FIC: [Haven] House Divided - Mara/Nathan/William, Explicit (6/10)

[roseveare]

Aiming for Wednesday for Chapter 6. New WIPbigbang deadline is 3rd August.

Chapter 5

Duke and Jennifer drive to the barrier in the hazy light of another damp morning. After being on stand-by three days, Jennifer is the one who is tired of waiting. She has her book in one hand, and with the other, hugs her jacket around herself as protection against the wind and rain.

"I open doors, right?" she'd said to Duke, as they lay together last night. "Or at least, I opened one before. Maybe opening things is something I do. Maybe I can find something that works against that wall."

Duke agreed they should try. When they woke early and restless, this morning, it seemed like as good a time as any. A time, specifically, when Dwight couldn't come out to ‘hrm' at them and disapprove. Jennifer is so desperate to help, some way, any way. Duke isn't going to hold her back.

The wind whips her dress around her legs, and the rain lashes them both as they stand on the grass a little way from the road, at a secluded point in the invisible wall around Haven. Jennifer holds up the book, and flicks through the pages, and glares at the pages. Eventually, she shouts. Her voice is thin but it rises loud and angry against the gale, directing her ire at both book and barrier… and maybe some part at herself. "Damn it! Why don't you do something?! You're supposed to be the contingency! You're supposed to have answers! Where are the answers?!"

Duke can't see the contents of the book either way, but can only assume from her reactions that the pages are still empty. Above their heads, the rain passing through the barrier outlines the goldfish-bowl structure in watery relief. It's an odd kind of beautiful, shimmering with droplets against the darker backdrop of the dingy, cloudy sky. There's even the shimmer of a rainbow trying to form within all the glistening reflections.

That mystical quality to the setting is probably what keeps them both out there and trying for so long. It feels like something is set to happen, something must change. It's in the air, in the whole feel of the world this morning, in this place. Everything seems poised for it. It doesn't seem possible they could leave with nothing having occurred.

But eventually even Duke feels that they have to move, and steps forward to tug on Jennifer's arm. "We need to go. Come on, it's not working. We need to head back. Get out of these damp clothes."

Jennifer's damp clothes squelch as she moves reluctantly with his tug, turning around. And Duke's phone rings in his pocket.

It's Dwight. "The watch I set up on Stranglers' Inlet sighted Mara's boat leaving the island. I guess I can stop feeling bad for sending those guys all the way out there now."

Maybe that's what he's feeling, Duke thinks; this sense that the planets are aligned. He hasn't checked his horoscope this week. Knowing his luck, it outright says ‘your evil friends will pay a visit on Thursday'.

"Wait -- wait -- wait -- wait!" Jen yelps, pulling away from his grip, both hands rising to her head. She tips her head back and stares up at the rain-shimmer of the barrier, eyes widening as her neck stretches. "Hello... Was that... did I hear Albert?" she calls, mystified, into the sky. "I heard -- I thought I heard -- Is Albert your name?"

Duke gapes. His girlfriend is talking to air, now. Of all the possibilities he'd considered, in coming here to poke at Mara's barrier, he hadn't anticipated that one.

"Where are you?" Duke's still holding the phone against his ear, and Dwight sounds suspicious.

"Jen wanted to try something," Duke murmurs. "Hang on." He looks askance at Jen, who doesn't respond to him.

"Yes! I can hear you!" she hollers up at the barrier, spinning around on the spot. "Talk to me again!"

Duke can't hear anything except Dwight breathing with steadily increasing impatience.

Jennifer trips across the grass and wheels like a shining faery creature, though her clothes are bedraggled from the rain. She's trying to look up and encompass the whole barrier at once. Her voice rises again brightly. "Oh! It's Jennifer. Jennifer Mason! I have a magical book. Are you the barrier?"

Duke puts the phone back to his ear. He doesn't have time for this. He needs to be back in town for Nathan. He's the one who rallied the troops. He doesn't want to think about what happens if he's not there to hold people back. But he says to Dwight, "Can you give us just ten more minutes?"

***

Nathan wakes still vibrating in the aftershocks of the day before. He can't feel, exactly, but with William behind him and Mara in front, there's enough of that faint, borrowed sensation soaking through his body to make him aware of how leaden and sluggish every part of him is.

Burning has been a particular horror to him ever since the volcano world. The only reason he slept is surely because he landed so deeply unconscious that the horror of Mara's last Trouble couldn't intrude his dreams. Returning to consciousness, he braces instinctively to burn anew, and waits for it to happen, tensed against the fire he can't stop. It almost feels contrary to the very nature of things when it doesn't happen. He almost feels cheated.

It was, at a guess, only hours, no more than half a day. But it took over his world so completely, imprinting him with that inevitable repeating cycle. For a long while he lies in the gathering morning sunlight and shudders as he doesn't burn, as expectations continue to be foiled and he almost can't cope with stability... safety.

He thinks Mara underestimates the destruction he's capable of now. He made this castle, and that Trouble has a flipside he hasn't fully explored. If Mara had made him feel it, as she so casually threatened, he thinks he'd have taken the whole place down with him.

"Easy, easy there… You're safe now." A low voice murmurs in his ear. Feeling steals over his rigid, trembling body, a bar around his waist, a concentration over his heart where William just flattened his palm. "I wouldn't let you stay like that. I begged her for you. Do you see now how much I love you?"

