better than letting a health and safety technicality slide. That decision worked out well."

"It was better than compromising--" Nathan choked off and flung his hands up. "This is pointless. You think we should all be irresponsible like you. Ignore the law to make things easier. Well, I'm not like you..."

Duke's hand rang as it slapped him hard on the ass, staggering him and making his jaw gape again. "Damn it, Duke!"

"Fine. But right now your rigid, metal ass is fixed, thanks to me."

Audrey was treated to the sight of all the plates Duke had just replaced coiling neatly to simulate the real curving motion of a human spine as Nathan turned on him. For a moment, she thought Nathan was going to throw a punch, and readied herself to step in. Instead, he snatched the screwdriver out of Duke's hand, imbuing the small gesture with violence. "Give me that."

He walked away from them both and used the screwdriver to fix in place the few stray plates that remained. Then he reached down and fastened his pants.

"Nathan..." Duke said, taking a hesitant step and reaching out a hand.

"No, it's true, isn't it?" When he looked back, his blue eyes were hard. Glass shouldn't be able to do that, thought Audrey, unable to argue the fact that it had. "This happened because of me. I was the... trigger."

"Nate, there was no way to predict he was going to react this way," Duke groaned, backtracking. "Look, I'm in a shitty mood, and this situation..."

"You're always in a--" But Nathan caught and held his tongue, and shook his head. "You need sleep, Duke."

"You do," Audrey broke in. "There's no point arguing about this, or anything else, until you've had some rest. How long has it been?"

"You refused to sleep on the Rouge," Nathan pointed out, but because apparently that was the way they did things, added a muttered, "Asshole."

"I was looking out for all our interests by not sleeping on the Rouge," Duke said.

"It's not really important," Audrey injected. Duke was abrasive through exhaustion and Nathan was abrasive through his traumatic transformation, and she was sure any discussion would go far better after a stretch of downtime. "Guys, you need to rest."

Duke looked guiltily at Nathan. "That arm of yours..."

Nathan pulled the new, white shirt down over it in response, and the new vest on over that, and brushed himself down with his hands, working and broken one alike, then topped the performance off by dragging his fingers through the short, brown fuzz of his artificial hair. "We'll deal with that another time."

"Fine." Duke sighed. "I bought toothbrushes. Not that I guess you need one. Actually, I got a little pot of flesh coloured paint... maybe your face..." He winced as Nathan moved to make a study of himself in a wall mirror.

"Later," Nathan said, and determinedly turned aside and dismissed that, too.

Audrey pointed silently at the bathroom and Duke retreated into it.

She was surprised when she turned away to find Nathan watching her with a subdued smile. "You're still the one who keeps us in line. Are you all right, with this...?" He jerked his head at the large bed. It was another of those times she was sure he'd be blushing if he still had the capacity.

"I guess so. After all, apparently we know each other pretty well in some world. Besides, I figure the guy made of metal isn't going to try anything." She softened it with a smile of her own.

"When we're back... if Duke and I don't know each other this way... maybe it'll be easier for you again."

She hadn't expected him to be so astute, and it stung because she had thought it. "I'm not wishing forgetting on you," she said with a shudder.

"If it happens, it happens either way." His face was very serious. "We can't afford to lose our focus. We're the only ones who know something is wrong with the world. Probably no-one else can get inside past that wall, and however reality has warped to encompass that, it's not going to be long before it draws the kind of attention we don't need. It's absolutely vital that you remember for us why we went back, and keep us all on track."

Audrey took a steadying breath. "Because we have to put the world back to normal, and stop this Malcove person. Don't worry. I won't let you stay this way forever."

"That isn't import--" Nathan looked down, then away. "I can't say I wouldn't rather be human again, even if I can't feel my body anyway."

"It makes a pretty big difference to me," Duke said, emerging from the bathroom. He'd stripped off all but his boxers, which were as old fashioned as Nathan's. He saw Audrey's gaze and grimaced, not entirely reading her study correctly. She'd been looking at his sculpted body, and more ruefully at the extensive bruising on it from the crash. "Yeah, I definitely should've bought more underwear. Call it a personal blind spot."

