FIC: [Haven] Eurydice's Adventures in the Underworld - R, Audrey/Nathan, Mara/Nathan/William

[roseveare]

Title: Eurydice's Adventures in the Underworld
Author: roseveare
Rating: R
Length: ~25,000 words
Summary: Mara and Nathan search for William on the other side of the gate.
Warnings: There are a lot of consent issues in this, on all sides.
Notes: Post-season 4. Mara/Nathan, Audrey/Nathan, Mara/Nathan/William.
Disclaimer: Not mine, no profit, yadda yadda yadda.
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Eurydice's Adventures in the Underworld


Prologue

"Mine. You're mine, too," William says, with unanticipated softness that does nothing to slow the panicked pounding of Nathan's heart. He can feel the pounding only because William is pressed so close against his back, that weight and heat as alarmingly present as Nathan's body suddenly is. But Audrey -- Mara -- is clamped to the front of him, delighted and cooing, stroking her hands over his sweating face, telling him he wants this, and he has nothing left to resist with. William breathes in his ear, "Everything Mara has she shares with me." He nuzzles kisses into the ridge of Nathan's jaw, and Mara's hands stroke and soothe and her voice whispers, "Shh." William's hips push hard, and his body makes the claim of his words.

Mara catches Nathan's sounds, sealing her mouth over his.

***

"First Mara," Audrey says, tapping her foot. "Now William, too?" She's wearing one of her old outfits -- a cheap pants suit and pale shirt -- and her hair is uncomplicatedly blonde, her face smooth and perkily uncreased by cares. She's not real. Nathan's been hallucinating her for days. Losing his mind is just one of the things he's had to deal with on this journey so far.

Without Mara or William touching him, Nathan can't feel any of the aches left by what they just did, and they both wisely left him alone at their little camp to watch the fire, while he simmers and occasionally flares even as the flames do, glaring at the rumpled blanket that was spread beneath them.

"That wasn't--" he rasps, bile rising. It wasn't exactly rape, because he could also have shoved an elbow in William's stomach and rolled away from them. But with all the touch overwhelming him, with Mara's touch overwhelming him... It was definitely of Mara's engineering, under duress. He plants his face in his palm and groans, and reminds himself he doesn't need to make real excuses to hallucinations.

"I know," Audrey soothes. It's slightly condescending and enough like the tone Mara used on him while smoothing the way for William to screw him to earn Nathan's glare. "Of course not. You just accidentally fell into Mara. The same way you accidentally fell onto William. And, hey, it was Sarah before them. Seriously, Nathan, just learn to say 'no'. Just because she's wearing my face doesn't mean you have to let someone lead you around by the--"

"You don't understand," Nathan hisses desperately. Hallucination-Audrey ought to already know this, but she's never quite complete or coherent, like he's only remembering her in distorted fragments. It seems to him that a product of his own brain ought to be more sympathetic and accommodating, but then again, the last time he fantasized Audrey she spanked him naked over a desk. "I told you, I need her. She did something to me." He scrapes at the collar of his grimy shirt, ready to pull it off to show her the handprints. He can't see them, but Mara has worked enough mischief that surely there's something there for Audrey to see.

Audrey shakes her head with what seems a deep, morose disappointment. "It's your choice. It's always your choice." She steps toward him and as her palm closes in to touch his face, she fades away.

Nathan shuts his eyes and shudders a shudder that's as much imagination and muscle-memory as Audrey Parker ever being there at all. The ghost can't touch him. She appears to him, to talk mostly, occasionally offer sympathy, usually when he can't sleep. Audrey is trapped somewhere inside Mara. She has been consumed by Mara, and Mara's return may have shredded her personality entirely. He might never speak to her again.

He forces himself to think about practical matters and goes to feed the fire. He entertains petty hopes that William and Mara don't find anything to eat, He can't feel the discomfort from hunger but they can. Then again, they might just come up with some new weird Trouble to give him, to make him provide them with food.

Nathan presses his knuckles into his forehead, boring them in as if by applying enough force he could make himself feel it. He's already five times the freak he was when he left Haven. Mara keeps promising to remove them, but she only removed one so far. Although most of his Troubles are helping their survival, so it's possible to argue their usefulness hasn't yet expired.

This place feels like someone stole the colours out of the world. The land is black, dry, dusty. It's scattered with white rock and bone. It's possible the white rock is also bone, so worn it's lost all shape and definition. The sky is white-grey, though it's beginning to tint red-orange now as two suns stretch out its sunset. It has animals, small ones, that can be caught and eaten. William, who's spent so much time in exile on these worlds, seems to regard this place as a safe base. Nathan could leave them both but would probably not last very long. They haven't seen anyone else remotely human, nor anyone they could communicate with. Mara and William aren't his allies, but he's better off staying where he is than embracing solitary madness.

He's not ready to regret his choice to be here. This way at least some of his sins are undone. By now, Haven is safe. Duke and Jennifer, Dwight and the others will have closed the way behind them. Mara and William are sealed in exile forever.

So is he.

***


1.

"Now. Who's going to help me get William back?" Mara asks, and the awful moment extends, swallowing up the world. Duke is -- Nathan doesn't even know what Duke is experiencing, except that what Audrey has become doesn't think anything of his chances. Jen is failing to respond to Dwight's attempts to resuscitate her; he must have crawled over there while Nathan's brain was whiting out with crushing loss at the very moment they'd thought they won. The Teagues are clutching each other looking stunned.

Nathan is apparently the only one really listening to Mara's question.

He points at Jennifer. "You need her."

Mara's calculating eyes aren't far enough removed from expressions he's seen Audrey wear in the past, and that discomforts him. "True," she says, and that part is surprisingly easy, although Nathan isn't expecting her to use Dwight to do it.

She turns and sneers at Nathan as he jerks his stiff legs into action, to move to stop her while her black palm is still only hovered over the back of Dwight's neck. Dwight's face is fixed but unresisting, his chin forward, but his eyes slide back to watch her in his peripheral vision. Mara says to Nathan, "Stop there, fool. Do you really think I could use you to heal anything?"

That freezes him in place. He hopes Dwight can forgive him the extra Trouble. Maybe it will even come in useful, though using it doesn't look like any kind of fun. When Jen gulps in air, panicked but awake, alive, eyes fluttering and clinging to a dizzy Dwight, it seems like a fair return.

As soon as she spies what's happening to Duke, she moves far faster than expected. "Don't touch him," Mara raps out harshly, which even Nathan can see is a waste of time.

"Oh my God! Duke, no. No, no, no! What's happening to him?" Jen turns to Mara. "Audrey...?"

Mara's brows raise. "No. Pay attention while you're unconscious."

Jen gives a little gasp and clings to Duke.

Dwight is getting up and moving toward Duke, too. Nathan grabs his shoulder and blocks him. Notices almost absently that his hands -- in fact, his whole body -- are shaking worse than Dwight is after the experience of using his healing Trouble for the first time. "Can Dwight heal Duke?" Nathan asks Mara.

"Not unless he wants to experience a hundred Troubles at once." Her mouth twists. Nathan thinks she would have let Dwight try just for her amusement. It hits Nathan abruptly that he'd only thought he didn't like Lexie wearing Audrey's face. This is worse.

Although part of what's worse is that Mara feels closer to Audrey than the facade of Lexie ever did.

"Duke," Nathan growls at her, holding her gaze, "is non-negotiable."

Her nose turns up. "Oh, you. I'm not going to get any sense out of Jennifer until he's no longer gibbering and bleeding from every orifice. Besides, he has something I want." She steps toward Duke and frowns at Jennifer. "If I were you, I really would get out of the way."

Dwight and Nathan pull Jen clear. She fights them with a few token shoves. "What the hell happened? I pass out for, what, thirty seconds, and... and this?"

Dwight asks, with what may be distraction or genuine concern, but Nathan can't pretend it's the biggest thing on his own mind at the moment, "You said something else came through the door?"

"I -- I -- it's not here now, Dwight. Duke!"

Mara's hand slides around Duke's jaw, forcing his mouth wide as he convulses. His eyes are open, but they're pools of red, seeing nothing. The blood on his lips daubs Mara's hand, but a moment later a torrent of those black spheres pours out, causing Nathan, Dwight and Jennifer to duck and stagger back. They cloud around Mara, and when she lifts her bloody fingers to flip open the breast pocket of Audrey's jacket, they flow down and stash themselves impossibly there. There shouldn't be enough room, but they don't even bulk out the fabric.

"Duke?" Nathan says uncertainly. Duke looks blind, blinking and wavering on his knees, half propped up against Mara's thigh. Mara steps back from him unheeding and he slumps over. Jen lunges forward to catch him.

"He's alive!" Her hands pat at his cheeks, frantically tugging and pulling on him.

"Of course he is," Mara says scornfully. She waggles a finger toward Duke and Jennifer for Nathan's benefit. "This can be undone in seconds. You owe me, Nathan. I'm not leaving William in that place one moment longer than I have to."

"Now?" Nathan catches Dwight's eye and hopes they're on the same page. "I'll help you," he allows. "Just me. You leave them all out of this now."

Mara tips her head and smiles. "I expected no less."

"Jennifer," Nathan says, and has to repeat her name until it penetrates enough to lift her head from Duke. "Can you open the portal again without William?"

Dave moans and jerks from Vince's grip, trying to crawl toward the steps.

"I can open it without any of them," Jennifer says. "The soft spot has been disturbed. It can't be completely shut... not by me, anyway."

That news isn't good for his plans.

"But I won't," she hisses, glaring at Mara. "You can't make me. We all just risked our lives to send that creep away."

"Jennifer." Nathan tries to catch her gaze. They may have got rid of William, but now they're stuck with Mara, who may be just as bad. Who may be worse. Nathan does not think he is capable of killing Mara, and he's not able to contemplate living without Audrey. If all that's left of her in the world is trapped inside Mara, then he'll take this. He'll do this. When so much of what's happened is his fault... in the end, it's the best solution he has.

In any case, Mara pissed off and alone may be worse that Mara and William together.

"Jennifer, do it," Dwight urges. "We have no choice now."

"We do!" she retorts. "We do have a choice." Jen has never particularly listened to Nathan. "I can choose to tell you to shove this book up your--" She brandishes the book at Mara, whose eyes spark dangerously.

"Little girl," Mara says. "Understand what is happening here. Nathan and I are playing a game. He thinks that if we go through the portal together, neither of us is coming back." She looks at him and raises her eyebrows with great amusement. "I would have pretended for the sake of his pride, poor thing. Never mind." Dwight shoots an 'oh shit' look back at Nathan over his shoulder. "I am content to challenge the assumption that Crocker will let any such thing happen. Now, open the door." She points imperiously, and pulls a face at the antics of the Teagues. "Oh, for goodness sake. She told you that you could go. Help them," she orders Dwight.

Dwight hesitates, looking back with his arms under Dave's. "Nathan..."

"Nathan is my foot soldier, now." Mara's smile is sickly. "Say 'goodbye' nicely, boys."

They exchange a tense look instead. Then Dwight is gone, and there's just Nathan and Mara and Jen. The mostly-unconscious, feebly-stirring Duke on the floor barely counts. Jennifer is shaking with frustration and anger, and she keeps having to drag herself back from checking on Duke.

"Do it," Nathan tells her, rougher than he intended.

"Hasty," Mara berates. "First things first." She pops a black sphere from her pocket, making it dance in the air above her splayed fingers. "Now, let's see..." She tips her head on its side, regarding him, before smugly nodding and telling him, "Open your shirt."

"Nathan, don't let her," Jen urges.

Mara points a finger. "Shh."

Nathan opens his shirt. "What are you going to do?"

"We may need fast protection when we get there. I'm going to give you some defences. Don't worry. This won't hurt." Her smile curls. "It wouldn't hurt anyway... Oh, but this one will be a masterpiece. Such a perfect intersection of personality and power."

She places her hand on his chest. Nathan feels her palm, but that's all. He doesn't feel her do anything, and doesn't see anything either. He barely knows she's done it except from the addict's hunger fading to a sated afterglow in her eyes.

Jennifer is looking annoyed and judgemental. Beyond her, Duke's eyes are open, still very red, but Nathan can pick out the darker shapes of pupils and irises again, can see focus and clarity gathering there. Duke saw that.

Good. Mara's confidence can't shake Nathan's convictions. Duke will know what to do. He understands necessity.

Mara re-fastens some buttons and steps back. She instructs Jen, "Now you can do it."

Jennifer lifts up the book. She glares at Nathan like it's his fault and, well, it is, but the chain of cause and consequence is rather long by now.

Duke pushes sluggishly at the floor and says, "Nathan, don't." It tugs at something inside Nathan's chest, but Dwight will explain things, even if Jen doesn't. Dwight will explain everything.

"Jen, no," Duke changes his focus as she raises the book, desperation taking over his pale features. "Last time you did this--"

This time, it doesn't look anywhere near so difficult or complex as it did last time. "Dwight can help her if anything happens," Nathan says, hoping it doesn't prove necessary. Duke doesn't understand because he was out of the loop for that part, but right now he's too weak to put up a fight.

Duke grunts, rising to his feet with monumental effort. He's wavering, pissed off and determined. "Damn it, Nathan, after everything that's happened, I can't believe you'd just--"

After everything that has happened, Nathan can't very well do anything else. "Quickly!" he snaps at Jen, who doesn't want Duke any more involved in this, either, and with that imperative, the trapdoor starts to open.

It's all much quicker than before. Nathan clings to the fact Jen is the one who knows about the portal and she seemed confident that if she refused to open it Mara would not get it open any other way, even if the door is less secure than it used to be.

Mara is smiling and Duke is too slow, too damaged. Nathan intends to wipe the smile off Mara's face. The portal is wide enough now to take both of them. He lunges at her in a diving tackle that carries them through.

Dizzying confusion swallows his consciousness. The last thing he hears is Duke's despairing cry.

***

Fingers jab at Nathan's chest, at his jaw, and the fact he knows that narrows the options for who's doing it. A slap rings out; sharp, weird sting across his face. The only other pain he's felt in months was when William punched him.

This isn't William. The buzzing in his ears settles a bit, allows him to better distinguish sound. His blinking eyes can't pick out anything that makes sense at first. For a while there, everything was white light and white noise. Nathan relies more on sight and sound than regular people. Sense-deprivation or sensory overload or both -- he isn't certain how best to label it, but it flattened him, reducing him temporarily to nothing but floating consciousness.

Mara's fingers pry him out of it. "Wake up, you useless worm..."