William never forgets. William is always looking to win points. Loving William -- which floods back in, slightly dented by the experience in between -- can't make Nathan like William. Can't make him comfortable with the other man's body curling against the back of his, inescapably masculine, unquestionably sexual. Even so, today a significant part of him wants to relax into the touch and allow himself to be comforted, allow William to soothe away the lingering shock of Mara's punishment.

"You know, in fact, I'm very generous…" William nuzzles the back of his shoulder, and manages to make the next words sound warmly fond. "Considering your natural reaction to go batshit insane and hit the mass destruction."

Nathan musters a shaky, "Fuck you," managing to level out his breath enough for words. He wasn't exactly in his right mind, and they're both damned lucky it wasn't worse, given the powder keg they've made of him. His body is still trembling and he still keeps his small defiance consciously quiet. Mara's face is buried against the front of his opposite shoulder. Her rage is fresh in his memory.

"Fuck me?" William muses. "Why, of course you may. But let's share a morning kiss, first." He raises a relative amount of cheer for the proposition, though it seems to be cheer that takes effort.

Nathan wonders how to move out of the way or say no in any fashion that will have an impact without waking or incensing Mara. Everything is too stark and he's wide open to the world, stripped by yesterday's dual trials of love and fear. He doesn't know what happens if William tries to take him now -- or even the other way around. Meanwhile, a solution isn't presenting itself and William is leaning over him.

A hand slaps over William's descending lips. "Let's take a raincheck on both," says Audrey.

Nathan doesn't have to question it this time -- he knows that's Audrey. As she smushes William's nose and mouth with her palm, and shoves him away, she can be nobody else. Out of the terrible rollercoaster of the last twenty-four hours, Nathan's heart rediscovers joy. He's struck with an inability to make any sound. His breath just draws in and he grins and grins at her.

"Mf," says William, and his eyes boggle as his own realisation comes a moment later. He moves like lightning backwards out of the bed, as Audrey rises up over Nathan like an avenging angel.

William has not forgotten her threats.

"Not her again!" he whines, with his body safely out of reach. "Mara, honeypot, where are you? Come back!"

"Get out," Audrey says, icily, and William runs, slamming the door behind him. Audrey's breath whoofs out of her and she falls back, slumping in a relief that proves her confidence of a moment before was for show. It's only a second, though, before she's animated and full of purpose again, her hands pulling at Nathan. "Nathan, Nathan, are you okay? Oh my God, I'm so sorry!"

"You remember what she did?" he rasps, climbing up on his elbow as her hands slide around his neck, under his chest. Her blonde hair, which Mara chose and kept severe and straight, is perfect on her now, rumpled from bed. "There you are…" Nathan breathes, reaching for that fluffy hair reverently.

She nods. "A little bit. I guess we do have William to thank for something, after all. He really did push Mara to undo it. Then again…" Her face turns absolutely thunderous. "He has no right," she hisses, and folds him in her arms. Nathan tries to move more upright, to have a more active role in the embrace, but he still feels like he's just the pieces left over after yesterday.

"I knew what I was risking when I went back to them," Nathan says. She's here, she's whole and real in his arms -- everything he needs to prove to himself he made the right choice. "It was worth it," he tells her.

"It's too much," she says.

William inside his body cannot possibly be more of a violation than Mara inside her head. He returns her gaze with silent stubbornness, convinced that he's right.

While her eyes are sadly roaming over him, he takes action and runs his hands down from her shoulders to her wrists, kisses her forehead, then her lips, and slides his hands in to circle her waist. "Audrey?"

"Don't get any ideas," she murmurs, her breath hitching, pulling back. Her hands flatten on top of his. "We aren't stopping long enough to get frisky. Not in Mara's -- not in this bed. This time we're going back."

Nathan finds his libido lacking, anyway, in the aftermath of yesterday. He just wants to hold her because she's her. He grunts and nods, and curls his fingers around her fingers, "To Haven?"

She clutches his hand and starts to scramble for the edge of the bed, dragging him. "Yes, damn it. If I can't get back there and stay as myself, I'll put myself into Dwight's hands and in a jail cell before I turn back into Mara again."

Nathan nods. "We'll figure out a way to help you stay you. William's going to make trouble, though."

"Literally," she snorts. "Okay, he's a problem." Her face pinches. "I wish I could just shoot that bastard."

It's a stab in the centre of Nathan's chest no matter how much he wants it not to be. "No!"

Audrey looks at him.

"I can't help it," Nathan says, glumly. He feels weak and stupid. It's nothing new that William's physically used him against his will, but this is-- He didn't want it, but now, they've managed to almost make him want it. He doesn't want this.

"Fuck Mara," Audrey says violently. "We're going to fix you, too, okay?"

He nods and follows her up out of bed. His legs shake under him like he's forgotten how to walk. He hasn't properly walked since Mara first made him burn to ashes. He can almost still taste the ashes. He remembers, dimly, a nightmare of crawling the castle's rooms and corridors, trying to find either one of Mara or William, or find something that could stop the burning, over and over, to do anything -- anything -- to make them end that Trouble. Tortuous progress made in seconds-long bursts of lucidity before the cycle began again. He chokes and grabs the bed with both hands to stop his legs from folding.

"Nathan…?"

"I'm okay. Just… yesterday." Audrey is back and he needs to be strong. This is the moment he's worked for. He can get her to the mainland. She remembers Mara. She can help Haven. They'll think of a way to fix what Mara and William have done to both of them, and they'll be together again.

