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Continued from here.
There were no reports of crows amassing again, though the head of the ornithology group seemed keen to tell Audrey everything about every kind of bird that frequented Haven's skies, and by the time she put down her cellphone she looked set to murder the next feathered friend that ventured near.
Ted Lears' personal effects were over at the morgue in a plastic evidence baggie. They had to wait an uncomfortable half hour to get his phone charged up enough to access the information they wanted.
While Audrey fiddled around looking for a charger that fit, Julia eyed both Nathan and Duke with what Duke was growing to recognise as the knowing look. There was a sort of soft, wry sadness on her pretty features. Nathan rolled his sleeve up again to show her the 'x' of tape, neatly avoiding actually having to vocalise anything on the subject. "Can we... see?"
"Morbid curiosity got the better of you, huh?" she responded, tipping her head. "Come along, then."
Duke did not want to see. He did not want to see dead bodies generally, but particularly not the poor suckers whose fate he had shared. Let Nathan be morbid and curious.
...So Duke didn't quite know why he was hanging a few steps behind Nathan while Julia opened drawers to reveal cold-faced corpses, unmarked and frozen in the moment of unexpected demise. The expressions of the dead people had no pain or fear imprinted upon them, no awareness they'd been about to die. The fact they looked so... so casual about it was itself freaky. Eventually, Duke just obscured his line of sight by standing behind Nathan, who seemed set on being thorough in each and every examination.
"Can I see Jerry Coggins?" Nathan asked finally.
"He's a bit messier than these," Julia said, for Duke's benefit, poking her head around Nathan's shoulder.
"Sure." Duke gave a thumbs-up and looked steadfastly away. "Don't mind me."
Coggins had been shot in the head from point-blank range. It wasn't that messy, all things Haven considered, but he was definitely dead. "Yeah, as corpses go, that's a dead one," Duke agreed, and dropped his hand back down over his eyes while Nathan and Julia indulged in another really good, close look.
"Audrey shot him," Nathan said, and even though it wasn't really a question, Julia nodded. "All right... Thanks, Julia."
The body of Mr Garbutt arrived just after that on the van, and they left Julia to her investigation and sat on the steps outside the front of the building, waiting for Audrey.
"She killed him," Nathan said, "Just like she told us. Are you ready to give up this craziness and start trusting Audrey again yet?"
"It's not that." Duke stopped, because it had been that, for a little while. He changed tack. "She wasn't killed, Nathan. We died. Thirteen other people died. People could still be dying. She was in the middle of it and she's fine." He thought about it and amended, "Well, for a not-dead value of 'fine', considering all the people dropping like flies around her, which probably isn't, you know, psychologically great." He frowned. "The chameleon couldn't kill her, either. He said she was 'different'. And you know it, too." He wondered if Nathan would volunteer the information. How much was it going to take to get him to spit it out?
Nathan played his numb fingers over his cheek and then each other, reflectively, his face sombre.
Duke prompted, "I see you flinch when she touches you. You. Flinch." He jabbed a finger into Nathan's shoulder, hard, and Nathan backed him up with no reaction whatsoever.
"It's not like that," Nathan said sullenly, hunching. "I haven't told her, so I sure as hell shouldn't tell you." But he rocked in position for a few moments with arms locked over his knees and his face rigid, then blurted out, "I can feel Audrey. I don't know what it means."
"You can feel--?" Duke didn't know what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. The instinctive protest, the urge to deny that roiled up inside him was hard to quantify. "You can feel her?"
"Yes!" Nathan snapped, misunderstanding. "When I touch her... skin, it has to be skin, it doesn't work through clothes... I feel it. I hadn't felt my own face in years, and then suddenly one little peck on the cheek she gave me when Jess left, and I had skin again! It was overwhelming. You have no idea."
Duke thought he had some idea. Shit. Nathan could feel Audrey, and how the hell was he supposed to compete with that? He rolled his eyes and sighed; hunched his knees in a copy of Nathan and dropped his forehead onto them. "Okay, Nate, I get the picture."
"You say that like you think I want to be reminded of everything I've lost with any casual touch," Nathan growled. "Well, I don't, but I want to touch her all the same, all the time, and it's messing me up." He groaned and pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "She's my partner. She said she was my friend. And all I keep thinking about is... is using her. How much skin contact would it take to make me feel properly alive? Would any amount ever be enough, if all I feel the rest of the time is nothing?"
Duke tentatively wrapped his fingers around Nathan's wrist. He might not feel it, but his skin was warm. Duke's fingers brushed tape, reminding him it was still only the illusion of life, now. Damn it.
"Feeling her doesn't help," Nathan said, oblivious to the touch. "It just makes things worse."
"But what does it mean about Audrey?" They had to get this back on track before she came out of the morgue, but Duke felt like the wind had been taken out of his sails. "That would mean your Trouble doesn't work on her. The chameleon thought she should've died, and she didn't. She didn't die from Coggins' Trouble, either. Is this a Trouble that's immune to other Troubles? We have to tell her."
Nathan un-hunched slightly to look at him, face flickering in the moment he noticed the light grasp Duke still maintained on his wrist.
"She's been keeping things from us, but if we know about this and don't tell her, that's no better," Duke added. "If you don't want her to know you can feel her after trying to get a grope in every opportunity, I get that, but we still need to tell her. She's only going to be more pissed the longer we leave it."
Nathan made an annoyed noise and changed the subject. "Julia knows about us. About the, uh, taxidermy," he specified.
"Yeah, I caught that."
"I should go ask her some questions while I have the chance. We need to know how to manage this." He jerked his stiff face into a challenge at Duke's lack of jumping for that idea, and rolled to his feet. "Look, she was there, and she's a doctor. She knows things."
Duke waved a hand go-to fashion and smiled a tight smile that wasn't all that amused. "If you want to treat this as a medical problem, go ahead."
"This is our lives now." Nathan leaned back down to hiss the words close to Duke's ear. "If we have to be full of sand and scraps instead of blood and bone, it wouldn't hurt to have a doctor's best guess what that means for us. Can we still get sick? Would the same things kill us? Piper died, but she was ripped apart. If the magic's in the stuffing, hers was strewn all over the room."
"Sounds more like it's Landon we should be talking to." Duke stiffly levered himself to his feet. The pain had improved from the day before, but he'd also forced his body to be a lot more energetic than it wanted to be. Now it was protesting.
"I suppose he has months of experience on us." Nathan screwed up his face
"Awkward?" Duke prodded.
"Yeah, a bit." Nathan stared into space.
"He was there, too," Duke said. "He can corroborate what Audrey said. Maybe give us some other answers. We should totally go talk to him." He watched Nathan's brows draw together sharply, and because he was expecting another rebuke, it took a moment to realise what he'd just said. "...Oh. Oh, shit."
"You wait here." Nathan was loping back up to the front door of the building as he rapped out the order, but he ran into Audrey coming out before Duke had chance to protest. "Parker!" It was almost a yelp as Nate barely stopped in time. "We need to get to Landon!"
Duke saw understanding cross Audrey's face in an instant. She grabbed Nathan, steadying his wavering balance. Duke could see her hand brushing skin at Nate's wrist as she hustled him toward the car and how he averted his face from her: how his flesh yearned somehow both away from and into her touch. Audrey reached for Duke as she passed him, but he avoided her and made his own way down the steps after them.
After they'd all climbed into the car, Nathan leaned gazing sightlessly out of the window, fingers reflexively stroking over the wrist Audrey had touched.
...Ow. That wasn't complicated at all.
"Nate," Duke hissed. "Focus. Okay?"
He didn't get a reply but Audrey got: "What's the verdict on Lears?"
"Cleaning the windows at number 25 last Thursday. If Landon dies..." She craned over her shoulder, eyes moving between them both. Duke made an incoherent noise and pointed at the upcoming junction, and she took a moment to ensure she didn't kill them all right now. "There's no reason to believe you guys have to die if Landon does. After all, Piper's dead and Landon kept going."
Duke's reassurance lasted until he registered that meant he was starting to cling to this state like it was living. "Probably be useful to keep him around, though," he said bitterly. "Patch and repair. Nathan needs a little already. Honestly, the amount of scrapes he gets I'd say Nathan was stuffed if he wasn't already stuffed."
"Shut up," growled Nathan.
Audrey slewed them to a halt outside the Taylor dry-cleaners. The door of the shop front was open and she was out of the car marching in without a glance back at either of them. Nathan sighed. They exchanged looks and moved to follow. Nathan paused to take Duke's arm when he faltered, but broke away too readily when he was steady again. Frustration rose in Duke and he felt the places where Nathan's hands had touched more intensely than any other part of him. He wondered how long the thought of sex with Nathan at the end of this damn awful mess could continue to power him. He involuntarily growled a little at the possibility there might not be sex with Nathan at the end of it. Nathan could come to his senses. They might not 'survive'. But they were a matched pair now, chained together by their macabre status. Who else was Nathan going to turn to?
Jealousy burned in him at the thought of the bright blonde who had just disappeared in front of them, whose touch Nathan could feel. He had to coax down his inner caveman before he could enter the dry-cleaners.
Landon Taylor had emerged from the back room of his shop to greet Audrey. His expression froze as Duke and Nathan entered, too, though his eyes paused only momentarily on Duke. "Nathan..." he began anxiously, hands moving out in some aborted gesture toward the other man and then sagging like an abandoned marionette.
"We know what happened," Nathan said, waving it off.
Audrey grabbed Landon's shoulder. "You were there last Thursday, and other people who were have died since. Have you noticed anything unusual? Crows hanging around? Are you feeling okay?"
"Noticed...? No, and I haven't had so much as a common cold since... since the fire." His eyes darted warily to Duke, who shrugged. "Why crows? What's happened?"
Duke was deeply unsettled by Landon Taylor. It was there in all his movements -- the stiffness of his limbs, the jerky way he carried himself. There was an unreality about him that, knowing the truth, made it wholly unsurprising. Anyone not already knowing the guy was as much dead skin and random filler as his hobby creations would hardly have guessed it, but only because who the hell would?
Watching Taylor, Duke hoped like hell he wasn't moving like that. He'd always been proud of his body's athleticism, his discipline and ability to take care of it. He'd not been making a lot of effort to see the bright side of his situation, but he'd at least been assuming things were going to get better. The aches would go, his movement would improve when he got used to it, and this was just a recovery period. He hadn't noticed Nathan moving any differently, but that was Nathan, who couldn't feel anyway, who was almost as wooden as Taylor to start with.
Audrey explained to Landon, "When Jimmy Coggins' Trouble activated on Thursday, people started dying as though the effect rolled outwards from him. The people closer... died... first." She visibly had to force herself to relate the story again, eyes hollowing in the recollection. "You were close enough to help. But the people who were next in line then are dying now, as though Jimmy's Trouble didn't stop, just... slowed down."
"There were big, black birds at the other deaths," Nathan said impatiently. "Have you seen any?"
"We can't be sure if you're in danger or not," Audrey said. "Or if Duke and Nathan are. Since this Trouble already killed them, you might say it's done its worst. It's a slightly different question whether you'd be vulnerable to it, but if you can't catch a cold..."
"Thanks for that one," Duke volunteered.
"Some of the new victims died in accidents," Nathan said, drawing Landon's gaze back to him.
Audrey nodded. "It's like they were already supposed to be dead and fate was redressing the balance."
"Oh, like we're supposed to be dead?" Duke started, belligerently. His voice dried up... In taking that last step, he could now see into the back room of the shop. Half the room was set out like a kind of hobbyist workshop, and unable to help himself, Duke was drawn toward it. "Shit. Is this where you... did it?"