He opens his eyes, staring up at her. Her clothes are marked by dust, pale and dark patches, and her face is red with anger. "You didn't need to do that so roughly," she snarls, and he remembers his dive with her between worlds. Well, he wasn't going to let her shove him in with some instruction to "fetch", to discover she'd lied about the nature of her deal. "Now get up and fight."

What?

It's only then Nathan realises they're surrounded by creatures who... his brain tags them as 'bone men', although it's more an exoskeleton and they don't really look like men. They're bipedal, approximately seven feet tall, and might have two eyes and a mouth hidden in what could loosely be called their faces.

Nathan realises he still has his gun and draws it. He points it their way as he scrambles upright. Their demeanour shows hints of interest, but they don't stop. He fires a shot into the ground at their feet to teach them caution, but Mara curses him. "Don't waste ammunition, stop them. I gave you everything you need!"

"What?" Nathan asks stupidly. He blinks over his shoulder at her, then swiftly turns back. Aliens... check. "No guessing games, Mara. Now would be the time to explain."

She sighs exaggeratedly. "It's an invisible wall of force that blocks out everyone and everything. I wonder where in your psyche that Trouble takes its roots, Nathan."

"So how do I--" Nathan nervously backs up a step as the bone men venture too close for comfort, and the foremost bounces off a barrier he can't see. Abruptly Nathan feels it, not with his dead nervous system, but like an extension of his thoughts, an immovable block sitting heavily in his mind. "...Control it..." His voice cracks and it's no longer a question, more like an urgent demand of himself, as he and the barrier seem to mesh together, and the walls slam down all around him. It flattens the bone men on the way. Suddenly he starts wondering -- can he breathe, thus encased? Control isn't there. His panicked thoughts cascade and he feels the walls build up thicker and thicker, his instincts responding to threat. He can see from the way the invisible barrier shifts the dust on the ground that it's right up to his skin and extends maybe ten feet around him. The air tastes stale.

...This is a Trouble, after all. Mara's trying to use it like a tool for her purposes, but Nathan's never seen a Trouble that wouldn't screw you over when it could. Control has never been that much a factor.

Movement stirs behind him and the whole thing collapses as Mara's nails dig into his arm. "Stop making such a drama of it. I made you Sue Storm, not some eldritch abomination." Her tone clearly suggests that the other option is still open, if Nathan doesn't pull himself together to her satisfaction.

It gives him some pause that Mara reads Marvel comics, mainly because he's pretty sure that must have come from Audrey. It could be Lexie or Lucy, but Audrey was the pop culture geek.

"Just breathe," Mara says, and while she's touching him, she's like a breaker on the fields wanting to fly off from him in all directions. "And now run," she adds, blithely low-key. "Before they get up."

"Can I turn invisible?" Nathan gulps as he pounds after her, distractedly looking back to the bone men, wondering if he hurt any of them -- their appearance might be freakish, but for all he knows they approached to say 'hello'. It all happened too quickly for rational thought, and Mara's demands have been leading his brain, but now that he thinks about it, they didn't have anything resembling weapons, and seemed more curious than anything else. "Can I fly?"

"No," she snaps, pissed off. "You're just an impenetrable wall, Nathan. Deal with it."

She looks strained and very much not-invulnerable. She's not Audrey, but at the moment, the mask of aloof evil she's worn since emerging in the lighthouse and dismissively declaring Duke as good as dead is definitely askew. Nathan has an odd sense that more time may have passed while he was out of things than he can definitively pin down.

However strained, he's sure that he's worse-off than she is. He can sense the walls wanting to press down around him the moment her pincer grip leaves his arm. He has always been passively numb; never had to fear carrying around a Trouble that lurks in readiness to endanger everyone around him. Suddenly he has a lot more sympathy for Duke.

They're running over sandy scrubland, where he has to watch his feet around the occasional thick tufts of alien grass. There's nothing much as far as the eye can see, but at the same time... "This isn't the place on the other side of the trapdoor," Nathan says groggily, not understanding.

"You were catatonic in the void," Mara says. "We need to get out of this world. William isn't here."

"How can you be so--"

"I know, Nathan." She stretches her red smile and shows her teeth at his displeasure being reminded of their 'connection'. She lets her grip fall from his arm and Nathan grabs desperately to reclaim her touch. Her hand is small and hot with sweat, and it's Audrey's hand.

"Don't let go," he begs. The shield is going to slam down and suffocate him without her driving it back.

She swears at him, but lets him keep her hand. It saves her a moment later, as she almost takes a tumble on the uneven ground, but she doesn't acknowledge that. "We need to find the soft spot again. There was some displacement when we came out of the void." She glowers at Nathan. "I would have been able to pay more attention if I hadn't had to hold onto you."

Glaring at him, her expression suddenly clears. "But you... you're good at finding things, Detective..."

The next instant, they've stumbled to a halt and her hands are tearing at his shirt, while Nathan tries to catch her wrists and shove her back. "No more Troubles!" He already has two, when he didn't even know that was possible, and he can't control the newest.

"It will be harmless," she hisses, "and we need it. You're useless to me if you won't. I might as well abandon you here, unable to navigate the void without me, lost forever. Why would I accept your company, except to make use of this?" She sneers into his face, enjoying his shock. "You think you can double-cross me, but I still need a canvas, even if it's an inferior one. I can't Trouble myself."

He didn't see her crush the sphere, but the words get through his defences. Suddenly her palm is splayed against his chest. Nathan averts his eyes. Mara grabs his face and drags his gaze back to her. "We need an exit."

The question lights up inside his head, that way, and he presses his lips together and dumbly points. Mara nods her satisfaction and drags again on his arm.

Nathan's newest curse leads them to a glimmering patch in the air. He supposes not every otherworldly portal can be hidden and enclosed. Maybe this world just doesn't care enough. Maybe there's no infrastructure here, or dimension-crossing magical portals are too commonplace to bother.

Either way, they've made it. Shouts from behind turn their heads. Figures on the horizon are catching up, and whether their approach was initially benign or not, they don't seem happy now.

"Go!" commands Mara, and they jump into the twisting colours. Nathan sees Mara's hair stretch out behind her, seeming to defy space and gravity as time slows down. Then he disappears, a white-out on his senses. He pins all his focus onto Mara's grasp on his arm and tries to hold that focus. The next thing he knows, she's pulling him out of the light and noise, and they're tripping and falling on bare rock. Nathan watches, feeling very removed from it all, as a sharp edge strips skin from his arm. Then he shakes himself clear of the last threads of confusion.

"Better," Mara says, critically. She stands, brushing off her clothes, looking around.

She isn't touching him anymore. Nathan crouches and draws breaths in rasps, trying to force that rhythm into something steady. Safe, he tells himself. The forcefields are a threat response. He doesn't need them. Mara brought them somewhere safe.

He doesn't know that, but isn't looking around and telling himself any different until he has this under control. He clings on all fours to the ground, the solidity of gravity cradling his sense of balance even if he can't feel rock beneath his hands. He even wishes he'd paid more attention to Duke's faddy meditation ideas. For the Driscolls, control was all about breathing. This is like claustrophobia in reverse. He can get a hold of it.

Nathan becomes aware of Mara's voice at his back, rolling out soothing tones to match the rhythm he's trying to capture in breath. "That's it... slowly... You alone control this..." As he wins back self-control by inches, she finally steps away. He watches her feet move around him. She stops and her finger reaches out to tap his chin up to look at her. "It isn't a curse."

"Fine," Nathan growls. "It's a tool, and it's back in the box. Where are we now?" He wrenches up onto his feet, yanking his sleeve down and buttoning it over the graze. She just helped him and there's no real reason for him to be so angry with her, except she witnessed that, and she's not Audrey.

"A world I saw in William's mind." Mara is unconcerned by his hostility. "He isn't here." She looks perturbed. "But perhaps we should use this as an opportunity to gather ourselves, while it seems safe to do so."

They're on top of a cliff. Nathan wavers on his feet when he turns around and sees the expanse beneath them, but even if it's a long way down, they're at least six feet from the edge. The view is incredible and holds no trace of civilisation.

"I thought William was a prisoner in the void," he says.

"William was exiled through the void," Mara corrects. "The Barn functioned as both the door and the guard of his prison."

"Then the lighthouse--?" Nathan starts.

"Such portals exist everywhere. The Barn was purpose-made, but the soft spot exists naturally. Our world is locked tight from intrusion -- not only, or even primarily, from William. Without its purposeful activation, it would have been impossible to use that route. But all these backwards, brutal or empty worlds aren't locked down in any such a way."

"Audrey said she first met William in the Barn."

She smiles. "You're the one who let him in. Congratulations, Nathan You shot the prison warden."

Nathan has regretted gunning down Howard far too often in the past eight months to react with much more than a grunt now. "Doesn't seem like much of a punishment, having the run of all these worlds while you were made to stay behind and fix what you'd done, as all--" As all those different women. As Audrey. Nathan's vision blurs with moisture.

Mara rolls her eyes. "He was parted from me for centuries. At least for all my long years in exile, I didn't know what I was missing. Although--" Her eyes flare. "I don't know whether to thank you or gut you for killing Howard. It means I don't get to do it with my own hands."

Nathan grimaces at the hate distorting her face, and has to remind himself again that she's not Audrey.

Howard, had he been a bit less smugly mocking of Nathan's helplessness to save Audrey, might still be alive. "We wouldn't be here." He glares at Mara. She is dust-coated, scraped-up and tired, as he must be. He wonders if that smile persists in hanging around her lips purely to torment him, or it's the thought of finding William that bolsters it.

It isn't fair. They were so close. William gone, and okay, the Troubles were still around, but at least without William to stir things up they'd just be the old Troubles they were used to. Without William to distract them, maybe they could have found a better solution. Audrey had almost had a chance.

Now, Nathan has to wonder if any part of Audrey still remains. It's that which drives him to push, saying to Mara, "You still remember them, obviously -- Audrey's memories."

She smiles her false, wide smile just for him. "I remember that you love me... No matter who or what I am."

She gropes a hand up for his face. He jerks away from the caress of her fingers but he's too close to the cliff edge to back off again as she catches him by the belt and the front of his shirt, and leans up to plant a mocking kiss.

***

Nathan Wuornos is not the tool Mara would have chosen. There's an infuriating rigidity in him that seems designed to resist her best efforts. Hendrickson or Crocker would have made for more versatile raw materials, if she were empowering either of them with skills to aid their journey. Nathan's a far narrower set of possibilities, and even those would be nigh impossible to ferret out if she didn't know him so well.

Therein lies the other problem. He has been far too close for comfort to other personalities she's been forced to wear. She remembers him in bed. She remembers loving him, as if she could love him as an equal and that thought were not laughable. He has done things to her that some part of her would strike him dead for, if other parts wouldn't so violently protest such an action.

That, too, is an infringement on her soul.

She has not been Mara for many, many years. There are forgotten moments, inside the Barn, inactive, in the waiting period between Troubles, where she could feel William on the edge of her thoughts... She remembers those now, with everything else. William reached out and tried to touch her from so very far away. Right now, he is not here, she cannot feel him, and his loss is an ache.

She tells herself that the Barn straddled the void. That's why she could feel him then, and can't now. His mind cries out for her still, but she cannot hear it because worlds separate them.

That doesn't explain why she couldn't hear him when she was in the void. It could be Nathan's fault because she was struggling so hard to hold onto him and bring him with her at the time.

Nathan asks something else annoying, the answer to which is self-evident, and Mara would leave him behind if she could. He's a treacherous fool, waiting for his chance to screw her over in favour of a woman who never existed. Who the hell does he think Audrey Parker was? Memories might invoke habit, in the absence of real self-awareness, but that was still a mask she wore. Unknowing and unwilling, framed with the skills and impulse to help these flies, but still Mara underneath.

Mara remembers. Everything.

In 1955 she is Sarah returned from the war, witnessing things that she was aware, even then, didn't shock her so much as they should have, for she has seen so many things before, and still knew it somewhere on a deeper level. Nathan Wuornos is out of time and ridiculous as the first man she meets in town, and she feels the attraction almost instantly as her anger wears off. Her inhibitions are low and it has been such a long, long time.

She can't help but wonder what Howard thought about the baby. Mara's fingernails break the skin of her palms as she contemplates it. Was he sorry? It can't have been part of the Barn's intent for such things to happen. In her memory she holds in her arms the fragile form she'd had to leave behind and holds the dying body of the man he became, and she wants very badly to kill someone.

In 2010 she meets Nathan for the second time, not knowing it. All the months as partners and friends... until they are together again, her legs wrapped around him, he moving inside her.

There are too many memories, too many pieces of her. She has only been Mara again for a matter of hours, and they have not been quiet hours. She needs time and cannot afford to take any. Where is William? Is he too incapacitated to feel her mind's call? Unconscious? Wounded? He can heal himself but it takes will and focus to do so. Pain or oblivion could set him back.

"Mara," Nathan says, with increasing harshness. "Mara."

She hates the way he speaks her name like he wants to speak another one and doesn't have the decency to be subtle about it. Doesn't he grasp that this body was always hers?

"Shut up," she tells him fiercely. A black sphere dances unconsciously above her raised hand and he backs off. At least his fear amuses her.

But he plants his feet and states stubbornly, "We're there."

So they are. She puts the sphere away and peers down over the cliff edge. The distortion of the soft spot hovers a few feet shy of the rock face.

Mara stops and strives for clarity of thought. If William is indisposed and cannot answer, she would yet know if he were on this world. They have no reason to stay except to prolong their safety, and the thought of William in need won't allow her to do that.

"I suppose we try not to miss," she declares to Nathan, raising her eyes from the drop. One push would do it, she thinks, but both of them find the mark. She stumbles to her knees in the void, ill-balanced to meet solid ground after the plunge. Nathan lands full-length beside her with a whump of noise.

In the void, Nathan is crippled by the incapacity of his senses. The void, above all, is a place where you feel your way. So much information is transmitted through the skin, the pulse and flow of energy, the currents to follow to find the routes to other worlds. He gets to his knees this time and freezes there, seeing only light too bright to function in and hearing only the buzz of energies flowing around them. She could do something about that, possibly, but she likes the way he's forced to react to her touch, hers and hers alone, and it might detract from his function at other times. He is used to being a blank. She can manage for them both in the void, in exchange for a foot soldier who can fight and never feel the damage.

This time around, he stays still and tips his head cautiously, near-blind, near-deaf, tracing the geography with what he has. His face zeroes in on her unerringly, though his eyes aren't focused. Perhaps he can smell her. She wrinkles her nose, because much running around has been done since Audrey Parker last showered. Nathan's eyes close. He waits for her.

