FIC: [Haven] Eurydice's Adventures in the Underworld - (2/4) R, Audrey/Nathan, Mara/Nathan/William
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.
***
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.
***