FIC: [Haven] Conversations With Ghosts - Nuke, OT3, post-finale [1/2]
TITLE: Conversations With Ghosts
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
LENGTH: ~12,000 words approx
SUMMARY: Nathan's Trouble came back gradually, a little each day ever since he walked alone down the armoury hill and left his heart behind. A few days after he finally awoke with no sensation left in his body, they found the first corpse with aether-smudged eyes.
Now he faces questions he never wanted to ask. Are the Troubles coming back? Is the apparition of Duke seen in Haven responsible for the killings? Can Croatoan's reach extend beyond the walls of the new Barn, and even death itself?
PAIRING: Duke/Nathan, Audrey/Duke/Nathan
NOTES: written for PhoenixDragon in the After Forever post-finale fic exchange: Duke isn't dead, but isn't technically alive, either. Nathan had to make a choice, Duke was not that choice. But he feels haunted and wonders if he made the right one - as attacks on Haven begin by a serial killer and Duke is the obvious suspect, even as he is not really there to defend himself.
This story is set as an alternative to the last ~2 minutes of screentime in the finale; Audrey is still in the armoury, and Nathan is still trying to live his life and rebuild Haven.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
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Conversations With Ghosts
Nathan's Trouble came back gradually, as if it seeped up out of his bones, slow to reform the old familiar shape within him, yet something he could never be rid of now. Audrey and the new Barn had taken all the Troubles out of Haven, and they were supposed to be gone for good, yet all the same he was not surprised that it came back.
Croatoan had used aether to fix Audrey... fix Mara, when Mara was young. It was integral in Audrey's body now, or at least that was his understanding -- something she could not live without. So... how, exactly, had Croatoan fixed Nathan? Even assuming the damage hadn't been done irreparably by the spike of aether he'd been struck with first. Either way, aether was still in him, and it recognised its former role.
It was almost funny, almost apt. After all, why should he be the one who got to return home to a normal life, when Duke was dead, when Audrey was trapped forever in the armoury that should have been Croatoan's prison? Jennifer, Charlotte, so many others. Even the Teagues had paid more, in the end.
The resurgence of full feeling started to noticeably fade after a few months, but touch lingered, traces of it, diminishing slowly for maybe another month after that. Not much more than three months from the day the Armoury had pulled the Troubles out of Haven, he was back to normal.
He thought of it that way: back to normal. The morning he woke up with no sensation in his body, his soul felt nothing more than resignation.
A few days later, the first corpse turned up with black-smudged dead eyes.
"You're wrong," he said into the phone, sluggish for the hour, hating that once more groping for the phone and the lamp in the dark had become a near-impossible task, and without the mumbling of Audrey or the bright definition of her sleepy body beside him to make up for it. "You must be mistaken."
"I sure as hell am not," Gloria snapped. "It looks like the others. Like the work of Croatoan." There was an edge in her voice. Not that Nathan couldn't understand why there would be. "Get down here and see it for yourself."
"I'm coming," Nathan grunted.
The dawn light cast a yellow and grey filter over the recovering town of Haven, quiet and eerie with the hour. Nathan had to judge his newly-unfeeling hands with care on the steering wheel. The skeletal shapes of scaffold from repairs and new builds loomed raggedly darker grey-on-grey from either side of Main Street. For a stretch of several seconds on the turn, all the windows on one side reflected and gleamed yellow from a chance angling of the rising sun, and then he was driving onto a less built up road with the dazzle and the scattered skeletons left behind him. Like the sun had crossed a threshold, though, there was suddenly more yellow in the world than grey, light enough to better see by. Several crows left a straggly tree and signpost at the roadside as the Bronco sailed past, cawing discordantly and beating their shadowing wings far too loud on the air.
Nathan pulled up outside Carla Jenkins' house.
He hadn't recognised it by the address alone, but he'd been here just a handful of days since, to respond to a callout. Carla had been pleasant and full of life and energy, and might have been flirting, but Nathan was so far from having any capacity to be interested that he'd not put any thought into figuring that question out.
He hadn't imagined, when Gloria said she was sitting on a corpse with black smudged eyes, that he'd know who it was. He should've, probably -- there weren't that many people left in Haven. Most who were there now were the tenacious survivors of Troubles, darkness, Duke...
