FIC: [Haven] CLOCKWORK, Chapter 12 (Audrey/Duke/Nathan, R)

[roseveare]

12.

"I hope you don't mind," Audrey said, safely behind the locked door, arranging the collar of Nathan's shirt back into place before she turned to the suitcases she'd left on the bed earlier. Nathan put their new additions down on the bed, too. Audrey threw the suitcases open, set the gun within easy reach, then started pulling at her dress.

"It wouldn't make sense for me to mind," Nathan said, clipped. "I'm made of steel. It isn't as if I can be--"

"--Interested?" she interrupted. "That's not why, Nathan -- well, not really. Although I have to admit that, in that context, and in light of what you've both told me about how we're supposed to be together and the fact I don't remember it, you are less threatening than Duke. I also think perhaps it's time to change that." She cast the dress on the bed, standing in the dull beige corset and an elaborate underwear and garter belt construction underneath that Nathan had seen in the shop but not really made the connection that it would be on her at some point. It still covered a lot of skin. She made a face at him and said, "It's more like a torture contraption than underwear. I swear, this world... I am going to pound this Malcove guy for making me suffer this crap for days on end."

Nathan nodded understanding. He was vaguely aware that the other version of Duke had also had a few snide comments to make about the excessively covering undergarments.

Audrey, her mouth quirking, reached up with both hands and pulled the top of the corset apart, releasing her breasts a little. "Oh my God, the girls can breathe."

Nathan tried to politely avert his gaze, but she walked around him. "The thing is, Nathan, that you're a real man trapped in this metal form, even if you don't know it. I can't help but feel we need to push that, to -- to help the person survive. Because being made of metal can't be good for anyone."

"I've always been real," Nathan said, trying not to let too much of his anger out at her, at the assumption. "Just because I'm not flesh and blood--"

Except he was. He ducked his head, still unsure how to handle that. It made him feel like he'd been approaching the world on false pretences.

"Are you embarrassed about the idea that you're human?" Audrey asked, breathy and a little sharp and very curious.

"It's so messy," Nathan said vaguely. That wasn't really it. "I'm used to thinking of myself one way, and that's... it’s important, and..."

She shook her head. "This isn't you. I think we need to find that real you, to bring him to the surface, instead of you repressing as you've done since we came back. Don't worry." She gave a wry laugh. "I intend to tackle Duke as well. He's being just as bad, and he doesn't even have the excuse of a clockwork brain. I thought I felt so confused and lost while you both knew who you were, in the other world, but ever since we got back, what that experience did to the two of you has been pretty awful to watch from the sidelines."

"I'm sorry."

She looked down at her breasts. Nathan hadn't moved again, since she obviously meant him to see. He tipped his head on one side as she peeled the corset further apart still and looked back up at him, her blue-grey eyes sly, a question in her face.

Nathan didn't find himself with anything particularly to say.

"You like me touching you, don't you?" she asked.

Nathan nodded. It was a peculiar experience. He had no nerve endings, and yet... he did enjoy that tingle as his form seemed as though it was trying to change into something more aware and alive.

"Touch me," Audrey said, jerking her chin down at the bared triangle of her chest. "Put your hand there, and let's see what that does. I want to know. Maybe if we hold that contact long enough, you can remember having skin."

There were a number of responses Nathan could make about the nature of the request, but at the end of the day, she was asking him to do it and he trusted her, and reason suggested that either way, there was no real impropriety here. Either he was a machine with no sexual interest to whom such an act meant nothing, or he was a real man and they were from a world where they were lovers -- however non-standard the arrangement was -- and touching her was his normal, acceptable practice.

He was also not going to fight his own curiosity and desire when he had permission to indulge it. He moved to lay his hand on her chest. Audrey caught his wrist and peeled the soft glove off, stripping bare the harsh metal. "This feels like rubber," she observed, stroking the material of the glove between her thumb and forefinger.

"It's for tactile grip," Nathan said. "Metal skids." His hand felt -- the wrong word, but still the best one -- naked now, as she pressed it to her skin.

Nathan closed his eyes. There was a thrum in his arm, as of -- the closest comparison he had was as if his gears had been over-wound, everything churning and ticking too fast in that initial surge, springing loose after the key was released. But it wasn't quite like that.

