FIC: [Haven] House Divided - Mara/Nathan/William, Explicit (7/10)

[roseveare]

Chapter 6

Dust still floats in the air, along with those balls of black goo William uses; spiralling like angry bees, most of them resolving into the henchmen again as William and Mara move. The thick smell of Troubled blood excites Duke more than he ever wants anyone to know, though he'd like to know how the fuck his sinuses can tell it's Troubled. He pushes it down fiercely and buries it beneath all the other things he's feeling right now. There are cries from injured people all around. It's terrible, what's been done here, and terrible to have been its instigator. Although Nathan is within a few feet of him, somehow Mara and William manage to reach Nathan's fallen body before Duke does.

All along there was the possibility that someone was going to take things into their own hands. Duke supposes that to most of those watching, Nathan just decimated their people single-handed. Maybe it seemed imperative to put a bullet in him rather than leave things to Duke.

"If he dies," Mara says, "I will destroy this town and everyone in it."

Even William seems to give a damn, though he's canny enough to recall those henchmen from taking Mara's revenge upon the Guard, to stand between himself and Mara and more bullets.

"Stand down!" Some part of Duke notices Vince emerging from rubble, and thinks, oh, thank fuck. After losing track of the old bastard in the fight, Duke doesn't know if he was buried, but he's picking his way through the carnage now like a grizzled, grey lion, coated all over by cement dust and blood. His eyes are wide with shock, but all the same Duke wonders if he knew the Guard planned to dump a building on top of Mara. He's glad, though, in what dim part of his attention isn't pinned on Nathan, and William and Mara, that there's someone here to take charge of this fucking disaster.

"I -- I've called 911," Vince wheezes. He's short of breath and struggling, but the wonder is he's still alive.

Duke wonders if there are any cops left alive or conscious within all this. (He wonders how many are dead.)

Mara's face goes tight. Nathan's breath rattles and threatens to stop. Duke makes himself remember the plan. Or... the plan modified.

Because he'd never have anticipated Mara loving Nathan enough to let Duke deliver him from her arms to Dwight. As far as he was able to tell all along, Mara thought of Nathan like a prized hound. He would never have counted upon her being willing to surrender him to save his life.

***

After Duke departs with Nathan, his form a blur under the influence of Nathan's seven-times-troubled blood, the stillness of everyone remaining hangs on the air.

It cannot last.

Mara breaks it. They dare attack her? They will pay. She gave Nathan to Duke to save him, but beyond doubt she intends to reclaim him later. She sneers at the remainder of Haven's pathetic army as she stands, Nathan's blood on her clothes and hands. Let it serve as her warpaint for the finish of this fight. She will show them! "Come on!" she yells. "We do not have all day! Let me see you fight!" She splinters one of William's creations to bring back her birds, and they hover, black wings beating the air around her. Perhaps she looks like the personification of death itself to these fools, for none of them move.

"M-my God..." stutters Vince, who is seeing the reality behind each of the imposed personalities his bumbling affections patronised over the years.

"Yes, Vince," she hisses. "Love from Sarah, and Lucy, and Audrey."

It feels like there's danger in saying that name, but she won't back off from it, and the moment passes.

Someone dares to shoot and a bird intercepts the bullet. It's knocked sideways in the air by the momentum but doesn't fall.

She promised to kill everyone here if Nathan died. Duke took Nathan and he is on his way to where Dwight can help him even if his breath expires before they arrive. Now with every passing second Mara's anxiety moves further toward rage. That these lesser beings had the audacity to band together to take them down! She thinks that she might just kill them all anyway.

Vince, who is near enough to see it and wise enough under the bumbling mask he wears to understand it, stumbles backwards, mouth opening to call a warning, but never getting that far.

"Oh, don't run!" Mara calls, letting her voice shift into mockery, riding over him. "Stay, and let me kill you! You always wanted, didn't you, to give me what I want?!"

"Mara." William's voice, tense and fearful, tugs at her from behind. It might not be the first time he's spoken. William was not made for extended battle. He prefers situations where he can manipulate and cajole, as that is where his true talents lie.

The Guard dropped a building on her, and she is still standing. She spins around to make sure she addresses them all -- all the worms that still live. "You think you can use my Troubles against me, my Troubles that I made? I will kill every last one of you!"

"Mara," William says again, desperately. "We need to go! Duke has Nathan! We need to go to Dwight." He is becoming tedious in his insistence to spoil her fun. "Mara, they think they can keep him."

That gets through to her. Is it possible they were so canny as to have planned this to part them? Nathan is hers and no-one else shall take him. But how does William propose they are going to get out of here, she scoffs at him, if not through fighting?

William tells her, I have been working on that.

The Guard are afraid of her now, them and whatever of Haven's police are left hiding in the sidelines, where her threats sent them scampering. But there's still danger in the moments when William is reshaping the aether into a new form, when they are left unprotected.

The henchman and the birds become one large bird, soot-black, taloned and with a beak like a saw. William climbs up onto its back, his movements imbued with urgency. "Come on!" Mara throws herself after him, catching his hand. Before she can completely seat herself, the bird is in flight.

It's hard to stay on. There are good reasons they had not considered this as a transport solution before. Utilising any animal as a steed is a skill of its own, and adding flight into the equation... it's just not dignified. It's certainly not comfortable.

Bullets pop on the air around them. Mara clings tight to their unsteady perch, tries to ignore the pain in her arm and the greater one in her heart, and laughs at the futile attempts to shoot her. Most of them ran too far on their chicken legs, when she set William's men on them in reprisal for Nathan, and all of them are shooting too wildly to have a hope of hitting anything from that distance.

