FIC: [Haven] Shattered (Unbreakable #3), part 4. Duke/Nathan (Explicit) [1/2]

[roseveare]

Summary: Decision time for Nathan and Duke -- and Audrey -- to try to map out a future for Haven... and themselves.

Notes: This is the last part, and since there is a definitive conclusion here, bear in mind that I am drawing the threads to a close while ignoring a good deal of the solutions that were suggested in season 5 canon, the first draft of the story having been written before those reveals. In a way, it's academic whether much of the information revealed in season 5 is true or not in this 'verse, because Nathan and Duke and co. don't have that knowledge and can only speculate in the absence of it.

Duke/Nathan - Explicit - 17,500 words

Part 4: Remains [1/2]

They are not fixed. But they are more fixed than they have any right to be, in the time they've had, after the scale of their fall, and that much will have to be enough... No matter what the outcome today.

The morning seems to come like flicking a switch. Nathan rolls over and blinks in the sunlight from the overhead window, surprised that he slept. The only reasons he's been sleeping at all well recently are probably exhaustion and anaesthetics. He's been pushing his body fiercely, damaged as it is. In response, it seized the time to repair. Duke wakes when he turns over, and Nathan has the impression that Duke slept more fitfully.

They don't greet the day with sex. The morning could be all the time they have left, but there's no urgent compulsion driving them to fill it with physical last goodbyes. Instead, they drift in and out of each other's personal space -- in the shower, leaving the bathroom door wide open, dressing, at breakfast -- and they don't say much, but small touches pass between them like secrets.

Occasionally, Duke says something like, "If you choose Audrey, then you know me. I'm the guy who sails off in his boat to the next place and gets over it." He's trying to pave the way, still, for Nathan to let him go, as if he's trying to convince himself ahead of time that he can let Nathan go, when Nathan is the one who isn't sure he can live without Duke.

It's a quarter to nine and they need to leave -- separately, they need to leave -- and Nathan still doesn't know what he'll do when it comes to crunch time.

They drive to the station where Duke exchanges his truck for Nathan's Bronco and goes to pick up Jennifer and head onward to Lucassi. Nathan is left with the truck that has a left hand gear shift and carries on to the morgue. Dwight's SUV is already parked at the base of the steps leading up to the main entrance, and after the painful trudge up the steps, Nathan finds Dwight waiting with Jordan inside. Jordan offers a stiff nod, and Dwight a tight smile and a speculativestudy. Nathan also cleaned and checked his old gun this morning and it sits now in its customary position at the back of his hip. Not so customary is that he can feel it there: its weight, edges, subtle threat.

Numbness always involved taking a lot of the world on faith. That's one of the reasons Duke's pranks -- the sort of pranks Duke used to make -- always alarmed him and rubbed him so far the wrong way.

Dwight notices the gun. Okay, so Nathan can't use it anyway, not here, but it's a solid and comforting prop.

All in all, Nathan feels about as fixed as he was ever going to get, too, in so narrow a time frame.

"Good, you're all here," Gloria comments, bustling in. She has gloves on her hands. "Sorry. Drowning," she states as she strips the gloves off. "Robert Glendower, poor little sod. His brother dragged him back to shore, but nothing anyone could do by that time."

"Don't tell Duke," Nathan begs. All of them look at him. Gloria sighs.

"We can try, but honey, things have a way of getting out. It's not his fault. Probably saved a bunch of those kids. People living by the shore started keeping a lot of firepower close at hand, since the other attacks."

"If it gets out in a week, it'll still be better than now," Nathan counters, knowing Duke won't see it the way she describes. Also knowing Duke won't appreciate the effort to hide it from him, but not remotely sorry. "Let's just try to keep it quiet. He only reads the horoscopes in the Haven Herald lately."

Dwight's eyebrows raise. "I've been in on one of the coffee breaks the Teagues spend making those up."

Nathan gives a bark of laughter. "Don't tell him that, either." He isn't sure if he's saying that to spare Duke or just to save it for future ammunition himself.

The crushing uncertainty of whether he'll ever get to use it takes him unexpectedly.

Without Nathan, and with the burden of his curse to run from, Nathan doesn't think that Duke will stay in Haven. Nathan doesn't even necessarily think he should. Duke can 'help' people here, sure -- at a cost in lives. But eventually, if or presumably when he goes the route of Wade, the route William gave them a preview of, the price is too steep to balance the help. Especially considering that what William did to them must have shortened that nosedive into blood, need and obsession significantly. Soon, perhaps, Duke will leave, go out with the tide, and the Cape Rouge might never return to the shores of Haven.

"Right." Gloria claps her hands. "Well, why don't we go see to Sleeping Beauty?" She unlocks the door of the storeroom and Nathan is tempted to draw his gun, knowing what she'd said about William waking before, having a good idea of why that door is locked. Dwight notices his aborted movement and offers a taser.

Gloria wheels William out of the storeroom and into the larger space of the lab. William is still sleeping, though his body moves occasionally, sluggishly. He's more active than yesterday. "Well, we said 9.15," Gloria says. "We're about on the dot now... Wanted to get them both out of it at the same time, 'cause I don't like playing with this drag factor between them when you do one thing to one that effects the other. Seems to me that if they're connected, that sort of thing is only connecting them further." She pinches a drip between her thumb and forefinger and drives it out of William. "Could be a few minutes, could be half an hour. Depends how deep he is." She watches the body on the gurney twitch. "So maybe not that deep," she adds caustically. "I could wait 'til he's conscious to pull out the catheter...? No? Okay, then. Any delicate stomachs, avert your eyes."

They wait. Jordan fiddles with something in her hands that looks like pepper spray or mace. Nathan checks the cuffs holding William down to the gurney.

William wakes up with a yawn and a restrained stretch, a taunt on his lips. "Wow. There's something to be said for a good, long sleep, huh?" His pale blue eyes make a study of their faces that's far too alert in the circumstances, and disconcerting for it. "What? Was I... not supposed to enjoy that? You should try catching eight hours straight when you're exiled to a hell dimension. So..." He bounces on the gurney, jangling his cuffs. "You guys must be ready for Round Two."