Inside, Gloria was slumped on the arm of the sofa and drinking coffee from a flask. Stan was standing looking grim. There was no sign of Vicki. Home with the baby, most likely.
Carla Jenkins, who in school had been Carla Rose, lay dead on the floor, just like all those others who'd had their Troubles ripped out of them.
"Was she Troubled?" Nathan couldn't remember, but there again, very few people had not been Troubled, at the end. If she had been, it had been something minor enough it hadn't ever exploded to the degree the news had reached him.
"No-one's supposed to be Troubled," Gloria said sharply, rising from her perch and setting her cup aside. Her eyes were hard as she pinned them on him, and... he should have foreseen that she would notice, if anyone did.
"Mine came back," Nathan reluctantly came clean. Stan's jaw dropped. "It's... I didn't think it was something to worry anyone about. Croatoan damaged, then fixed me with aether, in the back-and-forth on that last day. Aether that the Barn... Armoury didn't pull away, it seems like, maybe because it's keeping me alive."
"You kept that one quiet," Gloria said, her eyes narrowed.
"You didn't run my DNA sample," Nathan pointed out.
"Yeah? Well, clearly I should've. Fool idea to assume people would mention stuff that might be significant."
"I thought it was just me..." Nathan crouched down and reached for Carla's face, but stalled just short of allowing his fingers to connect with the skin below her eye. He wouldn't feel it anyway.
Other people knowing made his situation real in a manner it hadn't been until now. He swallowed, not feeling that, either, and reminded himself that without Audrey, without Duke, there wasn't much he was interested in touching anyway.
Yet he had already been aware that there was aether remaining, even with the Troubles gone. Could leftover scraps of aether be responsible for this, or...
Were the Troubles really gone?
Nathan did not want to be chief in a Troubled town that had shot its last bolt and expended all its last hopes, and stood with nothing but empty hands. He'd resigned himself to his Trouble returning when so much had been won for everyone else. But to think of all the Troubles returning, after they'd lost and sacrificed so much, fought so hard to see them gone forever, that was intolerable.
"Nathan, hon, are you all right?" Gloria's voice was still sharp, but her compassion and concern rang out clearly.
He realised his breath had quickened to such degree that he was on the verge of a panic attack. His head spun. He strove for control.
"Yes..." he gasped. "We need to bring Dwight in on this. What's left of the Guard, too." Further irony after all the time they'd spent trying to kill him. The Teagues were gone, and so much else of the infrastructure that Haven relied upon to cope with the Troubles. Audrey...
"He's not Chief anymore." Stan shifted uncomfortably. "He's not even in the force."
"Didn't want to wake up his daughter, at this hour," Gloria said. "Didn't see the point, until we'd had this chat. He is retired. Rib cage like glass, the number of shots he's taken to the chest. We need him, all the same."
"Mm." Nathan's brain was busy juggling a dozen contrary sources for panic. "Pool resources again. Find out if the Guard know of Troubles that have come back. Find out if Carla's friends or family -- or neighbours -- know what she did, if that was back. Find out--"
"Maybe you should put a guard on yourself," Stan interrupted, uneasily, and flustered for interrupting. "If whoever did this is targeting Troubles that have returned."
"I--" It would never have occurred to him. "We'll see what sort of numbers we're dealing with, first."
***
Heading back from the scene of the killing as full daylight was starting to emerge from the misty yellow dawn, Nathan saw a mirage. There one moment, gone the next, while Nathan was stopped at a crossroad. Duke Crocker bent to his car window and touched the bodywork of the Bronco.
Nathan slewed the car to one side and scrambled out, but there was no sign of the dead man. He spun in place and yelled, "Duke!" to no avail.
It had been a split second, and what he'd seen of Duke and what he'd seen Duke do had been very ordinary, not the least bit ghostly.
But he could only think -- think past the memory of tightening his hands and clasping struggling flesh and squeezing tight -- past that he could only think of Duke, collecting Troubles for Croatoan; of all the aether concentrated into his body when he died. And if some part of Duke was still around... maybe powered by aether which had been left or overlooked, what if that wasn't a good thing? What would become of such a traumatized spirit, no longer flesh and blood, no longer strictly carrying the Crocker Trouble? Would he re-enact the role Croatoan had created him for in death, Nathan's obliging act of murder no salvation after all?