"I..." Landon held out a hand as though he'd stop him, but recoiled at the prospect of actual touch, which was ironic, considering all the parts and places Landon must have touched. Duke felt his face go rigid, and fixed it with a teeth-bared expression that wholly lacked any qualities of a smile as Landon confirmed, "I hadn't done this... for some time, you understand, after what happened before. But I still had the equipment, even if I hadn't used it for months. Something wouldn't let me throw it away. I knew I should be able to make it work by myself. Part of me wanted to find out." He paused and swallowed. "Are you both... all right?"
"Does the pain go away?" Nathan asked roughly. It was an incongruous choice of question, but he steadfastly ignored everyone's reactions, holding his chin level and keeping his face an immovable mask.
"Uh, it did fade. I didn't know about this at the time. My wife was dead. I had to be there for my son... I kind of remember hurting." Landon gestured down at himself with both hands. "Look, Nathan, you were absolutely right. Once I got past the shock, there was no reason not to keep going. I can barely tell the difference. I definitely don't want to die." He turned to Audrey, distracted. "What did you say happened to those people?"
Duke returned to eying the back room as Landon focused on Audrey's full explanation of their new victims. Unwittingly, he found himself edging past Landon, venturing inside. Nathan echoed his steps, and they stared at each other, then around the room.
There were no visible bloodstains or buckets of discarded pieces, though there was a funky smell, and if Duke was smelling it, Nathan would be getting it worse. A big chest freezer in one corner drew Duke's attention. He wondered if some part of him remembered being in here, because he had the strangest feeling. They would have spent time here. Putting them back together must have taken Landon the best part of two or three days...
Landon gave a soft curse and broke away from Audrey to head them off. "You can't be in here." His hands were twitchy and his forehead was sweating.
Duke got it like a punch in the gut. "There's still something here, isn't there? What? The discards? I mean, shit, I'm basically stuffing in a skin-suit now, aren't I--?" That fucking freezer... He took another step toward it, horrified but pulled strongly nonetheless. Maybe it wasn't memory causing the feeling of familiarity here.
Landon nervously blocked off the freezer, hands extended warningly, placing himself like a sentry. An arm curled around Duke from behind, halting his steps and yanking him backward.
"Nathan, damn it...!"
"Not now, Duke."
When Duke broke the grasp and rounded on him, even Nathan was too pale. "I don't believe it," Duke said to Landon. "They're actually still in there?" He was half laughing, and he didn't know why, because this was so un-funny it didn't bear dwelling on.
"We didn't have chance yet to..." Landon trailed off. He was looking at Audrey.
"Cop should know the best place to dispose of two bodies," Nathan said. "Or... most of two bodies, I suppose." His face screwed up, and that really wasn't a smile on his lips, however hard it was trying.
"This is so fucking sick." Duke cast a glare at Landon, still between him and the freezer, but it struck Duke finally that he very much Did Not Want To See... and as far as he was concerned, the guy could relax.
A small noise made him turn to look behind them. Nathan was quicker, but he still wasn't quite quick enough to catch Audrey before she hit the floor.
***
Nathan's dismay filled the car. Duke could feel it rolling around the small space, trying to exacerbate his guilt even more. All right, so he could concede that maybe Audrey, too, was having a hard time with this. With the decision she'd made to save them, as well as the nasty practicalities involved. He hadn't seen Officer Parker faint before and hadn't imagined she could. Never mind that he'd felt like doing it, quite a few times throughout this business.
She hadn't been out very long -- had already been coming around by the time Nathan got his hand to her cheek and started speaking her name in panic, a few seconds after she'd hit the floor. Duke had joined Nathan on her other side, swearing and apologising and grabbing at her hand like a dick. But maybe the reminder of their presence didn't help very much because it was Landon she was sitting with in the back of the car now.
She had been back to business soon as she'd gotten hold of herself. A few sips of water and some squashed candies from Nathan's jacket pocket was all it took. Her first words had been, "Vince and Dave. Maybe Jimmy Coggins' Trouble was hereditary, like Beattie's, or Landon's. Maybe they've seen something like this happen before."
Vince and Dave knew all about this shit, too, so that encounter was going to be another delight.
"Tell me, Nate," Duke said, in an attempt to distract himself from Audrey's chalk-white face in the rear view mirror, "Why are you always the designated driver?"
"Because I'm neither hysterical or recovering from loss of consciousness," came the stiff response.
"No, because those would involve having an emotion. I see where the root of this mystery lies."
Nathan rolled his eyes, demonstrating the emotion of pissed-off. He turned his head slightly and demonstrated the emotion of concern: "You gonna be all right now, Parker?"
"I'm fine." Audrey sounded fairly pissed off, too -- Duke figured she was mostly annoyed with herself for being human. "Just the thought of what was in there and everything Landon had to do, all over again..."
"Shh," Duke broke in quickly, then backtracked. "Jesus, you were there?"
"For some of it. He needed help to work quickly." Her voice was raspy and her skin had gone translucent again.
"You don't have to tell us," Nathan said, talking hastily over what was, actually, the approximate same reassurance Duke was mustering -- the line of conversation was obviously not productive.
"When I went home, after... I have never thrown up so hard in all my life," she said, with a sideways look at Landon, then shook her head and seemed to steel herself to move her thoughts away from it. Landon didn't look very happy, either, and Duke supposed it was one thing to have the practice on animals but entirely something else to work on the long, exhausting and involved task of stuffing another human being, let alone one you knew... Shit, and he definitely needed to stop thinking about this.
"You did that for us," Nathan said, face forward and set like stone. "I'm certainly glad I'm... still around. Thanks." Which was thanks that had to be dragged out past a whole lot of baggage, but doubtless Nathan was trying his best.
"Working on it," Duke muttered, then feeling judged, cried in addition, "What? I'm working on it! I can't be any fairer than that." A different thought suddenly occurred to him. "So now you've seen both of us naked..."
Audrey kicked the back of his chair hard. "If you even dare ask for a comparison..."
Duke ducked as she went for the top of his head with her palm.
Things got a bit better, after that.
Nathan pulled up the car outside the Haven Herald offices. As they were getting out, Duke paused to offer Audrey his arm if she needed it. She looked as though her first impulse was to refuse assistance, but then she took it anyway, accepting the peace offering.
Vince and Dave were already looking up from their desks as the four of them filed in, so much have followed their approach through the big storefront windows. Both newspapermen's brows were up and their eyes large. Vince kind of managed not to drop the ball. "So... what's going on here? Audrey? Nathan."
"You look pale," Dave fussed, standing up and hurrying around to present a visitor chair to Audrey.
Vince leaned forward to peer at her in concern. "Do you need some sweet tea?"
She just sighed and said, "Thanks, Dave. Vince," and sat down. She leaned forward in the chair, hands rested on her knees, a posture of challenge despite her lingering weakness.
"We know, you guys," Duke said, waggling his hands at the two brothers. Nathan nodded and frowned, and Landon looked as if he'd like to hide behind someone, but folded his arms and hung back instead. "We're all right, by the way," Duke continued. "Thanks for asking. Oh, except for the dead part. And the fact you didn't ask."
"My God," Dave stuttered, adjusting his glasses, peering in a fascination that seriously annoyed Duke. "I couldn't really believe it would work."
Vince ventured around from behind his desk. Eyes narrowed in intrigue, he cautiously gripped the arm of Nathan, who was nearest, and caught up his fingers in a broad, age-spotted hand. Nathan made an uncomfortable noise and jerked back from both touches. "Astounding," Vince agreed. "Even feels warm to the touch. Nathan." He gave a wary, mollifying nod.
"Guys," Audrey snapped, while Nathan was still spluttering and searching for some comeback. "They're alive. Landon's... magic... fixed them. Can we get past that, because we have other work still to do here?"
"What would that be, Officer Parker?" Vince still seemed just short of assaulting Nathan again in some way, and Nathan's face spoke of reprisal imminent if he did, but fortunately Vince turned instead to pay attention to Audrey.
"Jimmy Coggins. He might be dead, but I'm not so sure his Trouble is. We know that some Troubles have been passed down generations. I'm wondering if there's anything in your archives that could help us."
"People are still dying?" Dave asked.
"The same people who'd have been next in line before," Nathan filled in. "Landon was near ground zero, so for the time being we're keeping him with us. But we don't know how far this could spread. We need to shut this down fast, Dave. Vince."
"Well, then I certainly hope the Herald can tell you something." Dave looked at his computer and wiped at the sudden sheen of sweat on his bald head. His fingers picked nervously at the keys. "Coggins... let me see. I remember his father, Stuart. There was Mary Jenners before that. Now, she... She died in a fire. I remember that." Landon winced, unacknowledged.
"Ooh!" Vince's eyes bulged as he practically jumped up and down with excitement. "Mary, I remember. And poor old Stu. Then his brother, what was his name...?"
"Andy, you sieve-brained old oaf. Andy Coggins. He only ran the Haven Post Office for twenty years. I don't suppose you'll remember Mary's mother's name?" Dave didn't wait for Vince's bumbling brain-racking. "Here we go... births, 1937. Born to Enid and Barry Jenners. Let's take a look here now..."
The Teagues found, looking back, a relative who'd been a victim of a rash of food poisonings at a fete, another who'd been caught up in a mystery epidemic, and 'poor' Stu had been killed in a bus crash, where some sort of toxin had been presumed to be involved because some of the victims had no marks of injury. A string of mass 'mystery' deaths... Duke found himself shuddering, and all of them were temporarily silenced by the thought.
"One thing for certain," Dave said finally. "When this family go out, they take a lot of folks along on the ride with them."
"Funerals," Vince said, punching his brother in the arm. "You remember. Stu and Andy. After what had happened to Mary, we all found it strange how they'd write that into their wills."
Dave's eyes narrowed, clearly none the wiser. "Write what?"
"Cremation, damn it!" Vince jabbed his finger at the screen. "You go through those obituaries again. I'm thinking each of those people got burned up or got cremated. And Stu, he died at what, twenty-nine? Andy not much more than a year or two later. Little Jimmy got taken into foster care... Seems to me they never had chance to pass on the need to..." His voice descended into a hiss, "...Salt and burn the bones."
Duke stared at them as the two old men snickered and nudged one another. "What the hell?"
"Oh, nothing," Dave chuckled. "Just this TV show Vince is hooked on about two brothers, much like yours truly," he gave an expansive gesture over himself and Vince, and then air-quoted, "'hunting down the supernatural'."
"This is exciting," Vince said keenly. "You still got that nasty whisky you were moaning about Friday? Might come in handy!"
Duke rolled his eyes. Audrey pulled a very sour face and said flatly, "You guys are so not Sam and Dean."
Nathan looked blank. With a desperate bid to inject sense, he said, "You're saying the bodies need to be burned. If so, Jimmy Coggins is still in the morgue. We need to get back to him and finish this."
"Before anyone else dies," Audrey agreed, getting up. Her phone rang before she'd taken more than a step toward the door and she plucked it from her pocket and held it to her ear. "Yep? Chief?"
She listened a moment while Nathan's hands clenched and his frame leaned toward her, giving the odd aborted twitch like he wanted to grab the phone. Considering he was right there, Garland's own son, and the Chief had called his partner instead, Duke couldn't blame him for feeling conflicted.
Audrey had been sporting the pasty-white look ever since her faint, but Duke discovered it was still possible for her to turn paler. "Okay, Chief. Look--" Her eyes darted at Nathan. "We know why people are still dying. Jimmy Coggins' family were always cremated within forty-eight hours of death. We'll head over to the situation, but you need to go to the morgue and burn Jimmy's body."