"If we could put you out forever, we would," Dwight growls. "We're not going to ask that sacrifice of Audrey."

"'Audrey', now? I see." William picks that up instantly. "But if she's been asleep as long as I have, that means you haven't..." A grin comes over his face, the one that says, oh, I've so got you. "Oh, guys. This is gonna be fun." He makes a show of having a good look around into every corner of the room before asking Nathan, "No Duke?"

"He's with Audrey." Nathan's body vibrates with the strain of being face to face with the enemy and, because of Audrey, knowing he can't attack. "I know what you did."

"...Yeah." William's face flattens very slightly. "Maybe that went further than I anticipated, but what the hell, here you are. Just look at you, all un-Troubled and clean and fresh again. That's a taunt to an artist. The lure of the blank canvas. I guess you wouldn't understand, a gun-toting cowboy like you... I still mean to do something about that, by the way." He waggles an open palm and leers.

"You'll be in jail," Nathan snarls, screwing the words out at the limits of what his voice can manage.

"Interesting choice, by the way. Duke... is with Audrey." William just stops and offers his quizzical look around, bringing everyone else into the question in his face. "Which is kind of... not a choice at all, right? Or are you just hoping you can keep both, and they won't mind? I know Mara would be up for a threesome, but I don't know how your Audrey Parker feels."

"Shut up," Dwight orders. "You're still under arrest. We're going to take you back to your cell, so you can plan your next mischief from there. How long were you exiled? Few hundred years? Better take up reading, or find a really engrossing hobby, because we're going to bury you in a cell with no door and throw food and a paperback down there once a fortnight."

"Wait, wait." William tries to spread his hands -- foiled by the cuffs -- and tries to exude innocence -- foiled by his own personality. "You can't treat a citizen that way. You're an officer of the law." He waggles a finger at Nathan. "So are you, so no plotting murder on the side. Connected, remember?"

"You're not a citizen of the United States," Dwight says impatiently. "Far as I can tell, you're not even a citizen of Earth. You don't even have a last name."

"...No. You just don't know my last name." He says that with exaggerated patience, but he doesn't tell them anything.

"I will pepper spray the fuck out of you," Jordan promises, stepping back well out of touching distance and holding up her weapon as they uncuff William's left wrist from the gurney "You forced me to kill that man. I don't give a shit if I give Audrey runny eyes."

William looks at her with his usual trepidation and whines, "I thought you people fought the scary things..."

Dwight bounces the back of a fist off the underside of his chin, just enough to jerk his head up, not a blow to really hurt. "You leave her alone." He transfers his hand to William's shoulder and hauls him off the gurney onto his feet. After four days lying down, his legs all but collapse. Jordan needs to keep her distance from William as much as she does Audrey, so Gloria grabs William's other side and she and Dwight keep him upright. Nathan cautiously ducks in to affix a chain to his ankles at Dwight's silent urging.

"Right, let's take him down to the car and get him in a cell." There's sweat on Dwight's face but he's beginning to show a glimmer of relief there, too. William didn't wake up crying vengeance and raining death on everyone, for example.

Dwight digs in his pocket for keys, which he hands to Jordan. "Follow us close in the SUV and keep your eyes open. We'll take Nathan's car. You okay to drive?"

"Yes," Nathan says. "But I'm here with Duke's truck."

"No problem. Gloria?"

"Yeah. I got a hypo full of the good stuff, he shows any signs of trouble."

"Oh, goody," William says. "I likes me the good stuff."

Jordan looks at him like she wants to just pepper spray him anyway. Dwight waves her ahead, and the rest of them follow, slowly.

William purposely copies and references at least half a dozen prison movies during the walk down to the car.

***

They're back in the station before Nathan has a moment to phone Duke to ask how things are going on their end -- where his real fears lie, and shouldn't. William is back in a cell, with Jordan and Stan stationed outside, armed with non-lethal but disabling weapons. Nathan stands in Dwight's office while Dwight paces and bunches his fists in his short hair, exuding strain. Dwight doesn't trust how William is taking this. Preferred outcome, Nathan feels, was William coming out fighting, themselves knocking him on his ass and throwing him in jail again. This, on the other hand, feels like a ploy, feels like the bastard is only biding his time.

"We are, uh, okay," Duke's voice says, sounding a long way off, distant and flat. "Audrey's fine. We're just going to get a coffee, and then we'll come join you, if we're clear to do that."

Nathan checks with Dwight then relays, "You're clear. Be careful." He doesn't know what precisely he's warning against. It's Audrey. But even if suspicion hasn't choked him the same way it has Dwight -- William's human, or humanlike, after all, just as Audrey is, and he's not going to be his usual self after being sunk in an enforced slumber for four days, whatever he tries to project -- he feels an uneasiness about all this too.

There's so much else he wants to ask, but he cuts the call and puts the phone away, because Duke has other things to focus on and so does he.

"Can you really do that?" he asks Dwight. "The cell you mentioned. Or was that an idle threat?"

Dwight shoots him a darkly intense study. "It's not idle. The Guard have... means. There've been a lot of useful Troubles among their ranks, over the years. And there've been dangerous Troubles or dangerous Troubled people who couldn't be contained by normal means. There are a few oubliettes scattered around town. There's one out on the cliff near the lighthouse that's empty right now."

Nathan gapes at him.

"The Guard don't like to kill their own. That's Crocker's route... Simon Crocker. The Rev's," he swiftly corrects. "End of the Troubles, they'd be back to normal, and either harmless or at least manageable, able to be punished by regular means."

"Except now they won't," Nathan bleakly fills in. He wonders how many more death warrants he's signed, sooner or later. How many life sentences.

Dwight tips a shoulder in half a shrug.

"Is he even safe left somewhere like that? He should be under twenty-four hour watch."

"We can do it between HPD and the Guard." And it has occurred to Nathan before now that Dwight is a handy intersection of both. "Indefinitely." He licks his lower lips contemplatively and narrows his eyes. "I was serious about the paperback. I'm thinking about going for Regency romances for the first ten years."