The thought was chilling, and it sent that shiver down his spine even through the nerves that couldn't feel, making Nathan squirm and shudder.
He made himself get back into the Bronco and move on. He had a meeting to get to that was almost as unpleasant to contemplate as such thoughts.
They were supposed to be ex-Guard, now, but instead of disbanding, the Guard seemed to have transmogrified into a sort of weird self-help group that put up obtuse meeting posters around town. Troubles Anonymous, Nathan couldn't help but dub it -- at least in the privacy of his own thoughts. It wasn't as though it was actually funny. There were enough people with PTSD in town, and he might've been grateful for the chance to talk about the things they'd been through himself, but relations were still far too raw with far too many of the people involved. He could not reveal so much to that contingent publicly. Or even attend.
Dread was pooling in his stomach, a churning, sticky, psychosomatic lump above his groin, as he walked into his office and found it already occupied. Lionel Harp, the head of the Guard-run self-help division, looked like he'd been turned out of bed five minutes ago. The man he'd brought with him looked belligerent and more awake. Nathan thought his name was Verne. Dwight looked emotionless and competent as always. Almost always. Nathan hadn't realised he was physically in such bad condition as Gloria's words had indicated. He frowned and looked the larger man over with a bit more intensity than he might normally, but he had enough other things on his mind that he quickly moved on. He needed to discover how far this stretched, how bad was the scale of the Troubles' return and the Armoury's failing?
"Your Trouble is back?" Dwight opened with, before he could speak, returning the intense study. "Nathan--" Serious, grim and so, so sorry.
"It's alright," Nathan said, waving him off. He sat on the edge of his desk rather than in the chair. Having Dwight there made it weird. It still felt a little like it was Dwight's office now, even though it had been Nathan's first. He stared at his empty hands and realised he'd forgotten to get a coffee to bolster him on the way in. Well, no real problem. His throat sounded dry, but it didn't bother him as such. Although when he added, "I'm fine, we need to find out who else has been affected so far--" the sentence terminated with a bout of coughing.
Lionel shocked him with a shake of his head and a flat, "No-one's come to us with anything like this." There was an edge in his voice, a distrust, a fear, despite the negative report of his words. "Wuornos, if you're playing some sort of sick stunt--"
Nathan picked up the stapler from his desk in a blind grab behind himself, flipped back the base and slammed the stapling mechanism into his palm. "I can't feel. I'm not making this up, or... losing it." Dwight made a disgruntled noise that said he disagreed as he leaned over and wrenched the stapler from him. "I wasn't going to do it again."
"I've heard nothing of any other Troubles coming back, either," Dwight said.
"Carla Jenkins died this morning. Same way as the others died back when Croatoan was killing. That requires two things--" Nathan tried to control his breathing. "One, for her to be Troubled, and two, for some agent of Crotoan to be on the loose to harvest her Trouble."
Dwight shook his head. "Or this is something we haven't seen. We know so little about the aether, even now. I'd hoped Audrey and Charlotte--" His voice wavered "--would be able to give us answers, but we lost both of them, and the Troubles too, with so much left unexplained."
"Maybe it's just Wuornos." Verne was definitely an unfriendly, and now that he spoke Nathan recognised him as one of the men baying for blood at that mockery of a trial. "Hell, it makes perfect sense to me--" He moved his hands in an expansive gesture, mouth stretched in a rictus grin that wasn't all mirth; too much tension behind this subject. "All the death and destruction visited on this town in the past year is down to him. Why should he get to be cured?"
It wasn't anything Nathan hadn't thought himself, but Dwight's chair slammed on the floor as he rose. "Get out." He looked as though he intended to bodily throw both of them out. "I'll talk to Nathan alone."
Given the size of Dwight, and the fact that if he had issues with physical fragility Lionel and Verne evidently weren't aware of them, the two Guardsmen left. Lionel threw a mildly apologetic glance back.
"You're an idiot," Dwight said, as the door shut. "Give me that hand."