Duke heard the sharp exclamation which met that suggestion from where he stood. Nathan snatched the phone from Audrey's hand and growled into it. "Dad, just do this one thing, damn it. Forget secrets and conspiracies and the damn cover-ups, or at least think about them later. You're the one with the authority to walk in and do this now. No-one knows how much of Haven's population this Trouble eats up if we don't stop it."
Nathan swore explosively and Duke realised he was holding a dead phone, on the verge of hurling it at something. Audrey quickly grabbed it back.
"Shit..." Nathan's burst of frustration ran down and he clutched his head, teeth bared in a fixed fury. "What did he even say?"
Audrey supplied, "He said, 'Those birds you fool kids are so interested in are flocking like it's the end of the goddamn world down on Auson Street.' We need to get back to Kale's neighbourhood. Fast."
***
Vince and Dave headed off in their ancient van to help Garland. All reasonable estimates indicated they would arrive long after everything was over, but they seemed sincere and convinced of their ability to help. Meanwhile, Nathan put his foot down and wrung record speeds out of Audrey's little rental car, taking them to Auson Street.
Where the sky was almost black.
"Don't suppose anyone has an umbrella?" Duke asked, as they sat in the car, staring at the bizarre tableau. The occasional splat on the pavement or the car's paintwork proved those were all real crows. "I'm just saying... I don't fancy getting out without one."
"I thought the local spin on that was that it was lucky," Audrey said.
"That's sea birds," Duke told her. "This is just birdshit."
"This a lot more birds than at Mr Garbutt's place," Nathan said, kicking his door open and climbing out. Ducking his head back down, he asked, "How many deaths does this herald?"
Duke thought he heard the softer sound of a splat landing on fabric before Nathan slammed the driver's door shut, but sighed and followed him out of the car anyway, holding one arm above his head as a shield. He kicked away a few interested crows that ventured too close. On the plus side, the birds didn't seem to have any more interest in Landon than their casually confused interest in Nathan and himself.
Auson Street was on the intersection at the end of the short road where Mortimer Kale had lived. Duke could see Kale's house if he looked that way, with its big gates and lengthy, grassy drive. "So here we are again." He shot a furtive glance at Nathan. "Place where we died, and everything."
"We were here yesterday morning," Nathan pointed out.
Yeah, but they hadn't known then. But Duke bit his lip and considered that it might be a lot healthier, in such circumstances as these, to have Nate's comparative lack of imagination. He didn't say that aloud because with a bit of luck he was still going to be able to command all of Nathan's attention later without having to jibe and pick at him to do it. His smart mouth was all well and good, but he still wanted to get laid.
People were out on their doorsteps, or the more sane or fastidious ones in their windows. Not a full complement for the neighbourhood, since there'd be people at work and school, and probably, hopefully, that meant they'd been at work and school when Jimmy's Trouble kicked in last Thursday. It could be worse. This much was bad enough.
"I sure as hell hope Julia and Garland are getting that body to an incinerator right now," Audrey said under her breath.
"Would it do any good to evacuate the area?" Nathan asked, blank tone indicating even he didn't believe it.
"It's not going to make a difference," Duke said, pointing at a guy who'd ventured out of his door and been mobbed by the crows. "You can already tell who's the next lucky number up just by the freakin' Hitchcock extras."
Nathan and Audrey charged in to help the guy and escort him back to the cover of his home. Audrey batted at the crows with her gun, and even loosed a shot, which startled the birds and set up a noise of raucous complaint and ripple of unease among the black clouds above and the crows lining the roofs and windows of the houses. Nathan didn't have his gun restored to him yet, but he took the opportunity of the brief clear patch around them to hustle crow-bait guy inside, shutting him in. Both cops then had to waft a few more birds away from Nathan. Duke hoped that Nathan couldn't draw the attention of the damn death Trouble back to himself.
"Over there," Landon said, grabbing Duke's shoulder. His face and voice were strained as he pointed to the corner across the road. "That's where I was when I saw the lady collapse up the street."
Nearer than this. Nearer than the houses the crows weren't interested in because everyone who'd been in them on Thursday was already dead. "Then I don't think you -- or we -- are in the line of fire for this," Duke said. It was a shock to him how small a comfort that actually was. "Just everyone else here."
"I was trying... trying to save her. Normally." He pulled a face. "Then I heard Audrey. She took me into the Kale place. There were so many bodies. You and Detective Wuornos, the family, the people out here... I thought, what if I could help?"
"I know, buddy." Duke squeezed Landon's shoulder back, understanding, now, the need to do something, anything, to lessen the horror. He thought of generations of Jimmy Coggins' family at the centre of mass killings, history repeating disaster again and again, and wondered how any of them could do anything other than just end it, living under that threat. Of course, Dave had suggested Jimmy hadn't even known.
Landon was giving him a startled stare, but Duke settled his eyes on Nathan again, feeling the relief and infinite possibilities of not being about to die. He might have indulged more time and thought to that, but... Yeah. They still didn't know how many corpses the end of this day would be strewn with, and that put a damper on even his and Nathan's version of romance.
A charged ripple went through the crows around them. Nathan was a way down the street, escorting some other curious cat back to safety, but turned and looked to the sky. Audrey was walking her way back to Duke and Landon by the car. She froze in her tracks in the middle of the street. "No!" she shouted, and her gun lowered in her hand as she started to shake. "No! It can't happen again..."
Duke could see it. Everything laid out. Every painful, bloody aspect of the decision she'd made in the face of horror, writ clear in her chalk-white face. Helplessness, and futile fury, in the face of a situation so shitty that none of her clever solutions would work. She could only patch up and salvage what she could. When Landon made his offer, she must have been desperate to claw back anything from that awful event.
Nathan was too far away. Duke ran to Audrey and folded her in his arms. The gun was somewhere down by his hip, but he counted on her cop instincts to be pointing it away from him and tried to ignore it as he crushed her to him, pushing her head into his shoulder. "Don't look." His voice broke. All these people... The bird-lined houses with no-one visible at door or windows, was that because the occupants were dead already? Or like Mr Garbutt, sick and dying? "It's not your fault. You couldn't do a damn thing more than you already did."
He tried his best to make himself a barrier against the world, to protect her from what was to follow.
But the ripple that passed through the clouds of crows transformed, mutating even as it spun out. Duke felt it, the force so sinister and malevolent it surely couldn't carry anything but doom within it... suddenly relax. In the space of a few seconds, the sky cleared, the darkness of a thousand black wings lifting to allow the sun to glimmer again through the patchy clouds.
"Oh, thank God," Duke mumbled into Audrey's hair, feeling his knees sag. She made a little noise of protest at abruptly finding herself holding most of his weight, and he quickly braced his legs again. "Julia and the Chief must have done it."
Audrey nodded and sniffed, still slightly squashed, but not complaining. Duke consciously relaxed his grip. Nathan, coming toward them at a run, skidded to a halt.
"You feel warm..." Audrey said, slowly, muffled. "I really can't tell."
"Well, you know what Nathan and I were up to earlier," Duke conceded, "and we couldn't tell. Although that's maybe not so surprising, with..." He caught a glimpse of Nathan's face and shut up.
A few more people were venturing out of their houses now the clouds of birds had gone, reassuringly curious and alive. Audrey pulled clear of Duke and heaved a shuddering breath, rubbing her arm over her face, holstering her gun. "We should... go knocking on doors," she said. "Make sure everyone's all right."
Nathan's phone rang. He plucked it out of his pocket and stared at the caller ID, his face twisting in puzzlement, before he slowly lifted it to his ear and hazarded, "Dad?"
Even Duke heard the expulsion of relief from the other end. Audrey, nearer, sniffed again and scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands, and mustered a dented smile.
"No, we don't think we lost anyone else," Nathan said. "Duke and I are fine... Yeah. We'll come back to the station as soon as we've mopped up here." He listened and said, "All right," a bit numbly, before he lowered the phone. "Chief's sending some officers," he said to Audrey.
None of them needed to point out that in the heat of the moment, when Garland Wuornos didn't know if his son was dead or... well, slightly-not-alive-but-at-least-still-around... he hadn't contemplated the delay, even of seconds, that he'd have had by continuing his policy of awkward avoidance. He'd gone straight to the source and called Nathan.
***
Minor chaos reigned for a while. Other officers arrived and Nathan, who was beginning to show some wear, dropped out of the action, though Audrey wouldn't contemplate leaving yet, and she had their wheels. Garland was presumably still busy with Julia, covering up a covert incineration and the fact the morgue was one body short.
Nathan wasn't Super-man; he collected the same damage as everyone else, even if he didn't feel it. Because he mostly didn't react to it, it was hard to remember that. Duke needed to remember that.
He caught up to where Nathan was standing -- leaning -- and took up his hand, because nobody was looking at them and no-one was dying, and he could. Nathan looked bewildered, but moved his feet compliantly as Duke led him through the big gates and into the grounds of the large house that had been Mortimer Kale's. Duke walked them out of sight of the street, pulled Nathan close and kissed him.
Nathan was startled and less reactive than usual, so it wasn't the most successful kiss ever. Duke pulled back from scraping their teeth together and held Nathan's face instead, rubbing his thumbs over sharp cheekbones... or the illusion of cheekbones (how did that even work?), but Nathan's face still felt real.
"So... this is the place where we died," Duke said slowly.
"That's romantic now?" Nathan asked, indistinctly, jaw moving as though he were still rolling the kiss around his tongue. Duke's belly fluttered weirdly as he realised Nathan didn't know how lousy a kiss that had been.
"It brought you back to me. That's if... you are back now, aren't you?"
Nathan's tongue licked his bottom lip, leaving a faint sheen of moisture that fixed Duke's gaze. "I'm back." So they would have time to practice the kissing. Nathan cleared his throat and shook himself. "Kinda wish now that I didn't have the rest of this... situation... to deal with, and we could just go home." Being Nathan he said 'situation' and not 'clusterfuck', while managing to make it sound like he was saying 'clusterfuck' anyway.
Duke buried his frustration beneath a laugh. "I don't think you were ever technically back on duty. You could say 'fuck it'. Or more to the point... 'fuck me'. Because I want you." He curled his hands around Nathan, let them slide down to his hips, and then grabbed his ass with enough gusto that even Nathan should know exactly what his hands were doing. "I want this. As soon as humanly possible. Please?" he tagged on as Nate's eyebrows rose.
Nate didn't shove him off, so he let his hands wander, concentrating on the front of Nathan's body, because maybe the guy couldn't feel, but his eyes sunk down and hyperactively took in every touch, until a spacey expression overtook his face. Maybe it was just as simple as making him feel wanted, and desirable, instead of broken. Duke's approach of the last few years, then, had definitely sucked.
"If we screw here--" Nathan jerked his head up, suddenly. "Is that romantic, too?"
"Uhm." Duke took a conscious step back, assessed the territory and its gloomy baggage, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. The thought of what had happened here sent a shudder through him. "Okay, maybe we're better off waiting until we get back to the Rouge."
***
At the station, Landon sewed up Nathan's arm, making exclamations of dismay about the cause of the damage, and Duke assiduously avoided watching him do it.
Instead, he poked with great focus at his own flesh; at the skin of his arm, or at least his skin covering an arm that looked real, felt real, but he knew wasn't real. He watched the skin distort with the pressure he applied, rippling out from his fingertip.
Looking up, he found Garland standing silent and closed-off in the doorway, watching him and watching Nathan. The grey eyes set in his wrinkled, grizzled face seemed to plead for Duke's silence, so he did nothing to acknowledge Garland's presence. Nathan was watching the repair job with his own morbid interest, detached but still fascinated. Landon pulled the needle through and... Duke turned away again.