Sensation was impossible. But it was as though his awareness of all the gears and workings of his arm was increasing with that tingle spreading up from his palm. After a few moments he realised there was a pulse there. It didn't belong to him -- there was no single beat in him that could create so solid and regular a rhythm. "I can feel your heart beating," he told her, opening his eyes, the airbag in his throat releasing unintentionally to give a soft gasp.

She stared curiously back, looking remarkably non-awkward with a clockwork hand nestled between her breasts. "How do you like it?"

The question was odd to him, but-- "I do like it," he said, and he was not just being polite. This excitement in him, was that a little of what sexual arousal felt like? The purely psychological component of it, he would have to assume. "You know," he volunteered hoarsely, a little ashamed to have to own to it -- did that irrationality mean this was bleed-through from the other side, the other him, the one who had a human sense of masculinity to be bruised? "I don't... I can't physically react to arousal, no matter what."

"I suppose that's true." Her eyes travelled down his form. "You've been tight-lipped on it, but I'm guessing that if your kind of machines are shipped from the factory to places other than Heppa, and if people are making use of your cohorts in naughty fashions, then there must be something down there to mimic those parts, and the function to some degree, if not the desire."

Nathan felt a vague horror at the thought that she was going to go into such territory, but she grimaced and shook her head.

"Yeah, I thought you'd get that sort of expression. Don't worry, Nathan. I think this is far enough for now. I just think we all need to remind ourselves that you really are alive." She pressed her lips thinly together. "If Lock is an ally of Malcove's, then he probably knows it, too, and may think that Duke doesn't. Which makes his 'offer' all the more diabolical."

Nathan reluctantly removed his hand from her, seeing that the experiment was done. But he was yet treated to a further dose of her touch as she offered out the glove and then carefully peeled it back onto his fingers.

He thought that was it, until she stepped back into his space. "No, stay." She caught him as he automatically stepped away, and she pressed her body to his, pushed her head into the angle of his neck. "This is for me. I want to remember, too. So hold me, Nathan. Maybe the body won't do it, but the spirit might... I want to remember myself, damn it. I want to know."

Nathan curled his arms around her, rested his chin on the top of her head carefully, and entertained for a moment the ghost of a tickle from her hair, the heat of her breath misting the sheen of his polished neck.

Holding her was easy and he felt... he felt...

"This is familiar," he said, roughly. The airbag that held his voice seemed to be constricted. Perhaps her head pressing just there was shifting the panels over it. Maybe Duke had put them back a bit loose. "This is me." He realised it as he said it. "This is something I know. Holding you." A kind of peace stole over him, soothing the protests of everything in him that said he couldn't be real, that he'd fought too hard to be real under other circumstances, other restrictions, and didn't want to cheat by being suddenly all-along-human.

If this had just been a ghost of a life, perhaps he could learn to accept as much after all, if the reality brought back such benefits.

"How do you feel?" he dared to ask her, curling a hand up to stroke her hair.

She sighed. "I still don't remember anything. Not even a little bit."

That deflated him somewhat, but didn't take away his new surety. "Maybe it is the metal. If you try with Duke..."

"Yeah. If I try with Duke. Or both of you," she added. Funny how Nathan didn't feel possessive about the possibility of Duke being in the equation. It felt right. Natural. Easy to believe, in fact, that the ingrained patterns of three people who'd lived and loved and worked together were buried somewhere within them. That they had ended up together, despite being placed at odds and on opposing sides, lent to that.

"Can you kiss?" she asked.

Nathan shook his head. "My mouth and jaw are designed for speech, not for anything else." His metal jaw clanked with a sudden shift. Damn it... He'd pondered over the attachment that had come in his original kit, but never understood it. Now, in the light of these sorts of discussions... "I just, I remembered something. There's an attachment, but it wasn't for kissing." It was like a tube, made of the same material as the gloves, and he fixed it onto tiny hooks up behind his metal teeth. He couldn't talk properly with it in, and it had seemed extraneous. The sole purpose he had been able to think it could have was if he were ever in a situation where he needed to pretend to eat. It would stop food and drink he put in his mouth from entering his works and gumming them up, and he could just remove the sleeve and clean it afterward. It had sat in the box, at Garland's place and then later at his own, untouched for years.