Dwight picked the staple out, holding Nathan's hand firmly between his two broader ones. The prongs hadn't closed, and the two metal points slid out easily, leaving only pinprick red dots, no worse than expected. Nathan had stapled himself before. By accident, he'd done it before.
"What do you think?" he asked. His breathing and heartbeat were starting to normalise. At least, he couldn't hear his heartbeat anymore. Embarrassment was catching up, though, at how close he'd come to losing it. "It's..." He scraped his free hand over his face. "Before Carla, I did think it was just me. Croatoan hit me with a blast of aether, at the end. Might've fixed me with it, too. For all I know, it's still in me. So it just... found the place where the Trouble used to be, and slipped back into the gaps?"
Dwight's shoulders moved in a shrug like an earth tremor. "I think we need to treat this and the murder as two separate things. Unless we find more people starting to express their Troubles again. I'll ask. I'll get them to ask." He jerked his thumb toward the door, where the Guardsmen had gone.
"There's something else." Nathan remembered it suddenly, and then wondered if he should mention it at all. He'd not been convinced it wasn't some kind of hallucination. "I saw Duke. On the road, on the way here."
"Duke...?"
"Just for a second. He was like -- like a ghost--"
They both stared at each other in unison. "You saw a ghost of Duke?" Dwight repeated, unusually lost and uncertain. "I spoke to Duke's ghost, back when -- back before the aether left town. You, uh, remember that?"
Nathan remembered he'd not been able to see what Dwight was talking about, and had not been sure he could completely believe him. "Have you seen him since?" His voice had become even more of a thready rasp, he noted almost academically, as though he was watching and listening to himself process that from outside.
Dwight shook his head. "I thought he'd gone with the aether. But if the aether in you didn't go..."
"Duke had a lot of aether filtered through him, the way Croatoan used him, the way the Crocker Trouble worked," Nathan said. "Maybe that's become something different, either from the Troubles or the raw stuff from the void. Who knows, it mutated in him before. A kind of aether that sticks, even to..." He swallowed, uneasily. "Even when the body's dead and buried."
Had killing Duke transformed him into a monster?
Dwight's face only went calmer and grimmer. "Come get a coffee and calm down, Nathan," he entreated. "You'll solve nothing this way. And finding out what happened with Carla Jenkins could take days of waiting until all Gloria's tests come back. If we even understand the results when they do," he added in a disenchanted murmur.
Nathan nodded and reluctantly went with Dwight.
He spent the rest of the day trying to tell himself that Carla Jenkins was some freak event. Maybe the Barn had missed a Trouble in the first collection, and its continued function had dragged the Trouble out of Carla later, with disastrous results. There were, he told himself, other possible explanations. Especially in this arena where they understood next to nothing.
But the following day, he was called in the morning with the news that two more dead bodies of former Troubled people awaited him.
***
In the mirror, as Nathan was getting ready to go out to the new crime scene, feeling scattered and frayed, he kept imagining he saw flashes of something at the edges of his vision.
Calm down and stop being an ass. The thought flitted across his mind with a certain alien quality that made him stop and review. It... felt like someone else had said it. But there was no one else there, and he was certain he had heard nothing through his ears.
"Duke?" he said, aloud, and felt ridiculous. He shook his head and dried his face.
I don't know what's happening here, but I'm going to fix this, alright?
That, too, could have been his own thought, yet he had the distinct feeling it was not. Before he could analyse it, the feeling was gone, and Nathan felt stupid for his brief-entertained imaginings. He finished readying himself and drove out in the Bronco to the new scene.
Gloria was already there, pouting and grumbling, the baby under her arm in just as grumpy a state. "Vicki's at the Johnston home. I thought we'd left well behind the days of waking up to two murders in Haven."
"Gerald Johnston?" Nathan asked, kneeling down over the body of Merle Bridge and studying the dead man's eyes. He'd seen Merle the other day, same as he'd only recently seen Carla. Haven's population was a lot smaller than it used to be, but he was still relieved that he hadn't seen Gerald Johnston in months. Since before the new Barn, and in fact it was news to him that Gerald had still been alive, after those last frenetic days.
He'd seen Merle at the community hall's re-opening ceremony, supposedly a celebration of the town starting to be put back together.
Merle and Gerald had both definitely been on the Troubled list.