She reaches out and takes his wrist in her hand, pulls him up with her. If he were able to hear her say, "Good boy," as he starts to plod trustingly where she pulls him, he'd probably react less sedately to those words and that tone. Having him obediently at heel is a much-improved situation from fighting him or hauling him around. The idea is pleasing, after what he's had from her.

Mara examines the possibilities of keeping Nathan while searching the currents leading out to different worlds for places she recognises from William's mind. She still doesn't sense William, and they were only together again with their hands touching for a split second before cruel Nathan broke them apart, so the impressions are fleeting and jumbled, not nearly so useful as she let Nathan believe. Nonetheless, she picks a world and sets their course with her intent. Their next step carries them along the current and into normal--

--Night. It's dark where they've come to, and William still isn't here. A very big moon looms above, and tree branches sway in a light wind. The ground crunches beneath their feet and Nathan breaks from her and stares around. The moonlight falls on his fine-featured face.

Apparently navigating the void takes it out of you. Mara feels exhausted. She shook it off before -- perhaps unwisely, since they were safer, unassailable from their vantage point, in the last world -- but now she definitely needs replenishing.

"I'm hungry," she tells Nathan. "Scout the area and search for food while I build a fire."

He stares at her, apparently feeling no such waning of energy. Of course not -- presumably he keeps going until his body gives out. "I'm not your henchman," he says distastefully, narrow-eyed.

"Do it or don't do it," she snaps, having no patience with his attempts to resist the natural order of things between them. "I am lighting the fire. We need warmth. We need to eat."

Nathan draws his pistol and goes. He's not without craft there, ghosting into the trees. The whistles, rustles and howls of animal life prove they're not alone. Mara shivers and regrets being so quick to send him away. Being herself again gives her no extra strength, though she has Audrey's skills and one small gun to protect her. She would rather leave the lowly tasks to Nathan.

She focuses on the fire until the flames leap, warming her hands.

She has annoyed Nathan, and he is gone a long time. (She refuses to entertain other options.) She doesn't hear any gunshots. When he eventually does come back, he's caught some small, grey, furred creature with a passing resemblance to rabbit or squirrel.

Mara raises her brows at him. All that time for Benjamin Bunny?

He mistakes her and responds, "I used the forcefields. Watched and waited. Walled it in. Asphyxiated it."

Mara is surprised he risked that. But it was wise, both not to waste ammunition, and to avoid the possibility of bringing attention down on them with a shot. That he knew it was a risk is clear from the way his limbs are still trembling faintly now.

"I have to learn to control it," he adds defensively.

"Sit down." She wants to order him to cook the unrabbit, but suspects he would make a mess of it, and she would rather eat.

Time passes. She watches Nathan sprawl out and maybe sleep, but wouldn't put it past him to fake in the belief she'll do something somehow incriminating or terrible when she thinks he's unaware. They are forced to be allies, at the moment. She needs him to help her find William. When she finds William...

Well. Mara is not completely decided upon what will happen then. Something inside her, a resistance that she doesn't want to examine too closely, kicks up a fierce rebellion at the idea of hurting Nathan.

She nudges him awake -- maybe -- and they eat. He does so mechanically. She remembers the distant ancestor she created his Trouble for, and why she created it, and the thought makes her pensive, but she also remembers specifically how his Trouble works. Nathan needs the food as much as she, but can't feel that he needs it, and certainly the flavour gives him no reason to care. Mara wishes she had no sense of taste, but the immediate problem of hunger is resolved. Her mouth is dry, but there is no solution for that but to suck the juices from the remnant of the roasted carcass, which at least are plentiful.

She decides, with her thoughts still grey and floating with too much exertion, that she'll sleep before looking for water. But there is still something else she needs to do before that.

When she tries to lay a hand on Nathan, he reacts violently, twisting to avoid her at the same time as shoving her away so hard she falls, barely missing the fire. "Don't touch me. I know you're not Audrey."

He looks a little bit sorry as she picks herself up, but she's reassured by his reaction and the new scrapes and bruises on her body, burning their outrage. He is too volatile, too injured, hurting and raw, to trust in his co-operation alone, that he'll follow Audrey's body and continue to do as Audrey's lips say. It seals her need to do this, before she sleeps in his presence.

"Audrey was a set of memories," Mara poses. "Memories I still have. Nathan, nothing was erased by William's touch. I only remembered who and what I really am."

While he dawdled, she has had more time to sift through and integrate those memories. Beginning with Audrey, since Audrey is most relevant to her situation now, and will offer the most clues of how best to use Nathan. The rest she has closed down into tight packages in her brain, to unpick one by one when she has the chance. Realistically, she may not need to reabsorb any of them, but sitting on them indefinitely is bound to cause problems, and they will remain in her subconscious however hard she tries to lock them out at the surface. Besides, she wants to know what she's been doing all these years. Careless enough to let your body go wandering without you. Foolishly blinkered not to find out where it's been.

Nathan stares at her like he's dancing around the connection but doesn't want to make it.

"I am Audrey, Nathan." She strikes the point home without mercy. "You can never 'bring Audrey back'. She is already here, and there isn't any power left in the world that can take Mara away again."

"That's not true," he mumbles, looking away.

"You told me you love me." She's worked her way close enough to touch his face. She hopes he won't add to her bruises again.

"We were talking about Lexie, then, not some..." he jerks his hands helplessly at her. "Whatever you are. Ancient evil."

"A promise is a promise, Nathan. No pancakes in this wilderness, but it's still you and me... more or less." More. Mara is more. She had never imagined, as Audrey, how much more she could be.

She has shattered him sufficiently that he only shudders and closes his eyes at the touch of her hand on his face. She leans in and kisses him. He tastes of their meal, but at least they both ate the same.

"It's still me..." she whispers, and his resolve collapses as she strokes her hand ever so gently over his jaw.

"Audrey...?" It's a sob, and his chest heaves in time to meet her other hand, sliding under his shirt and firmly pressing, pushing down over his heart and placing the seal that should fix her Nathan problem. His need is already rolling out of him in waves, so tangible and sickening... She locks it now into the fibres of his being and hisses triumph into his mouth as the breath rushes out of him and his eyes fly open.

He pulls away from her and drops onto his knees, gaze locked to her blackened palm. "What did you do?"

"Guess."

"I already have three Troubles," he chokes, chest jumping with his swift panic. He screws his eyes shut and ducks his head, burying his fingertips in the dirt as he battles something -- the forcefield Trouble spiralling out of control again. "That's not enough?"

"Four," Mara corrects.

"I said no more!"

"It's already done."

With a growl, he flings himself at her. Panic takes her, fleetingly, as his body covers hers and presses her down, hard enough to form more bruises. His hands curl and yank in her hair. For a moment, she thinks he's still going to hit her. The rage in his blue eyes is extraordinary in its violence. She remembers again his ancestors, from Max Hanson all the way back to the first, and wonders what possessed her to get close to that lineage.

Then confusion blurs the clarity and intent in his eyes. He leans down and sniffs at her neck, delicately at first, a quick and darting motion, then shoves his face against her skin and inhales her thoroughly. "Oh, God..." he groans, indistinctly, sounding like a man drugged. A moment later Mara is laughing as he laps at her skin, his hands sliding up under her shirt, loving again, worshipful in a way that would never hurt her.

Less mirthfully, she reaches in and grips his wrists hard. "Don't you dare tear these clothes." They're the only ones she has. Sooner or later, she needs to do something about that, too. They need supplies of all kinds. Trying to get them from alien peoples whose languages they don't speak only seems like a way to find trouble.

Nathan is breathing shakily. She set the ground-rule, and he has no choice but to listen. She has been lucky, really, that this Trouble works as intended. She was tired, and it's only the sixth or so that she's made in centuries, leaving the door wide open for any number of things to go wrong. It was also tediously complex to fine-tune it to bind him to her by physical stimuli, in such a way that her touch won't negate it and render it useless. "What did you do... to me?" he gulps. His eyes can't leave her, an addict's haze in them, but still, also, horrified awareness that he doesn't want this.

"You need me," Mara tells him. She slides both their hands down to her waist, and lets his go, then unfastens Audrey's cumbersome jeans. His hands shake as they pull on the denim, dragging it to her ankles, carefully sliding free her shoes and then removing the thick fabric over her feet.

He makes a wordless noise of affirmative, raises his head and awaits her nod of permission before he buries his face between her thighs. Mara wraps her fingers in his hair and bends her knees wide, and pushes him firmly down. She laughs and gasps as his needy mouth goes to town.

Occasionally he twitches like he's trying to pull away, and his trembles tell her that intellectually, he wants to stop, but can't, and that only makes it more delightful.

His tongue delves her sex until they're both sated. After that, her tiredness takes over and she cuddles into him, his body large, warm, tamed, and hers again. She rests safe and pleased in the knowledge that the biggest threat to her has been conquered.

***

Mara wakes in dawn colours to find a furious Nathan stamping around the camp and kicking out the remnant of the fire. The look he directs at her is pure fury, and he averts his eyes before it can turn into anything else.

"My rules," he growls at her groggy early-morning state, closing his eyes as he faces her. "You don't give me a single further Trouble unless we can't survive without it, and without clearing what it is with me first. Because if this happens again, I'm walking away."

She looks at the world, unknown, stretching around them. Being alone might spell death for either of them. She has no powers if she has no clay to sculpt them upon. It would mean his death, too, but in that moment, she cannot doubt that he means it.

"You're not Audrey." He scowls hate at her. "Audrey would never have done that. Audrey was -- Audrey was in love with me."

He turns roughly away from her, and she pouts at his back and keeps her mouth closed on reiterating how all his assumptions are wrong.

There is no need for him to fully understand what that means, and it's probably better that he doesn't.

He might struggle, but he can't escape. Her touch, even her nearness, can turn him against himself now. She was optimistic to think it would be simple. Of course he would fight her. But his stubbornness is of no consequence, when he cannot win.

***



2.

Nathan sleeps in a sated, narcotic haze with Mara in his arms. There were things he tried, that winter on the run when he believed Duke dead and Audrey gone, that had similar effect, but none of them were so powerful. As the hours pass and the sky starts to lighten, he's aware of waking in fits and starts from increasingly disturbed dreams, as his subconscious frantically kicks in and resists the thrall. Then he inhales Mara, buries his face in her hair, and it's all over. He sleeps again. A few times he's aware of her moving, tightening her arms around him. She's effectively using him as mattress, pillow and hot water bottle all in one.

The cycle is broken finally by a voice he hears as sharply as if someone had spoken it next to his ear.

"Nathan!"

Mara's voice.

He jerks his head up. Mara... Mara is asleep, and besides, that reaction only shows how far she's crawled under his skin, because that was Audrey.

They come from the same lips, but he still knows the difference.

"Nathan." She's sitting across the other side of the remnant of their fire. Her face looks pinched and cross. She's addressing him in a stage whisper. "What do you think you're doing?" He looks down in panic, afraid that Mara couldn't help but hear.

It does rather underline the fact he's not thinking straight.

Raising his head is more difficult a second time. The pull to lose himself in Mara is stronger than anything he's ever felt. But with Audrey watching, even if she can't be real, sitting there poking the fire in clothes she would have worn a year ago, to give in to it would be... horribly inappropriate.

It's awkward trying to disentangle from Mara at the same time as keeping looking and touching to a minimum. Somehow, she continues to sleep.

Nathan struggles to his feet, then stumbles to Audrey. He falls on his knees next to her by the fire. A flinch travels through him -- the pose he's adopted being far too similar to what Mara wants of him -- but his fingers pass straight through hers when he tries to take her hand.

Of course she's not real.

Mara's theory is that she never was.

"How... how are you here?" His voice almost chokes up completely. He doesn't know why he's talking to a hallucination.

"I don't know, but now I am, do you think you could keep your hands off Mara?" Audrey snaps back at him.

"I'm sorry. I couldn't..." It slams down on him, the full impact of just what she did to him, now he's free from her influence. What he did, under her control. He clamps his hand over his mouth, staring around in panic. It's very hard to fight down the urge to throw up without the cues of sensation to know how close he really is to that. "Oh, God..." He forces it back down and sinks his teeth into his knuckles.

Audrey hovers her intangible hand over his other hand, simulating contact. It's the oddest thing, because it's no different to touching anyone else for real, but if it was the real Audrey, he would feel it. "I asked you to keep your hands off. I never said I wouldn't forgive you."

"Because she's you," Nathan says heavily, a shudder in his voice.

Audrey pulls a face then slowly nods. "It's... not who I wanted to be." Her smile is sad, lopsided.

Of course it isn't. Nathan clasps his hands as though around hers. "I'll bring you back. I'll find a way to do it."

She laughs at him, softly, not hurtfully. Definitely not Mara. "I don't think you can."

Behind Nathan, Mara turns and mumbles in her sleep. He looks nervously her way, finds himself slipping and jerks his gaze back to Audrey again. "No. I have to believe you're still in there, and I can save you," he says, stubbornly.

Audrey gets up, leaving his hand. He feels bereft, although she wasn't touching him anyway. She paces in lethargic, morose little steps. "I'm not all that's in there. There's too much else and how would you ever separate us? I -- I was put there over a blank slate, Nathan!" She spreads her hands, frustrated, agonised, speaking her own autopsy. "Now that Mara's memories are... 'awake' again, I don't see how even Howard -- whatever he was -- could put only Mara to sleep. He would probably have to start again, with a completely new personality, and wipe everything that's gone before."

Even if Nathan's addled brain is hallucinating her and all of these arguments, he can't hold back asking, "Do you have Mara's memories?" Cautiously, he untangles his legs. They're rubbery and uncooperative, not wanting to stand.

"If I remembered Mara's memories, I'd be Mara," she says impatiently, then hesitates. "Or... something more like her than me." Audrey's head hangs. "I don't understand it. I always felt there was something... Some real me, underneath, that the memories I had weren't even close to everything I was... But I don't understand how I could be this all along and not know."

Nathan shakes his head. He doesn't understand, either. He wants to hold her, but can't. It wouldn't feel very fitting at the moment, anyway, after Mara. "What about the others? Lucy? Sarah?" His voice catches on that one.

Audrey gives him a knowing look. "I remember as much of them as I did before... And Lexie, before you ask. They're all in there, too, but they're... old. Not stale, but... quiet." She sighs. "Am I even real now? Am I Mara, dreaming? Or you, hallucinating?"