Audrey finds some clean clothes for them both and helps him to dress. He doesn't want to take the hand she offers to support him as she jerks her head at the door, but after a hesitation, he does. It's just while he relearns walking again.

Placing a hand rail on either side of the steep steps was one of his better design moves by far. He's got himself under control by the time he reaches the base of the staircase. He successfully totters away from the support under his own steam.

William is sitting like a gargoyle on the few steps up at the corridor leading to the kitchen area. His knees are drawn up, his back hunched, arms twisted around himself, a fierce, unpleasant expression on his face. He's found clothes from somewhere and got dressed, probably to make it harder for Audrey to get at the body parts he values most. William's had too much of both of them. "Where do you think you're going, Nathan?" he asks in a hostile grunt of a voice.

"Back to Haven," Nathan says. "With Audrey."

William asks, "What about me?"

He's not making himself very lovable at the moment, but even so, the thought of leaving him raises a pang.

"You have two hands, so use them," Audrey says crisply, her eyes narrow and nose wrinkling. "You can stay here and play at being the embittered villain. Or you can push this now and see who ends up losing patience and killing both of us first."

William ignores her and looks at Nathan. "Don't go."

Nathan gapes for a moment before he feels Audrey's fingernails jab into his skin and clings to her hand again for strength. "She's real."

William's laugh is nasty. "She's Mara. She was always Mara! Are you really so stupid?!" He jerks up onto his feet. It's almost a bounce, but it's far from animated by his usual ebullience. "She's Mara's psychosis! Mara needs help. Stop fuelling this -- this thing."

Audrey ducks around Nathan and punches him in the nose, and then they both reel back, swearing. Nathan grabs Audrey and glares at William.

"What? What? What?" the man cries, muffled. His fingers leak a small amount of blood, where he holds them clamped over his face. "How is that my fault?!"

"You're the one who revels in having this ‘connection'," Nathan says. He lifts his fingers cautiously to tap his own face, just in case, but there's no blood there. Audrey lifts her head and spits blood at William's feet, shaking out her hand violently.

"I'm Audrey Parker. Whatever you think." She wipes her hands on her pants, and ignores the further slow trickle from her nose. She takes a step.

"I won't let you deliver Mara to those ants that would defy us!" Abruptly, William's two henchmen are there.

Audrey initially backs off, but then stops them with a frown before Nathan can even call his troops. "You taught me how to command them," she says to William. "Remember? They don't only listen to you."

"I didn't teach you!" he howls, enraged and frustrated. "I reminded Mara! You're not going to the mainland. You're not taking her from me again! Don't you understand how long I waited?"

"Fine," Nathan rasps, "you don't want to wait, come with us." He holds out his free hand, while Audrey looks at him like he's insane. But they can put William in a cell, too, if he comes with them. Lock him down securely enough and they won't have to worry about him still being out there, and angry, the way they will if they leave him on the island.

William gawps in actual surprise, but quickly grabs Nathan's offered hand and uses it to pull him close, dragging him into a cloying, boa-constrictor embrace, all long limbs seeming to cocoon around him.

Audrey slaps at the coils. "Get off. You're not -- Nathan, he's not coming!"

But Nathan can't leave him, and practically, logically, he doesn't want to. "It's okay," he tells Audrey.

"Oh, you're too late, Miss Parker," William leers. "He loves me. He'd never leave me. He'll look after me. Won't you, Nathan?" he tags, encouragingly, coming out of the embrace and settling for just one arm slung loosely around Nathan's waist. "We made sure of that."

Nathan can't feel his face screw up but is pretty sure his expression is a doozy. Still, he takes refuge in silence -- and instead thinks of the catalogue of things Jordan McKee did and tried to do to him because of love. If William thinks that emotionally compromising Nathan makes him safe, then he's mistaken, but it's better to leave William thinking he's been screwed up enough that William can actually count on him. One thing Nathan would never do is pick that bastard over Audrey. He'll tame William by his overconfidence, if that's the opening he's offered. He picks up Audrey's hand again and squeezes it in silent reassurance, trying to deliver the message.

"We need to take Sophie," he says aloud, changing the subject, trying without much success to shrug William off.

"Really, I don't know how I can love someone so boring," is William's commentary on that concern.

"You're appalling," Audrey says. "People mean nothing to you."

She says worse as she's standing staring at the deflated, limp thing that William made of Sophie. "Change her back." Her voice catches in her throat, and she looks at both William and Nathan like she doesn't know either of them.

The glance at Nathan says, How could you have any affection for the monster who did this? But since she already knows the answer, Nathan doesn't have anything more to say.

"She's just not in use at the moment," William says breezily. "See?" There's an air hole in the back of Sophie's neck, and William puts his lips to it and starts to blow. The expressions on her face as she's inflated, as her body twists up and starts to expand, are horrible to watch.

Nathan knows William's a monster, but he makes a point to himself of holding this moment in his memory for when he needs something to remind him.

Audrey watches with widened and increasingly angry eyes while Sophie returns to a more human likeness. "I didn't say ‘inflate her', I said change her back! Take that Trouble off her right now!"

William's eyes spark. He finishes the last breath and pops the cap in place. Sophie falls away from him, sobbing, and Nathan steps forward to catch her and pull her away from William, whose play becomes obvious as he says sulkily, "I don't think I need to do that, Audrey Parker. I think you can do it." His hand rises, offering up his box. "Come on, now. You took the last one from her. Don't tell me you're too afraid to try again?"