Nathan gave something like a laugh, and eyed Duke's path across the room as Duke sidled around him. But he didn't pull away as Duke snaked an arm around his waist and over his shoulder, catching him in a loose embrace from behind, and kissed him on the neck. "I want you back. All of you. The you that can respond to this."

To Audrey, it looked like Nathan was responding to it now, his eyes sliding shut and his body yearning back into Duke. "There are probably things we can do," he murmured, very low. "In the morning. In the bathroom." His slit eyes slid over Audrey, and blinked wide.

"Hey," she said. "By all accounts we're in a relationship. That means I get to watch."

It was Duke's turn to snicker. "I'm gonna hold you to that promise. Schedule one robot hand-job..."

"I could also damage something we'll miss later, and I'm not a robot."

"Tomayto, tomahto," said Duke. He kissed the line of Nathan's jaw. "I love you."

Even Audrey could see that that took Nathan's artificial breath away. But he stepped free of Duke's arm and climbed onto the bed to sit up between the pillows, leaving a little less than half the bed for Audrey alone and reaching for Duke's hand to pull him in. "You both need sleep, and it'll be easier for me to get around like this at night."

His long legs sprawled out like a divider, and it was clear that that was all he'd intended to be. But Duke bunched up his pillows and moved over, plopping them all on Nathan's lap, and curled his body around so he could rest his head there. Nathan received it with as much bemusement as the kisses, but rested his hand on the pillow by Duke's shoulder nonetheless.

"Audrey?"

His glass eyes entreated her to trust them. She nodded and climbed in on his other side. Nathan's right hand, the broken hand, was on the very edge of her pillow. Duke was making a show of snuggling into Nathan, who looked pained and stoic and... painfully isolated, locked-in by his unliving, cold-metal condition.

Audrey lay down slowly. She was tired. She had stolen enough sleep to refresh her on the Cape Rouge, but a lot had happened since and a lot had happened before. Duke, just as utterly exhausted, was already starting to snore softly.

In a last impulse before she dug down into the comforter and closed her eyes, Audrey reached her hand out across the pillows and rested it on top of Nathan's.

He was still looking out for them, she thought, fuzzily, feeling a warmth enter her at the thought. Still keeping watch... Just like he had back on the airship.

***

Audrey woke up to soft whispers exchanged between mellow male voices, and drifted in the haze and comfort of the sounds, not necessarily able to make out the words, but the tone they carried was full of soothing, sleepy affection. Strangely, it was not strange, and nor was it threatening, to be in bed with two men. She lay and let their voices roll over her and basked in the familiarity of it, the feeling of belonging.

"--was kidding, Duke." The words started to make it through as Nathan's voice raised a fraction in exasperation. "Besides, Audrey's here, and she doesn't remember us."

"Audrey's asleep," Duke grumbled back, "and even if she wasn't, she said she'd watch."

Nathan answered with a noise that sounded more mechanical than human.

"What can I say? Proof that you're sexy even as a machine, jerkass."

"I'm not-- Okay, we're not doing this and there's nothing sexy about this... form."

"Just freaking grope me or something. I swear, Nathan, if we are stuck with you this way forever, I am not going to buy into that crap. You lost three years deciding you had to close yourself off from any kind of sexuality because you couldn't feel, and I am not losing you to this. Just please freakin' try! You've got the same brain. There has to be something. It's got to do something. You can still see me."

"And what's in it for you, exactly?" Nathan growled.

"I just said you've got the same brain! You're still you! Fuck!" Duke matched Nathan's rising aggravation, and Audrey sighed internally, and that was familiar, too.

Things were quiet a moment. Then, she heard a muffled noise from Duke, mixed with a soft movement from Nathan. She hardly dared to breathe, after that, for fear that she'd alert them to her wakeful state and they'd stop, no matter what Duke had said. They were very, very quiet, and all she could mark was the way Duke's breathing changed and hitched, and the occasional involuntary click or whirr from Nathan's clockwork body.

"See," Duke breathed, finally, stretching out the word in a soft exhalation. "See?"