By the time they'd finished, a row of neat stitches wound around Nathan's arm instead of an 'x' of tape, and Garland's face was set and gruff but not the lost, destroyed, helpless look it had worn to greater or lesser degree ever since they'd woken up dead. "You gonna start taking more care of that body, now you collect those marks like Frankenstein every time you take a knock?" he barked, startling Nathan and Landon.
"Frankenstein's monster," Duke corrected. "Jeeze, it's like no-one's ever actually read, or seen--" Maybe it wasn't the time for literary nitpicking. He shut up.
Nathan held up his arm and stared as though waiting for the stitches to fade away into flesh. They didn't. He sighed. "Yes, dad. I'm going to be careful."
"Well, just you see that you do. I'm damned if I'll have a patchwork police officer that can't pass for human. Even in this town."
Duke suspected that was meant to be Garland expressing affection.
"I'll be careful," Nathan said, irritated.
"It's the skin," Landon said, apologetically. "Once you damage the skin, it seems like it's damaged for good."
"I'll be careful," Nathan said again.
"You gonna be reporting in for duty tomorrow?" Garland asked it abruptly, after a bit of distracted looking this way and that and tapping the door jamb, trying to pretend the question was casual.
It really was no wonder Nathan was so emotionally unavailable.
But Nathan's face softened, understanding. They shared the same language, after all. "I'll be in."
"Good." Garland slapped his blunt hand a few more times on the door jamb, then took himself off in a hurry. Duke could hear the frantic click-click of his lighter and smell the first tang of a lit cigarette even as he walked away.
"It's going to take him... time, to come to terms with this, I imagine," Landon offered, trying to be supportive.
Nathan gave a noncommittal grunt. "Wait until I tell him I've started sleeping with Duke again."
***
"I can't believe it's taken us this long to get back to this," Duke groaned, practically hauling Nathan into the bedroom while his hands worked at his clothes. Why did Nathan have to be so buttoned-down?
Nathan, for all his observational and detecting skills, had seemed surprised to be grabbed the instant the doors of the Cape Rouge were closed on the outside world. He really ought to know better. After all, Duke wasn't made of stone, and after hours of having to behave around Nathan for the public audience, how was he expected to exercise restraint now?
Nathan wrested free from his attacking lips to ask, "What? Six hours? Or eighteen years?"
"Don't ask me to pick which was harder," Duke grunted. Nathan gave a bark of rare laughter and finally got his act together, reciprocating by dragging open Duke's pants. They got jeans and underwear down to knee-level before practicality forced them both to divert to take off shoes. Duke caught Nathan straightening up and unfastened his cuffs and a few buttons, then with a brusque order of "Hup!" pulled the whole shirt off over Nathan's head. Duke plunged them both onto the bed, pushing Nathan down into the soft give of the mattress with his arms still above his head.
Straddling Nathan, looking down, Duke experienced another of those glad-to-be-aliveish moments that had been landing on him with increasing regularity. Looking at Nathan, it crossed his mind that he didn't get this lucky, and that meant it was all by definition going to go horribly wrong -- until he remembered all the death and fucking taxidermy that had gone into making this moment possible, and his cynical psyche figured... yeah, okay, and was reassured. Everything was par-for-the-course and he was still in Haven.
The extended study caused Nate to draw in a long, shuddering breath beneath him. It was erotic as hell. But then Duke felt tension increase again in the body he was straddling. Since the events at the police station, Nathan had been quiet and compliant. It should have been obvious that wasn't going to last. Nathan squirmed and sat up between his legs.
Duke caught his shoulders before he got pushed off. "What is it?" For good measure, he leaned in, sliding one hand down to Nate's groin while he kept the other more or less where it was but stretched his thumb so the edge of the nail could scratch Nathan's nipple.
Nathan shut his eyes and turned his head aside, effectively excusing himself from proceedings. "We never told her."
"Told who what?" Duke asked with frustration.
"Audrey, damn it!" Nathan snapped. Duke's head jerked guiltily upwards... He maintained that he couldn't be blamed for a bout of Stupid, given the circumstances. "No, she's not there... But... She still thinks she's normal. She's Troubled, and we need to tell her."
"Is this really the time?" Duke cried out, exasperated, fighting Nathan again -- though all the leverage was already his and they shouldn't be having to fight anymore. So he'd thought. He closed his eyes and sighed. "Nathan. Sex. Now. We can deal with Audrey's issues another day. Which, if you ask me -- being immune to the fucking Troubles is a great Trouble. Probably the least lousy Trouble in existence. So stop sweating about her and worry about us."
Somewhat to his relief, Nate sagged back co-operatively again, looking between their bodies and swallowing hard at the sight of Duke's hand around his cock. But apparently he couldn't resist asking, mutinously, "You think she'll be okay?"
"Well, she's not a walking wall hanging, so she'll be fine." Duke wondered if Audrey Parker was thinking about them both together right now. Maybe the idea gave her some kind of comfort. If his charms had started to work on her, maybe it gave her a hint of jealousy.
...Enough thinking about Audrey Parker. He felt Nathan's surrender beneath him, and that wasn't something to let go to waste. After all, he had waited one hell of a long time for it.
"Where were we...?" He set fingers against the ridges of ribs that were only illusion, trying not to think about the illusion, and this time Nathan bucked underneath him and ground up into his hips. Nathan's hands rose to catch Duke's face, giving up his leverage to bring him into a kiss, eyes-open and fixed to Duke's. Nathan must have caught from his expression how close he was to losing it. The leap of near-telepathic intuition between them in the absence of half their collective nerve-endings caused enhanced arousal to shiver through both of them in response.
This was going to be a little bit odd.
Duke supposed he should accept odd as inevitable where Nathan Wuornos was involved. He framed Nathan's face with his hands in return and asked the question bluntly: "Are you going to let me fuck you?"
Earlier had been desperation and heat of the moment, and Nathan had taken the lead. This... Nathan had never liked surrendering control even back when they were kids, and here, now, they were approaching something that would require him to put on display all the places where he was broken, the compensations he had to make to live in a body that couldn't feel. That was a... sensitive issue between them.
When they were teenagers, Nathan's weird affliction had been in the past and they were so over that. It was a Thing They Did Not Speak Of. Different altogether to tackle it head-on as grown men.
Duke waited tensely through the seconds his question went unanswered. Until Nathan said, "It's what I've been waiting for all damn day. When are you going to get on with it?" Laughter bubbled up, shaking his long, slim body.
"You..." There wasn't a good enough insult in Duke's vocabulary for that moment Nathan lay back silent and let him hang.
But as though the particular note of frustration and anger he'd injected made the word 'you' an endearment, glazed-eyed and blissed-out, Nathan replied, "Duke."
"Hah." Duke groped for their improvised lube of earlier and scraped out a dollop. He kept his eyes locked to Nathan's as he climbed over him and pushed his fingers down to navigate unseen until they found their goal. The key had to be in not losing eye contact... not leaving Nathan floating without a clue in his unfeeling skin while Duke took his own pleasure.
...Of course, there were other things that Nate probably wanted to see. Duke watched his eyes slide slowly to Duke's erection, so very ready for this. The hunger that sparked in Nathan's blue irises left it impossible to form any other conclusion but hell yeah he wanted this.
Nathan was a man of few words but his face said, now.
Duke worked his fingers quicker, hurrying to finish preparation that he was definitely not scrimping on. He had unlikely but horrible visions of them fucking the stuffing out of each other, and... "Oh my God."
"Don't stop," Nathan growled, kicking him.
Duke groaned, and scissored his fingers one last time before withdrawing his hand. "Just a... a bad overabundance of imagination." They rearranged limbs until he had a whole lot of frustrated cop pressed beneath him and sinewy legs curled up past his shoulders. "You are so, so lucky you don't have that problem."
Nathan tipped his head up and wow, that glare was a doozy. "I can still decide to go home."
The idle threat sent an uneasy shiver through Duke all the same, but Nathan was curling hands around his neck and arm, clearly not going anywhere. After eighteen years and a lifetime... Duke swore as he lowered himself down and pressed slowly into Nathan. He watched the small movements and changes flicker in Nathan's face, and thought that he didn't look so much like a mannequin after all.
On the contrary, he looked like everything Duke needed to convince himself they could still be real.
It was a little awkward. Face to face, for the benefit of Nathan's eyes, out of practice, a fraction clumsy. Duke was too ready and Nathan wasn't ready enough, or at least lagged behind, sensation-impervious. Duke was forced to buy restitution with his head buried between Nathan's thighs, bobbing his mouth high to the tip of Nathan's cock and licking long and hard back down the length to make a visual show, until Nathan shuddered and curled his hands in Duke's hair as he came, making sounds he'd thought never to hear Nathan Wuornos make again.
He tasted as warm and real as he felt.
"That was... God..." Nathan lay back, his shudders slow to subside, numb body overwhelmed.
"I still prefer 'Duke'," Duke grinned, dopily, rolling and sprawling, stretching his languid, singing limbs atop the rumpled covers and staring at Nathan like he was a shiny present, and if he'd been in an anime he'd probably have big hearts in his eyes. It was sad. Really.
He couldn't help it.
He would have liked to imagine the anime hearts in Nathan's stare back, but was by no means that confident. Still, Nathan looked satisfied, and Duke thought proudly that he'd done that, made the unfeeling ass feel -- and this one was way, way better an achievement than all those years of affront and hurt and anger.
Nathan's toes played with his, lazily, and his eyelids drifted down, then jerked back up. "Are we really doing this? I mean--" Nate's face dipped shyly. It was almost cute, and Duke thought, holy shit, and he wasn't sure he could take any more moments like that in one evening. "We've been freaking out all day. Could be argued we're not in our right minds."
Duke appreciated that use of 'we'. Then again, Nathan freaking out was either Godzilla levels of destruction or completely impossible to tell apart from his normal demeanour, so who knew?
"Point: we don't, technically, even have minds." Freezer, Landon's workshop... not thinking about it... "Point two: I'm still freaking out. I'm just making the most of the compensation. Because we really, really have got to." He reached out and closed his fingers over the illusion of muscle in Nathan's thigh, the part of Nathan closest to his line of sight. Maybe that gesture came off needier than he'd intended. If he could just hold Nathan now, and somehow transfer that hold metaphysically, make it become a force to ensure Nathan would stay with him. In his bed, as often as possible. Duke tried, "Just because it's never worked before doesn't mean it can't work now."
Nathan's eyes laughed at him, though his voice carried dismissal in its rasp. "We were kids. Idiots."
"Oh, we're still idiots," Duke said, laying it on with a condescending level of reassurance.
A soft snort. "So this is how we manage our untimely demise."
"Together?" Duke picked up, raising his eyebrows in challenge because, well, it had been Nathan who'd said it, when he himself had no hope left to expect anything of the kind, after the hostility that had marked things between them for years. "There are worse things to be. Do not even get into the worse things," he added quickly. "Or what we are."
"It doesn't have to matter," Nathan said.
So Nate was still playing the denial game. Duke was going to have to try very, very hard to emulate him and not let it matter, lest he be stuck freaking out about his own body, trapped in the prison of his very fear. There was no escape from that except death or madness.
Judging from Landon and Piper Taylor, they could be around like this for a long time yet. This was far from over, and Duke was still very far from coming to terms with it.
But maybe, just maybe, with a Nathan to cling to he could find his way through.
A stuffed-comfort-toy joke coiled and readied and then died on his lips. Duke bit the end of his tongue hard and glared past Nathan to the wall with annoyance for his wayward brain.
...Too soon, damn it.
Way too soon.