Nathan's heart gives an odd jerk, that can't be any more real than she can. Do hallucinations doubt their own reality? He wishes that he had the confidence and the faith that he could tell if some part of what he's seeing is real, and not a manifestation of what Mara did to him. All he can be sure of is that he wants her to be Audrey, real and herself and talking to him, even if not physically present, far too much to trust in this. Last night Mara broke him apart, even though he thought he had nothing left to lose. He's been told how Mara's powers work, so he knows his own traits and impulses gave Mara the means to control him. Having that, she will take the parts of him she can use and discard the rest.

On one level, it doesn't matter. He said goodbye to any meaningful life when he jumped with her through the trapdoor. Duke and Jennifer will have closed the gate by now. Mara will never get back to their world -- either with William or without -- and nor will he.

On the other hand, he isn't dead and he's still selfish enough to want. He doesn't want to be Mara's slave. He still wants Audrey.

Audrey sighs and turns from him. He's been staring at her with his lips parted, responseless in the face of her denial of her reality. Her shoulders shrug. "Mara has all our memories. Maybe she's not really Mara any more, either. Maybe she just thinks she is. Maybe she's just pretending. Maybe she doesn't even realise yet."

Her form fades away like a trick of the gathering light. Nathan chokes on a harshly stifled protest, and lunges across as if he could grab her, as if it would make any difference if he could.

There's a noise from Mara behind him. She's waking up. Anger overtakes him at what she's done. The conversation he's just had, even if it was only with himself, at least brought home a few truths.

She needs him for her own survival or she wouldn't have brought him at all. He lays out his rules while she's still groggy, and does not feel the least bit bad about the moment of fear that crosses her face at the idea that he'd leave her.

"You still need me," she calls at his back, when he's finished.

It's true, but he does his damnedest to ignore her anyway. He's spent more than a year helping other people to deal with their Troubles. He's learning to control the forcefield Trouble, and he'll learn to get a hold on this one.

***

"I need to give you a Trouble," she tells him, before barely an hour has passed. Her voice is simmering peevish resentment. Nathan understands that last night she considered that she had him cowed and now she resents that she doesn't. At her declaration, he's almost disbelieving enough to fix his gaze on her...

"No," he answers forcefully. He's keeping space between them at all times and looking her way as little as possible. He'd block his ears to her, too, if he could.

"It's necessary. Besides, you'll like this one. We both need it for comfort and survival."

Comfort is meaningless to Nathan. She stands at the other side of the small stream they've found, her boots in her hand and her feet wriggling in the shallow water, her face wet from drinking. It's oddly charming, the monster taking her shoes off for a paddle. Nathan risks letting his eyes linger only because the water lies between them. He grunts, begrudgingly, "Tell me."

"We need supplies. A bottle to carry water. Weapons. Bags. Cutlery. You're a craftsman, in a minor way." Nathan presumes that sucked-lemon twist to her face is Mara accessing Audrey's memories about his hobbies. "I can build a Trouble around that."

She's right. It sounds useful and they'll need it. The answer's still no. "You're not coming near me. We'll manage without."

Mara clenches her jaw so hard in anger that white patches form at the edges of her mouth. "The water is here." She kicks it over him in a large splash.

"We'll find more." Right now, Nathan doesn't care, and her fury is deeply satisfying to him. Let her rage.

"You're being childish," she accuses.

Nathan doesn't feel obligated to answer, and starts moving upstream, staying on the opposite side from where she is, heading toward where he can sense the next portal into the void.

"Nathan!" she shouts, and the outrage in it is different from her usual tone of aloof command, a temper tantrum quite removed from the glacially calm sneers she'd begun with, back in the chamber under the lighthouse; altogether too... human. Surprise makes him stop and turn. "You can look at me, damn you. Do you think I'd create an affliction so bothersome? I hardly want you moping around me all the time."

He slides his eyes up her form to her face, warily, and it's true that the pull has ebbed. "Take it away."

"I can't."

Nathan doesn't believe that. "You can do anything you want. Take it -- change it into the new one. I'm not your pet."

She snorts -- obviously a difference of opinion. "I can't and wouldn't. Your presence is unacceptable without it."

Nathan's ready to do it, ready to swing away from the course of the river, start running and keep going.

"Nathan, please."

It breaks him even when he knows he shouldn't let it. She looks so stricken, and it's Audrey's face. He can't leave. Any chance he has of rescuing Audrey lies with Mara. Now, at least, his impulses seem back under his control. "Fine." He swings back and splashes through the stream, loosening his shirt. "Make the Trouble. But if your touch makes me lose my mind again, or it isn't the Trouble you said..."

She smiles at him, sickly sweet with victory. He rolls his eyes but stands firm. He feels the smug pressure of her palm, but again, nothing else.

***

Nathan getting to grips with his new Trouble is like a child with a new toy. She watches him sitting on a rock by the stream with his legs sprawled wide, boots planted in the water, and for the moment he seems to have forgotten where they are, who she is, and all of his bellyaching. His hands trace shapes on the air -- experimentally, perhaps unconsciously -- in front of his closed eyelids.

"You should only need to focus and let it happen," Mara complains, toeing the vase on the ground beside him. They could use it in a pinch, but it would be annoyingly awkward to carry. It looks like a museum piece. Other attempts scatter the ground around him. "There shouldn't be any need for all of this."

Nathan grunts. "It won't work like that. Shouldn't you know, if you created this Trouble? I've got to... to make the thing. In my head. And I don't know how to work leather."

With his eyes shut, her stare is a wasted expression. "You're unnecessarily complicating it."

Nathan tells her to shut up and let him figure it out. Mara's hackles rise. She watches him take thrill in the role of a craftsman working invisible, intangible materials.

One of Audrey's memories rises within her: a craft shop and a case, a bubble of mirth and the jeering question, "You do decoupage, Wuornos?" Mara grits her teeth against Audrey's laughter. Nathan's eyes are still closed, so he does not bear witness to her loss of control or her dismay.

Her throat closes up as she thinks about being presented -- Audrey being presented -- with three imaginatively-shaped clay fired pots. They were on her desk one day when she walked into the station. Nathan cleared his throat like the most awkward man in the world and said, "I'm running out of places to put them. I thought you might..." She'd gaped at him and pulled a face at the pots. "Pots? Why do you even have--?" She picked one up and rolled it over in her fingers, and saw his initials, scored by fingernail into the base while the clay had still been soft. "Wait. You made these? You made pots?"

The story had come out, in gradually-teased bursts, that he'd signed up for a twelve week pottery class at the local arts centre.

"In between fighting dinosaurs and aliens, you make pots?" Mara hears her own voice, friendly and cheerful, and feels the warmth in the memory of Nathan, flustered, stammering excuses about his Trouble and keeping his hands in practice with delicate work. For the purpose of firing his gun and practical, masculine things, you see?

She was still laughing at him when he said, "You don't have to -- I mean, if you don't want them, then I--"

And Audrey had swept all three pots up in her arms. "Oh, no. Too late. I'm taking these and sealing away the evidence, now!" Her mocking words don't match her thoughts, and as the memory fades, Mara feels an overwhelming sense of loss.

She isn't Audrey. Nathan didn't like Lexie, much, and knowing all he now knows, she will never have him look at her like that, or laugh with her like that, again. She has to take him by force and even then he resists, finding her vile enough to struggle against her power...

Fury takes her. He's just one of the insects, and she never wanted him to begin with. They had to twist her with false memories and overwrite every part of her being to make her want him. This is... it's indoctrination, and she should resist every bit as hard as Nathan. She will not give in to them.

She shakes off a moment's sympathy for the position she's put Nathan in. There's no comparison. Centuries, they had her and used her...

Nathan tosses something that hits her knees and falls to the ground. Mara jerks her gaze down, then bends to pick the object up. A finely made leather water bottle. She eyes the elaborate stitching down the sides and the different types of hides it's fashioned from, the patterns made by the differing directions of fur and textural alignments. The craftsmanship is exquisite.

"Did you really have to?" She makes her voice as sharp as she can.

"If I can make anything I can imagine making in an instant, I might as well make it the best I can." Dour stubbornness is entrenched in Nathan's voice. "Figuring out how to make it water-tight was what took the time." He curls his hands around another imagined shape and Mara watches another flask form. The patterns are different from the one she's holding. "They're easy now."

"Good." Mara stoops and fills her bottle from the stream. "You can make another for William, later." She straightens and loops the flask through her belt, ties it off there.

Nathan's jaw tightens, but he doesn't say anything.

***

In the days that follow, Nathan makes a game out of frustrating her. He resists when he can, but seems to develop a capacity in his mind to separate out everything else from the things he must do, when he caves to her wishes, when he has no choice because her body and his are pressed close. He's hers when they sleep -- or when they rest, because Mara suspects that Nathan doesn't sleep much. She wonders what he's doing each night. She wakes up enough times in darkness when he isn't holding her to be suspicious of those times she wakes up in daylight and he is. Quite often he's pulled blankets between them, so their skin doesn't touch, and his face is averted from her.

She is just that abhorrent to him.

Sometimes, deep in her sleep, she thinks that she hears his voice. Sometimes she thinks she hears herself reply to him. She wakes up wondering what she was dreaming.

During the day, she lets him hold sovereignty over himself, until that becomes an unspoken part of their deal. It's plain sense, as far as Mara is concerned -- Nathan is trained and capable, and she would prefer not to compromise his judgement while she needs him functional as guide and protector. It is beyond question that the one Trouble she forced upon him does compromise his judgement, turning him into a pathetic, shivering wreck.

Mara wonders why he doesn't walk away, when he obviously hates it so much. It must be a measure of his love for Audrey. He has probably convinced himself that the fact Mara still wants him at all is a signal of hope. He admits to her in the midst of another argument one day that he has tried to use his new Trouble to find Audrey, and it didn't offer any answers.

He uses the gifts she has given him to infuriate her. She gave him invisible walls, and it's as though he works hard to put them up in his mind, too. The things he makes continue to annoy her by being beautiful.

Together, they see worlds Mara could never have imagined, but she's not able to appreciate them while she's still absorbing the new inner strangeness of herself. The alterations in her own geography catch her out. Most commonly, when certain angles of Nathan's face catch the light, or he says something in a particular tone of voice, either of which can send her back to her previous life, to a complicated surge of Audrey's emotions. There are plenty of other triggers, though, less possible to predict.

One time she is leaning down to refill the flask and sees her own reflection, and suddenly remembers being Angela Shore, a century and a half ago, who had spent her months in Haven convinced she had the wrong face. Howard must have made an error in transferring the false memories across, that time.

Right face, wrong memories, and Mara -- Angela -- finally resolves the mystery of an alter-ego long dead. The memories well up in her, take the forefront for just a moment, then ebb again. Angela was never told a fraction of what Audrey Parker or Lucy Ripley knew. When she felt the call of the Barn she went curiously and unknowing, lacking the knowledge to fight against the end.

"Are you all right?"

She jerks upright just before she'd have tipped into the stream. Nathan's staring, narrow eyed. She's clutching one of the creepy, frond-covered trees for balance, although her hand is nowhere near the eye in the trunk and this one is sleepily closed rather than looking at her.

Nathan transfers his stare to it, and pokes a finger at the bark behind the eye. "They're some kind of parasitic organism or animal. Not part of the tree."

Mara doesn't care. The trees have eyes. It's creepy, but today it's not of interest.

"Could be a fungus. A mimic. The irises don't really move," he adds.

"We're going. William isn't here."

Nathan shrugs and it's obviously nothing to him either way, but she can't help but notice -- or re-notice, because Audrey knew -- that Nathan has an affinity with creepy things. Audrey was the same. How else could they so cheerfully investigate the morbid and the grim?

Mara wishes she'd put her foot down and insisted Duke or Dwight come in Nathan's stead. She wants William, who will help her to regain sovereignty over her own mind. Her real self, her old self, the one she needs to be. Nathan's presence calls to Audrey and makes it that much harder to recall Mara.

The worlds they visit blur into one another. She had not dreamed there could be so many. Perhaps this is a more impossible task than she imagined. Will she ever find William?

Maybe it's her despair that calls out to disaster, because they've been lucky, so far, to slide in and out of unpopulated landscapes, barely seeing another living creature after that first world. In most of the worlds since, they've seen little sign of life but the animals that have fed them. Such fortune can't last.

Mara is not thinking about danger as they land. A thin thread of connection sparks to life in her mind, overwhelming anything else. They have found him. At last! Relief floods through her. Her heart sings, beating faster and harder, and her voice sounds higher and brighter as she tells Nathan, "William is here."

Nathan's face goes stony and his demeanour turns heavy. Of course, he would have been happier if they never found her beloved. Nathan believes himself exiled, and he'll stay with her rather than face it alone, but William joining them will turn the power dynamics even further against him.

Knowing all of this, Mara begs him gleefully, grabbing at his hands and arms, "Find him for me. Find William, Nathan!"

He tries to shove her off, and she wonders how much she makes him want her with just an innocent touch.

"You're the one he's 'connected' to. You find him," Nathan says, cursing her.

"It's too faint to lead me to him. He's unconscious, or sleeping." She smacks Nathan's closest ear, and he ducks. His face says 'ow' but his eyes show deeper pain. "Find him for me or I'll take that Trouble -- and turn it into a worse one."

"You can't threaten me," Nathan growls, with the self-assured arrogance of a man who only thinks he's already lost everything the world could take from him. His perspective is too small. "If he's unconscious, how are you still awake?"

"Because I was on another world when he was knocked out!" She doesn't truly know if that's how the rules work, but isn't admitting the gap in her knowledge to Nathan. She clutches at him, all over him in her excitement. He doesn't like her now, and he doesn't share her goals the way William does, but even while she's rattling off idle threats, some deep down part of her codes him as a friend, and wants to share this. She's too giddy to care whether he reciprocates. Abruptly, his lips are pressed to her breast bone, hand on her hip, hand sliding up to cup her chin. He makes a discomforted noise, unhappy with the situation. Mara grabs his hair and drags his head up. "Stop that."

His spacey eyes find focus and narrow. "You don't get to complain when that happens." He reaches up to his face and digs his fingers into her hands hard enough to hurt, then with visible effort, pulls himself free of her completely.

"Find William," Mara urges, and Nathan curses.

"He's immune, like you. I don't even think I can."

It has been centuries. She saw him with true recognition for only seconds back at the lighthouse before he fell away from her. That wasn't enough for a reunion. On this world, she will hold him again.

The thread of William's presence is so small and faint -- not enough to share thoughts or impressions. She hopes he's asleep and not hurt. Worry wars with her anticipation. Nathan gets more twitchy, and neither of them notice, as they follow her best sense of what direction their quarry lies in, that as they hunt, something else is hunting them.