Nathan gives him a sidelong look. "That's cruel and unusual, Chief."

"We have to get him in there first without William pulling anything fishy," Dwight responds tersely, and then that conversation is pretty much over.

Gloria comes back and takes Nathan into his own office for what's become the more-or-less daily exam. "More movement here," she comments as she feels around his throat, teasing flexion out of his stiff neck. "I wanna get you back in for another x-ray, tomorrow maybe, or the day after. See how that bone is knitting. You're not whispering all the time anymore, so I take that as progress -- wouldn't hurt to document this thoroughly and add to the literature on it."

She declares his ribs passable and pats him on the stomach before drawing his shirt back together again. "You try to be less of a walking jigsaw, okay? Now, my work here today is done, at least until the next corpse. Try not to be that, either." She slaps his clothed shoulder.

Gloria departs the station. Nathan gets a coffee and thinks about Duke and Audrey. There's paperwork, but he doesn't know yet how he's going to write up William officially... if he's going to write up William officially. Seems like Dwight's preparing to disappear him on a permanent basis. Nathan can't say he's sorry about that.

Duke and Audrey arrive at the station an hour later, by which time Nathan's long buried himself in the paper trail of the Glendower clean-up, but he's been aware of Dwight tracking from his office down the corridor to the cells and back again approximately every ten minutes. The sooner William is buried in a hole, the better.

Nathan jerks to his feet as Audrey comes through the door, dropping papers from his hands. A pen rolls off the desk to the floor. She marches up to him and braces on her feet, legs parted in fighting stance, and her hand twitches as if she wants to strike him, but she doesn't.

Her eyes blaze Audrey but her clothes are still Lexie's. William's Lexie, the one who only got more spiky, more adorned with ironmongery, got more leather, showed more skin, the longer she hung around with him. The trappings give Nathan as much pause as they always did, but those are Audrey's eyes.

"You ass, Nathan," she says.

"I'm sorry..." he starts.

"No," she snaps, tone growing fiercer. "No 'sorry'. Did you seriously imagine that after everything that's happened, I'd want you back? I love you... I always will... but no. Just no. Get your head out of your ass and get over yourself."

Nathan's stunned speechless. Duke is standing behind Audrey, looking furtive, horror and hope and confusion all mixed in his expression and stance. Jennifer Mason is outside, on the other side of the glass, averting her face now with her hands over her ears, a polite girl. Duke's too fixated on what's happening between them, and was never polite to begin with.

"Audrey..." Nathan begins.

"Yes," she snaps, making it an affirmation of reality.

"I'm sorry I hurt you."

"You hurt a lot more than me." But she heaves in a breath, abruptly, cutting herself off and holding back from savaging Nathan's tatters of soul. "But that's in the past. We can't dwell on that anymore. We have to focus on making something of the cards we're left with now. All of us. So we need to leave... this... behind."

She stands there awkwardly in an abrupt and stretching silence. Duke raises a hand cautiously and offers. "Cool with me."

Audrey keeps her eyes fixed on Nathan and jabs a pointing finger toward Duke, increasingly emphatically, cross creases intensifying in her face. "There was no chance in hell that you were ever going to leave him. And I? I did not need to wake up from a four day coma to that discussion. So the two of you can damn well make up and get past this. I may not want you, but that doesn't mean I don't want you happy." She takes a step back away from him. As she's moving, her face starts to melt. She lunges back in close and says, "Oh, come here, you idiot."

She folds Nathan in a hug that is both intense and regretful and carefully, carefully platonic. He feels her arms around his waist through his clothes, but their skin doesn't touch. Duke, behind her, stands with his eyebrows steadily climbing his forehead.

"Figure it out, Nathan," Audrey says as she pulls away. "I am going to get more coffee and talk to Dwight. I figure sleeping for four days is a six-cup situation, come the morning."

***

They look at each other once Audrey has gone, albeit with no great celebration. Nathan feels flattened by the encounter, after the strain of choice that he's felt weighing on him so heavily, and he's more exhausted than relieved for having the choice taken from him. Relief he can't get to, yet. The part of him that loves Audrey still aches. And Audrey may be willing to forgive and be friends, but she thinks he's a coward.

"...No," Duke argues, and amends, "Yes. But you still had to be there in Team William. So only sort-of."

Nathan leans back at his desk and sighs. "What happened?"

Duke saunters uneasily over to take the guest chair and pull it close-in opposite him. That they talked about Nathan is all too obvious. Maybe it's Jennifer who he needs to grill, but she left with Audrey. "I'm sorry," Duke says. "I tried to talk her around."

Nathan frowns at him.

Duke gulps. "She said -- she didn't want you. I told her you'd done all this for her, and what it had cost you. She couldn't ditch you, after everything. I said... I couldn't be what you need, the way she could. She said 'fuck that'."

They both grimace. Lexie deWitt was not entirely a fabrication, even if they may never be sure exactly where Lexie ends and Audrey begins. Some kind of proto-personality, interrupted, incomplete.

"She told me to get over my own drama, and that there's no way 'that idiot' would leave me, whether he knows it or not." Duke meets Nathan's eyes, then rises slowly from the chair. Its soft scrape against the floor seems almost tuneful, and he just lifts himself enough to lean over the table and kiss Nathan, then eases down again.

Nathan follows his progress with an odd fixity. The pace of the world seems to have slowed down. Audrey rejected him. He... did not expect that. He has always been so sure of what they had, fierce, burning and pure. The stuff of high romance and fairy tales. That is not what he has with Duke. He has never been entirely sure what he has with Duke.

Just because it doesn't fit a recognisable pattern doesn't mean it's inferior.

"You should know..." Duke says, unsteadily. He, too, seems like the world has rocked under his feet, seems like he barely dare move or act. He taps the side of his fist on the desk top and scrapes at the wood grain with his fingernails. "I get that she has every reason to be monumentally pissed at you, after the Barn and... Sarah." He shoots Nathan an incredulous question with his eyes, like he does every time that comes up. "On top of... all the rest. Us. But... when she says she doesn't want you, I still think it's William she's thinking about. This... influence he has on her. Maybe she's rejecting you because she's still not in her right mind."