"Bastard." Audrey looks like she might hit him again. Nathan tries to step in between them, and half manages it, though he's still entangled with Sophie.

"Don't," he murmurs, giving at the shivering woman a sidelong study. She looks normal now, though her fingers are rubbing the air cap on her neck and she's whimpering with the discovery. "It's not dangerous like the other one. We can still take her with us." He can see from Audrey's expression that she is indeed afraid. She isn't alone. Yesterday she changed back into Mara and did more terrible things than ever in Mara's reprisal for being consumed.

"Yes." She nods slowly. "We have to get to Duke and Dwight first. I'm sorry." She grimaces sympathetically at Sophie. "I'll try to take it away later. But this isn't going to hurt you in the meantime. You're back to normal for all functional purposes."

"Aw, such hesitation," William mocks.

"Shut up," Nathan growls. "We can always change our minds and tie you to the bed again."

William flashes a leering grin. "I know that's where you want me, Nate. Gee, I hope ‘Audrey's' still enough to satisfy you, after what you've had a taste of now. I hope she still wants you after where you've been."

"Of course I do," Audrey says. "You're nothing but a rapist. Stop blaming him."

The word goes through Nathan like a shock, worse than William's taunts. He's angled, fortunately, so that the only one who can see his expression is Sophie. She gives a little gasp and clings to him in a fashion that's subtly different from her own distress, coming out of herself a bit more. He can't feel the comfort she's trying to provide, but maybe it helps a little. She was there for parts that Audrey missed.

This is not going to be the triumphant return he had envisaged -- and he had, in his more hopeful moments, envisioned one. Where his persistence allowed him to bring back an Audrey who could help them solve all the Troubles for good, and they returned to Haven with… some kind of fanfare, at least validation. His own absolution for the Barn and more. It would make right all he's done and sacrificed.

When he started out on this journey, he knew and accepted that Mara might kill him, or do terrible things to him. He didn't bargain on becoming her and William's plaything. Never imagined humiliation was the principal terror he was entering into. Though he should have, really -- what else were the Troubles, back when Mara and William created them, but their games of toying with human lives?

"It's all right," Nathan mumbles, holding onto Sophie's wrist. Feeling is not much of an anchor anymore anyway. Yesterday Mara and William almost drowned him in it. "We need to go."

He never imagined, either, that bringing Audrey back to Haven would feel like a betrayal in some guilty, conquered part of his mind.

***

It's raining as they leave the island: Audrey with Nathan and Sophie, and William far less welcome in tow. The rain falls unhampered onto Nathan's head, through his hair to dribble down his forehead and off the end of his nose. He makes no attempt to shield himself. By contrast, black orbs, hover over William's head in a featureless, shadowy flying manta ray. Audrey does what she can with her jacket and her hands, having surrendered Mara's more voluminous coat to Sophie, but the rain is heavy and persistent and she is cold to the bone.

Nathan takes the oars and William turns his nose up. Audrey reaches to help, but receives a shake of the head. She gets the sense Nathan wants the distraction.

The castle receding is a sight of contradictions. It's Mara's monstrosity, Mara's vanity, the ominous, threatening spiky towers imposed upon the secluded isle. On the other hand, it's Nathan's work, and it's staggering. He breathed life into every stone and spire. And in a way, he made it for her.

Most love tokens are smaller.

"You don't have to go at all." William has spied the direction of her gaze.

"Yes, I do," Audrey refutes sharply. She needs to get Nathan away from them, if she does nothing else.

Even if she doesn't know what Dwight and the Guard will do to her when she returns to them.

There was a time when she thought she could have a life -- that there was a way past this all, a way to win. Now, she's sharing a body with a woman who'd subjugate worlds, and it's become about damage limitation. That's all she ever really was, isn't it? A restraining device upon Mara? Her only drive right now can be to hand Mara over to the Guard and free Nathan.

Freedom might be a hard process, not just after what Mara and William have done to him, but how much he's invested in this fight. She hopes Duke will be around to help if she can't.

Because she thinks Nathan still believes in that happy ending, even now. It could only be that which still drives him to push himself so hard. He is a collection of hard angles at the back of the boat, both severe and oddly animated by his ever persistent will as he starts up the motor, now they've picked their way through the rocks of the island shallows. The lines of his body that can't acknowledge pain are screaming, and he avoids looking at William; avoids looking at her while William is there. Sophie is the only one whose eyes he'll meet. Audrey wants so much to give him healing and happiness, but the only route she can realistically think of is to be cruel first. To take herself and all of them away.

She doesn't think she can overcome Mara on a permanent basis. That means that while she is with Nathan, so too will Mara be, free to harm him further whenever Audrey falters. Mara grows more vicious with Nathan the more of herself Audrey takes back. The last Trouble was a horror. She can only be thankful he wasn't able to feel it.

She hasn't missed the essence of the basic equation in their current fractious company: Sophie avoids Audrey almost as fervently as she avoids William -- the fact she risked so much to lift the woman's more serious Trouble the day before apparently not enough in her favour. She's not clinging to Nathan any more; she just uses him as a buffer, in the sense that she places herself so his body is between her and anyone else. William, sleaze, wants to be close to Nathan, probably more to unnerve her than being genuinely that clingy. Audrey would try to block him but she needs to put herself where she can best watch everyone else.