They don't see them until the hunters ghost out around them, and then somehow, in seconds, they've been surrounded.

The people around them are clearly not human. Mara thinks that they resemble those animal-headed Egyptian gods. Sort of feline, fox-faces with elongated snouts, a down of hair over the skin but nothing remotely 'cute and fluffy'. It's more like Nathan's stubble, which is accentuated much more than usual at the moment because of the lack of shaving equipment on alien worlds.

They carry spears. More than that, they are wielding those spears with intent. Nathan cannot argue their essential benign nature this time. The way they move herds Mara and Nathan, trying to corner them.

"Don't," Nathan says, drawing his gun. When he levels it, they clearly understand it must be a weapon, though they look at it with equal parts curiosity as caution. "Don't come closer."

"Shoot one of them," Mara orders. "That will show the rest."

His head jerks around to her, then as swiftly back to the animal-heads. "No," he returns.

Stubborn fool! Mara has a gun, too, and she draws it. Nathan slaps the weapon down and the shot goes into the ground. "We don't know what they want and we can't understand them. I'm not opening negotiations by shooting someone!"

"Those spears aren't for decoration," she hisses at him. "A show of power might be the only language they understand." The animal-heads have retreated a few steps from her stray shot. Some of them are trying to act less threatening, as though specifically to annoy her, but there are enough stab-happy examples remaining.

Nathan grabs her shoulder -- clothes protect him from her touch -- and eases her back. His head whips around and he stops. More have moved behind them. He takes a shuddering breath and pulls his hand from her. She feels the heaviness in the air as a forcefield slides into existence, then the air displacement as it collapses. He isn't touching her, but trying to encase her inside apparently won't work either.

Nathan's forcefields keep the enemy at bay, even so. He can't enclose Mara, but he can force the enemy back by stages, one direction at a time. The animal-heads grow frustrated, bouncing off invisible walls. They snap animatedly at each other. One of them dashes away, and Mara and Nathan are stuck in a holding pattern of blocking and retreating for several minutes until he returns. When he does, it's to defiantly raise an object in his hand

It's William's box.

As Audrey, Mara had wondered where it vanished to when they caught him. Now, she knows it to appear and disappear at his will. He must have been trying to make use of it when he was knocked out.

The one who brought it stands and gestures firmly, the meaning unmistakable.

The animal-heads want them to come.

***

They do not take her to William. They take her to a scene of disaster. Mara feels a shock settle over her that is the influence of years under the sway of personalities not her own, because she has caused far worse than this and called it fun. She forces her eyes to feast upon it until she feels the old smile curl on her face. She knows the signs of a wayward Trouble when she sees them.

"This is William's work," she tells Nathan, proudly, when she can trust her voice to reflect that, and her smile does not waver as she turns it upon him. He gapes like a fish at the bodies. They have bled from their ears and nostrils, as though their brains haemorrhaged quickly and they fell where they stood. Living animal-heads stand guard around the scene with bleak expressions, a wide circle of them, tens of feet apart.

"It's a cordon," Nathan murmurs.

Mara understands that: the native William Troubled is still in the centre. These people want her to solve a Trouble.

She throws back her head and laughs.

A moment later, she's walled in by a dozen spears. The closest breach her clothes and prick her flesh. Nathan is sweating, and the spear tips are held a few feet back from him, pushing against the invisible shield. Pieces of it flare up and die, trying to protect her. That Trouble is of considerably less use to Mara than she had hoped.

She angrily flicks her hand in the vicinity of her shirt pocket. A gasp rises as a single black sphere does, and some of the spears retreat. Others jab a fraction further and penetrate her skin. Mara palms the sphere and points toward the centre of their cordon, where she thinks she can see a hunched figure amid the devastation, rocking on the ground. "Back off."

They retreat enough to clear a path so she can advance to the Troubled being. Nathan is within reach.

It's his bare wrist she grabs this time. It's hasty and ill-thought... no, it's not thought, really, beyond the need for him to lash out and protect her from these animals, and the influence of the devastation around them probably weighs into her design. She feels the Trouble pass from its potential in her thoughts into actuality in his being, seal itself to his flesh as something new. Its capacity for destruction makes her gasp. Audrey has a sunny view of her beloved. Mara remembers Hanson and the powder-keg of Nathan's lineage.

Nathan stares fearfully at her as she releases his arm, and the people around her burst into flame, shrivelling to ash before their spears can strike.

The leader or spokesperson shouts something and the animal-heads lunge at Nathan. They bounce off his forcefield, restored now Mara has backed off, but when he whips his head around in panic to face the attackers they, too, combust.

Nathan chokes out a horrified cry and shuts his eyes. Then, he slaps his hands over his eyes.

"What are you doing?!" Mara yelps. They are in danger and her protector stands deliberately blind and helpless, weapons abandoned.

"Mara, make it stop!"

"No! There are some left!" Still too many to fight, and why is he behaving like a child? "Open your eyes and deal with them. I'm bleeding, damn you."

"I just killed a dozen people by looking at them!" he shouts back at her. "I'm not opening my eyes until I know it won't kill a dozen more!"

"If you let them kill me, you let them kill your precious Audrey," she sneers.

The forcefield lashes out from him, flattening everyone in its path except her. "Undo it," he begs. "I destroy everything I look at. It doesn't have to be literal."

Mara sighs. It is unfortunately true that she can't have him walking around immolating every living thing he surveys. Plants on the ground nearby are burned up, too, and they will need to eat. "Stop moving, then," she scolds. "You can open your eyes now, anyway. They are all dispatched."

He does, then moans and shuts them again, and drops to his knees as one of the unconscious bodies combusts, his unconsciousness not saving him. "Oops," says Mara.

"'Oops'?" Nathan has his teeth grit. The edges of his mouth are white. His eyelids are screwed down tight enough to damage something. His knuckles dig small craters in the dirt.

Mara cautiously kneels beside him. She wraps her hand around his wrist again. He flinches at the touch, his body conflicted as it both yearns toward and tries to pull away. She focuses on returning the forces back into compressed potentiality in her hand, and they rise and seep out of his skin, rolling up again obediently for her like a playful, eager puppy. She feels sad that they did not get to play in the world and meet their real potential.

"It is gone," she declares.

He doesn't trust her. It takes several tiresome reiterations and negotiations for him to open his eyes, and even then he does it slowly, and makes her direct his gaze to foliage before he risks it on another living being.

"See?" she challenges him.

"We killed them all," he seethes. "This isn't our world. We don't know what they are. We can't speak their language. But we killed them all anyway."

"They're of no consequence," Mara dismisses. More flies. "We must find William."

She turns and leans over to pick up his box from the unconscious body of the spokesperson. It occurs to her, as she feels the prick and twists to see the dart in her side, that Nathan could not have failed to see the activity behind her. He chose not to react, not to warn her. His treachery shouldn't wound her, but it does.

Unconsciousness takes her quickly.

***




3.

Audrey swings her handcuffs around her index finger, head ducked, watching them spin. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you get tied up so much it's almost as if you like it," she comments.

Nathan chained to a wall, grunts, "I don't like it."

They have found William, and much good may it do them or him. They walked into the mess he made when he came to this world. Nathan glares at the unconscious, long body slumped on the other side of Mara and wonders if he enjoyed wreaking the carnage outside. Maybe it's not fun for him without Mara there. William's mischief hasn't achieved anything except to get him and them chained to a wall. The way Nathan is feeling at the moment, he might just let them all stay there.

He still hasn't stopped shuddering with the disastrous aftermath of what Mara did to him last. "I don't mind it right now," he amends to Audrey.

None of them can hurt anyone if they stay where they are.

Audrey casts her eyes over the three of them, critically. She leans down and peers into William's hanging face. "He looks like you, a little bit," she says, then pulls a face, possibly in response to the look on Nathan's. "I mean... he has a similar physique and facial shape, more than his actual features. I remember that his eyes are blue." They're shut now. She stands and shuffles. "I guess I have a type. It's so hard to believe that he's what I was looking for. That this is the answer."

"You're not Mara," Nathan says, quickly. "You're her jailer."

Audrey snorts softly, but apparently enjoys that thought, on some level. A little smile plays on her lips.

Nathan doesn't feel like smiling. His mind is stuck on horrible repeating images. "That--" He looked at people and they burned. "You said William told you Troubles are linked to the person. Mara keeps saying the same." Usually she says it while complaining how limited her options are with him. "What she just made me do--"

Audrey nods. "She used your anger. You have a temper and then some, Nathan. You really need to work on that."

He wants to, but the fact he could gladly throttle Mara right now is a little defeating where that objective is concerned.

The animal-heads were not unduly vehement taking him in. Nathan assumes they saw he was just as much a victim of William and Mara's trickery as the other poor sap who wrought so much unwitting destruction. But he was left in no doubt they'd have killed him if he hadn't surrendered, hadn't been crouched on his knees, offering his hands up to them.

The other Troubled had burned up with the rest. They must have seen Mara take Nathan's away, or surely they'd have covered his eyes. They spoke to him, but he couldn't understand what they said. He got the impression that they aren't sure whether he's Mara's victim or ally, but aren't willing to take any risks.

Audrey looks around. "Mara's waking up." A moment later, she's faded into the air again. Was she ever there? It's notable that his hallucination never seems to co-exist with Mara being around, or at least awake, but Nathan is afraid to read anything into that. Hope could destroy him more cruelly than anything else. He's afraid, too, to contemplate the real Audrey bearing witness to all of this, from leaving the Lighthouse up to his current predicament.

Mara wakes, quiet at first -- hurting, and making the same soft sounds of Audrey in pain that tug at Nathan's heart -- before she sees him and remembers. She flies into a rage which lasts about ten seconds, until she lays her eyes on William. Her whole demeanour changes in an instant. She draws in a gasp -- breathy anguish and pure fear. Her face grows drawn and her eyes sheen over. She starts wrenching at her chains. "William..."

Now that he looks closer, Nathan can see William isn't doing so well. He's very pale and there's old blood and white bandaging peeping out under his jacket. The tight lines of his neck and jaw speak of pain even in his unconsciousness.

"Nathan, get us out of these chains," Mara orders, forgetting so soon that he's a treacherous and useless minion. "I need to go to him."

Nathan jangles his wrists and coughs a wry, "How?"

"Insert a forcefield into the mechanism of the cuffs," she states, as matter of fact as though it's obvious. "Do it! ...Do try not to break your wrists."

Even if he can use the forcefields to open his cuffs, it's not going to be possible to work his Trouble close enough to Mara to do the same for her. Half of his compliance is pure curiosity whether it'll work. It does. Chains burst and Mara averts her face. Nathan scrambles loose, his limbs fighting him after the hour or so spent in that position.

"I can check his pulse," he says to Mara, with something close to wonder as he realises. Pressing his fingers against William's neck, he feels the thrum of blood and life.

"Hush," she says. Her eyes are closed, her expression focused. "I'm going to try to accelerate his healing. I haven't done this for a very long time."

Nathan checks William over silently. There's a big lump on his head at the back, to explain the unconsciousness. He could have been drifting in and out for several days, which would explain Mara's inability to sense him. His skin is hot and feverish.

"There," Mara says after about a minute. "I've done what I can. I think he should wake up soon... if I've done it right. Nathan, get me loose, now."

"I don't owe you anything," he points out sourly. "Besides, it's not going to work."

"Not the forcefields," she scolds. "Make a skeleton key. A saw. A lever to hack the chain fixings from the wall!"

Annoyed, Nathan says, "I can't pick a lock, you need a sense of touch for that. I don't know how to forge metal."

She proceeds to tell him how, in intricate detail. He wonders which of her past, Barn-inflicted selves knew all that, but it matters little. He sits back and tries to shape her description of lifeless fact into creative thought. He makes an axe.

Mara sighs. "It will do. Try it."

"I'm not your serf." But he can't just leave her here, either, and now he's calmed down, he doesn't particularly want to stay. They need to get out of here as quickly and quietly as possible, with no-one seeing them and no-one making the mistake of trying to stop them.

William starts to wake up when Mara's left wrist is already free, albeit trailing a length of chain, and Nathan's trying to hack her right wrist from the wall. Mara gasps William's name, repeating it, asking if he's all right, her litany desperate and filled with emotion. The monster in love, Nathan thinks sourly, and thinks it's quite something. Then she goes quiet and the changing responsive light in her eyes tells him she's communicating with William on a level Nathan can't touch.

That infuriates Nathan, without him quite being able to pin down why. He seethes as he goes to William, leaning down and checking him over again while the other man blinks back to something approaching normal consciousness.

"Nathan!" William croaks, still somehow as annoyingly cheerful and overly familiar as ever. "Buddy! I knew you wouldn't leave me..." His eyes slide slyly across to Mara. "Then again, maybe it wasn't your choice... Honey, it's been such a long time."

Since he's already been talking to Mara in his head, that part is a show for Nathan; William rubbing it in. With William's uncertain health and Mara's changeable emotional state, it's probably not a good idea to punch him in the face, however much Nathan wants to.

She used your anger...

He flinches at the memory of Audrey's words.

You really need to work on that...

Mara yanks at her remaining captive arm, turning a brief glare on Nathan, who mechanically gets up to finish the job. He stands a few moments later, axe hanging from his hand, eying William's restraints as Mara rubs her freed wrists and tells William, "They have the box."

"Yeah..." he drawls slowly. His eyes are already spaced out, but they space out more. Mental communication. "It'll come to you. Just think back to how it felt. Let me help you."

Mara shuts her eyes and holds out her hand. She gives a little noise of shocked delight as the box appears in it. She opens it to spill out countless numbers of the black spheres; they attack William's chains, forming black daggers in the air, sinking almost imperceptibly into the larger shape as they did when becoming the rougarou. The daggers smash through the chains without touching William's wrists, then head onward to the cell door. It falls, crashing outwards, completely detached from lock and hinges.

"Hot damn!" exclaims William happily. "You've still got it." His eyes slide past her. "Maybe best not to encourage Nathan to get too close to me with that axe, huh?" He waggles his finger. "Don't forget -- hurt me, hurt her."

"I don't know if I care too much about that anymore," Nathan says, and gets some satisfaction out of their wariness in response to that. At least they know they can only push him so far.

Mara dismisses his show of rebellion without acknowledgement, going quickly to the door. She moves like Audrey, a trained police officer.

"No more killing!" Nathan snaps, diving after her. It's disconcerting how the black spheres cloud in the air around them, but they slide away from him like they're repelled. Not one of them seems to touch him.