END
There were no reports of crows amassing again, though the head of the ornithology group seemed keen to tell Audrey everything about every kind of bird that frequented Haven's skies, and by the time she put down her cellphone she looked set to murder the next feathered friend that ventured near.
Ted Lears' personal effects were over at the morgue in a plastic evidence baggie. They had to wait an uncomfortable half hour to get his phone charged up enough to access the information they wanted.
While Audrey fiddled around looking for a charger that fit, Julia eyed both Nathan and Duke with what Duke was growing to recognise as the knowing look. There was a sort of soft, wry sadness on her pretty features. Nathan rolled his sleeve up again to show her the 'x' of tape, neatly avoiding actually having to vocalise anything on the subject. "Can we... see?"
"Morbid curiosity got the better of you, huh?" she responded, tipping her head. "Come along, then."
Duke did not want to see. He did not want to see dead bodies generally, but particularly not the poor suckers whose fate he had shared. Let Nathan be morbid and curious.
...So Duke didn't quite know why he was hanging a few steps behind Nathan while Julia opened drawers to reveal cold-faced corpses, unmarked and frozen in the moment of unexpected demise. The expressions of the dead people had no pain or fear imprinted upon them, no awareness they'd been about to die. The fact they looked so... so casual about it was itself freaky. Eventually, Duke just obscured his line of sight by standing behind Nathan, who seemed set on being thorough in each and every examination.
"Can I see Jerry Coggins?" Nathan asked finally.
"He's a bit messier than these," Julia said, for Duke's benefit, poking her head around Nathan's shoulder.
"Sure." Duke gave a thumbs-up and looked steadfastly away. "Don't mind me."
Coggins had been shot in the head from point-blank range. It wasn't that messy, all things Haven considered, but he was definitely dead. "Yeah, as corpses go, that's a dead one," Duke agreed, and dropped his hand back down over his eyes while Nathan and Julia indulged in another really good, close look.
"Audrey shot him," Nathan said, and even though it wasn't really a question, Julia nodded. "All right... Thanks, Julia."
The body of Mr Garbutt arrived just after that on the van, and they left Julia to her investigation and sat on the steps outside the front of the building, waiting for Audrey.
"She killed him," Nathan said, "Just like she told us. Are you ready to give up this craziness and start trusting Audrey again yet?"
"It's not that." Duke stopped, because it had been that, for a little while. He changed tack. "She wasn't killed, Nathan. We died. Thirteen other people died. People could still be dying. She was in the middle of it and she's fine." He thought about it and amended, "Well, for a not-dead value of 'fine', considering all the people dropping like flies around her, which probably isn't, you know, psychologically great." He frowned. "The chameleon couldn't kill her, either. He said she was 'different'. And you know it, too." He wondered if Nathan would volunteer the information. How much was it going to take to get him to spit it out?
Nathan played his numb fingers over his cheek and then each other, reflectively, his face sombre.
Duke prompted, "I see you flinch when she touches you. You. Flinch." He jabbed a finger into Nathan's shoulder, hard, and Nathan backed him up with no reaction whatsoever.
"It's not like that," Nathan said sullenly, hunching. "I haven't told her, so I sure as hell shouldn't tell you." But he rocked in position for a few moments with arms locked over his knees and his face rigid, then blurted out, "I can feel Audrey. I don't know what it means."
"You can feel--?" Duke didn't know what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. The instinctive protest, the urge to deny that roiled up inside him was hard to quantify. "You can feel her?"
"Yes!" Nathan snapped, misunderstanding. "When I touch her... skin, it has to be skin, it doesn't work through clothes... I feel it. I hadn't felt my own face in years, and then suddenly one little peck on the cheek she gave me when Jess left, and I had skin again! It was overwhelming. You have no idea."
Duke thought he had some idea. Shit. Nathan could feel Audrey, and how the hell was he supposed to compete with that? He rolled his eyes and sighed; hunched his knees in a copy of Nathan and dropped his forehead onto them. "Okay, Nate, I get the picture."
"You say that like you think I want to be reminded of everything I've lost with any casual touch," Nathan growled. "Well, I don't, but I want to touch her all the same, all the time, and it's messing me up." He groaned and pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. "She's my partner. She said she was my friend. And all I keep thinking about is... is using her. How much skin contact would it take to make me feel properly alive? Would any amount ever be enough, if all I feel the rest of the time is nothing?"
Duke tentatively wrapped his fingers around Nathan's wrist. He might not feel it, but his skin was warm. Duke's fingers brushed tape, reminding him it was still only the illusion of life, now. Damn it.
"Feeling her doesn't help," Nathan said, oblivious to the touch. "It just makes things worse."
"But what does it mean about Audrey?" They had to get this back on track before she came out of the morgue, but Duke felt like the wind had been taken out of his sails. "That would mean your Trouble doesn't work on her. The chameleon thought she should've died, and she didn't. She didn't die from Coggins' Trouble, either. Is this a Trouble that's immune to other Troubles? We have to tell her."
Nathan un-hunched slightly to look at him, face flickering in the moment he noticed the light grasp Duke still maintained on his wrist.
"She's been keeping things from us, but if we know about this and don't tell her, that's no better," Duke added. "If you don't want her to know you can feel her after trying to get a grope in every opportunity, I get that, but we still need to tell her. She's only going to be more pissed the longer we leave it."
Nathan made an annoyed noise and changed the subject. "Julia knows about us. About the, uh, taxidermy," he specified.
"Yeah, I caught that."
"I should go ask her some questions while I have the chance. We need to know how to manage this." He jerked his stiff face into a challenge at Duke's lack of jumping for that idea, and rolled to his feet. "Look, she was there, and she's a doctor. She knows things."
Duke waved a hand go-to fashion and smiled a tight smile that wasn't all that amused. "If you want to treat this as a medical problem, go ahead."
"This is our lives now." Nathan leaned back down to hiss the words close to Duke's ear. "If we have to be full of sand and scraps instead of blood and bone, it wouldn't hurt to have a doctor's best guess what that means for us. Can we still get sick? Would the same things kill us? Piper died, but she was ripped apart. If the magic's in the stuffing, hers was strewn all over the room."
"Sounds more like it's Landon we should be talking to." Duke stiffly levered himself to his feet. The pain had improved from the day before, but he'd also forced his body to be a lot more energetic than it wanted to be. Now it was protesting.
"I suppose he has months of experience on us." Nathan screwed up his face
"Awkward?" Duke prodded.
"Yeah, a bit." Nathan stared into space.
"He was there, too," Duke said. "He can corroborate what Audrey said. Maybe give us some other answers. We should totally go talk to him." He watched Nathan's brows draw together sharply, and because he was expecting another rebuke, it took a moment to realise what he'd just said. "...Oh. Oh, shit."
"You wait here." Nathan was loping back up to the front door of the building as he rapped out the order, but he ran into Audrey coming out before Duke had chance to protest. "Parker!" It was almost a yelp as Nate barely stopped in time. "We need to get to Landon!"
Duke saw understanding cross Audrey's face in an instant. She grabbed Nathan, steadying his wavering balance. Duke could see her hand brushing skin at Nate's wrist as she hustled him toward the car and how he averted his face from her: how his flesh yearned somehow both away from and into her touch. Audrey reached for Duke as she passed him, but he avoided her and made his own way down the steps after them.
After they'd all climbed into the car, Nathan leaned gazing sightlessly out of the window, fingers reflexively stroking over the wrist Audrey had touched.
...Ow. That wasn't complicated at all.
"Nate," Duke hissed. "Focus. Okay?"
He didn't get a reply but Audrey got: "What's the verdict on Lears?"
"Cleaning the windows at number 25 last Thursday. If Landon dies..." She craned over her shoulder, eyes moving between them both. Duke made an incoherent noise and pointed at the upcoming junction, and she took a moment to ensure she didn't kill them all right now. "There's no reason to believe you guys have to die if Landon does. After all, Piper's dead and Landon kept going."
Duke's reassurance lasted until he registered that meant he was starting to cling to this state like it was living. "Probably be useful to keep him around, though," he said bitterly. "Patch and repair. Nathan needs a little already. Honestly, the amount of scrapes he gets I'd say Nathan was stuffed if he wasn't already stuffed."
"Shut up," growled Nathan.
Audrey slewed them to a halt outside the Taylor dry-cleaners. The door of the shop front was open and she was out of the car marching in without a glance back at either of them. Nathan sighed. They exchanged looks and moved to follow. Nathan paused to take Duke's arm when he faltered, but broke away too readily when he was steady again. Frustration rose in Duke and he felt the places where Nathan's hands had touched more intensely than any other part of him. He wondered how long the thought of sex with Nathan at the end of this damn awful mess could continue to power him. He involuntarily growled a little at the possibility there might not be sex with Nathan at the end of it. Nathan could come to his senses. They might not 'survive'. But they were a matched pair now, chained together by their macabre status. Who else was Nathan going to turn to?
Jealousy burned in him at the thought of the bright blonde who had just disappeared in front of them, whose touch Nathan could feel. He had to coax down his inner caveman before he could enter the dry-cleaners.
Landon Taylor had emerged from the back room of his shop to greet Audrey. His expression froze as Duke and Nathan entered, too, though his eyes paused only momentarily on Duke. "Nathan..." he began anxiously, hands moving out in some aborted gesture toward the other man and then sagging like an abandoned marionette.
"We know what happened," Nathan said, waving it off.
Audrey grabbed Landon's shoulder. "You were there last Thursday, and other people who were have died since. Have you noticed anything unusual? Crows hanging around? Are you feeling okay?"
"Noticed...? No, and I haven't had so much as a common cold since... since the fire." His eyes darted warily to Duke, who shrugged. "Why crows? What's happened?"
Duke was deeply unsettled by Landon Taylor. It was there in all his movements -- the stiffness of his limbs, the jerky way he carried himself. There was an unreality about him that, knowing the truth, made it wholly unsurprising. Anyone not already knowing the guy was as much dead skin and random filler as his hobby creations would hardly have guessed it, but only because who the hell would?
Watching Taylor, Duke hoped like hell he wasn't moving like that. He'd always been proud of his body's athleticism, his discipline and ability to take care of it. He'd not been making a lot of effort to see the bright side of his situation, but he'd at least been assuming things were going to get better. The aches would go, his movement would improve when he got used to it, and this was just a recovery period. He hadn't noticed Nathan moving any differently, but that was Nathan, who couldn't feel anyway, who was almost as wooden as Taylor to start with.
Audrey explained to Landon, "When Jimmy Coggins' Trouble activated on Thursday, people started dying as though the effect rolled outwards from him. The people closer... died... first." She visibly had to force herself to relate the story again, eyes hollowing in the recollection. "You were close enough to help. But the people who were next in line then are dying now, as though Jimmy's Trouble didn't stop, just... slowed down."
"There were big, black birds at the other deaths," Nathan said impatiently. "Have you seen any?"
"We can't be sure if you're in danger or not," Audrey said. "Or if Duke and Nathan are. Since this Trouble already killed them, you might say it's done its worst. It's a slightly different question whether you'd be vulnerable to it, but if you can't catch a cold..."
"Thanks for that one," Duke volunteered.
"Some of the new victims died in accidents," Nathan said, drawing Landon's gaze back to him.
Audrey nodded. "It's like they were already supposed to be dead and fate was redressing the balance."
"Oh, like we're supposed to be dead?" Duke started, belligerently. His voice dried up... In taking that last step, he could now see into the back room of the shop. Half the room was set out like a kind of hobbyist workshop, and unable to help himself, Duke was drawn toward it. "Shit. Is this where you... did it?"