He wasn't sure how he'd come to be sitting on the edge of the bed. Audrey's hands were on his shoulders, on his face, patting and concerned and kind. "I didn't mean to..."

"No," he said. "It's not your fault. Sex is... it's not me. It's never been... The way Duke talks about those other machines..."

"Hush." She cut him off, planting her fingers over his mouth. "It is you, remember? Whatever Duke says, those functions don't have to be included to make you used by someone else. Since you are real, maybe they're there to make you complete. Being real -- being human -- is about living and loving, too... if you want it to be. Maybe it's Heppa we should blame, who weren't interested in making that part of you an option."

Nathan sincerely doubted that they'd thought about it one way or the other. It seemed nonsensical to him. If he was to be a policeman...

But what need of anything, in that case? You could extend such an argument to argue away all of the pieces of life he'd striven for over the years, asserting his right to have them. Why had he fought for those and yet rejected this? What Audrey was saying... Heppa had made them eunuchs, perhaps they weren't meant to be that way, perhaps it was possible to reclaim this, too, no matter the reason those parts and functions had originally been provided.

He frowned and started to feel annoyed, at Heppa as well as the other automaton buyers, in a way he never had before.

Audrey leaned in and kissed him on the edge of his mouth. "Like that," she said. "Keep that. Ignore the rest. I don't need you to BSOD out on me again."

To what? But she came out with many strange expressions, and Nathan focused on the tingle of the planted kiss instead. That feeling was also familiar, and made his mechanisms flutter and stutter subtly. "I'm all right," he said, a fraction testily because he could make a reasonable guess at what her unknown phrase meant.

Audrey touched his hand where it rested on his knee. "It feels very strange to be left as the guardian of both your wishes, in a way, but you were so invested, before, in the idea of the three of us being together. Hopefully we'll fix things so that all our memories are properly restored, but if we can't... I'd like to think that there's a way it's still possible to make of it what we can."

Nathan was struck by a sense of remembered sadness rising up, at the idea she had forgotten loving them. "It's there," he told her. "The memories are there, they're just... out of reach."

The side of her mouth ticked with palpable frustration. "Well, it looks like you're doing better than I am, then, on that front."

"You say things all the time that don't make any sense to me," Nathan pointed out. "You must remember enough of the other world to do that, at least. What is a BSOD?"

"Blue screen of de--" She grimaced. "You'd never understand it if I explained it." She shook her head. "But I don't have the same things to contend with as you do. I wasn't written over with this whole other existence. I hit my head. What if enough damage was done that the memories that mean anything, the ones that aren't just stupid and trivial, are simply gone?"

"It will be all right," Nathan said. "I'm sure they don't make you who you are." But he had a strange, unsettling, hollow feeling as he said it, partnered with the knowing he'd experienced as other memories bled through, that he wasn't sure he liked and didn't think he wanted to examine further in the context of that particular statement.

"We should... I should get dressed," Audrey said with a snort, reluctantly completing the fastenings of her now much loosened corset. "Before Duke knocks at the door and finds us like this, and wonders what the hell we've been doing."

"He won't wonder that," Nathan said.

She started pulling on another dress from the pile of purchases he had carried in. "You never know. He might. You both argue over everything else. I don't want to see you arguing over me."

"It doesn't feel like that," Nathan protested. "It doesn't feel like that at all."

She said wryly, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you're a little too messed up at the moment to remember sexual desire, let alone jealousy, so I'd rather not risk aggravating any situations." She yanked the dress over her head and pulled it down. It was the simplest dress from the local craft traders in the market. It couldn't hide the lines of the gun, but she picked up the small, flat purse she'd also bought and put that into there.

Nathan stood up, feeling both shaken by the conversation and yet happier, at least in himself. He was worried for Audrey. "I should get changed, too." He bent to make a token few swipes at his pants legs. They were coated in a thin but visible layer of dust from the market, particularly the lowest seven or eight inches. He still had the spares Duke had bought to make him more presentable while mixing with the other train passengers, though. "I'll have to see if Duke will let me back in. Will you...?" He hesitated. "I don't mind. So long as Duke's finished, it's only metal, and you just--" He gestured to her, feeling it was only fair.