Audrey dared turn as if still in sleep and peeked through her eyelashes at them. Duke was cradled between Nathan's knees, and had Nathan's hands curled between his legs. But even that was not so intimate as Nathan's face pressing forward over Duke's shoulder, placing them cheek-to-cheek.

"I don't have any release," Nathan said quietly. "I can love you, but it's just that. There's no... body chemistry. I still had that, before."

"Damn it," Duke said, turning one of his fists back to pound it on Nathan's embracing thigh.

Nathan lifted his hand. "I need to clean my glove."

He made to move, squeaking the bed from his weight, and Duke turned around and more or less sat on him, hands reaching down to grab him under the knee and thigh. A significant barrier between them had clearly dissolved, their touches far more casual and easy. "What?" Nathan asked.

Duke leaned in and kissed him. "You taste of metal and oil and wood," he said disgustedly, before leaning back in again. "And I don't care. Good morning, honey."

"Don't call me pet names, Duke," Nathan said in a by-rote fashion as Duke let him up. He paused and leaned his head in close again to hiss, "It's not the same. Biology matters," then he retreated to the bathroom. Audrey let herself blink and sit up as the door clicked to and water started to run.

"And a good morning to you, too," Duke said, with a dented smile.

After their intimacy so close to her own personal space, it was easy to reach out and rub his knee. "If we fix the Trouble, we fix this, right? And I... I always fix the Trouble."

"You always do," he said. "And if you fix this you'll be my personal favourite superhero for life. Not that you aren't already, of course."

"I can live with being a superhero, I guess." She frowned at the closed bathroom door. "How is it that the one of us who doesn't need to pee just claimed first dibs on the bathroom?" He snorted. "What time is it?"

"It's about 10pm. The respectable people will all be getting ready for bed." He groaned as he pried himself up from the mattress. She had seen, earlier, the extensive bruising on his body from the crash, but it looked worse now, having darkened and deepened while he slept. He'd left blood on the bed sheets from a few scrapes, though the bandage on his arm appeared to be holding up. "Hotel are going to be pissed, between that and Nathan denting the head board," he observed, noting her gaze.

Audrey looked at the head board, but it was only a small dent, more like a scratch where his neck had rested. "I think they're more likely to notice the sheets."

"I vote we just split. They're still gonna think that we're heading out for a stroll or a late drink at this time. We'll have to sneak Nathan and the baggage out, but those two things kind of dovetail nicely into the same solution."

Nathan emerged from the bathroom, and Duke made a dive for it but then caught himself, sighed, and waved Audrey in ahead. "Okay, I can be gallant. I can."

By the time she was finished and they'd swapped over, Nathan was self-consciously straightening his clothes in the mirror. With the resources of the bathroom made available, he moved on to retrieve the paint Duke had bought and used some tissue to brush it over the damaged parts of his face, fading the new colour to blend in with the old by using a little of the instant coffee provided in their room, a trick that struck Audrey as rather clever.

"You learn that painting those unbelievably boring seascapes the other year?" Duke asked, coming out of the bathroom.

Nathan shot him an aggrieved look and snapped the lid closed on the paint. He ran the cheap comb Duke had bought through his hair. "I think it looks as good as it's going to. Doesn't look human." He traced the highly visible joint lines around his jaw with a fingertip.

"From a distance," Audrey said. "Or from behind. Or at a glance. It is better. You look fine."

"We need to leave," Nathan said, and frowned at Duke. "Are you going to shower before you dress? I'm counting myself lucky I don't have a sense of smell right now."

Audrey wrinkled her nose and added, virtually pleading, "It wouldn't take long. And some hot water would ease out all those muscle pains as well, I'm sure. Plus the bandage probably needs changing anyway."

Duke threw up his hands and went, and Nathan fastened his shirt cuffs and started pulling together all the bits and pieces Duke had bought while Audrey reluctantly packed her body into another uncomfortable dress. "I really hate corsets."

Nathan cast a guilty look across to her. "I, um, don't hate the corset. Sorry."

"Yeah? I'd like to see you or Duke wear one," she grumped.

