FIC: [Haven] Shattered (Unbreakable #3), part 1 - Duke/Nathan (Explicit)

[roseveare]

Loosing this into the wild is a terrifying prospect. Should hopefully be posted complete in time for the last part to be uploaded for this Friday's Nuke Night on Tumblr.

TITLE: Shattered
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: NC-17
LENGTH: 73,000 words approx.
SUMMARY: Nathan has been clawing his way back to life since he returned to Haven. Dying might just give him the push he needs to get there. Duke/Nathan.
WARNINGS: references to violent sex, dubious-to-non-consent, death, deliberate injury, blood, addiction, mindfuck, trauma.
NOTES: Unbreakable #3. Canon compliant only up to season 4's Fallout, incorporating an alternate take on the season 4 plot arc but nipping season 5 elements in the bud. Novel-length, in four parts.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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SHATTERED

1. The Death of Nathan Wuornos

Nathan wakes up to agony and confusion. Part of him knows agony shouldn't be possible and fixes on the impossibility, the question of how? But the question reverberates through the empty hollows of his brain, while the pain spiralling out from his chest through every limb spikes up into his head and takes away any capacity to think.

Someone is crying. Great hawking sobs of raw emotion, loud and awful -- he registers it, before pain overwhelms the sound and its thin thread of connection to the outside world. Pain is all there is, and there shouldn't be any, but Nathan can't remember...

It comes and goes in waves. The surge is too big for him to contain. He doesn't think it's unconsciousness that claims him, just that the whole world becomes the pain until he can sense nothing else. In the ebb, he can make the connection back to exterior things. Eventually, he holds onto that long enough to blink open his eyes and try to turn his head.

Further pain flares in his neck. Bad. He stops the movement with a huff of sound. That small sound is enough to make him realise that, in addition to the other person's sobbing, most of the time up until now he's been whimpering himself, a thready, tortured noise.

Stop. Nathan breathes in, the air shuddering reluctantly into his lungs. He needs to find some control, get a hold of himself.

How? He chases the question again.

He remembers chest compressions, pressure hitting repeatedly where the agony is centred now.

He remembers not being able to breathe.

Memory slams him back down before the next wave and when he recovers, this time, he brings back another question -- where? He's looking up, now, with hazy vision, his open eyes seeing partial darkness and a rock ceiling. Beyond his own sounds of pain, beyond the muffled distress of someone else, pushing through the ebb and surge of the pain tide, he can hear real waves rushing in against rocks. He's not sure it was there at first, so either he didn't notice before, or it's coming closer.

A sense of immanent danger joins the rest.

It's blindingly obvious that he needs to be in a hospital. He isn't used to the signals, but he knows the ones he's receiving now indicate his physical situation is dire.

He can't turn his head any further, but he clears his throat and his voice rasps and rattles as he gets out something resembling a deliberate sound: "H...huh..."

Apparently that's the best he can manage. His heart struggles in his chest like it's going to burst. Pain spirals out from it again.

When he comes back to himself, Duke is desperately shouting his name, gripping the sides of Nathan's face. Nathan's neck screams at him, but the touch brings focus. Pain isn't the only thing that he feels. His hands, which have been an unseen mystery to him in all of the world that he remembers, rise up to curl in Duke's shirt. He feels warm ribs. The pulse under Duke's arm is volcanic, frantic.

"Duke..." It comes out no stronger than a sigh.

"Don't you go," Duke begs. Nathan doesn't understand. Where would he go? He can't move. He's stuck right here. Duke catches his fingers through a cloth barrier of Duke's own open shirt -- even Nathan can register the oddness of that -- wiping them with the shirt before he brings them to his lips. "Hold on, buddy. Hang in there. I'm gonna fix this. I'll make this right."

Nathan tries to pull Duke closer to him, but the body under his hands is trembling and stubborn. Muscles lock and Duke won't come. Doesn't he understand that Nathan can feel? They can touch. They can--

His fingers have left red smears on Duke's shirt.

When he comes back this time, Nathan realises there's something missing. It's taking time to unpick other sensations out from the pain, but the feeling against his skin is chill. He tries to fight the haze over his memory of how this current moment came to be. There was a Trouble. Always a Trouble. The stranger, William, who Lexie brought back... and too many Troubles.

Duke is shuffling around at Nathan's feet, causing sensation against the side of his foot. An expulsion of sound escapes Nathan -- the brush of touch was lighter than everything else assailing him at the moment, but it's been so long that for a moment, that almost felt like pain, too.

"Tuh... tickles..." Nathan says, thickly. He swallows. His mouth tastes funny. Coppery. Crusty -- wait, that's not taste but another sensation. He runs his tongue over the crusts in his mouth, breaking them up, tries to cough them out past his lips. Ends up coughing until he's forced to swallow them down. There's no pain associated with them. Wherever the blood came from, it wasn't his mouth.

"...Nathan?" Duke's voice wavers, sounding more uncertain than he's ever sounded before. He brushes whatever it was against the sole of Nathan's foot again, and the same whuff of air and grunt spills out of Nathan, even though he tries to hold still. The tickling doesn't hurt, but reacting to it does, and he wants Duke to stop that. "Jesus Christ!" Nathan isn't sure why Duke expels the curse in quite that way, and he's growing tired of being confused.

So very tired. Everything is heavy. He lets his head fall back and shuts his eyes.

Duke swears and Nathan feels the cloth Duke's holding frantically scrub over the rest of his body, resulting in reflexive jerks and sparks of pain in plenty of places, but no more tickles. "Shit, I'm sorry," Duke's voice rattles. "Sorry, Nathan, but I have to get you out of here, I have to, and I can't touch you like this."

...Huh?

Nathan can't make sense of that. There's a logic gap here, something he should tell Duke but can't track down himself. He feels a wet slap against his feet and realises the sound of the water has come even closer. The water is cold, and suddenly it makes him fully aware of how dreadfully cold he is all over, like the warmth has been completely leached from his body. He starts shivering, and that hurts, too.

The ground crunches as Duke stands up. He leans down and tries to gather up Nathan in his arms, and good luck to him and his back, thinks Nathan, inanely, because they're near as damn to the same height and weight. Duke struggles and can't lift him. Mutters to himself. "No, no, no. Got to do it. Can't do that. Shit. Need to do this. I'm doing this. Come on, Nate." In a supreme effort, he hefts Nathan's weight up across his arms.

The world rolls out of focus again.

It rolls back in with Duke's staggering steps -- each step is also an audible slosh -- as he carries Nathan out of the... the cave... and into the light. For some reason, it seems wrong that it's daylight outside. His subconscious expected night.

His body remembers things Nathan doesn't.

At first it's blinding, and he has to shut his eyes. The world turns red through his eyelids, and throbs with the agony Duke's every step jolts through him. Duke is breathing heavily, suffering, struggling.

Why doesn't he just use--?

A flood of images assail Nathan and finally, finally, he remembers what happened. The last thought he took into darkness was that he failed -- failed Duke, failed the Troubled, failed Haven... again. Now, he knows he succeeded, but it was almost too late. Duke can't afford to use his curse, so Nathan curls an arm over his shoulder, tries to help with his own weight. Tries to think himself lighter.

He could tell Duke to put him down and forget him, but that clearly isn't going to happen, or help.

Duke's arm shifts, tipping Nathan's head so that his forehead comes to rest against the stubble of Duke's chin. It feels prickly and amazing, almost enough to drown out the searing blossom of agony caused by the shift in position of his neck.

When he blinks his eyes open, now, Nathan can see that his chest is covered with scratches. Also that he's not wearing very much. It's generous to suggest he's wearing anything.

Some of the scratches are old ones reopened -- Wade did a number on him, and it's been less than a month -- but the rest are new. Duke has dabbed them clean, but the movement and the more upright position is starting to make them bleed again.

Duke is shirtless. Back in the cave, it was his shirt he used to wipe Nathan down.

There are scraps of clothing left on Nathan and he uses the biggest, a loop of shirt hanging off one arm, to clutch in across his chest, trying to keep his blood away from Duke, remembering -- remembering vividly now what happens if his blood touches Duke.

It works until Duke slips and falls to one knee. He tries to brace Nathan, to not let him fall and be hurt again -- and ends up sprawled on top of Nathan, bare chest pressed to bare chest.

Duke makes a raw noise and starts to roll clear. Nathan's breath has been taken too harshly away to make any noise of his own. Fires are breaking out all over his rib cage.

Nothing happens. Duke uncovers his eyes and they aren't silver. He stares, and then his face goes flat, and frozen, and empties of everything.

Nathan thinks, Of course. He knew he was missing a connection somewhere. Duke's curse is something that at least between the two of them they don't need to worry about any more.

Duke chokes, "Sorry. So sorry--"

Everything is different now.

Duke picks Nathan up again, and somewhere in the slog of plodding, weary step after plodding, weary step, filled by the background of Duke's laboured breathing and his own agony, Nathan loses consciousness entirely.

***

When he wakes up, it's in a hospital bed, and Jordan and Dwight are by his side. Jordan's face is not the one he'd choose to wake up to after an ordeal, but although her bright red lips are a thin line, her expression is full of too many other concerns to see her hate.

It's kind of disturbing when he realises she's holding one of his hands in both of hers, but he curls his fingers and grips back like her cold hand is a lifeline. She feels not exactly dead, but neutral. Cooler than she should be, but not cold. He's touched corpses before. Before his Trouble came back. He remembers the feel. She doesn't feel like a corpse. She--

His thoughts ping back to the nasty present. "Duke?" He heaves the word out from his aching chest, and it resists him all the way. The pain is still there, but it's distant, locked away by a barrier of fluff.

Painkillers. A lot of painkillers.

"Duke's just a few rooms away," Dwight says. Dwight looks very grim. "He's under sedation. His heart rate was -- he was having a panic attack. It was better to put him out."

Nathan doesn't trust that they're so quick to tell him that. They don't trust Duke anymore, so they put him out until Nathan was conscious again to deal with him. After this, he can't blame them if...

No. He can blame them. Duke wouldn't have done any of it on purpose. It was something that he was driven to, by William, and Nathan might have been almost too late, but he did bring Duke back.

He glares at Dwight.

"We had no choice," Dwight says, firmer.

"He was going crazy over you," Jordan adds.

...Maybe it is better that Duke remains out of the equation until Nathan is back in it. Nathan slumps back in his hospital bed -- hadn't realised he was craning forward. There are white dressings on his chest. Now that the drugs dull the all-encompassing agony there, he can feel the other hurts, hazily. His ass hurts. His limbs hurt, especially at the joints. The ache in his neck is focused in a particular shape, like someone curled their hand around it and squeezed.

"Duke killed me." Nathan supposes one of them is going to say it, if he doesn't. Someone has to say it. The evidence is inarguable. If a Crocker hadn't killed him, he'd still have his Trouble.

"Then he brought you back." Jordan nods. "It's the only way we could make sense of it." Her hands clutch tighter around his. It's very weird.

There are other things Nathan remembers. He turns his face away from their gaze, even though it hurts his neck. His eyes feel hot. He sighs and his voice trembles on the long breath. "What's the... the damage?" He settles for that word.

"I should get the nurse." Dwight half stands.

"You read the reports." He's the goddamn Chief of Police. "You know."

"Three broken ribs," Dwight says. "Hyoid fracture. Some deep abrasions on your chest, and..." His expression flickers from a trace of judgement back to discomfort. "A small amount of anal tearing. I'm sorry, Nathan, we weren't expecting--"

He means he'd have kept Jordan out of it if he'd been expecting that bomb. She clutches Nathan's hand harder. He realises that touch says, It's okay, I know what it's like.

Nathan shuts his eyes. Honestly, there's no guarantee that part happened last night. Things have been screwed up since William started piling on the hyped-up Troubles. Duke freaked out about going silver-eyed during sex for a second time, and they started using condoms after that. They are often rough, and when Nathan can't feel...