Then again, there's the curse of dumb luck. Somehow, a wild bullet connects, grazing the back of William's wrist as Mara is clinging on, mostly one-handed, her position more precarious in that moment as they're wheeling around to search for Nathan.

William cries out as the shot connects, but it's Mara whose grip is made painful and slippery with blood, Mara who falls.

She falls backwards, arms stretching out like wings as she tries desperately to find purchase. William and the bird move, reaching for her, but are already far too far away to connect.

She stares up at William and his black bird, receding in grey-white sky, air whipping past her as she falls. Abruptly, branches interrupt her view and he is lost from sight.

***

"Oh my God." Duke staggers as he finally lets the blood-rush subside, unburdening himself of Nathan's still bleeding form on the cabin's bed. "That -- that was not normal, even for me. I suppose a half dozen extra Troubles make all the difference."

"Is he alive?" Duke's vaguely aware of Dwight asking, moving past him to put hands on Nathan, while he collapses on hands and knees on the floor. Having pushed his body to run like The Flash under the influence of the Crocker Legacy, now he's paying for it and then some. He whoops for breath.

"...Didn't think that made a difference."

Dwight turns and pulls a face that tells him that it makes a difference to Dwight, even if it might not to the heal-ee.

"Okay. Sorry." Duke doesn't know if Nathan right now is alive or dead. Would his Trouble interpret it as a killing and absorb Nathan's curses, if he died in Duke's arms? He shudders as he watches Dwight put fingers to Nathan's neck, searching for a pulse. Clothing is pulled aside to expose Nathan's chest. Old burn scars, old bullet scars, new bullet hole. Duke can't help but notice that the burn scars are crazy improved from when he last saw them -- almost invisible, now.

"Someone got overzealous," Dwight observes.

Duke nods at the floor. "Doesn't someone always? Is he alive?"

Nathan makes a soft sound and jerks in the bed. Dwight bows over him with an oddly tender, "shh", and his hands move on Nathan's chest.

The sounds after that are less pleasant and less tender. Duke hunches over on his knees and pretends he's not listening to Dwight in agony. This sucks, and it's Mara's fault, and he just left a bunch of the Guard and probably several of Dwight's officers with Mara and William both, and who knows what hell is being unleashed back there now?

"That... that was chaos." He waits until Dwight's noises have subsided into shaky but levelling breathing, and underneath it, Nathan's breaths are drawing steady and regular again. His own breath is starting to level too, so he peels himself up and lurches over to hook his ass on the end of the bed. "That was fucking insane. Did you know they were going to drop a building on him?"

Dwight blinks at him. "Which building?"

"Oh, fuck you," Duke grunts. He wonders what kind of reports Dwight has received back from the battle. There's phone reception here, a little bit. "No kill like overkill, huh? Fuck you and fuck the Guard."

He lets his mouth run because, God. Nathan's there on the bed, and his eyes are still shut, but they need to deal with this. Duke has no idea how he's going to react to being forcibly separated from Mara once he comes back to himself. "Shit... Back there, I saw him... He cracked chains like they were nothing. I think it was that forcefield thing again, like he imploded the metal from within..."

How are they going to keep him?

Dwight gives Nathan's sprawled body a slightly wild-eyed assessing look. "I can find something to put him out. Depends what our goals are here. Do we want to keep him and see what separating them does? Or do we want to talk to him?"

The idea of drugging Nathan, after all the other mind-altering and self-compromising crap he's been subjected to by Mara already, repulses Duke. "I want to talk to him, Dwight!" he yelps, and Dwight returns a defensive, judging sort of glance that says Duke also has to face facts that having him conscious enough to talk gives him a good chance of getting out.

"Let's first get him secured, before he starts to wake up," Dwight says. "Ropes are a lot closer to the skin. Make them tight and they're closer still. Probably harder to use that trick without risking damage."

While Dwight's pushing Nathan's upper body sideways on the bed to tie his wrists behind him, and tie his wrists to his waist for good measure, Duke pulls the boots from his feet and ties more ropes around Nathan's ankles, then his knees. He doesn't feel good about it, though. Hell, it seems to him they're just increasing the chances that Nathan wakes up swinging.

"Maybe if his arms are behind him it'll make it harder to use that trick he pulled with the chains, too," Duke says, "because he can't feel it, so if he can't see it-- Oh, fuck. Fuck." He wishes he could un-say that, but Dwight's not stupid. Knowing how to make Nathan helpless makes Duke feel fucking awful. But he can't take the thought back, so he tears a strip from the corner of the bed sheet, and folds it over and over until he has a single thick, long strip that's surely impossible to even see light through. Then he wraps it around Nathan's eyes, and ties it at the back of his head.

Dwight grimaces and his breath whistles through his teeth, but he gives Duke a nod. They both pick up Nathan and shift him to the wooden chair in the centre of the room. They use more rope to tie him to the chair as well.

When they're done, Duke touches Nathan's face. He doesn't flinch, of course. "Nathan. Nathan?!" He's vocalised a few soft sounds through the process of moving him. Duke's pretty sure he's nearing consciousness, but it's never been easy to wake him up when he can't feel any signals from his body. After a few more repeats of his name, he goes very still under Duke's hand and Duke wishes he could see his eyes, but is pretty sure Nathan's awake.

A moment later, he confirms with a sluggish, "Where am I?"

"Never did have any imagination, did you?" Duke asks gently.

Nathan sucks air. "Duke." His voice has the edge of panic. "Why can't I see? Damn it, don't screw around, what happened? Where the hell is this? I can't hear--"

The battle, the sea, the traffic and town noises, Mara shouting at him, Duke fills in. And of course, Nathan's next question, before he can even attempt to answer any of the first batch, is: "Where's Mara?" He gives a little hesitation right before her name, as if he wants to say another one.