"The sooner we put him down that hole, the better," Nathan growls, and doesn't explain when Duke's face flickers with question. It'll all be laid out for him soon enough. "No. She's made her decision. Everything she said makes sense. I've just been too stupid to see it. Too many betrayals. Too much... carelessness. And then--" He stands up, rounds the table. He wants to touch Duke, but Duke's body language is a little too closed again. Instead he leans on the near edge next to Duke, rests a hand on the desk, between Duke's hands, waiting to be invited in.

"Then why aren't we the same?" Duke asks, still stubborn, still questioning.

"I don't know." He lets his wrist brush Duke's wrist. "But we're not."

"If Audrey's still in love -- or whatever -- with William, that's a problem," Duke says. "We need to get them away from each other. Far away."

Nathan is already thinking that an oubliette in the ground won't be far enough. Not so long as it's within the boundaries of Haven. Audrey and William have their link. They're... connected. Much as they know Audrey isn't like William, and would never want to be, the thought of her holding a direct line to William's brain is chilling. Far too dangerous to allow it to continue over any length of time. Nathan doesn't know how far away their oubliette would need to be to remain safe. And then, if it was far away, far enough, they couldn't keep watch over it.

They still need another answer.

***

William stays in his cell, jokes with his jailors, reads out excerpts from his romance novel. Jordan marches out in disgust as her shift ends mid-afternoon, to be replaced by another trusted core member of the Guard, while Stan is spelled by another member of HPD who's in the know.

"It's like he's happy to be locked up," Jordan tells Nathan, pacing in his office. Duke is there, feet up on the spare desk, reading Nathan's reports and critiquing his grammar. It may be the first time Jordan and Duke have been in the same room since Duke's descent into the Crocker Curse, and even though Jordan isn't Troubled any more, it's obviously not thrilling her. "It's making Dwight insane trying to figure out what he's setting us up for, and Dwight's gonna be driving me insane being like this until it's fixed, so how about you work on fixing that, Nathan?" She strokes her hair out of her face and twitches her shoulder as she turns her back on Duke.

Nathan finds that he prefers her curt, snapped judgements to her attempts to unravel his problems with sympathy. He weaves his fingers together and regards her over the top of them. "How am I supposed to do that?"

"I don't know. Talk to Audrey, or whoever she is. You're supposed to be our Troubles expert." She turns on her heel and slams out of the door.

"Back to normal there, then," Duke observes.

"Thank God," Nathan says, with heavy sincerity. "She's right, this is... a waste of time." He shoves his pen away from him. "I can't focus on paperwork while this is still out there. I'm going to talk to William."

Duke looks dubious, but doesn't argue against it. He follows Nathan down the corridor, and Nathan considers telling him to wait back in the office, but it isn't like Duke doesn't have a right to face the guy who did this to them, if Nathan's going to dive in like an idiot. He keeps the taser he took from his desk firmly in his hand and hopes it won't be Duke he ends up having to use it on.

"Can we get a minute," he says to the two on William duty, not really posing it as a question. The cop passes Duke a taser as they remove to a station just outside the door. Nathan says firmly, "If you inadvertently tase Audrey when she's in the middle of something, she'll flatten you. I'm not getting in her way."

"Huh..." Duke puts the taser in his pocket as they fully enter the cell.

"Wow!" William shoots to his feet as soon as he sees them, dancing on the spot, loose-limbed like a puppet. "Duke and Nathan. I missed you earlier, Duke. You did such a good job of cleaning up after all my fun. You wanna go again...?"

Duke pales and Nathan wishes he hadn't brought him after all. He retrieves one of the sentries' chairs from a corner and places it in front of the bars, safely out of arm's reach. "Don't respond to him," he tells Duke, who takes a position hovering behind his shoulder as he sits down.

"You're a dick," Duke says to William. Duke never listens. "You figure screwing with Audrey's friends will make for some big happy-making present?"

"Well, yeah." William, grinning, pulls over the bench in his cell so he can sit opposite Nathan, mirroring his stance. "This is gonna be fun. Interrogate me. I'm ready for it. You won't make me crack." His voice stabs at a lazy mimicry of some tough guy movie role. He put his hands on his knees.

"What did you do after you escaped here from your... other dimensional prison?" Duke asks. "Watch a hundred crappy flicks?"

"I missed a few hundred years," William hazards, possibly actually sounding faintly offended. "How else is a guy to try and blend in?"

"You really don't blend in," Duke tells him.

"Hush." Nathan's not in this to give William pointers to improve his game. "Come on, William, what's the plan?" He forces a weary smile onto his face. "What is it you're waiting for? What's the play this time?"

William shrugs. "Me? I'm just enjoying your company. Not much opportunity for guy-talk in a hell dimension. You want to talk sports, I'm there."

"I know there's something else you want," Nathan says, "or you wouldn't be sitting here." Keeping hold of his temper starts becoming a lost cause.

"TV with cable would be nice," William allows.

"Good call," murmurs Duke, in spite of himself. "Dwight's a hard man."

"Doesn't matter. I have my book." William holds it up, pages open.

Nathan twitches and snaps his mouth shut just in time. William sees and looks smug, and throws him, "I told you before, I've only ever wanted one thing. Mara." His expression twists. "Nah... really, I'm just going to sit here and drive the Chief crazy wondering."

"You're doing all this to get at Dwight?" Nathan picks up flatly, not believing it.

"Well, you didn't think it was about someone else, did you?" He feigns a shocked revelation. "That'd be so embarrassing. In fact, I did hear that you were Chief, once, before you... 'fucked the whole of the town up', I believe was the phrase I heard? To think we could've been adversaries. Too bad you're just too low down the food chain now."

Nathan tries not to grind his teeth and does roll his eyes. "That's cute."

"Hey, now." William waggles a finger. "Careful with your boyfriend standing there looking on. I hear he can get mean."