"I could go for putting Duke in one," he agreed, deadpan. "Nice and tight. Constricts the chest, makes it harder to talk, right?"

"Huh." She stopped and said, "Huh," again as he offered her two envelopes. One had his own name on it. The other had Duke's. He looked acutely uncomfortable about it. "Nathan, what is this?"

"Duke's dumb idea to write to ourselves. I spent a lot of time sitting watching you both sleep, so it seemed... Can you keep hold of them until they're needed? If they're needed."

"Of course." Audrey tucked the letters into the lining of her bodice. This dress wasn't so floofy and expansive as the last, and she appreciated its design for being a bit more sane for practical use, but it didn't have the copious silly folds that had been so useful to hide things in, either. "Maybe they won't be needed," she said encouragingly.

Nathan shrugged and said, "We're not that lucky, but maybe."

Duke emerged this time wearing a suit -- not so formal as Nathan's, in dark brown shades that seemed warmer and more casually wearable. He'd added a vest in green and grey stripes, and left the collar of his pale cream shirt undone by several buttons to show a flash of chest.

Audrey blinked quite a lot. This was no longer the grubby, oil-stained airship owner. He'd even tied his hair back in a neat ponytail. "Hey, you look... nice."

"You do." Nathan smiled the broadest smile she'd seen on his face. "That ensemble must hurt."

"I can wear a suit," Duke protested. "You've seen me in a suit before, Nate."

"Wasn't that prom night?"

"Dick," Duke shot back. "I remember prom night. You didn't show. You were, what, out boning the Reverend's daughter under the stars? If you'd shown, I might have asked you to dance."

"I'd still have said ‘no'."

Duke pulled a face but he was grinning. He shifted his gaze to Audrey. "You look nice, too."

She groaned. "I swear, if -- assuming -- I really am in a relationship with the two of you, you are both wearing one of these things the instant we all get back to normal. Because you deserve to know."

"I'm game if Nathan is. He won't feel it, but the sight would make it all worth while."

Nathan replied with a metal middle finger.

"We've done more imaginative things than that before," Duke protested. But then turned back to business. "Where'd you put the maps?"

Their things were all in a neat Nathan-organised pile at the foot of the bed. Nathan leaned down and pulled out the maps. "I was looking at them last night. It's bigger on the inside." He pulled a face, sort of. "It would have to be, if we're in Cawbrook. For sure we travelled further than forty miles in half a day and a whole night flying."

"Yeah..." Duke juggled the maps around, laying them out. "I'd have to agree with that." His fingers traced over the paper, and Audrey hitched up onto the bed to look. Nathan picked up and unfolded a map that said Maine on the front, that Duke must have bought yesterday. "From Heppa to Callion is 80 miles, but we bypassed Callion to the west, and came a lot further than that a lot quicker than I'd normally fly. I'd say we ended up about twice that distance out... Here." He jabbed his finger at a spot on the edge of the map, where there was nothing much marked.

"'Here be dragons' territory?" Nathan suggested. "I didn't figure out where we were, exactly, but while you were asleep I was trying to line up a few common geographical features. Heppa's Haven, it's got to be, even if it doesn't resemble itself even remotely any more. But it's about ten times the size. The only way I could make sense of everything is if it's all been... stretched."

"This is where we live? The real us?" Audrey tapped the new map and pulled it away from Nathan. She looked at the names on it... Haven, Camden, Bangor... They all felt familiar to her, but she'd seen the same map in the police station, and no specific memories stirred. "Damn it," she said. "I wish I could remember."

"You will," Nathan said awkwardly. "Uh, Duke, that's another thing. How are we going to get Audrey's results tomorrow if we go back today?"

"Fix the Trouble," Duke said, "and phone from Haven."

"What if we can't, and we're caught up in this far longer than that?" Nathan pressed, anxiously. "She can't just call them up on her cellphone from inside the Trouble."

"I guess coverage would be an issue. I don't think Heppa's baby telephone system would be compatible, either." He sighed and looked at Audrey. "Perhaps we should wait. We need to know what's wrong with your head."