"We're safe," Dwight says, his voice a low, reassuring rumble. "Duke brought you to me. I healed you." He adds, after a moment's sour consideration, "Again." After further consideration, "We restrained you for our own safety."

The moment Nathan gets that that's the reason why he can't move, he starts wrenching at the restraints; probably damaging himself more than the ropes in the sharp violence of his movements.

"Hey! Hey, hey, stop!" Duke yelps. "Whoa, Nathan! Buddy, I'm sorry, but we got you out, it was not easy, and you are not running straight back to Mara now we've finally got you here. And no, I am not real down with the bondage, either, but since you just totalled the most fucked up shit the Guard could throw at you, I'm not watching you walk straight back out of here. You're safe here with us, I swear it. Dwight's not going to hurt you, you know I'm not going to hurt you. Fucking listen. We got you out! Chill." It's a mournful fact that Nathan can't feel the comforting hands Duke tries to lay on his shoulders.

"You're an idiot," Nathan spits, but a moment later, stops thrashing. "I have to get back to her. You don't understand."

"No. You need to understand that you don't have to go!" Duke throws back at him. "You don't have to, Nate. I know she's screwed with your head. You need to get this sorted out, time-out to stop and think. Get your own choices back."

"You'll do that by..." Nathan shuffles, scuffles, moves the chair a fraction across the floorboards with a short whine of polished wood on wood "...tying me up and making me?" He laughs bitterly.

Dwight says, an odd flatness in his voice, "You just fought the Guard in an all-out battle to protect that bitch. How far are you going to go for her, Nathan? How many of them -- of my people -- did you kill?"

Nathan goes very still. The air seems to fill with charge, and it's impossible not to remember, looking at Nathan's face, that they were his people, too. "I tried not to."

He used the forcefields. Duke knows he has other shit in there, nasty shit like the shadow policemen that didn't make an appearance in the battle. Always when Duke's seen him fight for Mara, it's been with the forcefields. Which are, granted, scary as fuck to witness in action, especially when he flattens everything in sight. But they're still defensive. Mostly defensive.

"Where are we?" Nathan asks again in the silence, sounding annoyed.

"Somewhere we won't be disturbed," Duke tells him. They came here to this old cabin Dwight knew about -- and it was Garland's, so it's a sure bet Nathan would know it, too, if his eyes weren't covered -- in the hope that Mara won't be able to find him here.

"I can't hear the traffic sounds," Nathan says. "Can't hear any people. Town noises."

"No," Duke agrees.

"Can hear birds."

Duke can't fucking hear birds. Most of what he hears right now is his own stressed-out heart pumping. The soothing sounds of nature outside the cabin's wooden walls do not get a look in. It makes him wonder how Nathan, who was far more in the middle of the action, can possibly be calm enough to notice the sounds of the birds. Or maybe Nathan's been running on high-intensity for so many weeks now that it's all kind of levelled as normal for him now. Nathan's probably guessed where they are, but who the hell cares, so long as he can't tell Mara.

"You have to let me go." Impatience strains his attempt at a reasonable tone. "Audrey's still there in Mara. We were coming to you, but she changed back when the Guard attacked."

Duke stares. He's known Nathan to spin a tale or two over the years, but there's an anxious earnestness in his voice that makes Duke uneasy. Could it be true? He and Dwight exchange glances and Dwight shakes his head minimally, warning Duke off going down that route.

"I've never seen any sign of Audrey inside Mara," Duke says. "I know what they're doing to you, Nathan..." He chokes, and he didn't, doesn't want to spell it out or risk hinting too much in front of Dwight, but-- "Audrey would never allow that."

"That's what I thought," Nathan says, his voice pitching a bit high, almost sounding trippy. But it twists gradually to anguish as he carries on: "But then she came back. She came back, Duke! Where is she? What happened to Mara after I passed out? If you left her back there... Please, please, you have to stop them... You can't let them kill her."

Duke and Dwight engage in a word-free exchange of heated hand gestures. Nathan's crazy, Dwight thinks, rotating a finger at the side of his head. He'd say all that anyway. Needs to believe Audrey's still there and he can save her because it's the only thing still keeping him going.

Duke is not sure. He knows Nathan, and he knows when he's telling the truth and when he's lying, especially to himself -- to an extent, Duke knows -- and this desperation has a ring of conviction about it that he did not expect.

Dwight thinks Duke's fucking crazy for being ready to jump on board this train again.

But it's Audrey, it's Audrey, and something is keeping Nathan going when he should have burned out long ago. What if it is this? Duke loved Audrey, too, and doesn't she deserve a chance? One last chance, as much chance as he's prepared to give Nathan?

"I can't go there," Dwight says with exasperation, finally ending the silent back-and-forth. "Too much chance of bullets still flying. Look -- if you have to, you can take the truck and go check it out for yourself."

Duke's not in love with the idea of stranding Dwight here without an escape. The top sheet on the bed is speckled with patches of Nathan's blood from before. Duke picks it up and scrunches a stain in his fist. Enough seeps out to feel the rush again. It's so good that his legs feel weak. He sets his teeth against a moan that might be too obviously pleasure, and since the sheet is already torn, tears it again to take off the worst soaked corner.

"We're really going to do this?" Duke checks hesitantly. "Trusting him. Trying to take Mara alive, after everything... Even when it means keeping William alive, too."

"You're the one who's thinking of doing it," Dwight responds. "Don't ask me."