Still, it probably happened last night. Nathan remembers Duke pinning him down and thrusting into him, eyes altered and alien. Telling him he loved him so much, that it wasn't fair.

What wasn't fair?

Nathan can't remember how the situation metamorphosed from trying to talk Duke down into sex. It might have been himself that initiated it, but even if it wasn't, the pattern of their lovemaking has been so screwed up lately that Jordan's assumptions are almost certainly askew.

"No." It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt until after. Words are a struggle. "Duke's been... strange, lately. Over my blood. Ever since..." Over a week ago, William started sending Troubles into overdrive: he wants Lexie to come to him, to learn how to give people Troubles. He thinks that she's someone he used to love, a woman he calls Mara.

Nathan thinks that she's Audrey. Somehow, and he doesn't know how, because it almost killed Audrey to try and remember Lucy, but somehow he thinks she remembers being Audrey more than she ought. She's too good at police work. He's also started to think the way she glares at him isn't just a personality clash.

It makes him unhappy and hollow to think of Lexie being Audrey and knowing, all this time she pretended she didn't remember. While he's been with Duke, in front of her.

"I don't know what happened," Nathan admits. He remembers how it all came back to him when he was being carried across the shore in Duke's arms, but it's lost under a drugged haze now. He shifts in the bed. Tubes pull at him. He turns his neck slowly to look at Dwight and Jordan properly again. Stiffness and pain impede the movement. Hyoid bone... anyone who's worked a few strangulation cases knows what that is. Duke placed his hand on Nathan's throat and...

"My throat. Will it heal?" he croaks. He's never heard of anyone breaking that bone who wasn't already dead.

Dwight grimaces. "Yeah. I thought the same. Weird, huh? Apparently there're like a handful of documented cases. It should heal pretty quick. Doctors were freaking out about airway compression if the tissues swell, but your breathing seems okay. They said they probably won't need to do anything surgical."

Nathan blinks. Jordan makes the effort to smile soothingly at him, and it's frightening. "Lexie?" he asks.

"No-one knows where she went," Dwight says bleakly. "I think she went after William, after you and Duke went off the grid."

"Kind of hoping that she went after William and not to William," Jordan murmurs.

Hell, thinks Nathan.

They know they're just putting this off. They have Troubles going haywire and now they no longer have Duke. They need Nathan to deal with Duke, but even if they get both of them functional... No. Nathan stops, stubbornness digging in. They no longer have Duke. They can't afford to use the Crocker Curse to fix anything again.

Lexie's gone. They don't have Duke. They need Nathan.

The room is spinning slowly. Nathan flexes his hand idly, and it feels heavy as he pulls it against the tube stuck in the back of it. Things catch and shift, and little hurts flare up. If he was still Troubled, he might pull it out anyway. But he stops. He looks to Dwight. "I need to get up."

Dwight nods tightly, but looks as though he doesn't like it. Nathan doesn't like it either. Sickness roils inside him. He's not used to that. He feels... He feels mostly like he's going to embarrass himself.

"Gloria!" Dwight calls, leaning quickly out of the door.

A moment later, Haven PD's new old ME shuffles in, looking shifty. She eyes Nathan with judgement and Dwight with even more and says, "He's not fit to move, and I ain't down with using a human life like this, but there're too many Troubles out there and too few who can deal with them, and I'll have you know that's the only reason I'm doing this. That, and I'll be sticking to the three of you like glue until he's back in professional care."

She briskly pulls the tubes from Nathan's hand. He hisses.

"Now, git out, 'cause I got other tubes to yank, and he's gonna need to get up and pee, probably, and these hospital gowns are scary enough to just be seen in by poor old Gloria." She scrunches up her bulldog face and glowers at Dwight and Jordan. They flee about as fast as anyone would, and Nathan quails inside.

***

Gloria's ministrations take about an hour to get Nathan back to some semblance of humanity, checking over his pulses and responses, checking he's not too loopy on the pain meds since he hasn't taken any form of analgesia in years. But eventually she gets him into the clothes Dwight brought for him and into a wheelchair, and gets him out of the room, into a corridor where a window at the end shows a late afternoon sky. It's almost a whole day since Nathan decided to go after Duke. They lost Duke anyway. They almost lost him. They might yet have lost Lexie.

Duke's still alive, Nathan reminds himself.

Yeah, he's still alive. Nathan's heart thumps. Duke is still alive, and for Nathan that's -- that's everything. But right now, he has to think of the wider picture, and in the wider picture, Duke will never be any use to them again.

Dwight and Jordan aren't outside the room. Gloria wheels the chair down the corridor, and Nathan doesn't think of the wider picture, he thinks of Duke.

He slams his foot down onto the floor and stops the chair suddenly. That hurts a lot. When he's finished gulping breaths and Gloria's finished swearing at him, he gasps, "I want to see Duke."

Gloria swears at him again. Then she turns back stiffly to the door they just passed, and shoves it open. "Can you see him?" she snaps.

Nathan, confined to a chair, with a much lower perspective of the world than he's used to, can see a bed with a lump in it. "No," he responds, surly. He starts trying to brace his arms and get both feet on the ground and enough aligned with his centre of gravity to push off and get up. They don't make hospital wheelchairs to get up from.

"I will tie you to that thing," Gloria threatens. She catches him and pulls him back. Her hands, he's already discovered, are gentler than her brusque actions ever look. She gets behind the chair and pushes him to the head of Duke's bed.

Duke doesn't just have tubes, but is attached to machines that beep and monitor his heartbeat. That's instantly alarming. "He's -- he was all right," Nathan protests. His voice is breathy. He's noticing the problem in speaking more now he's upright and alert. Maybe it's down to the broken hyoid bone that he can't get the volume, that his sounds seem to slur. He seems to remember reading, somewhere, that it's attached to the vocal chords. "He carried me back."

"He was freaking out," Gloria snaps. "Best thing we could do was have him sleep it off."

Nathan reaches out and touches Duke. Dark hair is soft under his fingers, stubble hard, skin slightly clammy, and it takes him a few moments to remember those things, and catalogue them anew. He strokes Duke's face, wonderingly.

Why? Why did he do it? Nathan had thought he'd got him back. He remembers a moment where Duke's eyes were clear. Then he'd reached for Nathan's throat.

Duke's breath moves slowly, and when Nathan lowers his hand to hover it above Duke's lips, it feels miraculous. Soft, warm, damp puffs of air caress his skin.

Yet Duke deliberately reached out and stopped his breathing.

"Hey, now," Gloria says, "I know you two are all lovey-dovey, but we only got time for one beautiful moment." She slaps his hand, a sharp sting, batting it away from Duke.

Nathan's head jerks up, and her face softens while he's sagging into the back of the chair, trying to work through the nasty result of that movement. She places her hand on his shoulder through his shirt and rubs soothingly, little soft circles with her gnarled fingers. Nathan's body loosens, some of the knots of pain easing as he sinks into the touch. Soft touch like he hasn't had for such a long time. She sees it and keeps going, making a soothing hum in the back of her throat.

"It's alright, kid," she says, prosaically, finally stopping and picking up the handles of the chair again, manoeuvring them around. "I got a fuckton of the really good drugs in my kit if we need 'em. You just give the word."

Nathan tries to turn his head for a last look at Duke, but is too restricted to get more than a glimpse. Then the door swings closed behind them, and he really needs to start thinking of other things. Without Audrey, without Duke, without Lexie, and with William still at large, all they have is him, so he can't afford to be... broken.

But if he closes his eyes it's like it's still going on, behind the lids. Memory without sensation was always too persistently real, too close to the now. He feels it in his muscle aches and deep in his body like it's sensation delayed... The memory kicks into replay... how hard Duke pinned him down, and then fucked him the way Nathan had secretly always wanted, relentless and silver eyed. Except everything was wrong. The blood, sliding down his chest. Duke's face buried in the wounds. The rage, the intensity, wasn't Duke anymore, but something else he'd become.

And Nathan couldn't stop it. Couldn't do anything. Trying had resulted in an hours-long ordeal and this. Sensation coursing through him. His body broken and repaired and broken over.

"You still with us?" Gloria asks. "C'mon, it's gonna give me some explaining to do if we take you out of here and you make me bring you right back in."

Nathan blinks open his eyes onto hospital corridors. Breathes. Breathing hurts. More than anything else, it seems unfair that the most basic act of sustaining his life should involve so much effort. At the moment, he can feel his heart, too, and that's such a strange, heavy feeling, that he wonders how he'll ever get used to it again.

Chest compressions, like the act of sex, the same rhythm over and over... Fuelled by Duke's silver-eyed power... It was a wonder he did bring him back, didn't kill him twice over. Maybe Nathan's heart is actually bruised. It would make sense, the way the pain swells with each beat.

"...Here," he acknowledges Gloria, belatedly.

"He'll be all right." She's sharp with him, which makes him think the delay was longer than it seemed. "You've done everything anyone could. He'll sleep now for hours. Needs the rest to recover. Same thing you need, and won't get. Leave him be 'til after the immediate crisis. He's the lucky blighter."

Nathan roughly manages to ask, "What is the immediate crisis?" but she just grunts at him and trundles the chair along. If they're not going to let him stand up, he does wonder how much use he can possibly be. At this stage, it seems they must want him for his brain more than his body, so perhaps that won't matter. But the value of either seems pretty negligible at the moment.

They find Jordan and Dwight next to a coffee machine, heads close, talking softly. It's been like that since Jordan shed her Trouble... A shiver runs down Nathan's spine in the recall. They've both been resurrected now, after a death at the hands of the Crocker Curse, free of their Troubles maybe, but not unscathed.

Nathan sees the shift in Dwight's face, looking up as they approach. Suddenly he looks much more comfortable than he did when Nathan was in the hospital bed, and Nathan thinks maybe they're just too used to seeing him as something implacable, so it's like it's a source of embarrassment for Dwight to witness him hurting.

Jordan looks easier, too. It's relief, probably, that he looks presentable enough she won't need to put herself out there to comfort him again. Gloria did an efficient job of scraping him back together. At least, he looked almost normal, when she faced him with himself in the mirror. Pale, though, from all of the blood that Duke absorbed.

It occurs to Nathan to wonder why they're there, with a certain amount of affront, because even if they felt they had to come to his bedside, there is supposed to be a crisis going on and they could have gone ahead and left Gloria to bring him to the scene. Then he realises this is probably the closest to downtime they've had in about twenty-four hours. Their faces show the tiredness and the strain. Dwight's eyes are dark smudged. Jordan's are -- well, her make-up needs refreshing and it's harder to say. But there's still strain there.

Dwight gives him a nod and a, "Nathan." Jordan gives him a narrow-eyed look, like she's figuring out how best to take a step back from her earlier show of compassion. Nathan opens his mouth and Dwight's phone rings. Even as he reaches for it, there's a low rumble, and the ground shifts beneath them. Nathan feels it shift, up through the wheels of the chair into his distantly aching ass. For a moment, the world moves, and then stills.

Dwight barks into his phone, "What?" There's a rim of white visible around his eyes, and Dwight, like all of them, is very much nearing the end of his tether. Even Gloria's family was among the first to fall victim to William's insane spate of killer Troubles and the unavoidable solution of the Crocker Curse.

Dwight listens. Nathan tries to, but the voice on the other end is panicked and he can't make out the tinny words. Everyone holds their breath -- for Jordan it's an easy option -- and the ground shivers once more.

"All right, we'll be there in five," Dwight says, and lowers the phone. "Okay..." He looks around them. "The harpies and the killer trees will have to wait until later. We have something new."

***

A new fault line has opened up through the centre of Haven. Nathan knows what it is -- earthquakes, volcanism, the San Andreas Fault; he studied it in school, though he's never been anywhere that had them. Except, temporarily, Haven the other week, and the small ash volcano that blew out a house and showered debris for a hundred yards around.