She frowned. "But we might fix it quickly. And I can always come out of the Trouble again, if we don't." She met their reluctant faces. "We aren't going to drop all plans because of this," she told them firmly. "You know what the doctors said to me? Familiar surroundings and people would help bring my memories back. And while everything that should be familiar is different because of this Troubled crap, it's only going to be so much harder to get back to being me."

Nathan winced a bit more obviously than Duke, and she sighed again. "And seriously, whatever things you're both still being so close-mouthed about, I'm going to strangle you both when I finally do remember if I judge you hadn't damned good reason."

"Oh, boy," murmured Duke.

***

They planned a route that ought to bring them back into the area of the Trouble via a main road, but approaching from a direction that would avoid the Cape Rouge's crash site and any lingering attention Duke's damaged airship might have drawn. Ideally, they wanted to be near another city, as they weren't sure if the car would continue to work under the rules of the steampunk world, just as the Cape Rouge had failed to stay in the air as they came close to the edge.

Nathan drove them out of Cawbrook and a few miles further, until they were on near-empty roads quite eerie in the gloom. Well past midnight in the middle of nowhere, he pulled the car to a halt. "Audrey needs to be the one driving," he said, and asked her, "Do you think you can?"

"Why--?" Duke started, and broke off. "Oh. We don't know what happens to us when we go through. That's true. Forgetting how to drive while we were behind the wheel probably would suck."

"That, and I think Audrey can take the car through the barrier if she's in control of it, whereas I'm not so sure we can," Nathan said.

That he'd been driving at all was a little of a mystery. He'd had a quiet conversation when they first came out and Duke had surrendered the keys to him. Audrey wasn't sure if it was to do with Duke's arm injury or Nathan practicing fine motor control.

Audrey wasn't averse to trying -- everything looked familiar, far more so than the airship had, or anything back on Heppa, and when she said, "Sure, let me at it," Nathan surrendered his seat to her grinning.

Nathan re-settled in the front passenger seat. Duke leaned between the seats from the back, rustling papers as his array of maps shifted. "You okay?"

"Yep... yep, I am pretty sure I can do this." Instinct kicked in and turned the key and eased her foot down, then they were moving, the shadowy scenery flying past, and Audrey felt a thrill of achievement and even let out a victory whoop.

It was so different to being on Heppa. "It's no wonder I couldn't get anywhere, when all of the options in front of me were wrong!" she exclaimed. "This, this, I know... Okay, but one of you is going to have to shout out directions soon, because I have no idea where we're going."

"Bear right," Duke said, for the intersection coming up, signpost rising bright out of the darkness as the headlights caught it. None of the names on there were anything Audrey recognised. The car squealed slightly as she turned. Duke cleared his throat uneasily behind her. "I think when we get closer we should probably slow down, because if there is some kind of wall that's going to be even remotely tangible to Nathan and myself--"

"Ouch," Audrey summed up. "Check."

They didn't get that far. They passed a few drivers who blinked headlights at them. Audrey, unsure what they wanted, slowed down further and carried on, though she quizzed Duke and Nathan whether either of them had left something on the roof. "No... Wait, look--" Nathan caught it first, his eyes sharper in the dark. Then they were all leaning forward tensely, and the reason for the other motorists' warnings was dead ahead... A short line of halted cars. At the front of the line, the lead car was manoeuvring to turn back.

"They've blocked the road..." Nathan craned out of his window to see better. "People in suits... they're talking to the next driver."

"Police?" asked Audrey nervously.

"I can't see any uniforms, and we shouldn't have to worry about the police," he said, voice carrying an edge of frustration, "because we're the police. They're just men in dark suits." He pulled his head back into the car abruptly.

Duke leaned over to look and swore. "Incoming."

A suited figure strolled across and tapped on the driver's side window next to Audrey's face, looming ominously out of the night, almost silhouetted by the moving car headlights behind him that belonged to the most recent vehicle sent back down the line. She wound the window down and tried to project 'natural' into her voice, but very much suspected it came out manically cheerful instead. "Hi, hey, what's going on?"

"Gas leak," the man said. "Accident. We need you to turn and find a different route."