He's making it clear that it's Duke's choice and responsibility, damn him. Normally, Duke hates people making his decisions, but he'd give a lot to have someone else make this one.

He casts a betrayed glance back at the big guy for setting this on him, and jerks his shoulders convulsively, uncomfortably, as he steps outside the cabin. He squeezes more of Nathan's blood from the sheet, and starts running.

***

Nathan wakes up in limbo, or at least he thinks he wakes up, because he's blinded, paralysed, and like that, with almost no senses to rely on, it's more like being trapped in one of his recurring nightmares, where his senses fall away one by one. The forcefields want to roll out from him like waves, but he holds back, holds back, because he doesn't know what's out there that he'd flatten and destroy.

He makes himself wait, only to discover it's Duke who's done this to him.

Nathan wants Duke for an ally. Duke, of all people, has to believe in him. Duke who knew and loved Audrey as well... almost as well. His rage and frustrations probably hamper his attempt at explanations, but then Duke leaves; he believes Nathan enough to go help Audrey, and Nathan is almost overcome with the relief.

Nathan is also left with Dwight in the... cabin: he's fairly sure they're in a cabin. It could even be the cabin, because it smells like Garland's, but like this he can't be sure of much. He wonders if Dwight's aware that Mara knows about the cabin, that Audrey has been here.

Dwight's footsteps circle around him, not quite completing a circuit, but reaching a point and then stopping, tracking back the other way. They're faintly apologetic, or at least, hesitant with something that isn't fear. Nathan's not sure he can trust that impression. As far as HPD is concerned, he's surely public enemy number one by now. He even suspects that Dwight was willing to encourage Duke to go because Dwight wants an uninterrupted crack at Nathan. He doesn't buy into the claims about Audrey, but has no objection to losing Duke's interference for a while.

All the same, Nathan strongly gets the sense that Dwight is kind of embarrassed to have him here like this, in this position. They've worked together a while, after all. He was almost Dwight's boss. Then Dwight was almost his boss.

The silence stretches. Nathan isn't tempted to break it -- blindfold and tied to a chair is not his favoured setting for conversation.

"How many Troubles do you have?" Dwight asks.

"Is this an interrogation?" Nathan asks. His voice rasps.

"Call it that if you want." There's a shrug in Dwight's voice. His footsteps retreat and his voice grows duller toned, as if he's facing away. There's some rustling. "Duke's busy. I'd rather not waste the opportunity to gain information we might need in future."

"You're going to torture me for information?" Nathan says flatly.

Dwight snorts a laugh. His footsteps return. Nathan smells something sweet beneath his nose, and there's a sound of liquid sloshing, as a bottle is deliberately shaken to verify what's in front of him. "I'm going to ask you for information. Drink."

Nathan thinks about it a moment, then says, "Can't." He can't see or feel what he's doing. He's not going to choke or dribble soda, or whatever that is, all over himself in front of Dwight. Particularly not after William fed him, yesterday.

"Yes, you can," Dwight says, with absolutely no patience, and shakes the bottle again.

Nathan sighs and parts his lips. William fed him yesterday. What the hell does it matter any more?

Dwight curses as he receives some demonstration of the reason for Nathan's reluctance, but Nathan tastes cherry cola strongly enough to know at least some of it got in his mouth. He swallows. Dwight says, "More," and they repeat the exercise a few times further.

"Okay, Nathan," Dwight says finally, retreating and putting down the bottle before resuming his pacing. "Come on... You tell me you don't want to hurt anyone, that you're with Mara as some sort of damage limitation, so help us out. What did she do to you? I've seen the forcefields. I've heard about the shadow men. What else?"

Nathan thinks about it, turning his head to follow Dwight. If Mara is in charge again, if they have to go back to the island today, wait for another chance... He can do that, though he feels weary to the bone at the thought of it. Of absorbing more of both of their attentions. But he can survive that, for Audrey. For their next chance.

"If I tell you everything I can," Nathan says slowly, "will you let me go back to them? Will you support what I'm trying to do?"

"I'll think about it," Dwight says flatly, and... to be honest, Nathan believes him, because he makes it sound like it will take such a damned lot of persuasion. He's not stringing Nathan along with false promises. Dwight is not at all amused by the things that he has been doing under Mara's service, but he's not ruling out absolutely any possibility of trusting him as a spy in Mara's camp.

Nathan also thinks that Duke will like the idea far less than Dwight, who is willing to entertain that it's worth enduring what Mara and William will do to him when they get back, for future gain.

He chooses to try to make an ally of Dwight. It's also a relief to just tell some of it. He starts at the beginning. Forcefields, before they even crossed through the gate. The find Trouble, on the other side. Mara's attempt to seize control of him. The make Trouble...

"That's how the castle got there?" Dwight asks with amazement. "I thought William made it with his... blobs. Somehow."

"I made the castle." It's the one thing Mara's done to him that he in any way likes. It figures that it's the one that started playing up. "William can't make big things, permanent things, with the blobs. He's only got a limited amount of them."

Dwight grunts as though he's making note of that, too. Nathan carries on, through the ill-considered Trouble in the world where William was captive, that she took back -- and that makes Dwight draw in a sharp breath. "Yeah, she can do that. Audrey can do it, too. That's why we need her, Dwight. Need her alive. Even if you don't believe me about Audrey, Mara can remove Troubles." He tells Dwight about the shadow policemen, when Mara decided she wanted her own private army, and the attempt to let him control the weather that didn't really work. "She said she was running out of things she could do with me." He screws up his lips and then, after a moment, tells Dwight about the way she changed the control Trouble to include William.