"You--" It's just as well Duke holds himself back, aborting his lunge clear of the bars, because the rage that flares through Nathan at William's smugness, like he's proud of what he did to them, he has his hands full controlling his own reactions. Duke seethes and clenches his fists. He grabs Nathan's shoulder. "Let's get the fuck out of here, Nate. We're just providing entertainment."

Nathan's reluctant. He'd hoped to learn something. If they stay longer, they might be able to make up for the jibes that William got through. Or -- not. He jerks his head in a small nod and lets Duke pull him to his feet.

"This really is nicer than my last prison!" William calls after them as they go. "Kinda more like vacationing, really. People bring me food and I have a book. I even think there might be some corset-ripping soon!"

"He is..." Duke breathes heavily as they stumble out of the door, and his face is red with anger. "So annoying."

They both give looks of sympathy to the guard duty as they head back.

"I just don't get it," Duke complains. "How did Audrey ever see anything in that? I know, I know, each to their own, love's a funny thing, but..."

"We still don't have any clues why he'd be so content to stay in a cell," Nathan groans, scrubbing his hands over his face. Talking to William brought everything back again. It makes him feel unclean, the way the guy leered at him, specifically.

"He told us what he wants." Duke thumps a rhythm on the wall with his fist. "The only thing he's interested in -- has ever been interested in -- is Audrey. Or the person he thinks is inside Audrey. If he's telling the truth, then it follows that everything he does has that at its heart."

Nathan sags against the wall opposite him, feeling drained. Movement is too much effort. William is in a cell and it still feels like he's the one in control. Nathan feels cold, abruptly. "Only reason he'd be content to idle around is if he believes he already has her."

Duke stares at him.

"When Audrey put William out," Nathan explains raggedly, "she deliberately used their connection to do it. Four days. Gloria was complaining about using the 'drag factor', but... keeping them both down was still drawing on their connection. What if he thinks he's so close now that he's already won?"

"Then we definitely need to keep them away from each other. Don't you think we should be getting William out of Haven right now?" Duke's at his shoulder, urging him on. Back to his office, he'd thought, but they seem to have stalled at the coffee machine -- Nathan misses the specifics of the journey while he's trying to think. Jordan was right. They need options.

"How far would be far enough?" he returns to Duke. "They used a different dimension last time."

"Great. So we just need to discover how they did that." Duke throws his hands up in agitation. "All this supernatural crap. Howard... the Barn... whoever the hell the jerks were that decided it was a great idea to stick Audrey in this cycle anyway... Where are they now? They set in place all this elaborate shit and yet they didn't make proper contingency for one lone dick with a pistol showing up and gunning down their grand plan...? Sorry, buddy."

Nathan snorts. "It's true."

"Yeah, I know, but." Duke catches Nathan's arm and squeezes it.

Nathan gives in and sits down on one of the chairs by the coffee machine. "We need to talk to Audrey. Vince, Dave, Dwight, the inner core of the Guard, and this town, and all it's damned secrets. If we can find where those people came from, the Barn-builders, or anything they did leave behind..."

"Are we talking about aliens here?" Duke's forehead creases. He takes a gulp of coffee, veiling his expression. "Man, I'll have egg on my face if Toomey turns out to be right after all."

"If..." Nathan screws up his face with distaste at the subject matter. "If they came from another world, it was from something like another dimension. Like William keeps saying. Not in a spaceship. Are those still aliens?"

Duke shrugs. "How'd I know?"

"It's you likes science fiction. Time travel rules," Nathan jibes. He sighs and shakes his head furiously. This is achieving nothing. They need to save Audrey. He owes her that much. At least that much.

An office door opens a few feet from them and Dwight emerges, looking serious. "Couldn't help but overhearing. About back-up plans and... science fiction." He looks between them. "I guess you both weren't paying much attention at the time, but Jennifer has a book with a creepy rhyme in the front that glows and kills monsters. Would that be the kind of thing worth taking a closer look at?"

***

In the event, they gather in Jennifer and Audrey's apartment above the Gull, more because of the ready availability of food and alcohol and its sort-of-neutral status than the available space. Duke and Nathan arrive first, and Duke brings up extra chairs from the restaurant while Nathan sits nervously beneath the weight of the looks Audrey's giving him. He tries to examine his own feelings for her, and finds them so mixed, so confusing, that he doesn't know what to do with any of it.

She was his first friend in a long, long time. The first person he let close again. She was his first experience of physical sensation in just as long. It was intense, overwhelming. He remembers the months he spent fighting it, knowing that because he could feel her, that complicated things just too badly... Need and obsession and other impulses were too inextricably woven up with the feelings he had for her already as a friend and partner for them to get involved. Did he step over the line? Was it love? Or does it even matter, now, when so much came between them?

If his response to finding out that Lexie was still Audrey hadn't been to spend four days trying desperately to repair his relationship with Duke, things might have been different. Nathan finds he can confess to himself now when and where the choice was made. He'd spent days fretting, tearing himself up over it, when the decision had already passed unnoticed.

"Are you okay?" Audrey finally breaks up the silent sidelong glances to ask. "I was... harsh, earlier. Don't take that the wrong way: we are so over, if we ever 'were' to begin with. But I guess I'm... not so okay about this. It makes it difficult to, uh, gauge things. That, and I'm still plenty pissed about choosing to come back as someone who remembered loving you and then having to spend all that time covering your ass while you boned Duke. I could've come through that door as Lexie and been carefree."

"Lexie was real, then?" Nathan asks. He toys with his drink. She's given him some sort of non-alcoholic cocktail. It has fruit on a stick and a paper parasol, and leaves him unsure if he's being subtly teased.

"Sure, Lexie was real." She nods. The drawl is strong again. It surfaces and vanishes increasingly, now. In the days she was pretending to be Lexie, he has subsequently realised that it always tended to vanish mid-crisis, or when a situation was tense. "Worked in a bar, had the wacko bondage ex, never fired a gun in her life. Look at me now. I'm Audrey and I'm Lexie, and if that's not confusing enough... There's whoever the hell William wants me to be, fighting under there trying to get out, as well."

"I'm sorry," Nathan says again.