"Yes, sir," Nathan said, averting his face while trying not to look as though he was. "We'll do that. Thank you."

Audrey frowned, but the guy was already moving away. She eased the car out, though, and followed the example of the rest of the cars before them. Duke was a litany of under-his-breath cussing from the back, which broke into exclamation as soon as they were reasonably out of earshot. "Fuck! Holy fuck, Nate, there are fucking M.I.B. investigating this freakin' Trouble!"

"The barrier?" Of course, Audrey thought. What else would they be here for? It would be unreasonable to suppose that it had been here for days and someone hadn't noticed it.

"Then we're lucky the perimeter's so wide and so far from Haven," Nathan said tightly.

"We still have to find a way around," Audrey said. "Duke, where am I going now?"

"Okay, okay..." Maps rustled behind her. "There's a track, sharp right just a short way along here... Looks like it should be a road on the steampunk side, so far as I can tell."

"Kill the suspension going off-road in this thing," Nathan commented, but it wasn't so much an objection as an observation, possibly down to sympathy for a fellow machine, and it was certainly a bumpy ride when Audrey swung around and off up the track.

"About two miles down," Duke said. "You'll need to go slower than this."

"I'm not intending to smash us into an invisible wall, guys," Audrey said. "Hey, if we do hit, shouldn't Duke be in the front? He can feel it sooner if--"

"I'm repairable," Nathan grit. "And I'll be just fine. I can't feel pressure, but it still affects me. I can tell when it does."

"That was kind of sweet, from you," Duke said. "Oh, shit -- over there! Audrey, maybe we need to speed up after all."

She turned her head and saw the glint of headlights accelerating on the track behind them. A sort of rrrrrrrrr noise slid into her awareness and more lights and movement in the sky caught her eye. She squinted. "Oh my God. There's a helicopter." And that word rolled off her tongue as though she'd never lost her memory.

"Don't speed up," Nathan said. "We can't be far now."

"Touch me," she blurted out, with a sudden horrible thought. "If the car isn't enough... Duke, Nathan, grab hold! Now!"

Audrey felt Duke's fingers brush the back of her neck and rest there. Nathan had to strip his glove off, though she wasn't too sure if in his clockwork form, that didn't equally count as a part of him. Her heart pounded as he delayed and her hand was grabbing for his metal wrist before he'd got his fingers clear.

"Okay," she said. "We're doing this." The cars behind them were steadily gaining. She could even see inside their windshields in the mirror, pick out from darkness and light-flare the men wearing suits, the dark holes of black lenses they were wearing over their eyes even at night. "Now, now, now..."

The landscape changes were not possible to really register in the dark, but the biggest change was how the cars just weren't there anymore behind them. The sound of the helicopter had gone, and--

Audrey raised her head to look ahead, and squinted. That was a city. Beyond the tree line were hazy lights, and the smoke of chimneys. The natural light of the moon shone dully off a few high-rise edges, though it lacked anything like the aerial profile of Heppa. "We're back," she breathed. "Duke -- Nathan -- We're back!"

They were silent. Nathan shifted uneasily in the front, next to her. There was a thump as Duke's shoulders slapped back against the seat in the rear.

"I don't--" Nathan started, and stopped.

Duke was once more swearing softly.

Nathan tried again. "The last sixteen hours... This vehicle... My memory of what happened to us is... very strange." He turned around to Duke and flinched with an audible rattle. "My memory of you is stranger still."

The flat disdain in his voice just about broke Audrey's heart.

"Your memories are strange?" Duke choked. "Mine are fucking... I can't even... I kissed a freaking automaton? That's got to -- even if it's not just about the most pointless act in the universe, why would I ever even want to touch some metal-assed clockwork drone--"

"Stop it!" Audrey begged. The engine was already starting to cough as she drew the car to a halt. Damn it, damn it, damn it... "Just stop! You need to think, and listen, and we... We have to work together."

She clutched the dashboard edge tight and twisted around in her seat to face them both, even as the headlights started to flicker, still giving her light enough to catch the horror and hostility in their faces. "We need to talk."