Dwight is quiet for a long time, and his steps have stilled. While Nathan didn't exactly spell it out, he's told enough. Nathan thinks his face is probably red, and though he can't hide it from view, he ducks it down, chin against his chest.

There's movement from Dwight. "Drink," he says, quietly, and the scent of cherry cola reappears beneath Nathan's nose. After Dwight withdraws he's quiet, and his pacing footsteps pad in a much shorter arc than before. Eventually he stops and moves closer again. "I can see why Duke was so desperate to pull you out. They'll make you one of them for real, sooner or later."

"I won't let them," Nathan promises, his voice soft and low. "I'm there for Audrey. As long as she's there, I can't forget why I am. She'll always be more important."

Silence. Dwight may believe him about his intentions with Mara and William, but he thinks Nathan's crazy when it comes to Audrey. Thinks she's all hallucinations or wishful thinking. Hell, so did Nathan, for the longest time.

"If you catch Mara," Nathan says, "we can prove it. There must be something we can do to bring out Audrey again. It's happened twice now."

"Mm," Dwight grunts.

Nathan asserts, fiercely, "Audrey was with me all the way through the void. She's the only reason I stayed with Mara." His frustration is starting to mount up. It's hard to hold the forcefields back, even knowing he'd hit Dwight, even not knowing what else he'd be hitting, including parts of himself. He think's he's tied in a seated, upright position and his hands are behind him, but the world is a morass of guesswork. He wants to see again, almost enough to risk it. He tries to brush his head against his shoulder, assuming he's right about where his head and his shoulder actually are. He has freedom of movement to do that, until something catches him.

Dwight's face is close enough to smell his breath. "Don't do that. I don't want to have to put some kind of a collar on you."

Nathan hopes no-one ever presents that idea to Mara. "I can get out of this in an instant, damn you. I just can't get out of this safely -- for you or for me."

Dwight's breathing goes tenser. Mentioning that was a mistake. "Then stay a little while longer, and humour us. We'll wait for Duke to report in."

"I want my eyes back." It come out like a threat. Nathan's anxiety is rising. After yesterday, keeping any kind of cool while being restrained is very difficult, even if he knows they don't -- necessarily -- mean him harm, and certainly don't hold Mara's and William's sorts of intentions. He might lose control of the forcefields anyway.

"I know, Nathan. I'm sorry this has to be what works." There's a rustle from the side of him. Dwight's changed direction, his steps quiet. When he moves now, he opts to go behind Nathan, where his movements are harder to determine from careful listening.

It's not unreasonable that they're afraid of him, but it makes Nathan's blood boil anyway.

"Tell me about the castle." Something in Dwight's voice has changed. A lightness, as if he's trying to sound casual, but it's undercut by wariness. Nathan can't figure it out. "Does it have any defences other than your shadows?"

Nathan's hackles are up, threat-alerts on high, but Dwight isn't doing anything. Is it something he wants? Something about this question? He shifts uneasily. He can hear the sounds of his own movement, but they're too restricted to really register as movement with the body-sense he has. He can generally tell where his body is if it's moving, but there has to be a certain level of exaggerated shift. "Natural ones. Cliffs on one side, trees on another." Duke and Jennifer landed on the low side of the island and tried to cut up through the trees. "I didn't make a moat and fill the ramparts with burning oil, if that's what you're asking. It's enough. You're not going to get in that way, Dwight. The shadows..."

The shadows aren't dependant on his functions -- they're still there right now, guarding the castle while Nathan's away. They'll be there even if Nathan's locked unconscious. It occurs to him suddenly that Dwight might believe otherwise.

It's difficult for Nathan to tell when he's tired, groggy, losing consciousness, without feeling to guide him. But he realises now that his words have been getting slower and slower, harder to form. He mumbles, and it seems that's all he has left, "Don't go to the island, Dwight. The shadow guards..." He loses track of what he's saying. His head is sagging forward on his neck, enough that he can tell, and Dwight isn't picking it up this time.

It wasn't in the drink. He has more trust in his heightened sense of taste than that, and too much time has passed. And Dwight, at that time, was more interested than afraid. Of course, Nathan can't feel a needle. Wouldn't react, wouldn't know. He wouldn't put it past Dwight to have something like that, hailing from his days as Haven's fixer.

Nathan wants to confront Dwight about the betrayal. He'd thought they were trying to reach an understanding. He thought he had a potential ally. Instead, the world -- such of it as he has left to him; already small, and narrow, and dark -- slides away.

***

A tree catches her, cradling her in its branches like a friend. Mara has always considered herself to have an excellent rapport with shrubbery. She lies with her head spinning, looking up through the branches and soaking in the reality of not being dead, and the world seems unaccountably pleasant. Then, after a short while, her dizzy and not-very-coherent contemplations are replaced by anger as her brain resumes function. She has two gunshot wounds in her body, William is lost although certainly not dead, and they have taken Nathan from her.

Duke engineered it, she thinks. Maybe she can find it in herself to kill him after all.

Anger tightens her muscles and shifts her position reflexively -- and her position, already tenuous, teeters for a moment before the bottom drops out of the world as a branch gives way with an audible crack. She falls out of the tree.

She does not make a sound until she rises out of the undergrowth, and then she curses everything. The injuries inflicted by Haven's would-be protectors sting more fiercely than ever for the fall.

William did not get shot out of the sky and torn apart by the rabble on the ground, because she is -- relatively -- unharmed. Likewise, he knows the same about her. That she cannot reach his mind at the moment she presumes to be because he is busy. Well. She need not worry about William; he can take care of his own skin. Since she is wandering loose in Haven, and Duke took Nathan, it is Nathan's fate with which she will concern herself.