"No." She shakes her head. "It's like, when I think about it, there never was an 'us'. We never talked about it, didn't commit anything. There were... feelings. Crazy, world-rending, self-sacrificing, out-of-control feelings, but it's not like we even once had that fucking talk, you and me. Just a kiss on a hillside surrounded by people with guns, with the world about to fall down around our ears."

"It wasn't fair," Nathan says.

"No, it wasn't. But I didn't promise myself to you, and you didn't promise anything to me, except that you weren't going to lose me to that goddamn Barn, and guess what? You didn't."

Nathan can't help but feel like there ought to be more to it than that. She was the one person in the world he could touch. He held her and felt the stirrings of destiny. Did he derail something profound when he gave in to lust and fucked Duke? Or is it only that all the connections were coincidence, inflated inside his own head... If so, then apparently in hers just as much.

Something strikes him. "William said that." He had forgotten, amid everything else. "That you chose to come back as Audrey."

"Yeah. He said I could be whoever I most wanted to be on the other side of the door." She winces, and adds. "I guess that explains why he really doesn't like you. He came to me talking about big love and who I really was, and remembering... I bet he was hoping I'd come through the other side as the person he remembers, who loves him."

The last pieces slide and click into place. No, Nathan doesn't think he's unduly elevating himself to William's primary adversary. That Audrey should choose him over William, then he should reject Audrey, makes it a messy matter of pride.

"I never told you about the door and that whole choice, what with pretending to be Lexie all this time." Her face is apologetic. Maybe there are things they'd have understood sooner if they'd had all the information pooled. Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference. But either way, it's in the pursuit of avoiding any more errors like that they're all gathering here today.

"Duke and I happened by accident," Nathan says, with difficulty. Then he stops and realises he still idealises her too much to ever tell her the whole of that story. Besides, there are parts of it even Duke can never know. The darkest of his corners, he'll keep for himself alone. The truth is, they're probably what enabled him to survive more or less intact, though that might be more poetic if they weren't also his downfall in the first place.

Audrey tips her shoulder, and maybe she guesses there's more to it. Maybe she even guesses a little of what's really behind it, because she, too, came back to Haven with new kinks and shady corners. Duke only knows that he wasn't the first time Nathan had ever been with a man, and if he wonders about that, he hasn't asked.

But Duke is pushing back through the screen door, chairs in each hand, and Jennifer is pausing in the door to harrumph loudly on her way back from the bathroom... and probably spent five minutes trying to find things to do in there so she didn't disturb their talk, Nathan realises. An open plan apartment isn't the best forum for private discussions and personal secrets.

Dwight's coming in behind Duke, another couple of chairs in hand. They probably have too many chairs, now. Jordan follows behind Dwight, and the room looks packed. Jennifer puts the coffee maker on, then pours out six mugs and puts it on again. Audrey pulls a face and starts taking bottles down from the cupboard. Lexie doesn't do coffee unadulterated. A few minutes after that, the Teagues arrive, Vince with a couple of shadows bearing a Guard tattoo, Dave oddly nervous and looking like he really doesn't want to be there. Which is weird, then, and gets more so later.

All the major players. The council of war about the fate of William, and all of Haven, can begin.

***

It's the unprecedented event of Haven getting together to spit out the truth, to figure out the truth insofar as they know it, which means there's an edge of danger to the proceedings even before it's begun. By the time it's through, Jordan has twice had to be pulled back from killing her Guard masters, Dwight and Vince are exchanging glares of a very dark nature, and Dave Teagues will be spending the night in the cells, as well as William, to make damned sure they know he'll still be around in the morning. The Guard have just about stopped glaring at Nathan and Audrey, since they'd been almost over that one anyway and Nathan and Duke have been sprawled in each other's space on the sofa throughout. Vince keeps frowning down at his tattoo with deep unsettlement and so, to be honest, does Nathan -- even though his doesn't move and he had it inked there himself, by a man who cracked jokes about how groovy it was that 'his' design was catching on so well. Jennifer's apprehension of her book is more alarmed than even that. She looks like she wants to run away and have nothing more to do with this, but Nathan has faith in her expressed desire to help.

One thing they can all agree on is that the woman they know as Audrey Parker, among all her other names, has done so much for Haven throughout the years of her mysterious arrivals and subsequent disappearances as their sacrificial pawn. If there is no way to be rid of the Troubles, then it's their turn to salvage the identity she has left, and save her from becoming the monster William seeks.

Also in their interest, of course, to keep her around to continue to fix the Troubles. Perhaps she can teach her understanding of them to others, as she did Nathan.

Nathan keeps his lips tight closed on one revelation he still wonders about, that maybe even Audrey hasn't considered. The precise meaning of What was once your salvation is now your doom remains unclear. If William is the one she loves, that her original personality loved, he might be the one Lucy's solution refers to: a specific individual and not a vague prophecy after all. If that was the case, then even if Nathan and Audrey are no longer an epic tale of love rife for sacrifice-potential, killing William could still end the Troubles.

But killing William will also kill Audrey.

If he wasn't going to let her walk into the Barn and a fate of supernatural amnesia to end the Troubles, he isn't going to sign the warrant for her death. Even if he doesn't have the certainty of his feelings for her that he once did. Maybe not now more than ever. He owes a great deal, to others as well as Audrey, but he's already the man who ruined the town, and he'll live with the possibility that he perpetuated it by refusing to embrace human sacrifice in its fully literal meaning.

It does make him wonder what other secrets remain, that anyone else in this room will yet take to their grave.

At the end of the day, Vince is the leader of the Guard, and Nathan has seen how his old eyes mist when he looks at Audrey. Protector of the Troubled or not, they would both make the same decision. Maybe Vince harbours the very same thoughts, and would also never say.

Nathan suspects they'll get away with it. The Guard are too armed and aggressive and blinkered by their focus upon the primacy of force to really credit the indications that the Barn, the cycle, all of this, are powered by something as fragile and ephemeral as love. It was an issue of incredulity among them when it boiled down to Audrey killing Nathan because she loved him -- though they'd still have happily embraced killing Nathan -- never mind introducing some shadowy otherworldly lover into the equation.