"They took our guns," Mara replies, covertly low, for all the din she just made trashing the door. "I want them back. Find, Nathan!" After checking the corridor, she goes back to help William stand, silently gesturing for Nathan to take point at the door, just like Audrey would do.

The thought of using a Trouble to fight now is anathema, but his axe won't help against a throwing spear. The forcefields are harder to control even than usual. The incinerating-gaze Trouble knocked him off-centre. It's a struggle to keep a shield level, and just in front of him, rather than curling around and behind to where William and Mara are, where it will shatter against their resistant presence.

He has incentive to hang on. He sees the fate of the people that get past him, or that come from behind, courtesy of William's black spheres.

It's not the most dashing escape ever. After all, they're hiding behind a wall.

Mara tells him, "find," like she'd order a dog, but that's nothing new. She can't command his concentration, taxed as it is already, and the ability to find anything shifts in and out, difficult to use at the same time as the forcefield. He gets a vague directional cue, and if he'd rather focus on one Trouble or the other, it's not that one. He makes do with spotty flares of hints rather than the usual bright thread leading him to his target. They find their guns and supplies anyway, along with a few more useful objects on the way. Now they need an exit.

The nearest soft spot is in a courtyard with an elaborate fountain, at the centre of whatever compound they've ended up in. Maybe it's holy. Nathan imagines that it would give off some weird effects. It isn't locked down like the lighthouse, closed off by trapdoor and rituals.

The familiar fear slides through him at what they're about to do. Mara's smile is triumphant. William looks... like a desperate, beat-up guy who's desperately relieved. He looks disturbingly normal. The void beckons.

Despite all his efforts, Nathan is still incapacitated by the void. He ends up clinging to Mara on one side and William on the other, two people whose touch he can feel, but a situation he is acutely uncomfortable with. The world is too bright and too loud and no matter how hard he fights not to, he still needs their help to proceed.

"The void is instinctual," Mara's voice says, echoing strangely in his ear, but only because the noise that deafened him is suddenly absent. "You feel your way through. That's my best guess."

Nathan is on the ground. Her legs and William's are next to him. There are black and white rocks and two pale suns in the sky, and he has to shield his eyes against both of them as he rolls over.

"Sure it's not just because he's normal?" William's voice is teasing, gentle. His fingers play in Mara's hair, but Nathan can see he's holding back, a shaky, excited tension in his body. Almost as though after all this time, he's afraid to move in closer and really touch, or he's savouring every moment of the anticipation. "Regular people in the void... It's not something that happens."

"He has five Troubles, William. He's a long way from normal."

"Ah!" William's face opens with delight. His wide smile stretches his tired face. "You've been practising."

Nathan makes it as far as his knees. "Get away from her."

"Now, Nathan." An odd softness in William's face as he rolls his eyes. Maybe it's something akin to sympathy, since he's been where Nathan is now, but Nathan doesn't like to think of them as having anything in common. "You know the deal. Audrey Parker comes back... hey, she's all yours. She's not Audrey Parker now."

When he turns back to Mara, things flit across both their faces, telling Nathan they're communicating without words, forgetting he's there at all.

"Damn it..." Nathan drags himself to his feet. He always had a sick anticipation of this inevitable moment, of being alone with William and Mara; their reunion... and what the hell was he ever going to do about it?

They aren't interested in him. Their focus is for each other. Nathan's stomach turns as William's hands finally find Mara's face. It's her who pulls him in, the look in her eyes adoring. Their kiss is bordering on x-rated territory from the start. Nathan turns his face, clenching his fists, fighting fury that might not be wholly rational. It's Mara, not Audrey, in charge of that body now...

What claim does he have to dictate Mara's choices?

But he can't let this happen. Even if it's not going to get him anywhere. He can't fight them both, and what the hell would he do later, even if he managed it? They're his only companions.

That's Audrey's body. She wouldn't choose this. How can he face her if he stands by and allows this to happen?

He swings around and takes a step toward them. William pulls back from Mara and pins judging eyes on him. "Walk away, Nathan."

Mara's eyes contain more danger. But it's a quality in William's voice that makes Nathan obey. The clown that William plays is no longer in evidence. Nathan won't win this.

He doesn't know this monochrome world. Black rock, white rock -- which on closer inspection might actually be a macabre field of bone fragments -- grey-tinged sky, white-hot suns. There are trees in the distance, but even those look black and silver. Maybe it's a trick of the light. He keeps placing one foot in front of the other toward the horizon until he can't see William and Mara if he turns and looks behind him.

But he can see them in his thoughts. Reunited, lost lovers across worlds and centuries, making love on the rocky ground but only feeling each other, bodies intertwined. There isn't any chance they're doing anything else.

He looks around for his dream Audrey, but she isn't there.

Nathan sits down on a rock, finally, and buries his face in his hands.

***

William...! Mara's soul sings his name. She loses herself in him as their bodies and spirits meld.

Part of her was afraid of this moment. She has changed so much, unwilling, unwitting. So many pieces forced upon her, fragments of other lives, other people. They could not control her in the end, but there isn't a hope they haven't changed her. She isn't the woman she was. She has been the lover of other men since the last time she held William, too many of them. Borne the children of more than Nathan Wuornos. Seen some of them die. Lived and loved and birthed and lost while William was in exile. The Barn burned out a lot of it, used up the passion, left the memories cool and dry, but they're still there.

William has changed, too, she sees now. Still the trickster, the joker, the one with the power to make her smile. Still with the care and gallantry to make her feel like a queen, behind the buffoon. But there's a darkness in him that never used to be. He has suffered in equal measure to her, though the method differed. She would hunt them and tear them down for the punishments they inflicted, but Howard is dead already -- chalk up one favour to Nathan -- and who knows what is left of the rest of them after all this time. Centuries enough for worlds to fall.

"It has been too long," William's soul whispers inside her, and he accepts her, takes her as she has become, proving her fears groundless. He cares not a whit about those other men; she would not have chosen to be with them had she been in true command of herself. They mean nothing. Even the latest, the looming, desolate shadow of Nathan Wuornos, does not damage her in his eyes.

How could she do anything but accept him back in return? "My love."

William is battered and tired, exhausted by the time spent back in the void and by his longer imprisonment, healed but still drained by the process of healing. Their minds entangle much more energetically than their bodies are able. The last of her worries are soothed away. William has none such to soothe in return: she finds that the thought of rescuing her has kept him going all these years.

She remembers, now, snapshots of stolen instances inside the Barn, in the waiting years of her cycle, when they were able to reach each other as the old lives and memories were wearing down. Before other memories wiped her clean. Such meagre contact was enough to keep him hoping. She does not know if she could have kept the faith for so long, had their positions been reversed, had she been the one out there, knowing.

Instead she tries to chase back some of the darkness of those lonely years. The memories of them burn and make her shudder, but how can she shy away from them when he endured them for her?

It will all be different now.

There is no Howard, no Barn, and the rest of them, even if they are not long gone... She will never allow them to catch William or herself again. Now she knows the depths they'll sink to, she will mine her own depths to keep their freedom at any cost.

They have no idea how far she will go.

Objection stirs from the pieces of her that remember Audrey Parker, but she pushes them back down.

An unprepared and ignorant world awaits them on the other side of the gate. All they have to do is find it again.

"I like how you think." William nuzzles her neck and speaks aloud.

Mara shifts position. She didn't feel them at first, but she's starting to grow aware of how the rocks are hard, cold and sharp. She rolls up to crouch above him and places her hand on William's face, lovingly. "Nathan isn't going to help us find our way back, no matter what I do to him," she says. She pouts a little.

"No, I imagine he isn't." William's eyes are full of light and energy again, like her nearness has revitalized him. "He wants to keep us a long, long way from home." He smirks. "I didn't expect him riding to the rescue, honey."

"The irony is quite amusing," she admits. She doesn't want to talk about Nathan, but her unwillingness on the subject is the worst thing she could think about. William's face grows serious and he nods.

"Audrey Parker?" He leans up to kiss her breasts, burying his face between the sides of her open shirt. "Is she going to be a problem?"

The Barn didn't have chance to burn Audrey out of her, like it did the rest.

"I... don't think so." It's hard to tell where her mind is compromised. It is, after all, her mind. "Nathan is... difficult for me, William. I would have brought one of the others, but I had no choice."

"I know." He works his way back up to her face, catches her chin. "Don't worry about the geek. He's wandered off somewhere. Maybe he'll get eaten by a dragon."

She flinches; can't help it, even though that was a joke.

William mends the error with a wry laugh. "Hey, five Troubles, he can look after himself. But he's not here, and I'm guessing he'll stay clear for a while, so you don't have to think about him. It's just you and me, babe." He tips her chin and kisses her again. "Think about you and me."

It isn't difficult. William holds her and she feels safe, and whole, and that has been a long, long time coming, too.

Maybe there's just the slightest twinge of something missing.

They will have to adjust, of course they will. Both of them changed, and they will not fit together in quite the same ways they once did. They will need to work on that.

Right now is belonging, and it's the most powerful thing Mara has felt in long years, up to and including Nathan. How could it be otherwise?

Damn Audrey Parker for making her doubt this.

***

Nathan doesn't come back for long enough that she starts to wonder if he will. Part of her feels relief. He threatened to walk away before. Now that she has William, she doesn't need him. There is nothing she and William cannot overcome together. Nathan's leaving would be a solution to her problems.

Except the worst of her problems is that she doesn't want the solution. She wants to go and find him, drag him back with them if necessary.

It isn't necessary and she's saved the decision because Nathan does come back, eventually, though William's thoughts brush hers and his eyes watch her, knowing. It's he who nudges her lightly and says, "The life of the party is coming back." When she looks up to see the skinny figure heading towards them in a foot-dragging march, her little gasp would have given her away even without the connection between them.

She wants to tell William, "It's Audrey Parker, it's not me." Except that isn't how it works. Her actions might have been shaped by Audrey's memories and personality, but there has only ever been one soul inside her.

A delightful solution hits her suddenly. She has always shared everything with William. He picks the idea from her mind and gives her a skewed smile, full of irony and a certain softening amusement. It brightens and spreads across his face by increments.

"It doesn't matter to me that you were with him," William tells her, giving his pants a few tugs for more respectability but not fastening them all the way. "After all, you didn't know you were missing me when you fell for our boy Mr Interesting."

"After this, it won't matter," Mara promises. "Share this with me, too."

William's grin is gently mischievous. "You know he won't like it."

"But he will." Mara shares that, too, whispering from her mind to William's. "He's desperate for touch. Helpless against it."

William's smirk squashes a little and he looks down at his hand, flexing it into a fist and opening it again. He remembers for her his fist impacting Nathan's face.

Mara nods slowly. "He won't be able to help himself."

Nathan comes toward them, his face growing blanker and bleaker, steps slowing as he nears. He visibly steels himself to keep walking.

Mara disengages from William and stands to pin Nathan with the full force of her gaze. He has become adept at resisting her, stubborn enough that even she must credit him for it. "Nathan, come here," she says, projecting all her will and sexuality into the command. She lifts her chin, slides her hands down her throat to scrape aside loose cloth at her breast, exposing bare skin -- it's inescapable that the promise of feeling is what works on him the best. "Come here, I said."

Nathan's jaw works soundlessly. His feet have rooted into the ground. Stark suspicion and vulnerable need line his face. William sits upon a rock next to Mara, his bended legs sprawled and wide. He laughs. "I hear she got you on a leash, Golden Boy. But maybe that's not so different to Audrey?"

"Shut--" Nathan begins, his hands curling into fists at his sides. But it seems he can't divert his attention from Mara for long enough to finish even so short a growled return. His eyes fix again. There's sweat on his face. He fights her harder than he's ever fought, struggling not to be brought down in front of William. He says, "Mara, no."

The note in his voice isn't quite begging, though it wouldn't be the first time he begged her. It's more like he's trying to appeal to her -- to some better nature inside of her. To Audrey, or perhaps to the time they've spent in each other's company thus far.

None of that matters now.

Audrey and William war within her. This is the best way she has to mollify them both. Nathan will have to adjust.

"You need me," she reminds him. "I want you to touch me, Nathan. You can touch anywhere you like, this time."

His foot jerks forward. A moment later, his other foot matches it. Moving stiffly, he doesn't manage to catch himself until he's within reach of her. When he does catch himself, he jerks his head to one side, screwing his eyes shut. He folds his arms and clamps his hands beneath his armpits, squashing the temptation to reach out and touch. He says to William, "What does it mean, if she has you back and she still wants me?"

"All relationships are compromise." William shrugs and pulls a so-so face. He gets up and pats Nathan on the chest a few times insistently, and when that cranks his eye open sets a hand over his own heart. "I know it was a shocker, but... I'm sure the better man won." William sidles aside, behind Nathan, who shifts nervously, caught between them. He casts a glance over his shoulder, then in his confused anxiety makes the mistake of looking back at Mara.

"Good boy." Mara plants her hand over Nathan's mesmerised face and pushes him down in front of her. His face yearns into her palm. If he could burrow under her skin, she's sure he would. Mara drops her clothes.

Nathan licks his lips and manages to slide his eyes down to the pile of garments around her ankles and lock them there for longer than she'd expect, so close. He has become too adept at resistance. Seconds tick by while his eyes move up from her knees to feast on the expanse of her skin.

Abruptly, he loses the battle. His hands are curled over her hips, his mouth is on her body. She gasps and arches herself, pushing against him, as he tastes her, and no doubt tastes William still lingering on her, but is incapable of complaint. She puts her hands over his and reclines back, lowering herself to the ground, pulling him on top of her. "No, Nathan," she says, making her voice a smooth purr, "here." She guides his head up from the wet heat between her legs to her breasts, and works her fingers on his clothes, unfastening his belt.

Nathan's head is down. She looks over his shoulder to William's raised eyebrows.

This is what's left of Audrey Parker, she tells him. This is what Audrey Parker left her with.

But it can be something else they share.

Nathan knows she unzips him; the shock goes through him when she reaches inside his jeans. She is going to welcome him into her body as she has not done during their days of searching. That would have been too much to give away, before now. The sheen of moisture over the despair on his face speaks of his helplessness and desire. Mara pulls to the forefront of her mind Audrey, and the things they have done while she was Audrey, and the ways she touched him back then. She lets her face soften and whispers his name with an intonation no longer her own, and feels his surrender become willing, complete.

If she could have played this role from the start, she wouldn't have needed a Trouble to control him. But that, too, she dared not risk before now. Until she had William back, the potential cost was too high.

She refuses to be Audrey and can't afford to channel her for more than a moment.