She wonders if there's anyone left in Haven with whom pretending she is merely Audrey Parker will still work.

She does not want to think about Audrey. Nathan's betrayal this time is a dull burn, less important than getting him back. She cannot think about living a half-life, sharing her existence with that figment, that phantom, nor how she can possibly free herself of it now. She should at least be able to count on them sharing the same goal -- of rescuing Nathan -- if Audrey were to return now. Yet those fools were ready to hand themselves over to the townsfolks' mercy. As if this town would have any, after all she has done.

The tree she fell into is in the garden of a small, idyllic house. Mara tries the door and finds it unlocked. She enters straight into the kitchen and makes her first act to take a knife from the block there. A moment later, a voice calls, "You're early, Roger!" from the next room. A woman walks through the open doorway, only to gasp and jolt back at the sight of Mara, her eyes widening and mouth opening to draw in breath.

"Do not scream," instructs Mara, who has absolutely no patience for anyone's dramatics right now. If a scream does emerge from this woman's mouth, she's going to ram the knife down her throat and have done. She flicks her eyes down to her bloodied shoulder and wrist. "Give me bandages and antiseptic. I'll go. And everyone is happy."

The woman nods frantically, eyes on the knife, and sidles past her to a specific cupboard. Mara steps around and makes a study of the room, craning her head quickly through the door into the rest of the house. "Nice kitchen," she says.

That pride visibly starts to inflate the woman before the situation catches up with her, and she gulps and looks down, tells Mara a lot. She narrows her eyes and slides them over the... plants, the twee decor, the kitsch ornamentation. She doesn't know this woman. That always makes the results more erratic, more... interesting.

As a first aid kit is taken from a cupboard and placed on the table, Mara smiles sweetly, waggles the knife, and says, "Can I also trouble you for a glass of water?"

Twenty minutes later, she is heading out, her wounds attended, and the witness to her visit... well, will not be making any problems, at least for her. The exercise of her power has bolstered her confidence and her mood. She hopes Audrey Parker is squirming, wherever she's holed up inside Mara's psyche.

She spies a man walking a dog, a little way down the street, and increases her pace to trot in that direction. "Excuse me, could I borrow your phone? Only silly me, I seem to have forgotten mine, and my car... it's broken down a little way along the road."

She rolls the ball of aether around inside her pocket as she speaks, and when the man says, "Uh, sure," and extends the phone in bare, vulnerable fingers, she smiles as she reaches past the phone to clamp her hand around skin.

Two dogs where formerly there was one hare off down the street, barking, the smaller still trailing its lead. Mara catches the phone in her left hand before it drops to the road and raises it, dialling 911. "Is that Laverne? I'd like to speak to Dwight."

There's a pause from the other end. "Is that Audrey?"

"No," Mara responds bluntly. "Dwight."

"He's... not here, ma'am."

"Politeness will get you nowhere. Nor will delaying to try and trace my whereabouts from this call. You have my number. Perhaps you'd be so good as to pass it on to your chief. With a message: I want Nathan back. If I don't get him back, I will begin to afflict Haven with Troubles the likes of which no-one has ever seen. Meanwhile, I find I must have just a little patience left with you all, as I merely intend to devise a new gift for everyone I meet."

She cuts the call and stands in the street, suddenly weary. She waits for any sense of Audrey trying to overtake her will, expecting it to happen, but there isn't anything.

After a few attempts to reproduce Duke's number, she gives up. It's difficult, in this day and age of pre-programmed information, to remember the contacts of even close friends. She wishes she'd had Nathan buy them cellphones. She hadn't, at the time, for she'd had bigger plans that would mean they had no such need to rely on mundane utilities, and they were not supposed to be separated. She tries to contact William again but gets nothing. Audrey's resurgence has weakened their connection. She hates the silence where he should be and hopes he isn't harmed.

Cellphones, next time. Yes. She can make nuisance calls to Dwight and his tedious minions in the bargain.

A few cars line the side of the more populated road up ahead. Mara waggles her finger between them, selecting. Then she uses the skills from Audrey Parker's Orphanage Years to break into one and hotwire it.

Excellent. She is mobile again.

Mara steps on the gas and

..........................................Audrey almost ploughs the vehicle into a tree on the next bend.

She slews the car to a halt, the air hissing loudly through her throat. The last few hours land upon her, crushing out what breath she has left. Mara... She was Mara again, and Nathan's gone, but at least so is William. She was Mara and she fought her friends: Duke... Haven Police Department... Vince... and the Guard.

She remembers fleeing, falling, and after that--

She kicks open the door and slides out of the car, almost landing on her knees as her legs threaten to crumble. She doesn't have a thought for how she's left the stolen vehicle, the hazard it presents to other traffic, until she's stumbled a hundred yards or more down the road, and at that point she's not turning back. Only picks up her pace to a sprint to faster reach the people that she -- that Mara left Troubled in her wake.

The dogs are gone, nowhere to be seen. She can't fix that. She runs back into the house. How, how is she supposed to draw the Trouble out of someone who is now a room? Hand to flesh, is how Mara does it. Audrey calls out, "Hello!" and runs her hands over the surfaces, searching, hoping for something to speak to her, looking for a sense of what to do.

The oven clicks on and the gas rings on the stove suddenly flare up fiercely, rising far higher than they'd ever be intended to for kitchen safety. The microwave and dishwasher start to rattle. "Okay," Audrey says breathlessly. "So you're here. I'm back to fix this. Okay?" She shuts her eyes and tries to focus on her palm, where it's flattened upon the counter above the dishwasher. "Come on, come on," she murmurs. "Change..." She feels a surge of power that cries out, rejected, as she pulls it back to her palm. Mara stirs within her, pitying the denied energy, attuned to it. The dishwasher starts to shake even more, though the microwave is quiet now and the lit gas rings on the oven have returned to normal levels. Audrey staggers back. The black stuff that came out of the counter falls off her hand like peeling paint.