She laughed. "Yeah. I showed you mine, now I expect you to show me yours, Wuornos. I wanna see that shiny ass in all its glory... or its ridiculous knee-length long johns, as the case may be." Her face twisted. "Okay, less exciting."

"Not even remotely exciting," Nathan murmured, and reached for her hand as he went to the door. She held onto him, and the thing was, he knew she was holding onto him even when he wasn't looking down at the contact, and it was the left hand she had taken, and not the right one with the pressure pads in its fingers, and he was even still wearing his glove.

He listened first at the door, then pushed it open carefully to check the corridor outside. Audrey hadn't drawn her gun, but she was clutching the bag by its lip and its flap was open. Nathan shook his head. "No clockwork killers lying in wait."

"I wonder what they're doing," Audrey said. "I'd have expected a move by now."

"Maybe Lock rescinded the order after the attempt failed and he knew he'd been made."

"Because he's scared enough of us going after him that he wants to keep his metal bodyguard pinned to his side," Audrey suggested. A fiction, but Nathan supposed it a moderately reasonable one, given human nature.

They locked their door after themselves and tapped on Duke's, calling softly. Nathan had noticed before that a woman had the cabin next to them, and she stuck her head out now and smiled and waved to Audrey.

"Darling, we were going back for cards, later." The woman’s maid also peered through the door at her side. No automaton, this one. The girl was red haired and very pretty, the hair all arranged in a creation held together by pins that seemed very elaborate for a maid. Her dress was not nearly as straightforward as the one that Audrey wore now. Nathan wondered if they were failing their social disguise. "And after cards, there will be a pianist and singer in the bar. Supposed to be very good. Will you be joining us again?"

"We might," replied Audrey. "Thank you. Oh, this is Mrs Murphy, Nathan, and... This is Nathan." She pointed between them and smiled awkwardly.

"Oh! Yes, you'd said you had an automaton." Mrs Murphy's eyes went a bit hazy with disinterest, despite her friendly attitude.

Audrey surprised him by saying firmly, "He's not Lock's type of automaton. He's a member of our party and we're travelling together." Nathan cast her a wild look. Their ruse? Their cover--?

Mrs Murphy's eyes had narrowed slightly in thought. Nathan couldn't guess at what she was thinking, especially when she chose a response of carefully saying, "Very well. Then this is Deirdre," and placed her hand on the shoulder of the maid.

Audrey smiled, and Mrs Murphy said, "I hope I'll see you in the bar, even if you're not playing cards. The gender balance of this company is decidedly askew."

The door opened and they fell inside Duke's room. Nathan stuttered his protests the second they were privately shut in again.

Audrey wasn't listening. She was grinning excitedly. "We're all scandalous," she said with gleeful triumph. "Did you see that? Mrs Murphy's 'maid'?"

"Unusual for her to make the introduction by name," Nathan agreed.

"Not only that, but they're lovers. Travelling as Mrs Murphy's 'maid' is no more than a pretext. Hah!"

Nathan frowned and supposed that was possible, though he didn't really see how it was a foregone conclusion.

Duke’s jaw had dropped. "Those two women? Man, I've seen that maid."

"Stop it," Audrey told him. "You have two of us to focus your unsavoury attentions upon already, remember?"

Duke looked cagey. "Theoretically." He took a step back and eyed Audrey, then shifted his gaze to Nathan.

Nathan wrenched his attention back to the crucial point. "We were supposed to be pretending that I -- that I belong to Duke," he said curtly. "You... you just told her."

"She's okay," Audrey said. "She trusted us back. She's not going to say anything to anyone else. But I'm starting to think that maybe it's just not worth it. If it hurts you to pretend, and it does, then I say fuck them all. We can't escalate things much more than the guy trying to kill us. We'll be back in Heppa soon and it won't matter. Why the hell can't you be your own clockwork man? Maybe you're not 'technically' a citizen, outside Heppa, but hey, we still had to pay for an extortionately priced train ticket for person-shaped you, so who the hell on this train has any business taking issue with it?"