This is not small. It's a major structural upheaval that's taken out most of a road, leaving one side sliding downwards toward the crack at a shallow angle, with the buildings on that side of the street starting to lean. The heat is immense. Nathan can feel it coming up out of the chasm even from Dwight's truck, as Dwight curses and starts to reverse. They can see HPD officers, but they're some distance down the street and there's no safe way to drive to them.

"I can walk," Nathan says. A bold assertion. He managed not to fall while transferring from the wheelchair to the car seat, but the speed with which Gloria nabbed the hospital wheelchair, folding it up and stashing it in the trunk, wasn't a declaration of confidence.

"I'll take us around. I can still get closer than this." Dwight grits his teeth and guides the vehicle over terrain that Nathan realises is moving even as they try to ride over it. He leans back as the truck turns, risking his stiff and aching neck to watch a crack spread off the main chasm and take out a house that's stood on that spot for as long as Nathan's been alive.

"I hope they evacuated," Gloria says. "Nathan, you get that neck facing front and keep it that way. You got an injury there's squat living cases of each year the world over. Don't fucking push it."

Jordan snorts and Gloria gives her a cool, narrow-eyed look. Best not to dwell on the relationship between those two. Jordan doesn't have much love for coroners these days.

By that time they've pulled around via a less direct route. There's other traffic on this street, mostly HPD cars and emergency services, mostly heading away. Nobody could miss the new chasm forming. An offshoot like that in the wrong place would take out everyone here. Even with the distraction of Jordan and Gloria's expletive competition, an unpleasant surety forms that Nathan knows whose Trouble this is.

More precisely, he knows whose Trouble this was.

"Garland Wuornos," he says to Dwight. He leans forward, making strapped-up ribs creak, putting his hand on the big man's shoulder as he's cutting the engine, and says it again. He can't seem to get any volume into his voice. "This is my dad's Trouble, souped up about a hundred times. That means they're a--"

"A relation." Dwight's face flickers with guilty hope. "Who, Nathan? Think! Do any of your family live down here?"

"Not here." The crack in Haven extends out of sight. "Where else does this thing go?"

Dwight gets out of the truck and starts yelling over to Officer Rafferty, then swears and gives up. "Stay put," he orders brusquely back into the car, before chasing off to talk to the HPD officers on-scene, who already have more than enough call on their attention.

Gloria turns to Nathan with that WTF? face she does so well. "You holding out on me, kid? 'Cause I knew your dad, and he was never Troubled that I knew." She doesn't say, And how's that a different Trouble from yours? but that just adds Gloria to the heap of people who knew about Max Hansen and never told him, which offers nothing unexpected or new.

Given that, her accusation makes Nathan snort. "I guess he hid it well. Like a few other things." He ducks his head. Jordan's face is carefully blank -- she knows about Max, but that's because he told her, back when he was using it as currency to get the Guard to trust him. He stares at the worn pattern on the denim weave in the old jeans Dwight brought him. Can't shut his eyes. Duke lurks there. But he does need to think. "I don't -- dad didn't have many relatives in town. There were a couple of... aunts. Shirley and... uh, Anne-Marie."

Their last names would have been different, and Nathan can't remember them. They both died when he was younger, but they'd had family. He was pretty sure Anne-Marie's girls had grown up and moved out of town. He hopes William's crazy Trouble activations don't affect the Troubles of family members, wherever they are. "I think we're looking for Shirley's son, Gavin. He'd be my age now." He still can't remember the name. Damn it, he'd sent invites from dad's address book for the memorial. That day was all a blur. Had Gavin been there? He'd been... bald, but apart from that, he'd looked like Garland Wuornos, a bit. Nathan sighs. "Puttman. I think it was Puttman. I can't remember the address, but it's in dad's old stuff back at my house."

It's Gloria's turn to snort. "Garland never was any good at keeping touch. Seems like you're following in his footsteps."

"I've been busy," Nathan says sourly.

Jordan says softly, "We'll find him, Nathan." The sensitive-and-concerned act would be freaking him out all the more, but she's been subtly softening toward him since she began dating Dwight. She seems distracted. Her head turns and a strange expression develops on her face.

"Is that lava?" Gloria's question is sharp. Nathan can only see the heat distortion on the air above the giant crack in the earth, and Gloria slaps a hand to his shoulder to prevent him from craning to see.

"...Aaand we have volcanoes again," Jordan mutters. "That's just great."

"This isn't like last time." Nathan eyes the heat distortion with frustration. An orange glow reflects in the windows of houses, and off car windows and bodywork closer in. He can't see it with his own eyes, but he'll take it as read that there's lava. "Something this size could wipe out a town." He thinks again of people melted into statues in Pompeii.

Dwight comes back, stumbling as the ground moves beneath his feet. He has to grab for the truck door. He wrenches it open with difficulty, still trying to use it to keep his balance at the same time. "Crack extends almost down to the shoreline. It's growing offshoots. Garland had this Trouble?"

"It's amped up about a hundred times," Nathan says again.

"We think it's a Wuornos cousin," Gloria butts in. "Dwight, get in and drive, and tell those A-holes to pack themselves off out of here. Any fool can see this place is gonna blow."

"It's half of Haven," Dwight growls back. He gets in, but his head turns, eyes fixing on Nathan. "It started about a hundred yards up, by the corner of Cotter Street."

Nathan has a book at home that will tell him exactly where to look, but there isn't time. "Go," he says, tensely. Hopefully he'll recognise Gavin Puttman if he sees him.

Dwight puts his foot down and spins them in a tight circle. Gloria has to grab for purchase, interrupting a melodramatic toss of her hands into the air, but she doesn't demand that Dwight drop her off at the end of the street to go in the opposite direction, and Dwight doesn't suggest it.

Nathan is sweating from the heat, and it's possible some of the pain meds are wearing off. Are his limbs trembling, or is that the ground shaking again, shaking him with it? He tries to make his brain work through the fog. It must be slow, to take him this long to realise that his father's book doesn't have to be the only repository of the information they need, just because it's the one he used before.

"Jordan," he says thickly. He wishes that he could get his throat under control. "Do you have Vince's number in your phone?"

She passes it wordlessly back. He prods unfamiliar buttons. The sensation of them irritates his fingers, makes the actions feel like a slog. He lifts the phone to his ear. Vince is instantly irritable. Jordan did not ingratiate herself with him before she sort of mostly quit the Guard. "Vince, it's me," Nathan says, not that he expects it to improve the reaction. When Vince's teeth snap and he goes quiet, Nathan knows that the Teagues have heard. He forges on. "I need to find a relative who might have... dad's Trouble. Gavin Puttman."

After a second, Vince says hoarsely, "Let me check the Herald mailing list, Nathan. I'll call back." His solemnity is almost annoying, if Nathan had anywhere near enough energy to be annoyed. A moment later, the phone held loosely in his hand rings back, and Vince returns him an address.

It's in their epicentre zone.

Dwight's already headed there, but at least now they know which house to go to.

It's almost beside the point. The road seems to be crumbling underneath them. Dwight skews the truck to try and find the safest part of the road remaining, but the world is shifting around them. It's like a scene from some disaster movie, and it certainly feels like this chasm is opening up with the intent to destroy Haven once and for all. Was this why dad suicided rather than let them try to help him? Despite all her instincts, Nathan had never really believed Audrey's word on that.

He wipes an arm over his forehead and brings it away damp. Breathing feels harder. He realises he's almost forgotten the address Vince told him already, and his mind scrapes desperately after it.

A crack opens up in the road in front of them. It's not one of the big cracks, which are filling with glowing lava, but one of the filigree splits spreading out as the rest of the landscape tries to shift to accommodate. Either way, Dwight can't avoid it.

***

Nathan's neck hurts more fiercely than before as he crawls out of the truck. He lands on his hands and knees on cracked and rubbly ground that feels hot to the touch. Crawling hurts, but he thinks falling would hurt more, so he crawls the short distance to Jordan's door. She was sitting directly in front of him. Debris blocks it, foiling her attempts to shove it open. Nathan reaches up and pushes from the side, using his body weight more than any residue of strength left in him, and it starts to tip. Some of it shifts back, threatening to fall on him. Then, Jordan pushes again from inside the truck with her crazy strength. The debris scatters out away from Nathan and the door wedges open enough for her to squeeze through.

There's a long piece of shrapnel through her chest -- Nathan can see both sides -- but apart from the hassle it causes her in squeezing out she doesn't seem to care. She steps over him on her way around the vehicle, yelling for Dwight. The roof was crushed inward down the middle, between the two of them and the driver's side where Dwight and Gloria are.

Nathan can hear Gloria swearing, trying to wrench her door, but he can't hear Dwight. The bodywork is more badly crumpled on that side of the truck.

"He's unconscious," Jordan's voice floats over. "But I don't think he's badly hurt."

Gloria swears and crawls out of Nathan's door. She, too, steps over him on the way to get to Dwight. Their voices, talking together, fade into fuzzy background. Nathan looks out across the devastation and sees two figures among the madness and churned-up chaos that was a quiet Maine street. One of them is a man, almost bald, not tall, crouched rocking beside a hole in the ground the approximate size of a house. Nathan guesses it used to be the address he's been trying to keep stored in his head.

The other figure is William, dancing over the cracks. Singing.

Nathan is fairly sure David Bowie never wrote 'The Man Who Broke the World'. "Jordan..." He tries to get enough volume in his voice to reach her.

A fire hydrant is the sole solid object in a sea of quivering debris. Nathan curls an arm around and climbs up it, but even the hydrant is starting to shift by the time he's getting his feet under him. He suspects it won't be long until there's water spurting out to add to the chaos, unless the pipes have already been hit lower down. He lurches the half-dozen steps back to the truck and falls against the hood. "Jordan."

She looks up at him. He tries to turn his head to indicate. Bad idea. "William's here. So is Gavin."

Nathan starts inching his way across the uneven ground toward Gavin and hopes Jordan follows. The heat alone makes him want to pass out. The ground shakes him, and trying to navigate this without feeling would have been hard, but feeling it is harder. He takes it one step at a time, trying to put from his mind that he doesn't know when it all might shatter and blow. At least it doesn't seem like William cares about that, while he's dancing in the middle of it.

He sees Nathan shuffling like an old man across the terrain and waves. "Hiya, Nate. Did you enjoy my little gift? Made Duke the man you always wanted him to be?" He stops, eyes narrowing into a searching squint. "Wow. I never thought it would go that far." William looks actually taken aback. The idea that he can see Nathan's no longer Troubled is disturbing. "Still, maybe you'll be more fun this way. But I can always... you know. Give you that Trouble back. Or a whole shiny new one." His face opens up with perverse excitement and he flicks a black sphere into the air. It drifts down just slow enough to make it clear it's not obeying normal gravity, returning to him with a little detour like it's something alive.

"Screw you," is the limit of Nathan's capacity to converse with William right now.

"Tut, tut. Manners, Mr. Wuornos. Anyway, I'll let you think a little on that one. My boys, coming in while you're asleep. One handprint on your back and it's a whole new ballgame."

That was more of a threat before. He'll feel them trying, now, and wake up. He's already been keeping a gun under his pillow.

"I will fuck you up, you sick freak," says Jordan's voice from behind Nathan's left shoulder.

"Ah. Jordan," William says in wary acknowledgement, his demeanour changing. Last time they met, Jordan broke both his nose and Lexie's, despite all the rest of their caution not to hurt William since Nathan tried to shoot him and Lexie almost died.

Nathan has nearly reached Gavin. He takes the last few steps and places his hand on the man's shoulder, trying to soothingly speak his name.

"I really wouldn't do that," William says, almost sounding genuine about it, as the rumbling starts anew. "He seems to have reached a sort of temporary equilibrium."

"Why would you do this?!" Jordan yells at him. "Haven's your home too, isn't it?!"

"Can't make an omelette without..." William takes a big run-up and jumps five feet of molten lava in the central fissure at one of its narrower points. Abruptly, he's a lot too close for comfort. He doesn't bother to finish that sentence, but he adds, "Home is meaningless without the right people."