Nathan is too preoccupied, his hands joining hers at disrobing them both, yanking his jeans down with a new fervour, his heat like a furnace against her thigh. He doesn't register William's chuckle. He's speaking her name, over and -- no, not her name; a nagging reminder from William's psyche pulls her back from the brink.

Mara scatters kisses against Nathan's throat, opens her legs and takes him in, sweet and familiar. She abandons Audrey for herself and slides her eyes beyond Nathan to William, who bounces a few times on his heels and reaches for the fastenings on his pants.

Nathan is oblivious until William crouches over them both and sets his hand to Nathan's naked shoulder.

***

"He won't forgive us." William's face is unusually serious and pensive as they walk side-by-side through the silvery trees. The forest is pretty, but Nathan's anguish and fury was far prettier on him, when they left him fuming and debauched at their camp. Mara feels jubilation, satiation, an eradication of guilt. Now that Nathan belongs to both of them, they can belong equally to each other again. She knows if she holds onto that long enough, it will infect William through their link, and drag him up out of these boring doldrums.

"He will," Mara insists. "He has to forgive me. He needs me."

"Mmm." The noise William makes is long and unconvinced. He cracks a grin and nudges her arm with his knuckles, but it's a serious gesture, underneath. "Babe, you don't have anything to prove. We don't have to--"

Mara blinks at him. "You don't want Nathan?" Disappointment cuts her. She wanted to lay him out for William like a gift -- see, this can be his, too, this thing so precious to the part of her that was Audrey.

"...Nah. Wuornos is a peach." William shakes it off briskly and kisses her on the forehead. "It's been a long time, with the guys. Thank you, honey."

Mara lets her shoulders slump with relief, and tries to ignore the unsettled something still churning in her stomach.

"I am a bit concerned that we go back and he shoots me," William adds, his voice breaking on the frank admission and accompanying attempt at a laugh. "Our boy was still armed, and he's not as harmless as... past pets."

"He would not dare," Mara declares. "He could not forget again that to shoot you is to shoot me."

"Yeah? We might just have pushed him past the point where he's thinking about dear 'Audrey'..."

Mara rolls her eyes. There is a part of William that has always been bashful and endearingly timid. But after years apart have stripped their souls and remade them, she is relieved that it is still there.

"I watched you," he says, holding her hands beneath the silver trees. "I watched the world change, in your dreams while you waited in the Barn. The years they let you out to fix Troubles were the longest and loneliest. You were too far away, and I couldn't reach you at all. But then when you came back after each time, I got new stories, new people, new Troubles; I got to find out how our gifts had evolved, and how much you'd enjoyed playing with them again, even if you didn't know the real story..."

Mara nods slowly. "It was oddly satisfying from the other side. A murder scene can also be a pleasing puzzle. All our riddles, laid out to unpick. Maybe it was what I sensed of you in them."

"Or your original self." He leans down and kisses her. "Dear heart, I still love you. You have all my thoughts. How can you doubt it? Don't worry about Wuornos, one way or the other... Unless, of course, he's waiting back at camp cleaning his service pistol and planning to sink one in me."

Mara laughs and looks up at the sky. The suns may be setting soon, although with two of them a stretched-out hand's width apart in the sky, it's hard to tell what that will do to the light levels. They wasted an hour or so dozing on a bed of the odd, purplish-black grass that grows beneath the trees' sheltering canopy, after first leaving Nathan to chill. He has had more than enough time for his initial outrage to wear off.

"Do you want to go back and find out?" William asks, nervously.

She tips a shoulder and says, "Why not?"

The thought of Nathan's helpless arousal and warring fury thrills her.

***

Nathan stands up as they approach. His stance... the only apt description for it would be painfully stiff, therein lying all the irony in the world. His fists are clenched at his sides. He doesn't wait for William and Mara to get in range. Mara, as Audrey, shouldn't have forgotten that he can move so fast.

She should not have ruled out the possibility of violent retaliation from Nathan. He has done worse before. It is Audrey in her who wants to see him as kind, and good, and essentially harmless.

She sees him lunge at William and his arm swing back. She doesn't see the blow connect, her mouth opening and her lips on the edge of a startled, urgent order, but she feels the pain, a flare of agony across her jaw, and a corresponding crunch even though there's been no direct pressure to her face.

It blanks out her senses and she falls.

***




4.

"Now you've done it," William shares. Nathan stands over him, still trembling from reaction after throwing the punch and wondering at the fast-faded pain in his hand. He resents absolutely the other sensations that flooded through him again, as awareness of his body briefly returned from the force of that touch. William holds his jaw as he speaks, trying to move only his lips. The damage doesn't seem to be dissuading him from talking in any way. "You may actually have the least sense of self-preservation of anyone I've met."

Nathan's furious trembling is starting to subside. Punching William felt good, and he isn't inclined to regret that Mara got it second-hand. "Audrey wouldn't hold it against me. Besides, you'll heal each other in less than an hour. No harm, no foul, right?"

"Oho--" laughs William, holding the lower half of his face together but still managing to smile that familiar leer. "You laid hand on her. No-one does that."

Mara can burn. She isn't Audrey, and Nathan doesn't have to treat her like Audrey -- like there's anything of Audrey still in there -- until he gets Audrey back. It's taken a long time for him to reach this point, and Nathan thinks it shows a twisted sense of priority that she turned him into a machine for mass-murder and yet it wasn't until she decided to share him with William that the scales tipped. But he sees clearly now.

He says, "You and Mara can both go to hell. Or stay right here. The door's long closed. Duke and Jennifer and Dwight closed it after we left."

"If that's true..." William begins with difficulty. "Then, Nathan..." He pushes off from one knee, clutching his hands in Nathan's jacket, catching his arm to climb up him. Nathan stiffens and doesn't shake William off straight away, because touching William means touching William, and even if he could get used to that, he doesn't want to reawaken the other sensations lingering in his body again. "We're all we have. You sure you want to cut those ties, Nate?" He grins, lopsidedly, his head at the level of Nathan's breast, his broken jaw unsupported. "I'm not one of those guys who's all alpha-male about this. Next time, you can be the one on 'top', if that's what's important to you..."

Nathan shakes him off. "I don't feel any sexual attraction to you!"

William windmills his arms, stumbling backwards. Mara catches him around the knees, sliding a hand up to his butt to prevent him from tripping over her, because she's still on the ground. Her face is covered by her hair.

She looks up and Nathan sees the hatred raging in her eyes as she hisses, "You."

"Easy, honey." William strokes her hair. "It's gonna be a long, dull vacation if lover-boy's right. Don't strike down our best source of entertainment. I mean," he calls over to Nathan, "you may not feel attraction to me, but you feel me and that's got to be better than... well, nothing, right?"

Nathan almost draws his gun. It's not his fault William's touch has the power to be felt. But much as he's now willing to hurt Mara, he's still not willing to kill her and destroy Audrey forever.

"Nathan's a fool," Mara hisses. Her bloodied jaw clicks. "He doesn't even know how little he knows. We're going home. We don't need him."

"Oh, honey, don't..." William reaches for her. She clings to him to regain her feet. Her body is shaking with anger or reaction. "You're mad right now, but I know you, in here..." William taps his index finger gently to his own head. "I know you'll regret this later."

"William," Mara says, "shut up."

The force in her voice and the way William cows makes Nathan realise that all his assumptions this was an equal partnership have been wrong. Mara shoves William aside and stalks toward Nathan. He's only just got enough wits together to back off by the time she grabs for his shirt.

"If you don't want us... then we don't want you."

This close in, he can't help but feel the pull of her body. There's a new sourness in the experience of that addictive need, unpleasant, but that clings to him just as tight. Mara stretches up to slide her hand over his mouth, and when he opens his lips the taste of her skin is so strong and foul on his tongue that thought blanks out. He's aware dimly of her shoving at him, steering him backwards, of his stumbling, uneven steps. Of William's voice telling her again and again that she doesn't want to do this.

Only Mara tells Mara what to do. Long ago, worlds away, he remembers William saying something like that, but Nathan wasn't listening hard enough.

So he pulled the monster's tail. All along fooling himself that it was still a woman, and not really a monster at all.

In that moment, with what brain capacity Nathan has free to register it, she reminds him more of Audrey again than at almost any other time. Forceful and forthright, determined to do the necessary. She shot the Rev and she wasn't sorry. Took his own gun and would have left him a bystander outside the Barn. And she would not kill him, no matter what else was at stake...

Mara's stance on that part may have radically changed.

Nathan doesn't know how they got as far as the soft spot, but he senses the void close in around him, before he can't sense much at all.

He thinks he catches the ghost of William's voice, falling behind, very far in the distant background, saying, "Oh, Mara... You'll be so upset over this later..."

Clearer, he hears her voice, sharp and mean: "Enjoy your new home, Nathan..."

Then, he's falling face-down onto mottled red-black rock, choking in a heavy, sulphurous atmosphere. He can't breathe... The air is smoky, and a red glow seems to infuse all the land and even the air...

Heat, he registers, with panic. His forcefield flares up and locks into place, not helping him feel any less stifled. It doesn't stop his sleeve from bursting into flame, either, and Nathan rolls, beating at the cloth to put it out. There's smoke on the horizon in every direction and a few distinct plumes closer than that. Orange pools bubble. The ground sinks slightly under his forcefield as he tries to stand. Even through the shield, the soles of his shoes try to stick, almost melting.

Mara threw him into a volcano... A world full of them, by the look of it. There is no safety as far as the eye can see. He searches for the door, and finds it... but displacement has thrown him too far away from where his Trouble tells him the way out is. And even if he were to make it, he could not navigate the void. He would prefer to burn quickly than roll around in there, blind, deaf and unfeeling, forever.

It's an academic question because he isn't going to survive the next few minutes. Dizziness forces Nathan to his knees. The air is foul and hard to breathe. Perhaps he's already seared his lungs. The shield isn't keeping out the heat, or else the heat was trapped inside with him when he created it, and isn't dissipating fast enough to help him. He splays his numb hands on the fresh, rocky ground, and can't tell if that shift is the crust of cooling lava still malleable beneath his weight or if the unsteadiness is in his own mind.

He struggles to keep forcing air into his lungs and tries to think of some way, any way, out of this.

***

The time passes without Nathan and William will not stop thinking that she shouldn't have done it, driving Mara to distraction. It's not something he's doing on purpose, it's just there, a constant background hum of guilt. He's so worried for her, insisting upon feeling her pain when she's so determined that she isn't feeling it. Why should she feel anything for Nathan? He was forced on her. Besides, she did not kill him.

If the elements do it for her, that's not her fault.

Without Nathan, the journey becomes harder. She was not placing emotion over logic. Nathan was about to get untrustworthy anyway, as they enter the stage of their quest which involves going back.

But without Nathan, they have no means to find the portal leading to his world, or to find other necessary things, or to forge any useful object they might be needing. Without anyone to Trouble, it's almost like they are just normal, all their abilities rendered useless. How does anyone stand such mundanity?

Without Nathan, they have to use trial and error, William's unreliable memory and her even less reliable one, to locate a way back. Time passes, with false try after false try, and like it was in the time she spent with Nathan before, hopping between worlds with different cycles, it's not possible to count the days which have passed. Time starts to concern her as previously it did not. They sleep when they're tired and when it's safe to do so. Mara sleeps beside William and feels an emptiness at her side where she should feel complete.

The absence where Nathan belongs aches.

She thought she could stand it, that she could cut herself off from Audrey Parker's old emotions, but it's too real and raw. Nathan is gone, and she is still angry with him. She has been angry with him ever since her real memories returned, but he at least hadn't attacked her, then.

She still wants him back.

Frustration mounts and it starts to feel like they will never get anywhere. She and William rattle abrasively around each other, despite -- maybe a little because of -- their mental connection. In a heated moment, William voices, "You shouldn't have killed Nathan," and Mara snaps, "It wouldn't have mattered. He has no reason to help us find the gate back to our world."

"Oh, I don't know..." William looks away, distant for a moment. "I'm sure he could have been 'persuaded'. Your way or mine."

Mara stares at his expression and in a desolate moment realises that William feels this... Nothing so simple as sensing when thoughts of Nathan enter her mind and she tries to shakes them off because she is determinedly not thinking about Nathan. But the rest of the time, the deeper pain...

They have shared their love for each other. That they never shared the love of anyone else before their punishment is not surprising, because there wasn't anyone else, before, except each other. Occasional entertainments didn't count. It never occurred to Mara that their connection could extend to the attachments she made during those other lives.

She was aware that William did not regard Nathan as a rival even at the start, when she believed herself to be Audrey, but in retrospect had considered this was because Nathan was so far below them as to make the conceit laughable. Maybe it was, at first. Then, their connection grew stronger. She didn't think about the baggage it might carry with it. When she offered Nathan to William, it was as a shared plaything she could not yet bring herself to get rid of. It didn't occur to her that she might have already shared Nathan.

William misses Nathan.

Mara feels sorry that he should also be saddled with this, but when she was forced to love it was done to her, so this is not her fault.

"We could go back," William dares to suggest, hesitation in his voice, licking his lips.

They both know they can't. There is nothing to be gained by returning to that volcanic world. Nathan is dead. Even his bones have been burned to ash and scattered or absorbed into the firmament by now. Nathan is long gone.

Mara cries herself to sleep that night. Maybe it's because she finally stopped all the holding back in front of William. In his arms, she can feel his sadness, too, even as he tries to comfort her. They are joined now in grief.

It isn't fair.

The next world almost kills them, full of blue-skinned giant creatures with claws. As they lick their wounds later, William says, "We're close. I've been here before, back at the beginning. I know where to go next."

There are too many worlds and too many ways, with nothing to mark them; no maps in the void.

They linger, first, waiting for their wounds to heal. Mara hopes they can afford the delay. Night passes and the morning finds them whole again. They feel buoyed by the promise of Haven, of home and a world full of people upon whom to work their magic restored to them. A little of the depression slips free. They leave the camp to hunt together, and it starts to feel like old times.

Yes, thinks Mara. This will work. She has only been suffering because Audrey Parker was still so present. Having Nathan around didn't help with that, but if she can bury those memories under new memories -- new memories with William, her true beloved, then she really can leave Nathan behind.

They return to their camp laughing and touching, their catches swinging between them, an offering for the campfire.

Nathan is waiting for them there.

He stands next to the fire like a ragged ghost; thinner than Mara and William remember, seared-out and pitiless. His hair sticks up all askew, uneven lengths, some patches only just growing back. His exposed skin looks red and rough... scar tissue, healing burns from where Mara chose to cast him off. He stands next to their ransacked knapsacks and a pile of some kind of bulky clothing, which includes a helmet and looks sort of like a space suit. That may explain why his clothes are pressed to his skin and so sweaty. Is that how he managed to navigate the void?