Duke choked at the diatribe, but when Nathan looked his way, he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, and said, "Shit, I never wanted you in the first place."

Nathan scowled and Audrey said sharply, "He's talking about the fake ownership. Duke, you idiot--"

"What else would he be talking about?" Nathan grumbled, looking away.

Duke made a strange noise, drawing Nathan's attention reluctantly back, despite himself. By the time he'd turned, more scuffling noises had advertised the approach and he wasn't surprised to find Duke much closer than he had been.

Nathan stared at the crumpled letter Duke thrust into his hand.

"Fair's fair," Duke said. His face was red like he was going to burst something. "Look, don't take it too... I mean, I don't know what to think of most of what this thing says, either."

"Oh, finally," Nathan said, disgruntled; reminded how annoyed he'd been over the situation with the letters. That he should have written something for Duke which had been easily handed over but he'd been denied the same exchange. He moved away from both of them, stepping into the corner of the room as he carelessly flicked the paper straight and started to read. That turned out not to be overly easy, and with a frown, he laid it flat against the wall and smoothed his hands across it to try to reduce the creases.

He read the words on the paper with disbelief, and had to read again, slower, trying to decipher each word and take it in, because his clockwork brain had been too much in a rush to read the end of the sentence to work through the parts that were blurred. It looked like it had got damp at some point, though the paper seemed dry now.

He wouldn't believe it, except his own letter had backed up the sentiments. That had been different from having it confirmed in Duke's words. After all, he could choose to tell himself anything, and he could have been mistaken.

"What does it say?" Audrey was talking, behind him. "Nathan. Nathan. Don't zone out on me again, okay?"

"That was an option?" Duke demanded in a hiss, his voice indistinct and decidedly unhappy. "What the hell? I thought giving him the letter was supposed to make things better!"

Nathan thrust the letter behind him, blindly, shoving it toward Audrey's voice. The barely-useful pressure pads in his fingers told him she'd taken it, by the sounds of their clicks more than anything else. As soon as the paper was gone from his hand, he regretted it, wanting to read the words over again.

"Give him a moment to absorb," Audrey said, a gentle distraction underlying her voice. "His brain runs on gears and he's never had any framework for romantic relations." Nathan risked a glance back over his shoulder. Her brow was furrowed, her eyes focused. It occurred to him to wonder if Duke minded that he'd passed the letter to Audrey, and it was that concern that drove him to risk turning further, to look at Duke.

Duke looked nervous -- no, Duke looked afraid. He looked up and then they both kind of froze, accidentally catching gazes, and just sort of stuck there, each pinned by the other's attention, not knowing what to do.

"All three of us," Audrey said slowly. "Maybe that's what we should do."

"Beg pardon?" Duke choked out, like his throat was constricted. "That letter... I don't remember..." His voice sank to a wheeze in the protest.

"You wrote it in the bathroom after your shower." Her eyes flashed, a mix of anger and determination. "There wasn't any other chance, and this paper's been damp."

"...Yeah." Duke shot a guilty look Nathan's way. Tempted to turn away, Nathan didn't. "The other one's like that as well. Though I'm not altogether sure it's the dampness from the shower that's responsible." He made a crude gesture.

"You wrote a -- an erotic letter?" Nathan clarified, disbelieving. "About--" No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make himself finish that.

"About real-you. Yeah." He clutched his forehead with his spread thumb and fingers. "Okay, I sort of remember writing it. But it's like everything else in that place. I did stuff, but I don't remember why. Kinda reminiscent of some illegal substance that this doesn't mean I'm admitting that I've tried."

"No-one cares right now," Audrey said flatly. Though Nathan sort of cared, because if a real flesh and blood person was going to be in love with him, couldn't it be one without such criminal tendencies? "No, you don't," she added like she could read his mind.

She took a deep breath. "Look... Both of you. We need to deal with this. Because we were doing better when we were on the airship and you were in cuffs--" She looked from Nathan to Duke "--and you kept talking about disposing of him. At least, we were all happier. The three of us need to... be ourselves. We're already under siege for who we are, and pretending to be something else we're not, just so that we can fit into this world, isn't helping. We need to make the effort to be us, the real us."