Somewhere inside her, Audrey can feel Mara churning and raging as they strike for the mainland. They're splintering her circle, the things she's collected, the ones that matter. Even Sophie is a valued possession, Audrey realises, more than the castle and the island or any of the material creations on it. People, flesh and blood, can be forged -- by which she means Troubled, and revulsion rushes over Audrey again, at the thought of the monster closed inside her.

She cannot live like this. How can Nathan still believe in her, in them, in any hopeful outcome, knowing what lies under the surface? You're not Mara, you're her jailor, Nathan had said to her, and she holds to that. If she's not the fixer of Troubles she always thought she was, at least she has that.

They have to cut south to round the worst of the rocks before they can close in to the shore of Haven. It brings them close enough to the seaward edge of Mara's barrier against the outside world that they can see the rain sparking off it drawing its outline more visibly in the sky. Distantly, she thinks she hears voices, and for a moment, she's bowled over by the beauty of it anyway.

Nathan and Sophie are staring, too. Nathan with his head back and wonder opening up his face which had become so care-stretched and severe in such a brilliant fashion it gives her back her hope for him. William strikes a deliberately bored expression in defiance, sits in the centre of the boat and, well, plays with his balls. He deliberately manipulates the Trouble-creating black spheres in a constant reminder that he's still a threat.

The little boat bobs them to the shore, under an arching rainbow that shimmers and separates into colours spreading out across the arch of the invisible obstruction in the sky.

Nathan and Audrey pull the boat up onto the shore. It's not the private jetty William used before, since Dwight now knows of that, but a more isolated stretch of the town's coastline, a five minute walk away from homes. "Get out," Nathan has to say curtly to William, who lounges in the back of the boat, adding to their burden.

"Or we'll push you back out to drift," Audrey adds, slopping through water to seize the oars.

Nathan already has the engine keys clutched in his hand, but that gets his attention the wrong way. "Audrey..."

"I'm serious," she says dangerously.

"Push him away!" chimes Sophie, won over at last.

"William, William, get off, now," Nathan snaps, lunging deeper into the water, too, to grab William's wrist and physically pull him off the boat. Audrey hates that Nathan touches him so readily. William just pulls a face as his ankles land in water.

With Nathan no longer a safe harbour to cling to, and with Haven in sight, Sophie opts to start running up the shore.

"Your Trouble--!" Audrey shouts, then gives up. "Fine! Call Haven PD if you... start to deflate, or anything."

William snickers.

"You can shut up. That's not funny. That was an awful thing to do to a person." She can't help but notice as she rages at him that Nathan hasn't let go yet. Maybe it's for security that he wants to keep a tight hold on William, or maybe he's just telling himself that.

Sophie disappears over the scrubby slope that leads up from the shore, which grows less sandy and rocky and more grassy toward the top. Nathan gazes unhappily after her. "Maybe I should go make sure she's all right."

"I think she'll be ten times more all right away from all of us," Audrey reassures him. "Let her go."

"You know this just means we'll have to find another cook?" William says, a sarcastic drawl. "When she changes back and we drag you back to where you belong, Nathan."

"If you claim to love me," Nathan says, keeping his eyes averted from William and on the slope where Sophie disappeared, "give me the choice and not the caveman courtship." He doesn't look back for William's reaction to his words: just starts to trudge across the sand, then make his way up the slope.

"Love isn't choice, Nathan!" William calls up, wading behind him in loose, sprawling strides. "Surely you know that, if anyone does!"

He smirks at Audrey. She wants to hit him again, but she clenches her fists at her sides instead. "Yours certainly isn't," she says, spitefully. "You had to screw with his head to get him to feel anything for your twisted personality."

She wants her cuffs, then she could cuff him. There's enough rope around on the foreshore, that she could salvage from other boats. She anticipates both men's resistance and shelves the idea, not so easy or final as clicking a pair of cuffs into place. No matter what happens, she isn't intending to let William walk free around Haven for long, but actively restraining him probably has to wait until Dwight is on hand.

Nathan reaches the top of the slope. William hurries to catch up before he disappears out of sight. Audrey increases her pace to follow them both, her heart rate picking up to beat a litany of anxiety.

The rain has slowed and the world seems eerily quiet without its soporific drumming. It's just that post-rainstorm feeling, she tells herself. God knows any instincts she has for danger are scattered all over the place now. Up over the crest of the slope, they find themselves on a little spread-out street backed onto the water, houses of different construction in various states of repair, hardly one of the picturesque parts of the coastline. They have some distance to walk to get into the town proper. Nathan took a roundabout route from the island to cut down on their chances of being seen from the shore. They intend to hand themselves over to Dwight either way, but they'd rather turn up on HPD's doorstep to do it, and not have to deal with the Guard in between.

The mixed scents of fish and salt and wet foliage sink into Audrey's senses. Being alive and having a body, she thinks, is such a boon, in all sorts of tiny ways she never knew or appreciated. She moves to fall in at Nathan's side, glancing back over her shoulder to check on William, who's fallen behind them.

It might make her happier to lose him in town, except for what he'd get up to.

Nathan sees her looking and frowns.

"I don't trust him," she tells him, barely mouthing the words. "I think he's going to make some kind of move."

"Wherever he is, he'll get up to some form of no good," Nathan replies.