Nathan tries to ignore him and gets down on his knees, even though getting up again is an uncertainty, to try to dig Gavin out from his huddle. "Damn it, it's me. Nathan. Your cousin, remember? I'm here to help you."

"You..." Even Gavin's bleary eyes spark with knowledge and hate. Nathan groans internally. It's always the same now. He will never be free of what he's done.

"Come on, stay with me, Gavin." Nathan tries to keep the other man's head up, pulling at his face. Maybe it's not a good idea, because the ground starts to split beneath his knees. He can't move fast enough to avoid it if a crack opens up under him. This position is agony enough on his rib cage already. "Gavin, please. You have to stop this. You're the one in control."

"Don't you think I'm trying!" the Troubled man shouts.

William laughs, and something inside Nathan snaps and starts to boil with rage. All this... it's recalling vividly to him the last minutes of Garland Wuornos, and it seems to him that William must have chosen this victim specifically because of him. It would be a pretty big coincidence.

Nathan spins too fast and has to catch himself on all fours. That hurts everything.

"Not quite so unbreakable anymore," William observes, and a hand slides over the top of Nathan's bowed head. He hadn't realised William had got so close. He's still too busy recovering from the jolt of pain to react. "I always thought that Trouble was less Troublesome than the Hansens really deserved. But you know how it is. You can't always control every little detail." William's voice is even closer. A finger slides down Nathan's earlobe and his cheekbone. He shakes his head furiously and the world greys out for a second.

When he can look up again, William is on the ground, groaning, and Jordan's long legs are between them. The echoes of the words, "Get the fuck away from him," are ringing in his ears.

"Ow," says William, indistinctly. "Ow, ow."

"Ow!" yells another voice, from across the crack in the earth. "Damn it, Jordan!"

Lexie. Nathan's hopes lift, and he manages to get his feet under him again. He staggers into Jordan, who isn't supposed to touch William but just decked him with a bare fist, who offers an elbow and holds him up.

Lexie stomps across the terrain in her fuck-me leather boots, holding a bloody nose with one hand. Her leather miniskirt seems even smaller than usual, piercings and metalwork shining orange-red from the glowing lava pools upwelling from the cracks, "William, it's not working. I found a guy who mends china, but it went wrong. You need to do this."

"Unh." William makes a grunting noise.

Nathan gapes. "Lexie, what are you doing? We need to fix this!"

"I'm trying!" Something in her eyes isn't like Lexie, or Audrey, or anyone he's met with her face before. She looks dubiously at the crack in the ground, and doesn't attempt to jump it. "I just can't remember enough. William, I can't make it happen!"

A horrible feeling slides through Nathan. She might not remember enough, but she remembers something. She reads his face and scowls.

"I'm sick of putting human beings down like dogs because we can't fix this! I'm going to learn another way, and screw you, Nathan, but it's my choice, and this is the way I want to do it! You should be grateful. You won't have to risk your precious Duke any more!"

Her emphasis makes him decidedly uneasy. It's so close to being all out in the open now.

"Ah, honey," William says. "I guess it's difficult getting back on the horse."

Lexie gives him a look that isn't entirely hostile.

"She's right," William adds, backing off. "As I was saying, you can't always predict the results you'll get, and this one is getting just a liiiittle bit out of control. So we probably should go find a way to fix this before it rips apart what's left of Haven. Toodle-pop."

A shot rings out, cold down Nathan's spine. Apparently it's just as much a shock to William, and to Lexie, who spins and gasps.

"Fuck you!" yells Jordan, her eyes shiny with tears. Gavin Puttman lies a few feet from her, no longer curled up and locked in a crisis of trying to control his uncontrollable Trouble.

For a moment, Nathan's brain loses all ability to spin thought.

"What did you do?!" yells Lexie, freaking out.

Another Troubled person dead.

Dad's death, all over again. Jordan's hand this time, not the victim's own.

"You don't have to work with William!" Jordan hurls back. "It's fixed! He's the one who did this in the first place! Don't let him play you. Walk away." Tears are sliding freely down Jordan's face. All those threats, and it strikes Nathan she never actually killed anyone before.

Lexie stares at her, affronted and angry. She steps back. She points at William. "I want to go with him."

"Lexie..." Nathan breathes. He wishes Duke hadn't broken his voice with everything else. He can't make himself heard.

William, closer, hears just fine. "Maybe I can give her something you people can't. Something she deserves. You know she came back for you. And you..." He waves a hand. "Well. All tight with the floppy-haired crook, these days, aren't we, Nathan? Unless that's changed now, because I have to tell you--" William is laughing, shaking his head as he speaks. "You don't look good, Nate. I'll bet she wouldn't even want the bits that were left after Crocker finished."

"Audrey..." Nathan closes his eyes. He's known.... part of him has known for a while now. He just didn't want to admit it to himself. It wasn't that Lexie never liked him. It was that she was watching him betray her from the second Audrey stepped back through that mystical door.

Yet she helped save his life anyway. Becoming Lexie caused the Guard to cave, to let him live, let Duke live...

She has been alone for weeks while they searched for a new life in each other.

Nathan finds his voice as he reopens his eyes, forces the name out loud and clear enough to reach her: "AUDREY!" It hurts. He reaches out with his hand. He barks out more words in desperation, each one a flare of agony, "Come with me."

Gavin Puttman is dead, so it has to be an illusion that the world is still crumbling beneath his feet.

"It doesn't have to be about who you love." Jordan's voice cracks almost as badly as Nathan's. "Who do you want to fucking be?"

"Aw, f'r Chrissakes..." William whines as Lexie -- Audrey -- casts him a darting look and then scoots away from him as something in her eyes clears. Nathan stumbles along the edge of the crack, following in line with her footsteps over on the other side, while Jordan holds the gun on William. From past example, William is not confident enough of her abiding by the don't-shoot-William-and-hurt-Lexie rule that he'll dare to test her.

Audrey's steps are too quick and her limbs seem shaky, even at several yards with the chasm between them. Nathan's mouth opens, poised on a warning not to make the jump. But she takes a run-up and jumps, successfully, then she's landing in his arms. Her arms clutch around his chest -- pain, so much pain. He makes some noise that warns her to be more careful. He catches her again before she can break clear completely and holds her to him, awash with regret. What the hell has he done?

"Nathan... Nathan..." Her touch is like anyone else's to him, now.

"We'll figure this out," Nathan rasps. But the ground under his feet is still broken.

***

"What the hell is going on?" Dwight, it seems, has woken up with a headache. Nathan is leaning by the machine that dispenses the station's terrible coffee, clinging to the wall with one hand for stability, the other clutched around a cup he's only hoping he continues to manage not to drop. He feels grey. Dwight appears to remember, mid-step, and both calms the fire in his approach and lowers his tone. "Nathan? I just spoke to Jordan... Was this your idea?"

"Hers." Nathan gulps back coffee. It's his second cup since returning to the station. He went with Lexie. Jordan went with William and Gloria. Stan and the other two officers it took to manoeuvre Dwight into another car went with Dwight. Sometimes, there are no choices.

"Jesus Christ, Nathan. How could you? She's a mess, and if he catches onto it, he can kill her with one touch. She killed Puttman to stop William, and alright, I get that right now she's the only reason we have William at all. As far as I can figure it, because he believes she's unstable enough to kill both him and Lexie... Hell, I believe it. If she shoots William and Lexie dies..."

"Audrey," Nathan corrects. The coffee sears his throat. He doesn't remember feeling the first few gulps. He'd forgotten too hot.

"...What?" Dwight makes an uncertain double-take.

"It's Audrey." Audrey is sitting in Nathan's office. Duke is unconscious in the hospital. And everything already hurt.

Dwight clings to the wall at the other side of the coffee machine, like he needs its support, too.

"It's always been Audrey. I think part of... both of us knew, these last few weeks. We just didn't want to accept it."

Wordlessly, Dwight fills a cup and slumps heavier against the wall.

Nathan asks, "How's the head?"

"Lousy. Gloria wants me in the ER. We don't have the people. A quarter of the town just fell down a hole. Besides which, I dragged you out of the hospital."

"Concussion's different," Nathan says, carefully.

"If the Crocker Curse took your Trouble, you were clinically dead," Dwight shoots back stonily. Nathan gives him a look that he hopes implies he still feels like he is. He at some point soon needs to go back into his office and face Audrey, and he has to face Duke, too, sooner or later. He does not know what will result from either encounter. Dwight follows his gaze and a grimace wrinkles the large band-aid on the big guy's forehead.

Dwight reaches across the coffee machine and puts a hand on Nathan's shoulder. He holds it there for several beats before he pulls away. But through that contact, Nathan feels the powerful heat and life that's in Dwight, seeping in through his clothes down to his skin, and it reminds him that he's gained something -- something he doesn't deserve and never expected to have -- even if it does feel like feeling again is the curse, at the moment.

Then, Dwight frowns. "There are still fire-breathing harpies and cattle-eating trees out there, aren't they?"

Nathan has yet to see either, but has been inundated with reports in Dwight's absence since he got back. He manages to twitch his lips slightly at Dwight's surly roll of the head. "Enjoy those. I need to talk to Audrey."

***

She's sitting cross-legged in the miniskirt, fingers tapping on the top of the table, rattling her rings against it. That ironmongery, along with all the rest pierced through her face, glitters in the lamp's white light. Her chin jerks up as he enters. There's work on her desk -- on Lexie's desk -- but she hasn't been doing it. Paperwork isn't anyone's priority right now, in the midst of crisis and considering how late the day is drawing. Her line of sight is a gap in the blinds that leads directly to the coffee machine. She's been watching for his return.

Her eyes are dark and angry.

Lexie -- it occurs to him there must have been a Lexie DeWitt, or a proto-Lexie, like there was a Sarah, and a Lucy, only Lexie... maybe she was pulled out of the Barn half-formed, with enough Audrey left to remember. Because the clothes and the jewellery would've driven Audrey nuts in about half an hour, and Audrey was never that good at sustaining a pretence.

"Nathan," she says sharply. There's no need to pretend now.

He puts the spare coffee he's holding in front of her. Then he sits, not at his desk, but on the other side of hers. The name plaque that says Audrey Parker is an ironic slap in the face.

She eyes the coffee like he might have spit in it. Then she lifts her eyes to the door. "I went with William to try to help." Officer Bartlow is standing outside the door like a sentry, and has been since they returned. "William said he could show me how to alter Troubles. If that's true, then I could help so many more--"

"He wants you to turn back into his evil ex," Nathan corrects, "and he has some kind of influence over you. I've seen it."

"Screw you, Nathan."

Lexie's attitude problem makes Audrey's stubbornness more in-your-face then it ever was.

Nathan is tired. He was levered out of a hospital bed into a car crash into a battle. He hooks his arm over one side of the chair back and eases his body down a bit further, trying to not to bend too much at the waist, to ease the pressure on his ribs.

Audrey sees it. She can't possibly have missed the massive bruise on his throat. "What the hell happened to you, anyway?" In all the affront, there's still a spark of concern.

"Your new boyfriend," is probably not a helpful response, in the circumstances. Nathan sighs and shuts his eyes, holding up a hand to stall her retaliation, breathes in and makes a more neutral and comprehensive attempt. "William did something with that latest round of Troubles that made Duke... crazed. Blood hungry."

"Yeah, and you two have been dicks for the last week, so..." Her eyes fly wide, pinned on the bruise now. "Duke--?"

"He's in the hospital under sedation. Though he's..." Nathan grimaces. Truly, he doesn't know how Duke is. "I remember him being coherent when he carried me there."

Audrey breathes out again. "But... he did this?" Uncertainty takes over. "Did he... hurt anyone else?" Because if he'd do this to Nathan, then no-one would be safe.