"But I'm not that guy!" protested Duke. "I don't have his memories, I don't remember you as a human," he added, to Nathan, "though I'm pretty sure I got it loud and clear that you've got a world class ass. Or possibly that you are a world class ass... No, I'm pretty sure it was both."

Nathan mustered a scowl, kind of glad of the opportunity. "Oh, you're funny."

"Shut up." Audrey brandished the letter. "This says we should try whether we remember or not. This could have been the last chance you guys had to talk to each other, and I guess I'm not surprised that no incarnation of Nathan makes any expansive gestures with it, but you did." She raised her voice over Duke's protest, leaving his mouth hanging open. "You said let's try, and I think you were right."

Despite his own unease -- terror -- at where this was going, Nathan couldn't help but let a smile touch his lips as Duke raised his arms in desperate, silent objection, then gave the whole thing up and lowered them with a frustrated huff. "What are you suggesting, crazy woman?" he asked, voice heavy. "Sex? Because I hate to point it out, but the bed is not very big and the walls are very thin, and the automaton is probably going to freeze up and stick us all in some horribly compromising position until the train staff or police or Butler arrive and break down the door."

"I won't," Nathan said, more for the sake of objecting than for any confidence he had in the statement.

Duke raised an eyebrow. "That means you're down with this idea? You?"

Nathan stared back. He was -- he didn't even know what he thought about this. But he hadn't for instance said, No way in hell, which seemed to suggest that his intrinsic objections were less than anticipated. "I'm not a machine," he reminded Duke, and himself, a little stonily. "I'm a man, with a sex drive. Though I'd imagine--" He looked down at his body "--it's having a few issues right now."

"So long as you're not eying up any passing cars or locomotives," Duke said, but behind the humour his eyes were panicky.

"It doesn't have to be sex," Audrey said impatiently. "As you say, it's not very practical here, anyway. But I'd thought a hug? We could cuddle, touch each other, just be intimate together. Duke, behave." Nathan didn't know what Duke had done because by the time he looked around the other man's expression was all false innocence.

"Alright," Duke said quickly. "Hug the robot."

"I'm not a--"

"Check." Audrey held up her hand and continued. "We don't remember it, but we're not strangers. It's okay to be intimate. And doing that will help the real memories get through."

Nathan extended his hand slowly, almost in a dare, and put it on Duke's shoulder, metal thumb and forefinger brushing the bare skin of Duke's neck... The pressure pads in his fingertips announced touch in their dull, lifeless way. There was still a bruise there, the shape of Nathan's hand, from their first meeting. Perhaps that was why Duke looked so uneasy.

There was no tingle, the way there was with Audrey, but Nathan had to admit that knowing he was touching the other man, that he'd been granted permission to touch, held a certain fascination. He let his hand wander up the line of Duke's jaw, fingertips clicking.

Duke was still staring and frozen. "You're not going to kiss me, are you?" he finally managed, with Nathan's fingers on his lips.

"That's also impractical," Nathan said.

"Oh, for goodness sake," Duke said, with a distinct grump in his voice, and a moment later, Nathan was grabbed and pulled into a hug. "You're hard and cold and uncomfortable and I'm not remembering anything," Duke complained in his ear, but his voice sounded strange and he wasn't pulling away. Nathan blinked slowly and let himself be held. This was not, despite his fears, any kind of being used by Duke. Nor had that confused experience in the other world been like that. It was... He imagined Duke, surprisingly soft close-in, long hair tickling like Audrey's, beard bristly against his cheek. He imagined a body that could flush with heat and desire and respond to this... and maybe, maybe, it became less an act of imagination than an echo of memory.

There was an ache in him, somewhere deep, for all he had no ability to feel. He did feel the tingle as Audrey moved in to curl against both of them, her hair brushing his face as she leaned up, her arms encircling. Duke shifted an arm to pull her more completely in. Nathan stayed still, too unsure where his limbs were in the confusion of bodies and concerned about hurting someone if he made the wrong move.

Audrey said, "Why don't we relocate -- carefully -- to the bed?"