"I..." Landon held out a hand as though he'd stop him, but recoiled at the prospect of actual touch, which was ironic, considering all the parts and places Landon must have touched. Duke felt his face go rigid, and fixed it with a teeth-bared expression that wholly lacked any qualities of a smile as Landon confirmed, "I hadn't done this... for some time, you understand, after what happened before. But I still had the equipment, even if I hadn't used it for months. Something wouldn't let me throw it away. I knew I should be able to make it work by myself. Part of me wanted to find out." He paused and swallowed. "Are you both... all right?"
"Does the pain go away?" Nathan asked roughly. It was an incongruous choice of question, but he steadfastly ignored everyone's reactions, holding his chin level and keeping his face an immovable mask.
"Uh, it did fade. I didn't know about this at the time. My wife was dead. I had to be there for my son... I kind of remember hurting." Landon gestured down at himself with both hands. "Look, Nathan, you were absolutely right. Once I got past the shock, there was no reason not to keep going. I can barely tell the difference. I definitely don't want to die." He turned to Audrey, distracted. "What did you say happened to those people?"
Duke returned to eying the back room as Landon focused on Audrey's full explanation of their new victims. Unwittingly, he found himself edging past Landon, venturing inside. Nathan echoed his steps, and they stared at each other, then around the room.
There were no visible bloodstains or buckets of discarded pieces, though there was a funky smell, and if Duke was smelling it, Nathan would be getting it worse. A big chest freezer in one corner drew Duke's attention. He wondered if some part of him remembered being in here, because he had the strangest feeling. They would have spent time here. Putting them back together must have taken Landon the best part of two or three days...
Landon gave a soft curse and broke away from Audrey to head them off. "You can't be in here." His hands were twitchy and his forehead was sweating.
Duke got it like a punch in the gut. "There's still something here, isn't there? What? The discards? I mean, shit, I'm basically stuffing in a skin-suit now, aren't I--?" That fucking freezer... He took another step toward it, horrified but pulled strongly nonetheless. Maybe it wasn't memory causing the feeling of familiarity here.
Landon nervously blocked off the freezer, hands extended warningly, placing himself like a sentry. An arm curled around Duke from behind, halting his steps and yanking him backward.
"Nathan, damn it...!"
"Not now, Duke."
When Duke broke the grasp and rounded on him, even Nathan was too pale. "I don't believe it," Duke said to Landon. "They're actually still in there?" He was half laughing, and he didn't know why, because this was so un-funny it didn't bear dwelling on.
"We didn't have chance yet to..." Landon trailed off. He was looking at Audrey.
"Cop should know the best place to dispose of two bodies," Nathan said. "Or... most of two bodies, I suppose." His face screwed up, and that really wasn't a smile on his lips, however hard it was trying.
"This is so fucking sick." Duke cast a glare at Landon, still between him and the freezer, but it struck Duke finally that he very much Did Not Want To See... and as far as he was concerned, the guy could relax.
A small noise made him turn to look behind them. Nathan was quicker, but he still wasn't quite quick enough to catch Audrey before she hit the floor.
***
Nathan's dismay filled the car. Duke could feel it rolling around the small space, trying to exacerbate his guilt even more. All right, so he could concede that maybe Audrey, too, was having a hard time with this. With the decision she'd made to save them, as well as the nasty practicalities involved. He hadn't seen Officer Parker faint before and hadn't imagined she could. Never mind that he'd felt like doing it, quite a few times throughout this business.
She hadn't been out very long -- had already been coming around by the time Nathan got his hand to her cheek and started speaking her name in panic, a few seconds after she'd hit the floor. Duke had joined Nathan on her other side, swearing and apologising and grabbing at her hand like a dick. But maybe the reminder of their presence didn't help very much because it was Landon she was sitting with in the back of the car now.
She had been back to business soon as she'd gotten hold of herself. A few sips of water and some squashed candies from Nathan's jacket pocket was all it took. Her first words had been, "Vince and Dave. Maybe Jimmy Coggins' Trouble was hereditary, like Beattie's, or Landon's. Maybe they've seen something like this happen before."
Vince and Dave knew all about this shit, too, so that encounter was going to be another delight.
"Tell me, Nate," Duke said, in an attempt to distract himself from Audrey's chalk-white face in the rear view mirror, "Why are you always the designated driver?"
"Because I'm neither hysterical or recovering from loss of consciousness," came the stiff response.
"No, because those would involve having an emotion. I see where the root of this mystery lies."
Nathan rolled his eyes, demonstrating the emotion of pissed-off. He turned his head slightly and demonstrated the emotion of concern: "You gonna be all right now, Parker?"
"I'm fine." Audrey sounded fairly pissed off, too -- Duke figured she was mostly annoyed with herself for being human. "Just the thought of what was in there and everything Landon had to do, all over again..."
"Shh," Duke broke in quickly, then backtracked. "Jesus, you were there?"
"For some of it. He needed help to work quickly." Her voice was raspy and her skin had gone translucent again.
"You don't have to tell us," Nathan said, talking hastily over what was, actually, the approximate same reassurance Duke was mustering -- the line of conversation was obviously not productive.
"When I went home, after... I have never thrown up so hard in all my life," she said, with a sideways look at Landon, then shook her head and seemed to steel herself to move her thoughts away from it. Landon didn't look very happy, either, and Duke supposed it was one thing to have the practice on animals but entirely something else to work on the long, exhausting and involved task of stuffing another human being, let alone one you knew... Shit, and he definitely needed to stop thinking about this.
"You did that for us," Nathan said, face forward and set like stone. "I'm certainly glad I'm... still around. Thanks." Which was thanks that had to be dragged out past a whole lot of baggage, but doubtless Nathan was trying his best.
"Working on it," Duke muttered, then feeling judged, cried in addition, "What? I'm working on it! I can't be any fairer than that." A different thought suddenly occurred to him. "So now you've seen both of us naked..."
Audrey kicked the back of his chair hard. "If you even dare ask for a comparison..."
Duke ducked as she went for the top of his head with her palm.
Things got a bit better, after that.
Nathan pulled up the car outside the Haven Herald offices. As they were getting out, Duke paused to offer Audrey his arm if she needed it. She looked as though her first impulse was to refuse assistance, but then she took it anyway, accepting the peace offering.
Vince and Dave were already looking up from their desks as the four of them filed in, so much have followed their approach through the big storefront windows. Both newspapermen's brows were up and their eyes large. Vince kind of managed not to drop the ball. "So... what's going on here? Audrey? Nathan."
"You look pale," Dave fussed, standing up and hurrying around to present a visitor chair to Audrey.
Vince leaned forward to peer at her in concern. "Do you need some sweet tea?"
She just sighed and said, "Thanks, Dave. Vince," and sat down. She leaned forward in the chair, hands rested on her knees, a posture of challenge despite her lingering weakness.
"We know, you guys," Duke said, waggling his hands at the two brothers. Nathan nodded and frowned, and Landon looked as if he'd like to hide behind someone, but folded his arms and hung back instead. "We're all right, by the way," Duke continued. "Thanks for asking. Oh, except for the dead part. And the fact you didn't ask."
"My God," Dave stuttered, adjusting his glasses, peering in a fascination that seriously annoyed Duke. "I couldn't really believe it would work."
Vince ventured around from behind his desk. Eyes narrowed in intrigue, he cautiously gripped the arm of Nathan, who was nearest, and caught up his fingers in a broad, age-spotted hand. Nathan made an uncomfortable noise and jerked back from both touches. "Astounding," Vince agreed. "Even feels warm to the touch. Nathan." He gave a wary, mollifying nod.
"Guys," Audrey snapped, while Nathan was still spluttering and searching for some comeback. "They're alive. Landon's... magic... fixed them. Can we get past that, because we have other work still to do here?"
"What would that be, Officer Parker?" Vince still seemed just short of assaulting Nathan again in some way, and Nathan's face spoke of reprisal imminent if he did, but fortunately Vince turned instead to pay attention to Audrey.
"Jimmy Coggins. He might be dead, but I'm not so sure his Trouble is. We know that some Troubles have been passed down generations. I'm wondering if there's anything in your archives that could help us."
"People are still dying?" Dave asked.
"The same people who'd have been next in line before," Nathan filled in. "Landon was near ground zero, so for the time being we're keeping him with us. But we don't know how far this could spread. We need to shut this down fast, Dave. Vince."
"Well, then I certainly hope the Herald can tell you something." Dave looked at his computer and wiped at the sudden sheen of sweat on his bald head. His fingers picked nervously at the keys. "Coggins... let me see. I remember his father, Stuart. There was Mary Jenners before that. Now, she... She died in a fire. I remember that." Landon winced, unacknowledged.
"Ooh!" Vince's eyes bulged as he practically jumped up and down with excitement. "Mary, I remember. And poor old Stu. Then his brother, what was his name...?"
"Andy, you sieve-brained old oaf. Andy Coggins. He only ran the Haven Post Office for twenty years. I don't suppose you'll remember Mary's mother's name?" Dave didn't wait for Vince's bumbling brain-racking. "Here we go... births, 1937. Born to Enid and Barry Jenners. Let's take a look here now..."
The Teagues found, looking back, a relative who'd been a victim of a rash of food poisonings at a fete, another who'd been caught up in a mystery epidemic, and 'poor' Stu had been killed in a bus crash, where some sort of toxin had been presumed to be involved because some of the victims had no marks of injury. A string of mass 'mystery' deaths... Duke found himself shuddering, and all of them were temporarily silenced by the thought.
"One thing for certain," Dave said finally. "When this family go out, they take a lot of folks along on the ride with them."
"Funerals," Vince said, punching his brother in the arm. "You remember. Stu and Andy. After what had happened to Mary, we all found it strange how they'd write that into their wills."
Dave's eyes narrowed, clearly none the wiser. "Write what?"
"Cremation, damn it!" Vince jabbed his finger at the screen. "You go through those obituaries again. I'm thinking each of those people got burned up or got cremated. And Stu, he died at what, twenty-nine? Andy not much more than a year or two later. Little Jimmy got taken into foster care... Seems to me they never had chance to pass on the need to..." His voice descended into a hiss, "...Salt and burn the bones."
Duke stared at them as the two old men snickered and nudged one another. "What the hell?"
"Oh, nothing," Dave chuckled. "Just this TV show Vince is hooked on about two brothers, much like yours truly," he gave an expansive gesture over himself and Vince, and then air-quoted, "'hunting down the supernatural'."
"This is exciting," Vince said keenly. "You still got that nasty whisky you were moaning about Friday? Might come in handy!"
Duke rolled his eyes. Audrey pulled a very sour face and said flatly, "You guys are so not Sam and Dean."
Nathan looked blank. With a desperate bid to inject sense, he said, "You're saying the bodies need to be burned. If so, Jimmy Coggins is still in the morgue. We need to get back to him and finish this."
"Before anyone else dies," Audrey agreed, getting up. Her phone rang before she'd taken more than a step toward the door and she plucked it from her pocket and held it to her ear. "Yep? Chief?"
She listened a moment while Nathan's hands clenched and his frame leaned toward her, giving the odd aborted twitch like he wanted to grab the phone. Considering he was right there, Garland's own son, and the Chief had called his partner instead, Duke couldn't blame him for feeling conflicted.
Audrey had been sporting the pasty-white look ever since her faint, but Duke discovered it was still possible for her to turn paler. "Okay, Chief. Look--" Her eyes darted at Nathan. "We know why people are still dying. Jimmy Coggins' family were always cremated within forty-eight hours of death. We'll head over to the situation, but you need to go to the morgue and burn Jimmy's body."