There's no woman in sight. Audrey reaches over a trembling hand and jerks all the dials on the oven to zero. Then she yanks open the door. No. She's extremely relieved when it's the dishwasher door that yields to spill out a whimpering, jittery woman who is nonetheless human and intact.

Who looks at Audrey and panics, screaming and covering her head with her arms.

"No, please, I'm not--" Audrey tries to reach out and the reaction only gets worse. She reverses her hand and stares at her palm. The greyish smudges left there could be nothing more than dust. "I'm not Mara," she protests, faintly, feeling a heavy weight sink in her stomach. "I came back here to fix what she did."

She can't face or help the woman's fear. She can only take herself away. She runs from Mara's crime and her own solution.

Outside, the dogs are still gone. She cured the woman, that's something. She should feel better. She does not. This isn't her... She's Audrey Parker, she helps people. She doesn't do this. Doesn't -- doesn't create Troubles.

Yet she remembers how to do it. How to undo it. Remembers doing it.

Remembers exactly, now, Mara's reasoning for why she's still around, and the conviction that there isn't any such thing as Audrey Parker at all.

She has to, has to be wrong.

"I'm Audrey Parker," she says aloud. Her voice sounds disconcertingly fragile, ready to crack. "I help the Troubled."

She realises how much she needs Nathan and his faith in her that extends beyond reason. Ever since Mara took over her body, she has always had him. She may have only come back at all because of him, in response to Mara's treatment of him -- when she first enslaved him to her will, that first night in the void. She attached herself somehow to Nathan's consciousness to survive back then. Maybe that's why she feels his absence so acutely now. Maybe it's not.

The belief he has in her is a powerful thing, perhaps even enough to hold her together. Yet now he has been taken away from her. She can't fall apart; she needs to fight Mara alone.

She calms herself enough to grimace at the sight of the stolen car she left slewed across the road. It's stealing, compounding Mara's stealing, but she gets back into it, needing to be away from here, needing...

Nathan. Duke has him. She feels fury rise in response to that thought, but it's Mara's fury. She drags herself back and makes herself think rationally. They came here to turn themselves in. Despite the Guard's interference and Mara's return, they've actually achieved half of that goal. What Audrey needs is to get in touch with Dwight.

Mara already tried to contact Dwight. If Audrey goes to the police station, will they shoot her on sight? After the earlier wide-scale destruction, trigger-happy is going to be the understatement of the fucking century, she thinks grimly. HPD officers were there. People died. She doesn't know if any cops, any colleagues, were among the dead.

The jumble in her head isn't conducive to safe driving. Another near-miss and she pulls over, shaking worse than ever.

This isn't her. It's not Mara, either. Trying to share headspace is going to unravel them both. Will either of them truly win, if they fight, or will they just destroy the mind they co-habit?

She's been stopped for an unmeasured interval, letting it chase circles through her head, before something snaps her out of staring into space and makes her look up at where she is.

At first she doesn't recognise it, then she doesn't believe it. It... this used to be a picturesque street, the same one where she lived in her B&B for her first few weeks in Haven. Now half of it is a hole in the ground. What she almost hit was the large warning sign erected right before the blocked-off area.

She climbs out of the car, hand clamped over her mouth, for a closer look. She's not sure if the hand is meant to hold back a sob or the urge to throw up.

The pit is tens of feet deep, edges sheer like cliffs, and there are household objects, clothes, and children's toys among the rubble.

"Excuse me!" she yells to a woman who's walking past on the other side of the street, taking a temporary footpath through someone's front yard to avoid the hole. "Wait, please... Can you tell me what happened here?"

When the woman turns around, Audrey realises she knows her. Recognition sparks in the other woman's eyes, too, coming hand in hand with fear. "Oh my God," says Marion Caldwell.

"Don't," Audrey begs. "It's me, you know me, it's Audrey... What happened to this place?"

Harsh words confirm her worst fears. "You happened! What do you think?!" Marion always had a temper that belied her sweet face and small stature... She may be afraid of Mara, but this woman was never harmless. Storm clouds start to gather overhead, far faster than if this was any natural phenomenon.

Audrey backs off. "Marion, you need to stay in control, remember?"

"'Control'?!" Marion flings back, and the sky which had been clearing since earlier that morning is almost black in the blink of an eye. There's a line of blue sky left around the whole of the horizon, a crack where daylight still gets in, with a surreal, almost vertigo-inducing effect, but overhead the sky rumbles and it almost seems to shake the ground. Squally rain, that's there and then gone in wild bursts, belts the pavement, puddling underfoot in an instant. "Why? Because I might hurt someone...? It seems to me--" Marion's yelling above the natural fury she's called down, but backing away from Audrey all the same "--that I'd be doing Haven a favour getting rid of you! Forget storm damage! Fourteen people died here!" She jabs her finger at the hole in the ground. "They said you walked away singing after giving the Trouble that did this!"

"It wasn't me--" Audrey tries desperately.

"Vince and Dave had pictures!" Marion howls back. "There are Troubles in the Herald! Nobody's hiding any more. No-one can get in or out of town for the giant invisible wall! And everyone knows what you did! I thought you were here to help, but it was you from the start!"

"It's not--" Audrey begins, but she can't even voice the protest. She can't find a defence. Her eyes sting. It's not the wind that's whipping the rain in her face that's to blame. She ran from the crimes of Mara, before, and she's probably going to have to run from Marion, too.