Nathan almost shakes his head, catches himself, and rasps, "No." He hopes that's the right answer, but he hasn't actually had chance to follow up yet. He had Duke out of his sight for no longer than a quarter hour before catching up to him on the shore. He doesn't think Duke had time to do anything else.

"Nathan," Audrey says sharply, "are you in pain?" Her face sort of freezes as she reads it in him. She knows what must have happened to make him Trouble-free. She swears. She reaches for the coffee he brought her and takes a few needy gulps, then glares at it. "Can I get something in this?" Her eyes move shiftily to the side. "Wait, never mind." She digs in a drawer and pulls out a small hip flask.

Nathan pulls away his own cup when she makes a move towards it. He's sure he's on too many painkillers to be adding alcohol to the mix, and it's already difficult enough trying to focus.

"So you... can feel," she reasons. "I mean, wow." There's a large dose of sarcasm in there. "Only, wow, right now it looks like that's 'feel like shit'."

"Some things aren't all they're cracked up to be." He reaches for her hand, on the table. "Audrey, I'm sor--"

"Don't you dare." She seizes her hand back from him. "You don't get to apologise, or look at me like that, like you can mend this with words. You and Duke did your own thing. Hey, it looks like at least you got on fine without me. In fact, it looks like you screwed everyone over to get me back and then chose Duke anyway." The words come harsh, loaded thick with venom, but at the same time her eyes sparkle wet, and Nathan gets the impression that these words have been suppressed for a long time. Lexie has spent almost two months in Haven.

It doesn't stop his insides feeling like they're growing ice crystals. He wants to protest that Duke would never have happened if he hadn't done everything else first, and this, he never meant things to happen this way. It wasn't supposed to be what he and Duke were about.

What he and Duke were supposed to be about got shattered on the rocks of that sea-cave, and Nathan doesn't know if they can salvage anything of the rest.

He hangs his head to hide his face from Audrey. He missed her, thought she was gone for good, and so much had happened by the time he began to have doubts about her identity as Lexie. By then, the idea that it was still Audrey in there was too monolithically awful in the context of everything else. "I didn't mean to..."

"Stop, Nathan, just stop, okay?"

He wonders how many times it's reasonable for one life to crash and burn. Some part of him digs in enough to ask. "Why didn't you tell us? Fine, you didn't tell us in front of the Guard, but you could have told us."

"You wanted to die. They were going to use me to kill you. For all I knew, you'd let them. And after that, what would have been the point? I could see you were with Duke!"

Stubbornness stirs. "You were my partner and my friend. You let me believe that Lexie..." He thought Audrey was dead and her replacement... didn't exactly hate him, but certainly had no liking for him. He remembers all her annoying habits, all the get-at-Nathan pranks, paper spit-balls bouncing off his head while he tried to work and a hundred snide sexual slurs. "All that was you playing a game with me?"

"You don't get to talk!" She's standing up now, yelling in his face. Everyone in the station will hear it. "I came back for you! I crossed worlds for you, from some freaking disintegrating trans-dimensional Barn which was apparently your fault, and you were fucking Duke! Your epic love that embraced murder and shattered the lives of who-knows how many Troubled people lasted, what, six months? Would that have been shorter still if Duke hadn't jumped in the Barn after me? What do you want, Nathan, and how many people have to pay to ensure you get it?"

He slams his hands on the desk and follows her up. "I'm trying--" But the movement doesn't stop when he reaches his feet. The world fluctuates like it's been put through a funhouse mirror, stretches and distorts. For a moment he's weightless. He can't account for the gap between that and being, suddenly, on the floor. Breathing hurts too much. He can't get enough air.

Audrey, who a moment ago was ready to tear him to pieces, is frantically loosening his collar as she repeats his name. He also hears the words, "I'm sorry," in there, which doesn't seem very fair. None of this is Audrey's fault, who went willingly to surrender her existence for Haven.

He blinks up at her and hooks an arm over hers when she offers help. "Let's get you to the couch." Pulling on his shoulders hurts his chest. She curls an arm lower, around his hips, without confirming with words. Pain has become something visible and real on his body.

Nathan sags into the couch as Audrey lays him down, rather gentler than Duke last did. He can feel the rings on her fingers at the back of his neck, hard and cool, though slightly warmed by her body heat, where once they would have just been an absence. The room turns slowly. He tries to speak but just gets a loud huff of air. Trying to suck in another breath proves more difficult than it should.

"I'm not sorry for being mad at you," Audrey adds. Her fingers cold on his neck, she touches his throat and they both hiss and flinch. "I just... today was... this is not a good day. Hang in there." Her words sound like they're from a very long way away. The world doesn't seem real any more with sensation in it, and Audrey grips his hand tightly, but it's meaningless now.

He shuts his eyes. Reality wobbles. Duke's voice says, "Stay with me," but that's only a memory. Discrepant from all the rest, because in it, he can feel Duke's hands on his face, the way Audrey's are on his face now.

Or not Audrey's, because pain slices through his neck and a harsher, older female voice grunts at him helpfully, "Steroid injection, Nathan, hon. They gave you one in the hospital, but it's worn off. The tissues in your throat swelled up too much. This should make breathing easier real soon."

Gloria pats his cheek. "You rest. You're just havin' a lie down in the office. All feel better when you wake up."

Nathan doesn't know how she thinks he's going to sleep when every breath is a struggle to suck in air, but she keeps talking to him, low and calm as she strokes his forehead, and her voice isn't soothing, and her hand is coarse and bony, but the world fades out all the same.

***

Disturbing dreams coat the darkness, but the memories are harder. Every time he tries to pull his thoughts together and climb back up, Duke sets a hand to his throat and squeezes, tumbling him into delirium over again, pinning him with eyes that are silver and insane. Sensation assails him. This body, always his least worry, is more fragile than its ever been, too friable, too sensitive. Need calls him, urging him up from the stupor. Haven is falling to pieces under the chaos William set in motion. He needs to help.

The Guard will kill him if he doesn't.

Every next Trouble isn't just expiation of guilt, but the right to keep breathing. Maybe that's why breathing got so hard... with so many Troubles running rampant, and himself unable to keep up.

The Guard won't just kill him. They'll kill Duke.

Nathan wakes with a shock, one of those jolting, falling awakenings that steal breath, and he hadn't that to begin with. His throat feels like it shrank two sizes. He has movement back in his neck that he hadn't realised he'd lost. He rubs his eyes -- being able to judge pressure again knocks all his built-up mechanisms off balance and he jerks his hand away, finding he's unable to trust himself not to press too hard.

The office is empty. Outside is quiet. The windows show night. Someone took his shoes off to tuck his feet into the end of the couch, and he can't put them back on, unable to bend that far around his broken ribs. His left arm feels like it's wired straight into the agony down that side of his chest, and he hugs it close to himself as he uses the other to help inch him up. Two tablets sit beside a glass of water on his desk. Gloria left him painkillers. He gulps them down, and drinks all the water. He feels dried out.

The silent, empty office is unsettling. He pads to the door and opens it. A skeleton crew of officers are left. They look up when he emerges. Officer Bartlow raises a hand like a nervous classroom volunteer. "Chief said to take you over to join them if you woke."

"Join who where?" Nathan rasps.

The morgue, it turns out, after Bartlow has helped Nathan tie his shoelaces and put on his jacket, and then driven him the five hundred yards he could have walked in as much time on any other day. He hunches into his jacket, feeling cold, and leaves Bartlow with the car, taking the morgue steps one at a tortuous time, but he's damned if he's asking for help with that. The door at the top is open. He wanders in, following the glow of electric lights and low murmur of voices through the corridors.

Seeing Audrey on a slab almost gives him a heart attack.

Dwight spots him and crosses the room in two steps on his long legs, grabbing Nathan's shoulders. "She's alive. Heavy sedative. Paralytic on top of that. It was her idea."

To control William. Nathan understands, but--

He's bereft all over again. He barely had chance to speak to her and she's gone, just like Duke is gone. Severed from the world by artificial means, while where he stands with either of them is truly unknown.

Gloria lifts her head from checking equipment. There's a beeping monitor hooked up to Audrey, it's chirp reassuringly calm and regular. William is on another gurney. Jordan leans exhaustedly against the far wall, arms sagging, a weapon in the hand of each. Dwight casts Nathan a last look then goes to her, peels the guns from her fingers and puts them on a nearby counter, then folds her in his arms.

"We had to get 'Lexie' down before we could fetch William up," Gloria says. "Sorry, Nate. Sleeping through it seemed like the best thing for you. Figure it works like this -- if we keep both of 'em down, Lexie can't keep pulling William back up, whether she means to do it or not. Sucks donkey balls, I know. We could sure use the lass."

But Haven will still be safer for William being out of the picture. Nathan nods, numbed again by this blow.

He missed it. Audrey was back: now she isn't. It's like she's Sleeping Beauty awoke from the curse just once to give him a glimpse of Audrey again, and before he even realised how temporary it was, too late to say any of the things he meant to, she's gone.

He looks at Audrey sleeping, pale faced. She's so deep under that the movements of her breath are barely detectable. Lexie's piercings aren't distorting her features any more -- for this, she's taken them out. He remembers her last words to him were begging him to live, even though right before he collapsed they'd both been hurling accusations at each other.

He doesn't know how to do this.

He doesn't know what to do with this. He can't deal with this. Not alone, and this, it... it isn't just his to deal with. There are things he needs to know. The worst of them scare him half to death, but he needs to know them all the same. Last night, Duke held him down, fucked him and killed him, then brought him back. He needs to know what that means for Duke's sanity, and for both of them.

Audrey is locked away from him, but Audrey has been locked away from him for a long, long time, before she ever stepped into the Barn.

The Troubles won't wait, but they never do. There's always going to be something else he needs to be doing. But they've just put Audrey out of the action to keep William down, and Nathan is damned if he'll see Duke left to rot while the next crisis rolls out.

"We need to go back to the hospital," he says roughly to Dwight. "To get Duke."

***

William levels them like ninepins, Nathan thinks, as he sits at Duke's bedside watching consciousness slowly start to return to his form. Himself, Duke, Dwight, now Audrey... Jordan's their only fighter who hasn't been put out of the game entirely for a stretch of the last twenty-four hours. Maybe Lexie's and Gloria's plan will at least give them a breather... But chances are William already set enough in motion to keep them busy. There are still the Glendowers, on top of everything else.

"I wasn't looking forward to him waking up without you here," Dwight admits, standing by the door. Dwight must have a million better things to do than hover around to protect Nathan from his own boyfriend, but it isn't as though Nathan hasn't already pointed that out.

Nathan catches Duke's hand, where it's lying on top of the bedclothes, having to lean to do it, shifting stiffly in his chair. Sitting down necessitates hanging his ass off the very edge of the seat and leaning far back with his shoulders, lest he pressure his strapped ribs and other painful parts.

The worst isn't even really the pain. Discomfort is going to drive him insane. A million little different sources of it. His bladder, starting to twinge again after the coffees in the waiting room. An itch at the back of his skull. There's a persistent ache in the hand that got cut up dealing with the clay golems, that he never knew about, and weird twinges that play through his frequently broken toes, that he did.

"I don't remember arriving here with Duke," Nathan murmurs, "only being carried from the beach."

Dwight grimaces. "There are still Glendowers out there we haven't rounded up. I don't know where we're going to keep them when Sal Brody's aquarium fills up. I don't know what we're going to feed them. They're still... human... underneath. We could have really used Duke making that last kill. Sorry."

"William knows exactly who to target." The biggest family in Haven, and a hundred crazed mer-people savaging tourists and fishermen. Not that there are many tourists in Haven these days. "He's connected to the Troubles somehow, and he can't just alter them, he can make them. He threatened to give me another." Nathan had forgotten that, in the heat of the moment.

"And William is connected to Audrey."

Both of them sit there, thinking it, saying nothing. Until Nathan makes himself. "She's always known too much. About what drives them, and how the rules work."