There are other things disclosed, that weren't secrets yet Nathan did not know them. At the time the incidents with Jennifer's book occurred, he and Duke were fighting a parade of deadly Troubles. In those frenetic, bloodsoaked weeks, if someone had mentioned to him that Jen had found a magic book, he can't say he'd be terrifically surprised that his own brain junked the information as inconsequential. Dwight figured out the fact that all the victims of the monster had shared the same birthday, and so if William's target had always been Jennifer...

There had to be a reason he was afraid of her. The book and its enclosed rhyme seem a damned good candidate.

If William's exile was to a 'hell dimension' -- though Duke claims he got that phrase from pop culture -- then is there a means to send him back? Jennifer's book and Vince's tattoo, it seems, may literally point the way. "Nothing out there except the lighthouse and the open sea," says Duke, flinging back the drapes, opening the windows, gazing out of Audrey's balcony, across the darkened waters.

Their council turns into a treasure hunt: a midnight excursion which is only relayed to Nathan, forced by his physical incapacity to remain on the couch, back with Duke and Anna Benedict, Jordan and a fidgety Dave Teagues. Several telephone calls later, they're all back in the apartment above the Gull again, the clues in Jen's book shifted along several pages. The lighthouse is the heart of Haven. Only Jennifer can see the trapdoor to the secret cave underneath, where the maze from the Guard's tattoo marks the floor.

The gate needs four people to open it, but not just any four. Audrey, Jennifer, William and... the last, surprise addition, Dave Teagues.

"You remember that place?" Nathan demands of him. "What was it like?" But Dave, held down by Vince and two Guardsmen, can only shake his head, unable to go into details. Anna Benedict fills in, unnecessarily, "The experience was obviously traumatising."

It's to Jennifer's consternation that they can't get anything from Dave about the world they both came from. She clutches her book in her hands and looks scared, the crux of the plan to shut down William, and a stranger in town -- a randomly seeded contingency to that end. It seems a callous position to place someone in. There are still times Nathan finds it hard to regret he shot Howard.

Eventually they have their plan for the morrow and the participants start to peel away. Dwight and Vince take Dave back to the cells. Anna Benedict and the other Guard leave with them. Jordan lingers to swap low-key conversation with Jennifer and Audrey. Gloria exchanges a few acerbic words then leaves to return to the baby. She's been at the spirits with a will, so Lucassi gives her a ride back. Duke's fingers slide up and down Nathan's bare arm from wrist to elbow as he feels himself sinking further into the seat. Duke's voice says from a long way off, "You didn't put any alcohol in those umbrella things, did you?"

"I'm fine," Nathan groans, though he knows he's drifting. He sits up and shakes himself, gets up and puts the coffee machine back on. Duke watches him, suspicious, blinking.

"We should stay here," Nathan says. He's been watching Jennifer and Audrey, marking their tension. It's late already. He doesn't want to abandon them to uncertainties and the night. "William's in a cell, but who knows what he might be planning? Some last-ditch effort to get at all of us, if he's figured out what we're going to try. It'll be harder for him if we stay together."

He sees something shift in Audrey's face, deeply mixed, apprehensive and disappointed and relieved. She thinks he's right. Can William sense traces of their plans through her? Who knows what she's getting back from him? She needs her friends with her tonight to keep her strong. Nathan would wish she didn't have to be there in the same place with William tomorrow at all, but they need them both to open the gate.

"Sounds good to me," Duke says. "I've drunk enough that I don't trust you not to arrest me if I get behind the wheel, and I really don't fancy getting planted into a tree, the way you're half asleep already. Audrey? If you did spike him, it's not funny. He's still on medication."

"She didn't," Nathan says, in time with Audrey's helpless laying out of her open palms and silently mouthed 'who, me?' -- which does give him pause, but he's sure his sense of taste is still good enough to pick alcohol out of a fruit drink. Some day his other senses might normalise, but they haven't yet. It's likely to be a gradual process, if it happens, after so many years relying on all these other clues about the world for both information and stimulation. In the meantime, and with the addition of new-minted sensation, Nathan suspects he's more wide-open to the world than anyone should be.

Anna Benedict might have something to say about that -- might have something to say about him thinking that -- but she's already gone.

"Lexie wasn't entirely irresponsible, you know?" Audrey retorts. "And cheers for the vote of confidence." She grabs the offered coffee from Nathan's hand, though she tips the remnant of her existing drink into it before making the swap.

"Yeah, I can see that," Duke says. "So you're happy with the way this goes, Audrey Parker?" He leans forward on the couch, planting his legs apart, accepts a coffee from Nathan but still looks intently at Audrey. "Stay in Haven. Fight Troubles. Grow old -- maybe... Hell, you've been doing this for centuries, so who knows how long it takes for you to grow old? -- and get to stay Audrey Parker?"

"Yeah." She gives a tight smile. "I guess that's a 'no' on the big romance, although what the heck? Vince is still free, and I have to remind you guys, Sarah's still in here, too." She points to her own head and enjoys their expressions of horror.

"He's totally got a something," Jen agrees, slightly tipsy and oblivious. "Kind of a silver fox, right? Or more like a lion with all that curly mane." Her hands move expressively.

Jordan pulls the strangest of faces and flatly turns away, which is pretty funny in itself. "And on that note, I... am going to go. You all try not to be hungover for the showdown in the morning."

They make their farewells and then they're down to four.

It's almost like it used to be -- Jennifer extra, but an easy extra to have around, bubbly and content to meld into what places she fits in their existing dynamic. The lines are redrawn differently. Not that Audrey and Nathan ever did much hand-holding in Duke's presence, or at all, the way Duke and Nathan are doing now. Audrey stacks all the spare chairs next to the door to take down in the morning, waving Duke back into his seat when he starts to get up to help, then comes to join them, pulling another comfy chair closer to sit with Jen on the other side of the occasional table.

It's Duke who suggests getting the cards out -- of course it is. He's probably chosen his moment carefully, knowing Nathan's too tired to focus, let alone try to beat him.