Lightning strikes down, catching a gatepost less than six feet away. She yelps and leaps back from it. She can feel the energy of it, the static charge that fizzles in her scalp and fingertips. The sky rumbles and electricity flickers among the clouds, readying another shot.

Marion doesn't laugh or gloat. Her teeth are grit and her eyes are wide in horror. Nathan had talked her down once, Audrey knows. Nathan, Marion would have frozen. Audrey, she intends to fry.

Marion isn't violent like this. In grief, in anger, her Trouble raged out of control before. This is an anger she's working to sustain and use as fuel. She knows she has a dangerous power, deadly when it's unleashed, and knows the woman responsible for cursing all of Haven is standing in front of her. Marion is out of her depth, but Marion has a weapon of epic proportions and, for Haven, she is determined to use it.

She may even have the right idea.

But Audrey wants to live. She's rather surprised to discover it's so, that it's not so easy to surrender her life when everyone is trying to end it. "Marion, no!"

She senses the build-up in the air -- another blast collecting -- and she dodges purely at random, hoping for the best. It misses by slightly more margin than the last, but the charge the air carries is significant enough that she feels a low-grade electrical jolt seem to humm through her bones anyway.

Running is no option: too much open ground where Marion's lightning strikes can pick her off. Audrey's only choice is to lunge for Marion, physically grappling with the smaller woman. Surely Marion won't try to kill herself in the bargain.

...Except that she lost the love of her life not two months ago, and very well might.

"Marion, please listen..." She struggles with the other woman, who shrieks and whimpers in outrage and pain, and screeches angry defiance as she tries to fight back. She wasn't prepared for a physical attack, and Audrey is trained while she is not. Inside, Mara quietly revels in her swift physical domination of her opponent. "I am Audrey Parker. The woman who caused the new Troubles in town... The one who caused the Troubles originally... Her name is Mara, and she's not me! I'm still Audrey!"

Sheet lightning burns the ground, a wall of energy slicing thirty feet to their right, down the centre of the street. Most of it disperses into the hole.

"Marion, you're going to hurt somebody!" Audrey gasps. "Somebody else!" That much seems necessary to add. Her practised grip is hurting Marion, as she twists her arm further, but it doesn't lessen the threat from the weather. It's increasing it: the sky seems to explode with light. The next burst could destroy the rest of the street.

No...

Stop.

Think, she tells herself.

She has Marion's bare skin under her palm, can feel a racing pulse, anger-flushed flesh... and something else, thrumming beneath all the normal signs of life. Something she can feel in her bones, in her soul, shifting and alive, powerful and calling to her.

There...

Audrey calls back to it. Mara, who also wants to survive, is bubbling and helpful beneath the surface. Mara wants to transform it -- recreate Marion's Trouble as something terrible and painful and deadly, to crush Marion for daring to raise a hand against her.

Audrey says firmly, No. She keeps control by a thread, and pulls the Trouble out of Marion with a shaky lack of finesse that attracts Mara's scorn. The sky starts to clear as the power behind its fury is broken down again into its raw state. Audrey's palm feels gummed with the stuff, which is rife with potential and ready and waiting to be used again.

I don't want you! Audrey hurls at it, and like before, it petrifies and cracks and starts to crumble off her skin in flakes.

Cowardly fool! Mara hisses in her belly, then goes quiet.

Marion is still hanging from Audrey's armlock, her mouth open in shock, not even struggling any more. Audrey convulsively lets her go and staggers back.

"You... you took it away." Marion finds words before she does, all the same.

"Yes!" Audrey gasps. "Mara gives Troubles. I... I can take them away."

"But she's still there." So Marion saw that. Was it the same thing Duke saw, what feels like an aeon ago, the first time she ever did anything like this? The flash in her eyes when they were both so connected, intimately Trouble-entangled.

"I know," Audrey says. "But I'm here now. I want to help. The whole of Haven is out to kill me -- kill Mara. I need to get to Dwight."

Marion steps away and raises both her hands in a helpless gesture. Everything in her manner says she no longer intends to try and hinder Audrey.

She can't hinder Audrey.

It gives Audrey pause, thinking on that. Like there's something she should say, or do, something she could say or do to make this better. But if there is, it won't come to her. There's nothing more she can do but leave Marion, Trouble-free and hugging her arms around herself, eyes wet from pain, drenched from the brief rain she called and so powerlessly human. Audrey, intensely disturbed by the encounter, hurries back over to her stolen car.

Driving is far safer than being outside and displaying her face in full view for all of the long walk to the police station.

She's only driven a few streets when her stolen phone rings. She pulls over again, her heart loud in her chest as she answers.

"Mara," Dwight's voice growls. "Where are you and how did you get Bernard Rickles phone? What did you do?"

...Dwight knows everyone. It just has to be a truth. Even now, she's struck by that, and incredulous enough that she even lets out a weak laugh. "Oh my God," she breathes, feeling the panic fluttering in her chest start to settle, or at least find a different rhythm. "Dwight... Thank goodness..."

"Audrey?" he asks, incredulous. "Audrey, is it really--?"

It takes her in ambush, and she feels her stomach flip. Suddenly the world is much more angry and raw and -- albeit for reasons she can't place -- suddenly so highly amusing, and she's cackling into the phone like a madwoman. "Hello, Dwight," sneers Mara. "Aren't you just one gullible G.I. Giant?"

NOTE: This is later than planned. I realised I needed to edit all of the last chapters as a unit to make sure I had the continuity straight, which meant I had to get the last of my typing done. Hoping to post the last three sections Saturday-Sunday-Monday.