"We call Dwight," Audrey outlines quickly. "Tell him to come and get us. Tell him the situation. Get the jump on William before he can make his own move. As far as William knows, we're going to the police station." She looks up warily, sidelong meeting Nathan's eyes.

He slowly drops his chin in a single nod.

Audrey is feeling short of breath. She's not sure she could speak at a normal volume if she tried. "I'll move on ahead, get myself into one of the houses to find a telephone. Tell William... that I'm scouting, or... distract him if you have to." She doesn't like making that suggestion. Nathan's face twists, receiving it, but he nods again.

Audrey's steps break away from him. Nathan turns back to wait for William. And a car screeches down the road out of nowhere, burning rubber at clearly arrest-worthy speeds, and slews to a halt a short distance in front of them.

Audrey registers firearms, crying out a warning as she dives for cover, hitting a grass bank behind a boat-loaded trailer as bullets ping. The car's windows are all down. She can see it from a skewed angle through the underneath of the trailer as its doors open and it dispenses men with dark clothes and heavy boots and -- she can hear the guns in their hands even if the angle no longer gives her a line of sight above waist level. She can't see the tattoos either, but she's pretty damn confident placing them as Guard.

Nathan's standing in the middle of the street, unprotected and making no move to protect himself.

...No. As her heart leaps, he just looks toward the ambushers, and their bullets make hard, hollow sounds as they stop on the air around him.

Audrey has never seen the forcefield Trouble truly in action. Not on this scale, not as herself. Only in the dim memories of Mara. Seeing it makes Nathan terrifying. Not just the hovering sense of power, the charge that's tactile in the air, but the expression on his face -- the way it becomes tight, focused, so very intense he doesn't look like himself any more. Audrey understands on an intellectual level that the forcefield Trouble is very difficult to control. It's perhaps the most dangerously out-of-control Trouble Mara put in him that he still has in him.

...Then the air rushes away from Nathan and flattens the Guard party, knocking them down to a man, and he's all the more daunting.

"Nathan!" She breaks from cover and rushes to join him. Mara knows how close she can get without disrupting his Trouble, and Audrey needs that now, poking free the memories and calculating as she runs.

Something pings past her ear and she feels an impact against her upper arm that shoves her off-balance, almost tripping her running steps. She looks down and is surprised to see the hole in her arm. The pain hits a moment later.

"Audrey--!"

"They're all around us!" The Guard are groaning, struggling, some of them reaching to recover their weapons, starting to move to get up, but this didn't come from them. That shot sounded more like a police issue pistol than the sorts of weapons favoured by the Guard.

"Fall back to William!" Nathan yells, his face taut with strain, as light refraction on the air illuminates his struggles to encase her in his forcefield. He's already trying to cover a field of about 270 degrees in front of him, leaving open the shoreline and a retreat the way they came. Audrey's presence so close is poison to his gift. She doesn't have the breath to speak past the pain. She somehow makes her legs move into a stumbling run, trying to fall back, as instructed, for both Nathan's sake and her own.

Something is spiralling inside her head.

William is clutching his own shoulder, looking angry, and the box is on his shaking palm, black spheres bursting out of it in a cloud.

Another car screeches down the street. It's followed by Duke's truck, but the truck is still a white speck in the distance while the new arrivals from the Guard are disembarking now.

William's henchmen swirl into existence and Audrey is more pleased to see them than she had ever thought she could be. She reaches William's side. Nathan, alone in front of them, looks so exposed, even though she knows that he isn't.

Her head reels. She clutches her shoulder harder and looks around for a weapon. She wishes she had a gun, but there are only stray black spheres zinging in the air. Several of them meander toward her, enticing her to take them and use them. They sidle into her pockets. But they aren't her weapons...

William is looking at her intently.

His men step out, placing their bodies before both Audrey and William like human--inhuman--shields. "He's seen off worse than this before," William says, talking about Nathan.

Chains whip out of nowhere to seize and bind Nathan, appearing within the confines of his forcefield. He falls as they wrap around his body and drag his arms tight to his sides and his legs together. A Trouble, and Audrey immediately picks out one of the Guard who's lying on the ground but watching Nathan with anticipation. She doesn't know what made her look at him, in particular...

No. That's not true.

It's like she can feel it emanating from him. She remembers this Trouble, remembers creating it... She remembers enough to know that it won't work. Chains can't hold Nathan for long--

She revels in it as he bursts free, forcefields splintering the chains from within, and she's so proud of the power he wields in her name. Her very effective underling, even as treacherous as he is--

"Kill them all, Nathan!" Mara raises her head and screams.

But Nathan stumbles in the act of getting up, and looks back, stricken.

***

By the time Duke arrives, it's a raging battle, and he's damned glad Jennifer wanted to be dropped off at the hospital. He's still not sure what's going on with her, but talking to invisible voices out of the air has to be better than being caught up in this.

He almost falls out of the door of his truck. He can see Nathan, who's furious and frenetic, fighting against chains that try to pin his arms, his legs, wrap around his throat. Each time the chains seem to have a hold, they burst away. Nathan shouts at the Guard, all raw fury-- "You have no idea what you've done!"

The sight of him turns Duke cold. He doesn't look in control. He doesn't look sane. Was Duke wrong, three mornings ago on the island, when he thought there was enough of Nathan left to save? Or have things changed so much since then that they're past the point of no return now?