Duke heard the sharp exclamation which met that suggestion from where he stood. Nathan snatched the phone from Audrey's hand and growled into it. "Dad, just do this one thing, damn it. Forget secrets and conspiracies and the damn cover-ups, or at least think about them later. You're the one with the authority to walk in and do this now. No-one knows how much of Haven's population this Trouble eats up if we don't stop it."
Nathan swore explosively and Duke realised he was holding a dead phone, on the verge of hurling it at something. Audrey quickly grabbed it back.
"Shit..." Nathan's burst of frustration ran down and he clutched his head, teeth bared in a fixed fury. "What did he even say?"
Audrey supplied, "He said, 'Those birds you fool kids are so interested in are flocking like it's the end of the goddamn world down on Auson Street.' We need to get back to Kale's neighbourhood. Fast."
***
Vince and Dave headed off in their ancient van to help Garland. All reasonable estimates indicated they would arrive long after everything was over, but they seemed sincere and convinced of their ability to help. Meanwhile, Nathan put his foot down and wrung record speeds out of Audrey's little rental car, taking them to Auson Street.
Where the sky was almost black.
"Don't suppose anyone has an umbrella?" Duke asked, as they sat in the car, staring at the bizarre tableau. The occasional splat on the pavement or the car's paintwork proved those were all real crows. "I'm just saying... I don't fancy getting out without one."
"I thought the local spin on that was that it was lucky," Audrey said.
"That's sea birds," Duke told her. "This is just birdshit."
"This a lot more birds than at Mr Garbutt's place," Nathan said, kicking his door open and climbing out. Ducking his head back down, he asked, "How many deaths does this herald?"
Duke thought he heard the softer sound of a splat landing on fabric before Nathan slammed the driver's door shut, but sighed and followed him out of the car anyway, holding one arm above his head as a shield. He kicked away a few interested crows that ventured too close. On the plus side, the birds didn't seem to have any more interest in Landon than their casually confused interest in Nathan and himself.
Auson Street was on the intersection at the end of the short road where Mortimer Kale had lived. Duke could see Kale's house if he looked that way, with its big gates and lengthy, grassy drive. "So here we are again." He shot a furtive glance at Nathan. "Place where we died, and everything."
"We were here yesterday morning," Nathan pointed out.
Yeah, but they hadn't known then. But Duke bit his lip and considered that it might be a lot healthier, in such circumstances as these, to have Nate's comparative lack of imagination. He didn't say that aloud because with a bit of luck he was still going to be able to command all of Nathan's attention later without having to jibe and pick at him to do it. His smart mouth was all well and good, but he still wanted to get laid.
People were out on their doorsteps, or the more sane or fastidious ones in their windows. Not a full complement for the neighbourhood, since there'd be people at work and school, and probably, hopefully, that meant they'd been at work and school when Jimmy's Trouble kicked in last Thursday. It could be worse. This much was bad enough.
"I sure as hell hope Julia and Garland are getting that body to an incinerator right now," Audrey said under her breath.
"Would it do any good to evacuate the area?" Nathan asked, blank tone indicating even he didn't believe it.
"It's not going to make a difference," Duke said, pointing at a guy who'd ventured out of his door and been mobbed by the crows. "You can already tell who's the next lucky number up just by the freakin' Hitchcock extras."
Nathan and Audrey charged in to help the guy and escort him back to the cover of his home. Audrey batted at the crows with her gun, and even loosed a shot, which startled the birds and set up a noise of raucous complaint and ripple of unease among the black clouds above and the crows lining the roofs and windows of the houses. Nathan didn't have his gun restored to him yet, but he took the opportunity of the brief clear patch around them to hustle crow-bait guy inside, shutting him in. Both cops then had to waft a few more birds away from Nathan. Duke hoped that Nathan couldn't draw the attention of the damn death Trouble back to himself.
"Over there," Landon said, grabbing Duke's shoulder. His face and voice were strained as he pointed to the corner across the road. "That's where I was when I saw the lady collapse up the street."
Nearer than this. Nearer than the houses the crows weren't interested in because everyone who'd been in them on Thursday was already dead. "Then I don't think you -- or we -- are in the line of fire for this," Duke said. It was a shock to him how small a comfort that actually was. "Just everyone else here."
"I was trying... trying to save her. Normally." He pulled a face. "Then I heard Audrey. She took me into the Kale place. There were so many bodies. You and Detective Wuornos, the family, the people out here... I thought, what if I could help?"
"I know, buddy." Duke squeezed Landon's shoulder back, understanding, now, the need to do something, anything, to lessen the horror. He thought of generations of Jimmy Coggins' family at the centre of mass killings, history repeating disaster again and again, and wondered how any of them could do anything other than just end it, living under that threat. Of course, Dave had suggested Jimmy hadn't even known.
Landon was giving him a startled stare, but Duke settled his eyes on Nathan again, feeling the relief and infinite possibilities of not being about to die. He might have indulged more time and thought to that, but... Yeah. They still didn't know how many corpses the end of this day would be strewn with, and that put a damper on even his and Nathan's version of romance.
A charged ripple went through the crows around them. Nathan was a way down the street, escorting some other curious cat back to safety, but turned and looked to the sky. Audrey was walking her way back to Duke and Landon by the car. She froze in her tracks in the middle of the street. "No!" she shouted, and her gun lowered in her hand as she started to shake. "No! It can't happen again..."
Duke could see it. Everything laid out. Every painful, bloody aspect of the decision she'd made in the face of horror, writ clear in her chalk-white face. Helplessness, and futile fury, in the face of a situation so shitty that none of her clever solutions would work. She could only patch up and salvage what she could. When Landon made his offer, she must have been desperate to claw back anything from that awful event.
Nathan was too far away. Duke ran to Audrey and folded her in his arms. The gun was somewhere down by his hip, but he counted on her cop instincts to be pointing it away from him and tried to ignore it as he crushed her to him, pushing her head into his shoulder. "Don't look." His voice broke. All these people... The bird-lined houses with no-one visible at door or windows, was that because the occupants were dead already? Or like Mr Garbutt, sick and dying? "It's not your fault. You couldn't do a damn thing more than you already did."
He tried his best to make himself a barrier against the world, to protect her from what was to follow.
But the ripple that passed through the clouds of crows transformed, mutating even as it spun out. Duke felt it, the force so sinister and malevolent it surely couldn't carry anything but doom within it... suddenly relax. In the space of a few seconds, the sky cleared, the darkness of a thousand black wings lifting to allow the sun to glimmer again through the patchy clouds.
"Oh, thank God," Duke mumbled into Audrey's hair, feeling his knees sag. She made a little noise of protest at abruptly finding herself holding most of his weight, and he quickly braced his legs again. "Julia and the Chief must have done it."
Audrey nodded and sniffed, still slightly squashed, but not complaining. Duke consciously relaxed his grip. Nathan, coming toward them at a run, skidded to a halt.
"You feel warm..." Audrey said, slowly, muffled. "I really can't tell."
"Well, you know what Nathan and I were up to earlier," Duke conceded, "and we couldn't tell. Although that's maybe not so surprising, with..." He caught a glimpse of Nathan's face and shut up.
A few more people were venturing out of their houses now the clouds of birds had gone, reassuringly curious and alive. Audrey pulled clear of Duke and heaved a shuddering breath, rubbing her arm over her face, holstering her gun. "We should... go knocking on doors," she said. "Make sure everyone's all right."
Nathan's phone rang. He plucked it out of his pocket and stared at the caller ID, his face twisting in puzzlement, before he slowly lifted it to his ear and hazarded, "Dad?"
Even Duke heard the expulsion of relief from the other end. Audrey, nearer, sniffed again and scrubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands, and mustered a dented smile.
"No, we don't think we lost anyone else," Nathan said. "Duke and I are fine... Yeah. We'll come back to the station as soon as we've mopped up here." He listened and said, "All right," a bit numbly, before he lowered the phone. "Chief's sending some officers," he said to Audrey.
None of them needed to point out that in the heat of the moment, when Garland Wuornos didn't know if his son was dead or... well, slightly-not-alive-but-at-least-still-around... he hadn't contemplated the delay, even of seconds, that he'd have had by continuing his policy of awkward avoidance. He'd gone straight to the source and called Nathan.
***
Minor chaos reigned for a while. Other officers arrived and Nathan, who was beginning to show some wear, dropped out of the action, though Audrey wouldn't contemplate leaving yet, and she had their wheels. Garland was presumably still busy with Julia, covering up a covert incineration and the fact the morgue was one body short.
Nathan wasn't Super-man; he collected the same damage as everyone else, even if he didn't feel it. Because he mostly didn't react to it, it was hard to remember that. Duke needed to remember that.
He caught up to where Nathan was standing -- leaning -- and took up his hand, because nobody was looking at them and no-one was dying, and he could. Nathan looked bewildered, but moved his feet compliantly as Duke led him through the big gates and into the grounds of the large house that had been Mortimer Kale's. Duke walked them out of sight of the street, pulled Nathan close and kissed him.
Nathan was startled and less reactive than usual, so it wasn't the most successful kiss ever. Duke pulled back from scraping their teeth together and held Nathan's face instead, rubbing his thumbs over sharp cheekbones... or the illusion of cheekbones (how did that even work?), but Nathan's face still felt real.
"So... this is the place where we died," Duke said slowly.
"That's romantic now?" Nathan asked, indistinctly, jaw moving as though he were still rolling the kiss around his tongue. Duke's belly fluttered weirdly as he realised Nathan didn't know how lousy a kiss that had been.
"It brought you back to me. That's if... you are back now, aren't you?"
Nathan's tongue licked his bottom lip, leaving a faint sheen of moisture that fixed Duke's gaze. "I'm back." So they would have time to practice the kissing. Nathan cleared his throat and shook himself. "Kinda wish now that I didn't have the rest of this... situation... to deal with, and we could just go home." Being Nathan he said 'situation' and not 'clusterfuck', while managing to make it sound like he was saying 'clusterfuck' anyway.
Duke buried his frustration beneath a laugh. "I don't think you were ever technically back on duty. You could say 'fuck it'. Or more to the point... 'fuck me'. Because I want you." He curled his hands around Nathan, let them slide down to his hips, and then grabbed his ass with enough gusto that even Nathan should know exactly what his hands were doing. "I want this. As soon as humanly possible. Please?" he tagged on as Nate's eyebrows rose.
Nate didn't shove him off, so he let his hands wander, concentrating on the front of Nathan's body, because maybe the guy couldn't feel, but his eyes sunk down and hyperactively took in every touch, until a spacey expression overtook his face. Maybe it was just as simple as making him feel wanted, and desirable, instead of broken. Duke's approach of the last few years, then, had definitely sucked.
"If we screw here--" Nathan jerked his head up, suddenly. "Is that romantic, too?"
"Uhm." Duke took a conscious step back, assessed the territory and its gloomy baggage, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. The thought of what had happened here sent a shudder through him. "Okay, maybe we're better off waiting until we get back to the Rouge."
***
At the station, Landon sewed up Nathan's arm, making exclamations of dismay about the cause of the damage, and Duke assiduously avoided watching him do it.
Instead, he poked with great focus at his own flesh; at the skin of his arm, or at least his skin covering an arm that looked real, felt real, but he knew wasn't real. He watched the skin distort with the pressure he applied, rippling out from his fingertip.
Looking up, he found Garland standing silent and closed-off in the doorway, watching him and watching Nathan. The grey eyes set in his wrinkled, grizzled face seemed to plead for Duke's silence, so he did nothing to acknowledge Garland's presence. Nathan was watching the repair job with his own morbid interest, detached but still fascinated. Landon pulled the needle through and... Duke turned away again.