Duke's fingers twitch beneath his. Nathan jerks his head up to Duke's face. Eyes, brown and not silver. Open. Muzzily trying to focus on him. "...Nathan..."

Duke, coming up from analgesia, isn't really fast enough to surprise Nathan with his clutching arms. He sees them coming. He has a good, long moment to make the decision of whether he's going to go toward Duke or flinch away from him.

He doesn't flinch, but Duke does. Maybe Duke sees how much effort he's putting in not to. Before they can make contact, Duke jerks back, eyes widening and his breath starting to come in audible, panicked bursts. "God. No. Nathan, you... you need to get away from me!"

The declaration is so earnest, so tortured, that Nathan actually stands and backs off. He feels Dwight's hands curl on his shoulders when he's nearing the door, warm and heavy. "Duke..." He's numb again, his body stiff and dead to him. He feels like stone inside. "You..." You won't hurt me dies on his lips. That's an untenable claim. "What happened?" is what he asks instead, his voice almost disappearing.

Duke stares back at him, eyes and hair wild, face pale. The nurses have cleaned all the blood off, and there aren't any visible injuries to suggest any of it was his, but he still looks feral. His fingers clutch in the sheets, all joints and bone, and one leg braces on the edge of the mattress, the other on the floor. It's a fight or flight pose. Like that, he's also flashing both of them, though Dwight keeps his face blank. Duke has also placed the bulk of the bed between himself and Nathan. A few stray wires swing loose.

"You don't know?" Duke responds, like it's a challenge. His eyes scan Nathan up and down, looking for marks. They alight on his throat and fix there. Duke's expression flattens out, as if he wasn't sure of everything he'd done himself, until now.

"I don't know why."

Dwight being there is awkward. But Nathan is sure Dwight has experienced much more traumatising things than their relationship's dark underbelly. "I went after you... to talk you around, but you were wild for the blood." The only reason they have managed to keep Duke in control for this long, with the souped-up Troubles William has been throwing at them, is Nathan's Troubled blood, ready and willing in his bed every night. "I couldn't get you to reason, this time. You just wanted me. You f-- we fucked, and then you..." Duke's hand around his throat, squeezing until the crunch surprised both of them. Then Duke's hand over his mouth. Nathan's hand has risen to his throat now, and Duke can't miss the gesture. "You killed me. Then brought me back." It had been the resurgence into life that brought the pain. More of it than Nathan was built to handle.

Duke sobs and puts his hands over his face. He slides down onto the floor, the bed still between them, and buries his face and hands in the mattress.

"Duke," Nathan exclaims, alarmed. It, like everything else, comes out like the volume's been turned down on his voice and he can't adjust the dial. He moves forward, but Dwight catches him and won't let him go. "I'm not dead. But I need to understand what happened."

"I couldn't," Duke moans, muffled. "I couldn't. Nathan, I... I didn't know what I was doing."

Nathan starts to angrily shake his head; regrets it quickly. "You were sane toward the end. Saner. Damn it, Duke, make me understand! You took my Trouble. Why?"

Duke rises up, fist pressed over his mouth, bloody-knuckled. "Wasn't thinking about killing you. Not like -- didn't want to kill--!" He shakes his head, denying, frantic. "Nathan! Next time... later... The next time something crazy happened and they sent you, or you came after me. The next time we were in bed and I could smell it in your veins. Next time... some time... it would happen. It was going to happen! I had to! But I nearly--"

Dwight swears under his breath behind Nathan's left ear, maybe too soft for Duke to catch.

Nathan's legs sag. He slides out of Dwight's attempt to catch him and slips to his knees.

"I wasn't making sense," Duke growls. "I fucking nearly killed you! I'd already pounded the hell out of you. I did kill you! And I couldn't get you back... I was so close -- so fucking close to killing you for real. It's not the amateur CPR that brings people back. That's just TV. It's the -- it's buying time for when the doctors arrive with all their shit. I know that, and I... I could have left it and done it in a hospital, with Gloria on standby, and I didn't because... because even in that state, I knew you'd say 'no'! I was rational enough to know that, and yet--"

"Duke," Nathan says, his voice half a sigh. "You're not making sense now. You said you were a threat to me, but..." He spreads his hands. "I'm not Troubled. You did it."

Duke makes a gurgling sound and tries to curl in on himself like a slow worm, against the side of the bed.

Nathan says, from his knees, "Fuck you, Duke, if you did this to me and you're going to make me be the one trying to pull you back together."

That jerks Duke's head up, startled anguish and outrage animating him, jolting life back into his features.

"I don't have the energy," Nathan chokes out. He's horrified to find hot trails streaking down his cheeks. Jesus Christ, Dwight is there. "Duke, please. I... I can't..." He can't do this without him. As for what they did, it was dangerous, stupid and necessary, playing loose with both their sanity when all the fucked-up edges had only just been starting to smooth off their relationship before that. But in the circumstances, what they did held back the Troubles and fought off William's campaign to turn Lexie -- Audrey! -- into who-knew-what for almost two weeks.

It was always going to end like this.

No. It was going to end worse than this.

They're both still alive.

Duke is looking at him with dull eyes that are... not in the best place, still, but they're not silver, and Nathan doesn't think they look crazy.

Then, with an inarticulate noise, Duke rolls across the bed and is scrambling to catch Nathan up in his arms. The hospital gown and sedative-clumsiness and Nathan's paucity of available pain-free movements get in the way, and Dwight curses them both, "God damn it! He has three broken ribs and some fucked up neck injury only corpses get! Crocker!!" But then Duke is gathering Nathan in with his hands in the centre of his back, and lips are on his, warm and soft, and someone else's warm, living breath breathes into his mouth. Nathan sobs and clings back to Duke, drinking it in. The breath, the softness, the warmth. Tickling beard against the side of his face. Long hair under his fingers. The scent is more antiseptic than he's used to, but familiar enough underneath.

Kisses pull at his lips, dry-wet, warm-hot, air exposure cold, salt and copper taste, rough tongue and smooth skin and the unexpected tangly dry-hard oddness of hair in the way. Sensation floods Nathan, takes him away from just pain. Duke pulls him up higher from their knelt position, so he's straddling naked thighs and Duke's arms can wrap tight with impunity around his uninjured waist and hips, instead of having to treat his chest like it's made of glass. Nathan rests his head on the top of Duke's head, and Duke is careful to bury his in Nathan's shoulder, and not his throat.

Duke doesn't need to be told where Nathan is injured.

"Alive," Duke mumbles into his jacket. "Shit. I killed you. Shit..."

Dying did not hurt, but being alive again has been very painful, until now. Nathan is going to choose to take that as a sign. He slides his hands up Duke's shoulders to lift his face. "Let's go home." He means the Rouge. It has to be at least midnight. And Duke is not going to be up to anything to help combat the Troubles tonight, if ever again. Nathan isn't going to be up to much tonight, either. Maybe more than this, but he's going to choose to be selfish. A day ago, he died. "Let's go home together."

***

Dwight is uneasy with it, but drives them to the marina anyway. Duke's truck was at the hospital, but has been towed away for causing an obstruction. Nathan's Ford Bronco is presumably still parked out by Wistlow Sands, where Duke went hunting Glendowers and Nathan went hunting Duke. When they arrive at the marina, Duke's truck is waiting there ahead of them -- Nathan didn't realise, when Stan said it had been towed, that he meant he had towed it home. Thought of the Bronco drifts across his mind, abandoned on its lonely foreshore, but he's too dead-beat to do more than push the thought away.

They don't touch on the drive, but Nathan curls his fingers into Duke's hand again the moment they've disembarked. "We'll be all right," he says to Dwight, standing next to the rolled-down window. "I'll..." He's not going to promise anything for Duke. "I'll report into work in the morning."

Dwight says, "Have you got your pills?"

Since he already knows Nathan has them, he's asking that specifically so Duke knows, too. It's unclear whether his intention is to make the point of how badly Nathan came out of this one, or if he doesn't trust Nathan to take medication without prompting. But Gloria warned that without the anti-inflammatories he could end up struggling to breathe again, and the painkillers really aren't a problem to remember.

He responds wryly, "I'm fine, Dwight."

There's still a notable hesitation before the big guy turns his head away and starts the engine, unhappy to leave Nathan with the man who already left him like this.

"Wow," mumbles Duke, staring after the truck. "I guess I can't claim not to see where he's coming from."

"He's wrong," Nathan says, with a touch of ill temper. "Nothing will happen to me with you."

The word anymore is invisible and heavy on the end there.

"I'm still not sure I don't agree with him." Duke is too low-key, subdued, hurting, and Nathan could have things to say to Dwight about giving him reason to feel worse, if he were in any condition for taking on a giant. They did this together and Duke would not have used Nathan for blood -- for battle and, in the end, just for blood -- if Nathan had not urged him to do so.

"Shut up," he says wearily. The rest, Duke knows by rote.

"We rode the whirlwind." Duke sighs as they slouch dejectedly and painfully across the short distance to the Cape Rouge. "Got chewed up and spat out. That's the nature of whirlwinds."

"If you start quoting Buddha, so help me..."

Duke coughs a laugh. "I can think of a few other philosophers more appropriate."

"Please don't." Nathan's head can't take that, on top of everything else.

They get inside, Duke opening the doors. The boat is cold and feels almost unlived-in. It has been over twenty-four hours since Nathan found Duke gone and left after him. It feels like a lifetime.

They stand in the galley and Duke gently teases Nathan's jacket off at the shoulders, not a part of a seduction, just an aid of necessity. He tries not to give away too much as Duke guides it off his left side, but is unpractised when it comes to hiding pain reactions.

"I am so, so sorry." Duke leans in and kisses the corner of his jaw.

"It's living that hurts." Nathan shakes his head and refuses to repeat the murmured words when Duke fails to catch them. There's something more important they need to establish. "Do you... feel like you still need the blood now?" Because if he does, they have a problem. Because Nathan can't give that to him anymore.

Duke thinks about it, sombrely, and answers seriously, none of his customary glibness in sight. That's a little unnerving, but then he's been awake less than two hours. "No... no, Nathan. That was a very sobering experience. I think a glass of red wine should be more than adequate for tonight." He grimaces. "As for food, I think I have a pack of rice cakes somewhere, but cooking is seriously not happening."

Guardedly, Nathan asks, "Do you have a can of soup?" Duke double-takes, sighs, and leans on the kitchen counter heavily for a moment before he reaches up into a cupboard and pulls a couple of cans from the back. "Oxtail or asparagus?"

As it's starting to bubble on the ring, he turns around and asks, "What did I do to your throat, again? Isn't the hyoid the bone that always breaks in CSI when...?" He trails off.

"Strangulation," Nathan picks up. "About a third, in reality, so pretty much always, on TV." He broods. "Gloria says it should fix without any other treatment than the pills, in a few weeks. If I don't screw it up any further." She said those words.

"When your neck made that god-awful crunch, I thought I'd done something unfixable." Duke shudders.

"How clearly do you remember it?" Nathan asks -- he's alarmed by how Duke is able to talk about it with such clarity.

"Like it happened on TV," Duke admits. He turns and plays with the soup pan. "Like I was watching it happen, but it wasn't really me in control. I remember it all pretty clearly. What happened before that, too." He says that with stony emphasis.

"Did I initiate it?" Nathan asks. It's been bothering him that he can't remember. It could be important.

Duke stops, thinks, and heaves a sigh. It's only partly relief. There's not a hell of a lot of relief to be had, here. "Yeah. Yeah, I think you did. But that's no excuse." He grabs in another cupboard, takes out a bottle of wine, pops the cork and pours out a glass. He drinks half of it without pausing.

"The whirlwind, remember," Nathan reminds him, stiffly.

"Fuck the whirlwind."

They eat together almost in silence, after that. Duke puts peanut butter on his rice cakes and crunches like he's on a mission. Nathan drinks his soup. Their fingers play together in the centre of the table. Nathan relearns the feel of angular cutlery and a bowl too hot to hold.