Is that how he managed to survive? Time is meaningless and hard to count, but it has been at least days, of their experience.

Nathan's eyes turn wild as she watches. It's not rage; it's a hot need. He stumbles to Mara at a run and she's too surprised to stop him grabbing her at the waist and by the hair, pulling her in and burying his face against her neck, then rising to lick and taste her face like he's desperate for her.

She recovers herself and shoves him away. He's easier to move than he was. His body has suffered, even if he hasn't. He sprawls on the ground and gulps the air. His battered fingers scrape in the dirt. "Thanks," he grunts, edging slowly to a safer distance. The gratitude sounds real. "God. I can smell you from here."

Mara can smell him, too.

William goes to help him, but of course Nathan slaps the help away. He doesn't know that William loves him.

It may be that he doesn't know Mara loves him.

Nathan reels back onto his feet, smiling a strained smile and keeping his distance. "I sure as hell hope that's not the real reason I came back."

It obviously wasn't for revenge. There's no new anger in him for her attempt to kill him. She was acting according to her nature, and he knows that. Mara has no words. William asks, "How did you do it?", stunned and delighted and oddly reticent all at the same time. William's body language is expansive and eager, like an awkward teenager with a crush.

Finding that impression in her brain makes him try to pull it back a little.

"I found your knapsacks," Nathan says roughly. "Since I couldn't find you. It took time... You had to take them off sometimes, but I kept getting a bearing then missing you."

"The volcano?" Mara asks sharply.

He shoots her a look that is brimming and molten. "I had all the tools to survive." Shakily, he levels a pistol at her. It isn't his service gun. It's a rough, old-fashioned creation, flintlock, ball-firing. She knows without asking that he made it himself. "If you're going to try to kill me again, let's get this over with."

There's a pause and Nathan shifts his aim to William, as if shooting William will any less shoot Mara and hence Audrey. Maybe he will feel less responsible if he does it that way.

Mara closes her eyes, and blinking hard, behind them comes to her decision. She opens them again to tell him, "It was a mistake. I was angry."

William scuffles on the ground at her feet, crawling there to retrieve their spoils, dropped in the shock of Nathan's appearance. He holds them up from his knees and offers earnestly, "Stand down, lover-boy, and come eat with us."

Slowly, Nathan lowers his gun arm. His stare is peculiar. It's no wonder, Mara reflects, when they're acting like a couple of lovesick clowns. Apparently she cannot be rid of Nathan even when she tries.

But when Nathan nods warily, Mara breathes easier than she has done in days, as though the world is restored to rights.

***

Nathan spent uncountable hours clinging on within the cocoon of his shield before Audrey arrived to kick his ass and make him do something more proactive to stay alive. Within the shield, by then, he'd crawled to a more secure perch, where the rock was less molten and the heat fumes reduced... He was not the best judge of such things, but visually there seemed to be less of them. He had managed to fashion a gas mask with a filter, using the skills Mara gave him, to make the air that went into his lungs at least a little more breathable.

He didn't know why he made the effort. The void was unnavigable to him, there was nothing here, and even should he succeed and conquer both this world and the void, there was nothing to survive for.

"Damn it, Wuornos," Audrey said. "What the hell are you doing?"

'Dying' seemed too curt an answer, so he said nothing. Hard to say anything, anyway, clutching a filter to his lips, with his respiratory system shot.

"...Because it sure as hell looks like giving up, and I thought we'd agreed that we don't do that, Nathan. Come on." She didn't come this time with accusations and philosophies and helpless angst, or unaware or half-aware of what was going on in the real world around them. Where Audrey had always previously been inconsistent, uncertain, in tune with the identity of an hallucination, this time she came with purpose, drive and urgency. Out to save his life. Out to make him save himself.

Audrey couldn't touch him. She couldn't pull him onto his feet and shove him onward. He needed to do that. The shield protected him except in the moments he had to open it up to refresh his air supply, but he'd been there long enough for his body to become weak, and damage had been done in those first moments, before he got the shield in place at all.

He coughed and choked as he pulled the mask clear of his mouth and he managed to speak. "I can find the portal onto the void. But what the hell do I do once I get through it?"

"Can't you find in the void?"

"I can't... think in the void," Nathan coughed back. If Mara was there, he could flail a hand and she could interpret it and drag him.

"You know what you need." Audrey's hands grasped helplessly at his shoulders, passing through them. "You need a suit. Like Duke's diving suits, that time. Something that could protect you against this environment and the void." She played her intangible fingers over his reddened and burned arms and hands, sorrowfully. Nathan's shield flickered, struggling as if responding to her near-touch, to her capacity for nullifying Troubles...

There were things he didn't know how to make. Audrey, like Mara before her, knew more, but it remained a matter of trial and error, a torturous process. Slower still because he had to replace the mask, keep breathing, and couldn't converse at the same time. If he passed out, that was likely to be the end. The shield would probably fail and he would be cooked by the air.

Hours along the way, Audrey disappeared.

Her frantic care and urgency to save him had made its impression. He forced himself to keep going, even though he had not slept in what must've been over a day. He finished the suit, peeled it onto his body; substituted the breathing mask for a helmet with a built-in filter. He staggered, carrying his unfeeling, possibly dying body over the uneven and deadly terrain to where the gate into the void lay.

Nathan fell out of one world of horror into a confusion not much better. The suit filtered some of it out. Focusing as best he could, he oriented his ability to find upon a safe world, the first one where he and Mara had camped, green with life, inviting. He used his Trouble as the thread of purpose to pull him across the void, and fell out of it into the world of his destination.

He hadn't really believed until then that it would work.

He got as far as removing the helmet and gulping lungfuls of the clean air. Even if the air was clean, it still seemed hard to get enough of it to satisfy his reeling consciousness. He wondered how much damage had been done to his lungs, but had no way to know. The sound of alien birds touched his ears and soothed him, a canopy of leaves swam in his vision, and he let his head roll back and succumbed to sleep.

Audrey harried him awake. It was long enough later that his body seemed to have had chance to recover somewhat, so he'd probably been out a long time.

She stopped yelling his name in his ear when she saw he was awake. "You need to get the suit off. We need to check your injuries."

Nathan stripped and they considered the parts that were burned. The soles of his feet were bad, but they had been somewhat protected by his shoes. His knees, the palms of his hands and elbows, the places his body had been in contact with the ground... Audrey knew a little about herbs -- more of those undefined memories -- but they couldn't find familiar plants in this place. Nathan could offer commentary on familiar smells, and they found something they thought should help, pulping it up and pressing it gently over the burned skin.

"I'm sorry," Audrey said, finally. They both seemed worn out from their efforts. He had almost forgotten that she couldn't be real.

"Why?" Nathan's voice had survived the ordeal the least successfully: reduced now to a harsh rasp.

"She tried to kill you. I tried to kill you."

"What Mara does isn't your fault."

Audrey shook her head and pressed her lips together, pensive, and Nathan wondered if she knew something he didn't.

Then he wondered about this Audrey, who had been helping him rather too actively for an hallucination. She knew too much. Knew things that he didn't, and his subconscious wouldn't. At least, he couldn't see how his mind could just be accessing unconsciously-known information. All that stuff about polymers for the suit... and he'd never been the slightest bit interested in herbs, beyond their scent. It wasn't as though Garland was interested in gardening, nor anyone else he knew. The information wasn't something buried in him and waiting to be dragged up.

He remembered how she'd affected his forcefield Trouble, back on the volcanic world.

Mara was... they didn't even know what Mara was, but if she was human, she was also more than human. She had forged a bond with William, somehow, that linked them body and mind, let them share thoughts. Nathan didn't know how the hell that worked, but it was proof Mara's mind was able to do things that weren't normal.

Hallucination-Audrey was only there sometimes.

And he absolutely couldn't remember, when he thought back, ever experiencing his hallucination of Audrey while Mara was there and awake.

He wondered if Mara had regretted killing him. Or had Mara known deep down, when she left him, that she'd already given him all the tools to survive?

Had the schism between Mara and Audrey forced her to separate herself, at least when the bulk of her mind was no longer conscious, to the extent that she could travel in her dreams and latch onto Nathan's thoughts? To help him survive?

"Audrey..." Nathan said, and he heard his voice shake.

She turned and met his eyes, and he knew it. Even if she was a ghost, even if she could only escape when Mara slept, she was here, She was real even if he could no longer touch her.

Her eyes misted as she looked at him. She took a step nearer, reached down and pretended to hold his hands in both of hers. "I know," she said softly. "I figured it out, too."

It invigorated life again in Nathan. If Audrey was here, then she still existed as a separate entity within Mara. That meant he could save her. He had to try.

He needed to rejoin Mara and William, worlds away. If they had already been battered like flies against the barrier to their own world, trying to break through after Jennifer had closed the gate, Audrey wouldn't be here with him.

Audrey alive meant that, somehow, he had to find Mara and William again.

"I'm coming for you," he promised her fervently.

Her eyes looked sad.

***

Nathan hears Mara say, "It was a mistake," and looks for the shade of Audrey inside her. He followed them doggedly to get to this moment, but it was all for nothing if she still wants him dead.

She doesn't. He was watching her. Though he doesn't quite know what to do with what he sees.

William's expression, too, is a matter for another time; boyish and eager, a hair's-breadth away from having his tongue loll out like an enthusiastic dog.

"Eat with us." Mara backs up William's offer, and throws fresh sticks on the fire.

Nathan doesn't know what this is any more and he doesn't understand it. But he decides he'll accept what chance he's given to stay close to Audrey and maybe somehow, someday, find a way to save her.

***

Cleaning up the camp is a simple matter, oddly cheerful with Nathan back, even if he is back as a scruffy, skeletal and slightly confused shadow, who watches Mara and William too closely and burns with something else that seems to have replaced his inner anger. Maybe it was the lava that seared all the anger out of him.

Whatever it was, they are free, and complete, and Nathan has stopped fighting them. They will be home soon.

Mara kicks out the fire and kisses her men, William first, then Nathan. Nathan shuts his eyes, though he doesn't otherwise resist. He only half-falls into the stupor that she cursed him with. Somewhere along the way, he seems to have found a new method of restraint in not resisting at all.

The result when William tries to kiss Nathan might be funny if it didn't simultaneously make her heart ache. She soothes him, mind to mind. They have time. All the time in the world to bring Nathan around. With Haven and his friends on the line, they will have a new means to control him, a new pressure to apply. Nathan is going to be much more amenable to William's advances in the immediate future.

Nathan suits up for the void. It is the kind of idea she has toyed with, considering that she could perhaps instruct him to make the parts and they could create something workable between them. She did not, for she preferred him helpless.

That he created the suit unsettles her. She finds herself unable to be sorry that he created it, though. She tried to kill him once. Her traitor heart subsequently taught her better. If she must embrace this to survive, then so be it.

Nathan's suit has gloves but they traverse the void holding onto one bare hand apiece, the gloves tucked away. Mara feels his reaction, the jolt that goes through him as, presumably, his sense of finding tells him something about their destination. Her hopes soar with the confirmation that finally, finally, they are going home.

She understands that Nathan's reaction is fear. Only half of it is because he doesn't know what will happen when they hit the barrier of a locked-down portal, but for all he knows, they're about to die.

They do not die. The dark walls of the room under the lighthouse coalesce around them, along with two figures. The artificial colours of Duke and Jennifer's clothes are an affront to the eyes after so long among natural palettes.

Duke gapes. Jen gapes. Nathan, in the suit, falls to his knees with a heavy thump. He rips the helmet from his head and he, too, gapes -- outraged, aghast, at Duke and Jennifer. "You -- why the hell didn't you--?"

He sounds rougher and angrier than he is because of the ruin the volcano world left of his voice, but he is very, very surprised, and relief and disappointment visibly war within him. While he had no intention to bring Mara and William home, no-one ever really wants to be exiled.

On this, Nathan has always been a fool. It isn't his fault. He lacked the relevant information, and Mara felt in no way inclined to provide it.

"You..." Duke stutters. "Nathan, what the hell? You've hardly been gone more than half an hour. We haven't even finished the first round of arguing about this craziness yet. What the hell happened to you?"

Duke doesn't understand either, shocked by Nathan's appearance, stunned by how he could get that way in so short a time.

Comparative time is almost meaningless when you are travelling between worlds.

Almost, and therein lay Mara's small core of worry. For time moves slower on this world than most -- the factor that made William's exile all the crueller. He has spent a thousand years or more without her. The wonder is he stayed true to her at all.

Nathan rises to one knee, his hands bunched into fists on the floor. He's angry now, cold anger, but hardly surprised. "You knew..."

Of course she knew: she didn't tell him, although she told him honestly that they were going home. Anything more specific he could not expect her to divulge. This was their contest from the start. It was always possible, along the way, that they'd have the misfortune to hit a world where time passed nearly as slowly as in this one.

Mara is floating on a wave of bliss. They have won... home and together... and what could represent a greater victory? She stretches the kinks out of her back and lifts her hands, playfully, to Duke and Jennifer. "Are we... earlier than planned? I apologise for the vagaries of time in the void. But now that we are back..."

Nathan makes a choked noise. Mara pauses and looks to him worriedly. She can feel the forcefields trying to roll out from him, and see his struggle to get it under control before it flattens the whole room, or at least flattens everything in front of him, which does include Duke and Jen. It's no skin off Mara's nose, but it would be unfortunate for him, and she would rather he were not in pain.

She loves him very much.

She watches him get control over the forcefields. He has mastered, after a fashion, five Troubles under her guidance. He will be immeasurably useful to her, though he might mope and thrash some more before succumbing to her purposes. But she knows well where his weaknesses lie. "Never mind," Mara soothes. "It isn't your fault about the timing. We both went into the underworld to retrieve our beloved. The only difference is that I was successful."

Something flashes in Nathan's eyes. She has no understanding of it. But it isn't failure or defeat. Whatever it is gives him the strength to pull himself onto his feet and stand, stable and solid again.

Mara dismisses it, choosing to be satisfied that he is fine.

She licks her lips and stares around them; Duke, and Jennifer, and darling Nathan. Dwight stumbles to a halt with a small sound of dismay at the cavern entrance, returning too late. They shine. Their Troubles pulse in shimmering, twisted threads within them. The whole world seems to glow with all the many possibilities of her long-fought freedom.

She turns to William, smiling. "We are all going to have so much fun."


END



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