Mara and William hang back, too far away for Duke to see their expressions. Those two guys slouch, glaring, in front of their masters, further blocking the view -- shifting unconcernedly as bullets hit them. Although Duke can't get a good look at William and Mara, he thinks he can see blood on them both.

Mara extends a hand and points a finger, and Duke hears a crack that he thinks is her voice, commanding, buried beneath all the other sounds on the air. The smaller of the two guys breaks up into his constituent goo-balls and the spheres form into spears that fly at one of the Guard like some fucked up cross between arrows and birds. They fly in a small flock and one pierces the man's throat, sending him into a gurgling, bloody sprawl. The chains cease to hamper Nathan.

Duke gulps. Mara and William, he's noticed, aren't big on the expenditure of unnecessary effort. Past pattern is they shove Nathan between themselves and any threat and leave him to deal with it. Duke's not quite sure how to take it that he just saw Mara leave herself open to help Nathan out.

Vince is in the car that arrived ahead of Duke, easing out of it behind the shield of his open door. Duke casts a frown and an angry, insistent gesture Vince's way, and the old man raises his voice: "Remember, we want Wuornos alive! We'll--" Mara's form catches his stare and his old voice goes slow and sad, but gains a weighty conviction. Vince was there to witness Mara's acts right after she first came back to Haven. Vince, like Duke, doesn't need any extra convincing that Audrey -- Sarah -- Lucy... all of Haven's saviours are long gone. "We'll take the other two as they come."

Mara isn't going to remove the Troubles she made, but Nathan can still try to fix them. That's how Dwight sold it to everyone.

"Stop!" yells Nathan. He's out of breath, choking, deflecting automatic gunfire like some kind of freakin' superhero movie, but he raises his hands like he's surrendering. "You can't kill them! ...Audrey's still in there! She can come back! Audrey's still there!"

Nathan has always spouted that.

Vince shakes his head.

Mara and William try to fall back. If they can make it to the shore, back to their boat... Would they leave Nathan? That would make things easier...

"Nathan, come," Mara orders, sounding strained. "Despatch them quickly. We need to go home!"

There's something changed in her from the cruel, confident woman Duke saw three days ago. She holds herself differently. There's a new edge to her voice as though, in the meantime, somebody taught her fear.

"Audrey!" Nathan yells back at her, and most confusing of all, "I need you back!" There's a conviction in the way he says it, as if he's waiting for Audrey to appear in a flash of light, accompanied by a divine choir or something. As if he expects it, as if it could happen, and that's crazy.

"No, Nathan." And Mara's response sounds harsh, but harried. Last time the Guard and Haven PD came out to challenge her, Duke saw her laugh amid the violence. He doesn't think it's the ambush that's responsible for the undercurrent of distress in her now. "We are going home. You will go back. End this skirmish!" She still says that last like the fight is only a pesky diversion, some game Nathan's got too involved in that she can't drag him away from.

Duke has a bad feeling about all of this.

One of the other Guard, who came with Vince, inches forward of the car to get a better field of view. Duke sees his hand move.

Things start falling from the sky. Another Trouble, and seriously? It's like it's just producing any random shit... Oh, look, there's a pony. Duke gawps at it. A freakin' jeep appears, making everyone nearby swear and run for cover. It bounces off Nathan's forcefield and slides, metal groaning, to the ground. It rolls and smashes upside-down onto the hood of the Guard car that was first to arrive and is left stranded in the middle of all this, trashed from the battle even before the jeep landed on top of it.

"Holy fuck!" Duke howls to Vince. "What the hell made you decide to drop stuff on a guy who has a fucking forcefield against physical attack?!"

Vince gives him a quelling look that says, Wait. Duke's thoughts disappear into curses. But Nathan's looking panicked... Increasingly so as the attacks edge behind him, toward William and Mara.

The Troubled man is sweating too. Mara's birds resolved back into the little henchman, but Duke wonders if they'll reappear.

Nathan starts moving suddenly, and Duke squints, searching for why. Wait, what are those--? Bricks, he thinks, and oh, oh crap... Bricks are materialising on the air above William and Mara. They both start running, too, but not towards Nathan, away from him, back to the shore. It's the wrong choice, Duke thinks, disbelieving, because whatever the Guard are trying to drop on them now is enormous. It's not a house... With more of it appearing he recognises, dry-mouthed an old factory complex from three miles or so down the coast. Teleported mid-air, with no support to stand on, it's collapsing even as it materialises. Bricks rain down the convex edges of Nathan's forcefield, and Nathan has begun flinching with the impacts. The thing's so freakin' big. Is it too much for his forcefields to cope with?

"Is this seriously supposed to take him alive?" Duke yells at Vince, who's gone bug-eyed and stock-still, watching.

The man the Trouble belongs to collapses, tremors going through his body like he's caught in some kind of fit. Apparently it's too much for him.

Nathan's still trying to run. An avalanche of bricks are falling from the sky and he's put himself right under the centre of it, now, in his bid to get close enough to protect William and Mara. The partial levitating building shatters completely as the Troubled man falls. Some of it disappears with the cut-off of the Trouble trying to materialise its enormous structure. The rest falls all at once in a final cascade.

Nathan makes it in time to deflect the bulk of what's left from William and Mara, shaping the forcefield he can't wrap around them into a steep slope to catch and siphon the material away instead. Some bricks get through despite his efforts. More get through as Nathan's forcefield collapses and he disappears beneath the avalanche.