"So, are you okay?" Duke picks up to ask Audrey again, halfway into the first game. "Really okay?" And Nathan groans and gives up, folding his hand. He peels pills from the depth of his jeans pocket and takes them with his cooling coffee.

Audrey grimaces back across the hand of cards arranged in a professional fan between her fingers. "If this is to distract me like Nathan, it's not going to work. Ante up." She chucks a bill into the middle of the table.

Jen splutters. "Since when were we playing for money? The Teagues haven't paid me this month!"

"Yeah. You need to hold those boys upside-down and shake them out," Audrey opines, pure Lexie for a moment. "Play with what you've got on you."

Jen picks up a bottle cap from the edge of the table and chucks it into the centre and Audrey contorts her face approvingly and nods like it's a million bucks. She still glares at Nathan and Duke like it's their duty to offer up real cash for her to fleece.

Duke peels a note from a suspiciously thick roll that he returns to his inside pocket. Nathan holds up his empty hands. His cards are discarded on the table.

"Doesn't seem fair to make Nathan play for money," Duke says, insincerely. "He's half unconscious."

"Screw you," Nathan offers.

"Audrey," Duke says pointedly. She's dodged the question twice. Now he's paid cash.

"You know, I never thought I'd get this chance," she muses, as she casually puts her hand down and scrapes back the notes and bottle cap, barely looking at everyone else's cards. "Last year, I spent so long knowing I was going to forget everything. Who I was. Everyone I'd met and helped and loved. Then since I've been back, things have been so crazy, and the person William wants me to be... That's not what I want. I wanted to find out who I was, not find out I was the Big Bad. So yeah. Sticking around in Haven. Mopping up Troubles. Dishing out parking tickets. I can handle that. I can handle living."

"And William?" Duke presses, as the cards are dealt again.

She tips her head and sighs, and her eyes are sad. "I'm not having a good run with guys. Maybe I really should hit Vince. Or call up Chris Brody, see what he's doing now."

Nathan and Duke both flinch at the thought. "Man, that's low," Duke mutters.

Audrey smirks.

"Who's Chris Brody?" Jen asks.

"Only about the bestest guy in the whole wide world," Audrey tells her. "You ask Duke and Nathan about their epic Bromance. Hey, if I'd known you both swung this way back then... I'm surprised you didn't jump him. That was his Trouble," she explains to Jennifer, grinning. "You'd like him. Obviously."

"Can we talk about something else?" Nathan pleads, staring at the remnant of his coffee and wishing he could add something stronger.

"Dudes are so fragile," Audrey tells Jen.

Duke wins the next hand, and Audrey the next, and the back-and-forth pretty much goes between them, except the time Jen wins and bounces around the room in celebration, and another when Nathan flings his cards in with what turns out to be a 50 dollar bill glibly peeled from his wallet, and somehow flukes it, because he can't even remember what his hand was as he's pulling his winnings back towards him.

"Will you be able to let him go?" Duke asks, still persisting, in a break where Jen's up at the kitchen area and Nathan's sagging even further back into the chair, probably being the reason Jennifer's started playing with the coffee machine again. Duke and Audrey are leaning very close over the table, but Nathan is awake enough and his ears are sharp enough to hear. "Guy's got a line into your head. Didn't turn out too well when he was screwing with ours."

"Yeah, but..." She scrunches her face. "It can't be the same way. Those black blob things are how the Troubles work. I'm immune to Troubles, and I can manipulate that stuff the same way he does, so I don't think he could use that. This connection is... something else. Something we don't know."

"All the more reason to keep an eye on it. You need to stay away from him tomorrow. Let me and Dwight do the manhandling."

Audrey blinks at him and anger flares in her. "Give it a rest, Duke. I know what I need to do. I'll take this one, okay? Because apparently my Trouble is called 'William', and he's a killer and an asshole, who hurt my friends and tortured the whole of the Glendower clan for nothing. So I'm going to see him dealt with, once and for all."

It's forceful and passionate and it's the Audrey Nathan knows of old, and in that one exchange is a flood of reassurance that he was missing about tomorrow. William won't take her down. Nathan has faith in her, as he always had. With her on-side, they can't help but win the day.

"Coffee... coffee... coffee..." Jen wanders back to the table, distributing mugs unsteadily, breaking the conspiratorial huddle of two apart. Duke gives a subtle nod as he leans back, and touches Audrey's hand, briefly, as it lands on the newly arrived coffee mug.

The game continues, sporadically. It's late, and the coffees seem to be having less and less effect. Nathan drifts, without meaning to, and can't pull himself out of it, even when he knows dimly that the voices around him have turned to talking about him.

"Trust the guy who suggests the sleepover to be the first to fall asleep." Audrey. Lexie.

"He's still recovering. I could sleep. Like, do you think I have to be touching this book all the time, because it's kind of gonna be uncomfortable lying on it?" Jennifer.

A snort from Duke, but there's no answer to that. "He's just bushed. Let him sleep." A sharp note in that last. Maybe Audrey was heading in for a poke. Nathan's eyes are too heavy to open and confirm.

"He'll have a bad back in the morning, sleeping there like that." Jen, again.

"And he'll feel it." Audrey, not over-ready with the sympathy.

"Well, you know," Duke hazards, with a trace of discontent that's obvious to Nathan even through the haze. "Let him enjoy the pitfalls as well as the perks. Living a hundred-percent in the world again after all this time has to be a funny thing, I guess."

There's more conversation after that, but Nathan just remembers it as noise. He wakes with light flooding through the drapes into his face at past 6AM, with a crick in his back and his neck stiffer than it's been in three days, and a numb thigh where Duke's been sprawled using him for a pillow. But it's a better kind of numbness, all in all, then the one he'd grown so used to. Duke snores softly, and Nathan moves his hand enough to trail his fingers through Duke's untidy hair, strewn over the couch cushions.

His senses should be starting to fade back to more normal levels, now, if anything at all. So it makes no sense whatsoever that the world seems to have more colours, more intensity, more depth, than it's ever had before.

***