"What if it's..." Kneeling down over the body, he reached for the right words. "If it's not a murder, but some failing of the Armoury. If people's Troubles are escaping, trying to get back in."
Gloria shrugged -- as best she could, holding Aaron -- and pulled a face. "When it comes to that sort of mumbo jumbo, my guess is as good as yours. Seems to me it's as likely as anything else."
"Our best suspect otherwise is a dead man," Nathan muttered. And Nathan did not want it to be Duke. He had killed Duke to stop more killing at Duke's hands, because Duke had asked him, and he hated it. It couldn't have been in vain, that murderous reach extending even beyond Duke's sacrifice, even when Croatoan was meant to be gone.
Gloria narrowed her eyes at him, perhaps thinking on the oddness of the comment, perhaps just taking it as a reference to how Dave had killed. "I've seen stranger things," she said glibly, shrugging the uncomfortable moment off, and settled the baby in his stroller.
Nathan forced himself to set about the rote of taking evidence. What evidence was there going to be, for either a mystical process or a murderous dead man? If Croatoan was using someone new, he told himself, then there could be physical evidence to tie that person to the scene. And he scoured the location with a fine-toothed comb. Then he headed on to the next scene. Everything there was much the same: no real sign of any disturbance not caused by the body falling over, and the only damage on the corpse the familiar black aether-scored eyeballs.
Panic was duller and quieter than the day before. Something was badly wrong, but Nathan did not know the answers, had no leads and no obvious course of action to prevent whatever this was from continuing. Audrey was gone. Vince and Dave were gone. Charlotte was gone. Every resource they'd had about Haven's mysteries was gone. He was... useless.
He came in to the police station -- coffee and bag of sugared donuts firmly in hand after yesterday's lesson, and he'd force feed himself calories if that was what it took to push the panic back down -- and frowned at the reports left on his desk from the interviews conducted in connection with the Carla Jenkins killing.
Don't know what you'll make of this, said a yellow sticky note in Dwight's handwriting. Should be good news, but then ?explanation?
Nathan frowned at the note, then peeled it off and read the reports.
No friend, relative or neighbour had seen any indication that Carla's Trouble had returned. No friend, relative or neighbour had thought her behaviour had changed recently, in such a manner that she could have been keeping a returned Trouble secret, or that she had acted as if she was in any way under some new source of stress.
Nathan sat back in his chair and stared into space. He stirred himself after a while to drink coffee, the probable coldness of which had no impact upon him, and reached for a donut.
Three deaths in two days. Was this going to escalate? Would he have even more new bodies facing him tomorrow?
Was every resource he had to find out what was happening really gone? Those flashes of Duke, if they were more than just his own restless guilt, were they anything he could do any more with? But then Dwight, who had reportedly spoken to Duke after his death, had not been able to contact him since. Nathan didn't know how to reach Duke, if he was even there to be reached.
Audrey... Since she had left, he had never tried to... would never try... She had chosen her own fate, after all, no going back, no point other than to torture himself and risk further contact with forces that had almost torn Haven and even the whole world apart. But surely circumstances such as these called for action.
He looked at the clock on the office wall, the second hand ticking toward midday like a countdown to destruction.
He stood up, shaking. He was unsteady as a drunk as he headed for the door.
This was absolutely something he had to try. Even if the worst could be a lot worse than him ending up looking ridiculous, screaming at a hilltop.
He told Laverne as he walked past her to take messages for him. He didn't know how long he was going to be out.
***
The disappearance of an historic monument of the scale and visibility of the old armoury had been something for which no explanation was necessary in Haven itself, but to the world outside it had been a harder sell. In the end, Nathan had figured nothing was more misleading than the truth, and marked it up as 'vanished overnight'. "Maybe aliens took it," he'd suggested to the two buildings inspectors who'd popped up a few weeks later. They'd laughed at the line and gawped at the absence and poked tentatively at the ground for sinkholes, and nobody else had ever been back.
Nathan didn't much like returning to the site.
Not just that this was the place he'd finally lost Audrey, after such a long fight. There was an eerie feeling, a charge in the air, like that place they'd found when looking in the woods after the disappearance of Audrey II's memories. Something powerful had manifested here: it left a permanent mark on the soul of the place.