It's already 1AM by the time they go to bed. Duke undresses tiredly from the borrowed clothes he wore out of the hospital. Nathan kicks off his shoes clumsily and eases his pants off, but he leaves his shirt on, just unbuttoning the cuffs and a few buttons at the top, then rolling up the sleeves.

"What are you doing?" Duke asks when he climbs into bed like that.

"Because there's no need to dwell on it." Because Duke is all raw nerve endings and there are unbandaged cuts on Nathan's chest that were not made in the pursuit of saving his life, even if some of them are older than the previous night. "Besides, it'll help to protect the strapping on the ribs."

Duke can't argue with that. He sighs and collapses back, a sprawl of limbs; stares up at the wooden ceiling and the skylight. "Do you want a blow job?"

Nathan grunts and shuts his eyes, sighs and wriggles tentatively and painfully, searching for a comfortable way to lie in the bed. "No, but I'd really like a foot rub."

Duke grumbles, "If I hadn't felt anything in three or four years, I'd want a blow job."

It's... too much. And not necessary. Nathan thinks he could get off on any light, loving touch at the moment. "Duke." There's the barest hint of a wheedling plea in the reproach.

"All right." Duke rolls down the bed and curls around Nathan's feet, picking them up. He pulls the socks off first with a snort. Nathan was going to drag them off against the mattress and kick them away, rather than having to bend with his broken ribs, but he forgot. Duke slides his whole palms down to the soles of both feet first, and Nathan moans. The palms tense but move and start to make slow circles. Nathan wriggles and makes a noise he is subsequently aware was somewhat pathetic.

"Oh," Duke says, like he just realised something. "When I stop feeling like shit about this, this... This is going to be fun. Sorry."

Nathan is drifting in a cloud of fluff. He took a couple more pills before they came to bed, which may be part of it. Duke's hands are warm against his feet, and that -- he drags open his eyes for a second -- that was Duke breathing softly out over his toes. That feeling could be this good is something he'd forgotten.

The Guard are going to be furious when they realise he's shed his Trouble, while they still have theirs. There are things he hasn't told Duke yet and desperately needs to. But for the moment, he needs this.

Needs to find out if they can put themselves back together before he starts to examine the rest.

***

Nathan wakes in the night as Duke carelessly shifts and throws an arm over him, to a flashback of being held down while silver eyes leer into him, and he sits up, shoving away with both arms and a hoarse yell.

While it's not something he'll never live down, Duke's dismay and anguish is painful to him. Nathan doesn't sleep well that night in general. The blankets scrape his skin. He's too warm, too cold; the actual pain is almost beside the point. There is too much feeling, and it overwhelms him, wrecks him, stretches him out at the mercy of the world. Without him realising it, the Trouble he'd hated had become a shield of sorts. Bereft now, he's vulnerable to so much again. Certainly it helped him to work to quell other Troubles.

They only sort of sleep through the latter half of the night. Duke goes from being dozy from the sedatives still in his system to restless because he's slept most of the last twenty-four hours away already.

Nathan gives up trying, eventually, blinking his eyes open in the dawn haze filtering down through Duke's skylight. He's been aware of the stiffness in his neck for a while, and he needs to take more pills before it turns into a problem. Duke's brown eyes are watching him softly, like they've been watching a while. Duke waits until he can see him do it before sliding a fingertip over the back of Nathan's hand, and then down his arm, where it's sprawled between them.

Nathan wonders if he realises what he just did.

He sits up and takes the pills, carefully. The world is steadier this side of the night. The pain is -- different; not better, but stiffer, more solid, less liquid and flowing and unpredictable. He very quickly figures out which movements hurt, what he needs to avoid. Turning his head much at all comes top of the list.

"Can I kiss you?" Duke asks. He's never asked before.

"Yeah," Nathan replies, shortly. "But just so you know, I'm not planning on moving much." And after killing him and stealing his Trouble, it is definitely Duke's turn to make the coffee.

Duke moves carefully, slow and watching for Nathan's reactions. He apparently doesn't like what he sees when he moves to straddle his knees either side of Nathan's stretched-out legs, or when he tries to lean across to brace a hand on the pillow the other side of Nathan instead. Being pinned down is still a bad memory. In the end, Duke delivers the kiss leaning awkwardly beyond his centre of balance, with one hand braced on his side of the headboard.

"Do you want that blow job, now?"

Nathan decides that might as well be the potentially last thing they do together. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah." Maybe they're not irrevocably broken, but he has no way of knowing if the bruised remnant will survive Audrey's return, and Duke doesn't know about that yet.

Duke slides Nathan's knees apart, very slowly. Finds him half hard and the simplest of touches gets him the rest of the way with ease.

"Careful," Nathan warns. It's going to be quick, unfortunately.

Duke takes it very gently, the first sexual act Nathan's been able to feel since -- since Sarah, and maybe he should've started to question his preferences back when he had as much staying power as he did with Sarah, considering that was his first sexual touching in three years. For Duke, he can't hold back. The release floods over him, and he tries not to jerk his hips into Duke's face, for the sake of his ribs as much as Duke.

Who swallows and coughs. "Seems like we have to relearn this all over again."

"Maybe," Nathan hedges. "I need to get up." He wonders how he can shower around his strapped ribs. "I need to call Dwight." He needs to tell Duke about Audrey. Maybe he shouldn't have gone for the one last blow job. He reaches across for his phone on the nightstand and catches a whiff of his own underarm... Okay, he really needs to shower. Duke's being polite and guilty not complaining.

He gives Duke a frown, calls Dwight, and starts off with an apology when the big guy answers, "Chief Hendrickson," so promptly he must already be at his desk: "I'm sorry, Dwight. Yesterday was--" Too much in a myriad of ways. Yet he left Dwight to the remnant of it, to go home and sleep with Duke.

"Are you okay?" Dwight interrupts sharply.

"Fine," Nathan says. He's sitting on the side of the bed, legs braced wide, in only his shirt. Duke's fingers have started sliding gentle circles up underneath his shirt, over his lower back. Nathan swallows and shivers. Dwight was really concerned for his safety last night. "What's happening?"

A heavy sigh from the other end of the line, but he can hear Dwight enter a more casual mode. "The remnant seismic activity's died right down. I've had that geophys guy with the bad attitude that you and Audrey used before down from Camden, just to make sure the ground is stable. He's freaking out over volcanoes in Maine. But the lava's cooling. You can almost walk across it now."

"That'll make an interesting new feature for the tourists." Nathan huffs an only-in-Haven snort of laugh. It's still not really funny.

"Amazing we don't have more fatalities... two confirmed deaths from the volcano Trouble so far, anyway, but there was another Glendower attack during the night. And we've got two more Glendowers penned in the aquarium, now. We need a better answer, because we're almost out of space, and if we put them together they might start killing each other."

Nathan shudders. He knows what Dwight wants to say. He can't turn his head, but he feels Duke, down through the gentle touch on his back, and shuts his eyes, focusing on that. He's not strong enough for any other answer but, "No. We only just got him back this time." A thought hits him, taking away his breath. "What about--?"

He stops himself from mentioning Wade's name with Duke in earshot. Wade is in jail, and in substantial amounts of therapy, some of it provided by Claire Callahan's replacement, Anna Benedict, who visits Shawshank from Haven at least once a week. They are trying to save Wade, even though he killed two women and tortured a police officer.

Nathan would trade in Wade's sanity to save Duke in a heartbeat. Duke would not. So yes, he is going to talk to Dwight about this. But he will do it later. It won't be a solution anyone likes, but if Wade Crocker kills a Glendower, at least they'll stop finding half-devoured human and animal corpses washed up on Haven's shores.

Nathan changes the subject. "Have people been able to go back to their homes?" Last update he had, they were camped out in the church -- Reverend Driscoll's old church. It's a churning worry, given the past record of the clergy in Haven, having all those victims there -- a situation rife for sowing discontent about the Troubles and Troubled. Although the Rev's replacement has yet to give Nathan any problems.

"Some," Dwight hedges, tersely, likely thinking the same thing. "When, uh... when do you think you can come in? I can't have you out and about, not in your physical state, but I could use someone manning a desk here who can deal with every type of... incident."

"Give me an hour." Duke pokes him, in revenge for foolish promises. "And, Dwight... thanks." He is relieved to be forgiven for absenting himself yesterday, for choosing Duke over Haven. He had promised himself he wouldn't repeat the mistakes he made over Audrey, but maybe some mistakes repeat and repeat, and can't be avoided. Maybe that's just how love is. He cuts the call and sighs, sagging back on his hands. "Will you please stop poking me?"

"I," Duke solemnly declares, "will never get tired of poking you." Especially now Nathan can feel it again, apparently.

Nathan stands up and glares at the full length mirror on the wall -- the one that's pointless, now, because they put it there so he could check himself for unnoticed scrapes and cuts before getting into bed with Duke. He lifts his arms, the left one only so far as he's able, and critically eyes the strapping on his ribs.

He says, "Help me tie a plastic bag over this, so I can go in the shower."

***

He tells Duke about Audrey as they're sitting down opposite each other at the breakfast table, after the shower. Duke... Nathan really thought that Duke would react badly, not the least because Nathan waited until now to tell him, but he doesn't react much at all. There's a kind of resignation in his flatness. Duke also knew. He asks, "What will you do?" and Nathan has to admit that he doesn't know.

Duke reacts worse to being told why he can't speak to Audrey. "That's diabolical. We can't just leave her like that!"

"Her plan," Nathan says.

"Since when has that stopped you--" Duke shuts up so hard he almost swallows his tongue.

"We don't have a choice," Nathan says. "William will destroy Haven to get what he wants. He almost did. At least this way we have a chance to rebuild before we have to do it all over again."

"...Without me." Duke stands up and he leans his hands on the table, where they clench and unclench. His head is ducked down, his eyes squeezed shut. So Duke did catch that.

"You were this close to becoming something else we'd have to fight." Nathan slides the spoon around the remnant of his porridge, and when he looks up again, Duke's eyes are open.

"Not close," Duke corrects. "I don't know what would've happened if I'd found someone else before I'd found you." Dwight would probably no longer be having a problem with Glendowers, at least, Nathan thinks grimly. Duke continues, "We both know it's only a matter of time before something bad enough to need the Crocker Curse comes up again. This town always finds something. Last year I swore I'd never use it at all. And then..."

"No," Nathan snaps. Then he has to stop and get hold of himself, climb down... and put the porridge spoon back on the edge of the bowl. Both of them eye the splatter, standing facing each other across the table now. "All right. If that happens, then I'll be there. Only this time I won't be ten pints of Trouble to feed your addiction."

Maybe that sounded too much of an accusation. Duke flinches. Anger ripples through Nathan with the flinch. Maybe Duke wasn't thinking clearly -- not thinking, at least, of the overwhelming chances that Nathan would end up dead courtesy of this plan to 'save' him -- but there's still a decision in there that Duke made. He took Nathan's Trouble away rather than face having to control himself for every future day and night he spent with Nathan.

"You're right," Duke says, breathing himself back to control. Meditation techniques. Nathan has seen a lot of those over the last two weeks. "Knowing I won't cut you or kill you for the blood really does make me feel that much better." He gives it an edge of challenge.

Nathan thinks, How dare he sound so self-righteous.

He wonders if Duke even realises that he didn't want this.

Something happened in his months on the run. Somehow, out there in the motels and truck stops, in the drunken haze, he reconciled himself to not feeling, accepted it as his due penance and punishment. He had no right to expect to feel again, no right to want to.

He has no idea how he will ever face the Guard.

But he shouldn't be arguing with Duke, after Duke has just been pulled back from the brink of madness. Duke was still a long way from his normal self when he made the decision to take Nathan's Trouble from him. "The question is what we're going to do about Audrey," he says, tersely, and pauses. "We could... just continue... until she wakes." That's just putting it off, but realistically, Nathan doesn't have the energy to do this now. He hasn't enough energy, period, and hasn't any to spare. To choose Duke, or to break up with Duke... A chill wash of feeling all but paralyzes him. His heart pounds much too fast and loud for a man used to feeling nothing. It's the small things, he's learning, that make him feel fragile now. The things that are real and always there, because his injuries will go away.