"No!" Duke howls. He starts moving towards them, which is just stupid while the bricks are still falling. While Mara and William are still there, knocked flat but clearly having escaped the worst of it. "Nathan!" He thinks... he thinks that looked survivable. Nathan just caught the last edge of it.

He's proved right as Nathan rises up, coated with dust and blood. Their eyes fix on each other and Nathan's widen in an oh shit moment clear as day before another forcefield spins out and knocks everything flat.

The ground slams Duke in the face, and he groans. He wonders if he heard ribs go or if those cracking noises were just splintering bricks. He thinks Nathan didn't mean to catch him in that; Nathan was already hurling the attack out before they set eyes upon each other. The bricks that had begun to settle are smashing outward in a spray and Duke lets out an unmanly whimper as he clutches hands over his head and hunkers down, stumbling to his knees. He escapes being hit, but hears cries of pain from elsewhere, hears bricks impacting cars and trees and, further back, buildings, smashing glass. "Fuck! Oh, fuck!" he shrieks into his hands. "How was this a good idea?!"

How was this his idea? He must have been out of his mind.

"Duke?!" Nathan's voice wavers across the devastation... He's finished. Shit, Duke thinks, it's finished. He uncovers his head in time to enjoy about one second of Nathan's concern before that concern springs away to Mara and William, who are picking themselves out of the debris behind Nathan.

And, oh, they're fine. They're moving, and there's almost nothing else in this field of devastation that is.

"Vince... Oh, fuck, Vince..." Duke looks back to the car, looking for the old man, and can't see him, but -- damn it, Nathan's right here! Within a sprint of him! He's bleeding. Isn't this what Duke came for? Surely, surely, the forcefield Trouble is through now, after all of this?

Duke starts scrambling, staggering through the wreckage. And maybe if he'd been alone, he'd have made it, Nathan wouldn't have pulled out the big guns. But there are other noises now as the remnant of the Guard and the police are starting to pick themselves out of the rubble. Another man stands up and, oh, oh, fuckshitdamnitall, Duke knows what his Trouble is...

Duke starts to yell as his feet quicken: "Don't -- don't -- don't!"

All the breath gets knocked out of him as he bounces off the forcefield.

For a moment, he's just so relieved, so fucking relieved, that the forcefield Trouble still works... Then the world turns red and he's howling and swearing and knows he needs to be away, far away from Nathan, right now.

Fire. Owen Ferris makes fire.

If the Guard bothered to tell Ferris that they want Nathan to come out alive and, at worst, only medium rare, it doesn't particularly look as though Ferris listened.

But though Nathan flinches from the oncoming fire, it bursts on his forcefield and gets deflected like everything else. Duke's trying to burrow into a hollow in a heap of fallen bricks. Make himself a hollow to burrow into. He's got far too good a view of proceedings from his vantage point, and he can see that Nathan's skin hasn't reddened, his hair hasn't burned. If anything, his hair looks better than when Duke last saw it.

The thing is, Nathan doesn't get up to retaliate. He stays curled over, fallen on his hands and knees within a contracted forcefield, his limbs rigid and his mouth stretched in an expression Duke's not sure how to read. His forcefield held. He's untouched by the fire. Duke... doesn't understand.

"Nathan!" Mara yells, full of concern and fury and her own fire... and a panic Duke is also not sure how to read. "Nathan, get up! You are in Haven. You are fine!"

Of course, Duke realises, dazed. Nathan came back from the void with burns. They don't know what happened there, but everyone who's seen him knows that much.

Mara looks shocked and shattered, and then, stunning Duke, she starts to run, with William on her heels. Nathan's forcefield is cinched in tight around his form; it's not big enough to cover her any more. She's injured and so is William. Their two thugs grunt, set their expressions grimmer, and forge in front of them. The Guard and HPD officers who are getting up to shoot at Mara -- well, the thugs can move like lightning. After the first two go down the rest are wheeling away in panic and Duke is trying to make himself look very, very unthreatening.

And in the midst of all this, there's still Owen Ferris' Trouble. This time he aims it blithely over Nathan's head, unconcerned about Nathan at all, now, with bigger things in his sights. Mara opens her mouth to start a scream or shout. William beats her to it... and the thugs explode in the instant of his cry, their constituent goo-balls surging in front of Mara and William to form a black wall just in time to block the fire. Mara turns her cry into a scream for Nathan that's at least half of it rage and indignation. Duke's noticed that does seem to be her song.

He watches Nathan snap out of it, shaking his head and wedging a knee under himself to stand. He looks like he's just woken up and is still half in a daze. The forcefield flickers and dies as he staggers.

It hits Duke that this is what he was waiting for. Mara and William are cut off. The henchmen... the goo-balls... are busy being the wall responsible for that, as hellishly unnerving as that black, hanging shape is, and the guy with the fire is still on hand to make them observe it. Duke frantically gestures to Ferris, mouthing, leave Nathan for me.

He runs across the rubble. "Nathan...?!"

Dazed eyes look up and meet his. The plan was to beat the crap out of Nathan, no holds barred, using his own blood to do it, then run what's left of him to Dwight.

It's made ridiculous by the moment. Nathan's eyes lighten with the sight of Duke, and Duke sees his own name on Nathan's lips as he straightens and takes a step. Duke could lead him away from Mara right now just by taking his hand...

Duke's just reaching out to take that hand...

The single shot that drops Nathan catches them both completely by surprise.