The floor plan of the armoury, starting to become overgrown with grass, was surprisingly small on the hill's brow.
Nathan stood in the centre of it. "Audrey?" he asked the humming air, alive with vibration he could taste, and he could hear the thrum with his ears though he couldn't feel it. This was the place -- a connection still held true, from here to wherever the Armoury was now. "Audrey, I need to talk--"
He hadn't been at all sure it would work. Was half convinced he was being utterly stupid. But the world turned white and too-bright around him.
"Nathan!" For a moment, his arms were full of her. His face was alive again as she ran her fingers over his cheeks. His hand renewed, as she grabbed and held it. His lips--
Sensation wasn't gone as Audrey pulled back. He realised that as had happened in the Barn, his Trouble was nullified by the power of the Armoury. "Nathan, what are you doing here? It could be dangerous."
"Vince can't make sure I walk out of here with all my memories intact?" Nathan croaked, only half in jest. Vince was off to one side, trying to make himself inconspicuous -- absurd, for such a large man in an otherwise blank space.
Nathan hadn't expected this to work. When the Troubles had gone, he had thought that was a line drawn underneath it all. He, Audrey, Duke, were over like the Troubles, over like the taste of magic -- malign as much of it had been -- intruding his ordinary human life. But if he could come here and call out to Audrey at any time...
"We can't take your memories," Audrey said. "But the Barn isn't, strictly speaking, on Earth any more. Stepping through dimensions is always a risk. So I hear." She eyed Vince sideways.
"Are you..." All Nathan's thoughts and plans and practicalities derailed when faced with her. "Are you all right? Audrey..."
"I am." Her eyes glittered. He didn't believe her. What the hell was there here for her, what was this as any kind of life, stuck in this space, in this nothing? "Nathan, why are you here?"
"I need to know," Nathan made himself ask, "Is Croatoan still captive here?" He looked around, wondering if the killer would materialise out of the white space.
"I assure you he is," Vince said. "The old bastard's in retreat, taken up contemplation. Learned it from Duke, I think, after the time spent walking around inside his head, because he sure as hell didn't learn it from my brother."
Dark Duke had never seemed much into contemplation. Nathan shook off the memory of killing him as it asserted itself more strongly than ever. "Someone... We found something. You're sure he's not walking around in someone's head again, out in the real world?" Nathan asked. Vince's assurances didn't mean much to him. Seeing Croatoan would mean more. He barely looked at Vince, though, for all his concerns. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Audrey, here with him again in defiance of everything he'd thought possible.
"Positive," Audrey said, grimly. "There is no way for even his consciousness to slip out of the Barn just like that. This is Croatoan's prison, and we were careful." Her lips twisted and he couldn't help but think that there was something she was not saying, maybe even something she was hiding. But what she said was, "You mustn't come here again." After his responding silence, staring into her eyes... "What's happening in Haven?"
"We're finding more corpses who look like they've had the aether ripped from them. I don't know how it's possible when... when the Troubles are gone." He averted his gaze from Audrey's sad eyes. She had done this as much for him as anything. He couldn't tell her his own Trouble had returned.
"It's not possible," Vince said, finally moving closer. "Nathan, that can't happen."
"Well, it's happening." Nathan grimly spit out the words. "We don't know the effects overexposure to aether has on people. Dwight said he saw a -- like a ghost version of Duke. With all the aether siphoned through him, what if that did something? What if he's still around--still killing but in a different way?" His voice had all but risen to a shout, but his fears finally choked the words into silence.
He'd hoped they'd have an answer, but all Audrey gave him was a bigger question, and news he'd never expected. "Duke came to us, too," she said quietly.
"--What?" He could only stare at her dumbly.
"Before you." Her voice gathered breathless excitement and momentum. "Today. He pulled the same stunt, in fact. He always was that little bit quicker..." Audrey teased, but there were tears in her eyes. "I didn't realise that... something of Duke... was still left behind, or I'd never have just left him, I never would! But he seemed normal. Oh, Nathan, he really did. He was still Duke, he was okay..."