By the time they'd finished, a row of neat stitches wound around Nathan's arm instead of an 'x' of tape, and Garland's face was set and gruff but not the lost, destroyed, helpless look it had worn to greater or lesser degree ever since they'd woken up dead. "You gonna start taking more care of that body, now you collect those marks like Frankenstein every time you take a knock?" he barked, startling Nathan and Landon.
"Frankenstein's monster," Duke corrected. "Jeeze, it's like no-one's ever actually read, or seen--" Maybe it wasn't the time for literary nitpicking. He shut up.
Nathan held up his arm and stared as though waiting for the stitches to fade away into flesh. They didn't. He sighed. "Yes, dad. I'm going to be careful."
"Well, just you see that you do. I'm damned if I'll have a patchwork police officer that can't pass for human. Even in this town."
Duke suspected that was meant to be Garland expressing affection.
"I'll be careful," Nathan said, irritated.
"It's the skin," Landon said, apologetically. "Once you damage the skin, it seems like it's damaged for good."
"I'll be careful," Nathan said again.
"You gonna be reporting in for duty tomorrow?" Garland asked it abruptly, after a bit of distracted looking this way and that and tapping the door jamb, trying to pretend the question was casual.
It really was no wonder Nathan was so emotionally unavailable.
But Nathan's face softened, understanding. They shared the same language, after all. "I'll be in."
"Good." Garland slapped his blunt hand a few more times on the door jamb, then took himself off in a hurry. Duke could hear the frantic click-click of his lighter and smell the first tang of a lit cigarette even as he walked away.
"It's going to take him... time, to come to terms with this, I imagine," Landon offered, trying to be supportive.
Nathan gave a noncommittal grunt. "Wait until I tell him I've started sleeping with Duke again."
***
"I can't believe it's taken us this long to get back to this," Duke groaned, practically hauling Nathan into the bedroom while his hands worked at his clothes. Why did Nathan have to be so buttoned-down?
Nathan, for all his observational and detecting skills, had seemed surprised to be grabbed the instant the doors of the Cape Rouge were closed on the outside world. He really ought to know better. After all, Duke wasn't made of stone, and after hours of having to behave around Nathan for the public audience, how was he expected to exercise restraint now?
Nathan wrested free from his attacking lips to ask, "What? Six hours? Or eighteen years?"
"Don't ask me to pick which was harder," Duke grunted. Nathan gave a bark of rare laughter and finally got his act together, reciprocating by dragging open Duke's pants. They got jeans and underwear down to knee-level before practicality forced them both to divert to take off shoes. Duke caught Nathan straightening up and unfastened his cuffs and a few buttons, then with a brusque order of "Hup!" pulled the whole shirt off over Nathan's head. Duke plunged them both onto the bed, pushing Nathan down into the soft give of the mattress with his arms still above his head.
Straddling Nathan, looking down, Duke experienced another of those glad-to-be-aliveish moments that had been landing on him with increasing regularity. Looking at Nathan, it crossed his mind that he didn't get this lucky, and that meant it was all by definition going to go horribly wrong -- until he remembered all the death and fucking taxidermy that had gone into making this moment possible, and his cynical psyche figured... yeah, okay, and was reassured. Everything was par-for-the-course and he was still in Haven.
The extended study caused Nate to draw in a long, shuddering breath beneath him. It was erotic as hell. But then Duke felt tension increase again in the body he was straddling. Since the events at the police station, Nathan had been quiet and compliant. It should have been obvious that wasn't going to last. Nathan squirmed and sat up between his legs.
Duke caught his shoulders before he got pushed off. "What is it?" For good measure, he leaned in, sliding one hand down to Nate's groin while he kept the other more or less where it was but stretched his thumb so the edge of the nail could scratch Nathan's nipple.
Nathan shut his eyes and turned his head aside, effectively excusing himself from proceedings. "We never told her."
"Told who what?" Duke asked with frustration.
"Audrey, damn it!" Nathan snapped. Duke's head jerked guiltily upwards... He maintained that he couldn't be blamed for a bout of Stupid, given the circumstances. "No, she's not there... But... She still thinks she's normal. She's Troubled, and we need to tell her."
"Is this really the time?" Duke cried out, exasperated, fighting Nathan again -- though all the leverage was already his and they shouldn't be having to fight anymore. So he'd thought. He closed his eyes and sighed. "Nathan. Sex. Now. We can deal with Audrey's issues another day. Which, if you ask me -- being immune to the fucking Troubles is a great Trouble. Probably the least lousy Trouble in existence. So stop sweating about her and worry about us."
Somewhat to his relief, Nate sagged back co-operatively again, looking between their bodies and swallowing hard at the sight of Duke's hand around his cock. But apparently he couldn't resist asking, mutinously, "You think she'll be okay?"
"Well, she's not a walking wall hanging, so she'll be fine." Duke wondered if Audrey Parker was thinking about them both together right now. Maybe the idea gave her some kind of comfort. If his charms had started to work on her, maybe it gave her a hint of jealousy.
...Enough thinking about Audrey Parker. He felt Nathan's surrender beneath him, and that wasn't something to let go to waste. After all, he had waited one hell of a long time for it.
"Where were we...?" He set fingers against the ridges of ribs that were only illusion, trying not to think about the illusion, and this time Nathan bucked underneath him and ground up into his hips. Nathan's hands rose to catch Duke's face, giving up his leverage to bring him into a kiss, eyes-open and fixed to Duke's. Nathan must have caught from his expression how close he was to losing it. The leap of near-telepathic intuition between them in the absence of half their collective nerve-endings caused enhanced arousal to shiver through both of them in response.
This was going to be a little bit odd.
Duke supposed he should accept odd as inevitable where Nathan Wuornos was involved. He framed Nathan's face with his hands in return and asked the question bluntly: "Are you going to let me fuck you?"
Earlier had been desperation and heat of the moment, and Nathan had taken the lead. This... Nathan had never liked surrendering control even back when they were kids, and here, now, they were approaching something that would require him to put on display all the places where he was broken, the compensations he had to make to live in a body that couldn't feel. That was a... sensitive issue between them.
When they were teenagers, Nathan's weird affliction had been in the past and they were so over that. It was a Thing They Did Not Speak Of. Different altogether to tackle it head-on as grown men.
Duke waited tensely through the seconds his question went unanswered. Until Nathan said, "It's what I've been waiting for all damn day. When are you going to get on with it?" Laughter bubbled up, shaking his long, slim body.
"You..." There wasn't a good enough insult in Duke's vocabulary for that moment Nathan lay back silent and let him hang.
But as though the particular note of frustration and anger he'd injected made the word 'you' an endearment, glazed-eyed and blissed-out, Nathan replied, "Duke."
"Hah." Duke groped for their improvised lube of earlier and scraped out a dollop. He kept his eyes locked to Nathan's as he climbed over him and pushed his fingers down to navigate unseen until they found their goal. The key had to be in not losing eye contact... not leaving Nathan floating without a clue in his unfeeling skin while Duke took his own pleasure.
...Of course, there were other things that Nate probably wanted to see. Duke watched his eyes slide slowly to Duke's erection, so very ready for this. The hunger that sparked in Nathan's blue irises left it impossible to form any other conclusion but hell yeah he wanted this.
Nathan was a man of few words but his face said, now.
Duke worked his fingers quicker, hurrying to finish preparation that he was definitely not scrimping on. He had unlikely but horrible visions of them fucking the stuffing out of each other, and... "Oh my God."
"Don't stop," Nathan growled, kicking him.
Duke groaned, and scissored his fingers one last time before withdrawing his hand. "Just a... a bad overabundance of imagination." They rearranged limbs until he had a whole lot of frustrated cop pressed beneath him and sinewy legs curled up past his shoulders. "You are so, so lucky you don't have that problem."
Nathan tipped his head up and wow, that glare was a doozy. "I can still decide to go home."
The idle threat sent an uneasy shiver through Duke all the same, but Nathan was curling hands around his neck and arm, clearly not going anywhere. After eighteen years and a lifetime... Duke swore as he lowered himself down and pressed slowly into Nathan. He watched the small movements and changes flicker in Nathan's face, and thought that he didn't look so much like a mannequin after all.
On the contrary, he looked like everything Duke needed to convince himself they could still be real.
It was a little awkward. Face to face, for the benefit of Nathan's eyes, out of practice, a fraction clumsy. Duke was too ready and Nathan wasn't ready enough, or at least lagged behind, sensation-impervious. Duke was forced to buy restitution with his head buried between Nathan's thighs, bobbing his mouth high to the tip of Nathan's cock and licking long and hard back down the length to make a visual show, until Nathan shuddered and curled his hands in Duke's hair as he came, making sounds he'd thought never to hear Nathan Wuornos make again.
He tasted as warm and real as he felt.
"That was... God..." Nathan lay back, his shudders slow to subside, numb body overwhelmed.
"I still prefer 'Duke'," Duke grinned, dopily, rolling and sprawling, stretching his languid, singing limbs atop the rumpled covers and staring at Nathan like he was a shiny present, and if he'd been in an anime he'd probably have big hearts in his eyes. It was sad. Really.
He couldn't help it.
He would have liked to imagine the anime hearts in Nathan's stare back, but was by no means that confident. Still, Nathan looked satisfied, and Duke thought proudly that he'd done that, made the unfeeling ass feel -- and this one was way, way better an achievement than all those years of affront and hurt and anger.
Nathan's toes played with his, lazily, and his eyelids drifted down, then jerked back up. "Are we really doing this? I mean--" Nate's face dipped shyly. It was almost cute, and Duke thought, holy shit, and he wasn't sure he could take any more moments like that in one evening. "We've been freaking out all day. Could be argued we're not in our right minds."
Duke appreciated that use of 'we'. Then again, Nathan freaking out was either Godzilla levels of destruction or completely impossible to tell apart from his normal demeanour, so who knew?
"Point: we don't, technically, even have minds." Freezer, Landon's workshop... not thinking about it... "Point two: I'm still freaking out. I'm just making the most of the compensation. Because we really, really have got to." He reached out and closed his fingers over the illusion of muscle in Nathan's thigh, the part of Nathan closest to his line of sight. Maybe that gesture came off needier than he'd intended. If he could just hold Nathan now, and somehow transfer that hold metaphysically, make it become a force to ensure Nathan would stay with him. In his bed, as often as possible. Duke tried, "Just because it's never worked before doesn't mean it can't work now."
Nathan's eyes laughed at him, though his voice carried dismissal in its rasp. "We were kids. Idiots."
"Oh, we're still idiots," Duke said, laying it on with a condescending level of reassurance.
A soft snort. "So this is how we manage our untimely demise."
"Together?" Duke picked up, raising his eyebrows in challenge because, well, it had been Nathan who'd said it, when he himself had no hope left to expect anything of the kind, after the hostility that had marked things between them for years. "There are worse things to be. Do not even get into the worse things," he added quickly. "Or what we are."
"It doesn't have to matter," Nathan said.
So Nate was still playing the denial game. Duke was going to have to try very, very hard to emulate him and not let it matter, lest he be stuck freaking out about his own body, trapped in the prison of his very fear. There was no escape from that except death or madness.
Judging from Landon and Piper Taylor, they could be around like this for a long time yet. This was far from over, and Duke was still very far from coming to terms with it.
But maybe, just maybe, with a Nathan to cling to he could find his way through.
A stuffed-comfort-toy joke coiled and readied and then died on his lips. Duke bit the end of his tongue hard and glared past Nathan to the wall with annoyance for his wayward brain.
...Too soon, damn it.
Way too soon.
END