"Then we change nothing," Duke says. Darkness lurks in the back of his eyes. "We have time... fuck, Nathan, I did not just kill you for nothing."

Nathan bares his teeth back. It's not a grin, it's not a snarl, it's not anything. They've spent enough time dancing around, not quite committing to tearing into each other, but neither content with affairs as they stand. Too much has happened. Too much coercion, need, violence, force, blood, pain. Nathan sags his shoulders. His ribs creak. He hugs his left arm in, holds it with his right. "I have to get to work." He couldn't win a shouting match with Duke right now anyway. He told Dwight an hour. Haven is falling apart and there isn't time for the two of them. Things may look better later, anyway.

Nathan takes a deliberate breath. He takes out and toys with his keys and gets as far as wondering if he can drive before he remembers where the Bronco is and groans. "Will you go to the Gull?" he asks, strongly implying in his tone that he'd prefer Duke went. The thought of leaving him alone in the Cape Rouge all day, under the circumstances...

"I'll drive you to the station and go on to there," Duke says, putting his hand over Nathan's and firmly pushing the keys down. "Seriously, you weren't intending to drive today?" He sighs, then relaxes and stands down the annoyance fixing his posture into such rigid lines. "I dread to think what's happened to my menus by now."

It's been at least a week since Duke put his head in at his restaurant. Nathan's relieved to see him give a damn. "All right."

When they emerge from the Rouge the Bronco is sitting outside next to Duke's white truck, innocuous and improbable. Surely no-one would have had time.

Nathan stops in his tracks and stares at it, until he makes the effort to drag his focus away and finds Duke looking at him moodily. He decides that, no, he probably doesn't want to drive anyway, with the painful movements in his left arm and neck. He can't turn without moving his whole body. Peripheral vision is a joke. It probably was insanity to even contemplate it.

"All right," he mumbles again, raising his hands in mock surrender. As far as they'll go.

***

Duke drops him off in front of the station and gets out to kiss him, to save on bending down. They don't worry about the public setting any more. Folks in Haven have more things to worry about than men kissing in the street. Though he might get a few gripes that it's not proper for a police detective.

Then Duke is moving away from him, and it's simultaneously the biggest relief and makes the day ahead look a colourless and wearying prospect without him.

Nathan turns away and then back to watch Duke's disappearing truck. He has Tracey's number on his cellphone, and in half an hour or so he intends to call it, and make sure that Duke did go to the Gull. He seems okay today, but one day last week he admitted to sitting outside Marion Caldwell's shop for hours, talking himself out of going after her blood, and that was before he went out to hunt Glendowers and ended up catching Nathan.

Nathan walks up the steps into the police station. It's quiet. He's later than he said he'd be, and probably most of their manpower is taken up by the established crises. Lexie's desk -- it's Audrey's desk; it has never been anyone else's -- is empty and accusing. Dwight's left a note on Nathan's desk that reads, See me when you come in. Trying not to feel like a naughty schoolboy, Nathan heads straight back out of his door and turns into the Chief's office off the corridor.

Jordan and Dwight's bowed heads jerk up at his arrival.

"You left a... note," Nathan uncertainly offers.

"Right." Dwight slaps his hand on the table and stands up. "Thanks for coming in, Nathan." The gaze that looks him up and down apparently finds him more convincing than yesterday. Point of fact, Nathan still feels rough, but he can breathe and the pain that slips through around the edges of the pills is... not quite real to him, in a way.

"Mm." He finds some kind of focus. "Thanks for the Bronco." He probably can't hide the archness in his gaze, though, that the town is falling apart and Dwight wasted manpower on that.

"Actually, it was Jordan." At Nathan's loss for any response, and Jordan huffing as her chin rises to avert her gaze, Dwight elaborates, "She needed a time-out, kept asking me for a job to do. I was as surprised as you look right now when she took that one."

"Uh..." He feels the way his mouth twists, forming his expression, as he slides his eyes to her. That's as strange a realisation as the rest of this.

Jordan twists her own mouth right back at him. "No need to overwhelm me with gratitude, Nathan."

"I'd like you to work from in here, today," Dwight says, shuffling a few Dwight-specific items to one corner of his desk.

"What?" They've had two months of subtle sniping at each other over this desk, and now Dwight's giving it away?

Dwight rolls his eyes knowingly. "Don't get comfortable. But there's too much going on and I need someone right here who's able to make decisions at all levels. If I can't send you out right now, then that role has to fall to me."

Nathan nods. But this is more than a desk. It's almost co-captaincy.

"I don't trust William to stay down," Dwight adds. "We need to make the most of this breather while we have it. Fix as much as we damned well can before the next onslaught. That means focus." He frowns, and turns his head a few times as if missing something. "Crocker..."

"Duke's at work. At the Grey Gull."

Dwight takes that declaration dourly in his stride.

"I've got spies among his bar staff," Nathan adds for reassurance. "They'll let me know if anything goes... awry. " He drinks in a deep breath. "Wade Crocker... you might want to think about it."

Jordan gives a sharp gasp. Maybe that does count as insensitive.

"Duke can't take any more," Nathan asserts. "It's going to be hard enough to fix the damage that's already been done."

"I understand. I'll think about Wade." Dwight gives Jordan a reassuring glance before looking back to Nathan. "I wish killing a Glendower was still only a possibility, but this morning was one corpse too many. I don't care how much history they have in this town, that they didn't choose to become monsters, that it isn't fair. We need to stop all of them. The Crocker Curse is the only way I know to do that."

"William might know of more," Nathan says grimly, thinking about William's teasing threat again.

"Kick him in the nuts until he folds," Jordan says acerbically. "I'll volunteer."

For a fleeting moment, Nathan wonders if they could attach some electrodes to William's testicles. Then again, the implication is he's been tortured by experts in other dimensions. Chances are they compromise themselves and it doesn't work. Nathan grunts noncommittally, though maybe he'll use that next time he's face to face with the bastard. It'd be apt enough, since his ass is still sore and William targeted him and Duke explicitly through their relationship. "The only one he's really going to tell anything is Audrey."

"We can't afford to lose Audrey." Dwight bores fingers into his own forehead tiredly. "From everything William's indicated, it's a game-changer if he gets what he wants."

"She fucking went to him," Jordan says. "She was going to stay with him. The man's the biggest sleazeball I ever met, and that is not normal. He has some kind of hold over her. We can't let her near him." She glances at the clock on the wall. "We need to go. The Guard will be there already."

"Fine," Dwight grumbles. "Nathan... Gloria wants to see you. She'll probably head in around lunchtime. This morning she's running some more tests on William, while she can." There's enough of a falter there that Nathan knows it is William and Audrey the tests are being run on. "We're heading out to hunt Glendowers. Someone caught a sighting up on Gavil Cove."

"Good luck." Nathan stands by Dwight's desk and watches them step in sync for the door.

Dwight swings back. "Oh, we fixed the killer trees. Power's still off some places around the fault zone where the lines got cut. Gas and phone, and sewerage, too. People are out there dealing with it."

He stops again at the door. "I got three hours sleep last night," he tells Nathan. "That's an improvement on the night before."

"Dwight," Nathan rasps. "I've got your... paperwork."

"Good man." Then Dwight is gone, the door swinging shut behind him.

Nathan isn't an agent to stop Troubles anymore: he's an administrative extension of Dwight. Did the Guard sanction this? Does he really seem so broken this is all he's good for? That even the Guard understand it's too much to ask more of him now? Or maybe the Guard are just too distracted dealing with other things. Can he assume, in the light of this, that Dwight will stick up for him if people break out in another round of "let's kill Nathan Wuornos" to try and morale-boost, later?

He sits down at Dwight's desk and pulls the paperwork in front of him. God, he'd forgotten about this. He's instantly faced with how to write up strangle trees and fishmen murders and a crack opening up in the centre of a quiet Maine resort in any way that the outside world will understand, and it's...

It's kind of soothing, to be honest.

He falls back into it like he never left.

He checks up on Duke a while later, and then at lunchtime. Gloria comes armed with a bag of medical supplies, feels his throat and checks his ribs, replenishes his pills and cheerfully tells him he's good to go, and she'll check back again later. Maybe there's too much determination in her cheer.

"How's Audrey?" he asks, and she responds, "Snoring."

Then she leaves and in the quiet of the office -- even the phone has given up its hounding buzz -- Nathan drifts on the buffer of a fresh pain pill and thinks about everything that brought him to this point. All the things he and Duke did, and shouldn't have done, knew they shouldn't have done, but also knew they needed doing, so did them anyway. That descent into impossible choices. His own desires, twisted to begin with, matched to Duke's desires increasingly skewed by blood and need. They did this to themselves. To each other. William knew just where to apply pressure to make them do it.

Nathan wonders why.

It was meant to be about Audrey. Yet this was personal in so many ways. William could've sent Troubles so large-scale the Crocker Curse would have been laughable or plain useless against them. Nathan can think of things William could have done that wouldn't let Duke near enough to the Trouble's source to draw blood, let alone strike. He can create monsters with those black spheres. He could have made something they couldn't fight. Instead, he sent enemies it was possible to combat, curses it was possible to kill, forcing them to try, driving them to their limits.

William has at least once in Nathan's hearing referred to them as 'flies'. So, if he can, why doesn't he just swat them?

He seemed to take some affront to the "unintentionally complementary" nature of their two Troubles, the first time he saw them fight, but it also amused him. Nathan doesn't think that's the reason.

Lexie spent time with William. She met him in the Barn. Nathan has always trusted Lexie because she was the woman who used to be Audrey -- even when she didn't like him, and he didn't like her, he trusted her, thought that there was an innate goodness, a will to do the right thing, that had stayed with her. Ironically, now he knows Lexie was always Audrey, that faith is assailed. It's hard to think of her as Audrey in the past tense, when he spent so much time thinking of her as different. But... Lexie met William in the Barn. She'd already encountered him back in Haven before she introduced him to the rest of them. Nathan has no way of knowing how many times she saw him, and what they talked about.

He remembers she didn't want to leave William's side at the fault zone.

It is absolutely possible she knows more than she's let on. But Audrey chose to put herself out of the action to take William down, and that can't be a ruse. She did it after being directly faced with the results of what William had done to Duke and Nathan.

The 'connection' between Audrey and William puts chill in Nathan's veins, but they haven't lost her yet.

Unfortunately, whatever she knows is locked away with William, for however many days or weeks they have before the reprieve comes to an end.

They are counting time.

They need every bit of it they have to recover.

Nathan sits and thinks back, and the past two weeks are a blur.

He can't isolate how he and Duke fell so far so fast. The more he thinks over it, the less sense it makes, the more hazy the past week or more becomes. Hadn't they been climbing back? After Wade... after Jordan, and the realisations that came with Wade... Knowing the price, and that they couldn't afford to do this to one another.

Nathan picks up the phone and hesitates. He types in a name one-handed on Dwight's computer, pulls up the contact number, and dials it.

"Anna Benedict," says the voice on the other end.

"Dr. Benedict... It's Detective Wuornos. Can you come down to the station? I'm working from the Chief's office, and... I thought I might be able to use your skills."

There's a surprised little pause. He's explicitly refused her skills a few times before. Nathan had been willing to speak to a psychiatrist -- had in fact briefly consulted over Skype with an out-of-town doctor who was a personal friend of his neurologist -- but had not been willing to deal with someone who was a part of the police department, part of the infrastructure of Haven, and likely even part of the Guard, where everyone already had too much on him. He thinks they are a bit beyond those objections now.

"Of course," she says, pulling herself together. "I'll be right over."

Nathan sags in his chair and thinks that he'll live to regret this.

***



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