"Damn it!" The rage rose in place of any other emotions or thoughts that Nathan couldn't hope to deal with, causing her hands to retreat from him. Would she have told him about Duke, the thought flitted across his mind, if he hadn't raised that fear? "If Duke's still around, why doesn't he communicate with me?! He was supposed to have spoken to Dwight, before, but I've not seen or heard a thing in all of this time! Months, he's been there--" --the insides of Nathan's eyelids stamped with his dying face--
Something felt like it was tearing inside him. Was it because he had killed Duke, that Duke wouldn't come to him? He didn't remember his nightmares, but his waking thoughts were bad enough. Did Duke blame him? Nathan had wondered, so many times, if that deed had truly been necessary. Duke had asked him but Nathan could have refused. Croatoan had turned, in the end. Duke hadn't had to die.
Three months, he'd thought Duke dead, Audrey gone, both of them unreachable. But they had all been here in the same place in the space of a day. If that could happen, there was still hope. It wasn't over. Perhaps there was still a way for them to somehow be together... and both of them had had some inkling of that, without communicating it to him.
"Oh, Nathan," Audrey said, as if she could see all of those thoughts in his face. "You can't see him. He still hasn't made peace with you..."
"Or you haven't forgiven yourself," Vince suggested tersely.
"Duke... If Duke was here..." Nathan fumbled the words. He tried to reassert some control, reason with himself. This wasn't about him. He had let himself choose love over Haven before. Now, it was his responsibility to rebuild, and he had to hold onto that. "I need to talk to Duke. If he's out there, he could be something to do with this. If I could pass word to him for us all to come back at the same time... would I be able to see him if we were both here, in the Armoury...? The way the rules worked differently in the Barn, before."
Audrey's breath caught. "Oh. That could work. But, Nathan..." He could see her wanting to tell him he couldn't and mustn't do this again, the impulse being weighed against her own desire to see them together. He dragged his eyes from her because it hurt too much to watch.
"Nathan, look at me."
"I... perhaps it's not a good idea. Perhaps none of this is." He forced out the constricted words, and made himself hold up a hand between them to impede his view. He needed to leave, before he wanted to stay here forever, before she broke him again by telling him he couldn't. This meeting wasn't a gift, it was no more than torment. "I... I have to..." He had to go back to Haven and turn the wheels on finding a solution to all of this. He didn't know what he'd do if he saw Duke again.
"If you can fetch Duke..." she said, voice breathy and almost disappearing. "And return... one more time.... for the sake of Haven."
She wasn't made of light, it was just the Armoury's bright interior. But he felt like she was too radiant for him to bear being near her. Then the next moment, she wasn't there anymore. The white light was gone and he was standing in the space on top of the hill where the Armoury had been.
***
Nathan went through the rest of the afternoon in a daze. He had not lost time in the Armoury, and the time seemed to have slowed for him now. He spoke to some imagined Duke periodically when he was alone, telling him -- potentially telling no-one -- that he was going back to Audrey that evening and Duke should come with him. Perhaps in the Armoury they'd be able to talk. He felt more like he was going mad than achieving anything.
The anticipation almost hurt. The idea of seeing Duke again, of Duke being there -- all this time, perhaps -- to be seen if only Nathan had the eyes to see, was almost too incredible and awful to contemplate. What was Nathan going to say, when they were face to face? Nathan had brought Duke back to Haven after he'd been free and clear and escaped his damned 'destiny'. Then Nathan had killed him.
A breath of air seemed to rustle past him, and in that moment it seemed something touched his face, an impossible feat anyway. He jolted up from his chair -- how long had he been sitting, locked in that daze? -- and repeated, breathlessly, his speech about meeting Duke at the site of the Armoury.
Jeeze, would you shut up about that? The thought slid paper-thin through the back of his mind.
Nathan clenched his teeth so hard something clicked.
He looked at the clock: it was almost time.
He grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair, pulled it on over his shoulders. The habits of years spent numb hadn't eased so much in three months that he couldn't settle easily right back into them now. It was sad just how easily.
"I'm going now," he told Duke. He rubbed his forehead, pointlessly, pressing with his fingers until he heard his bones grind. "...Well, I hope you're coming." He muttered it more to himself this time than the maybe-ghost. He strode out of the office, stalling just past the threshold with an indrawn breath when the door caught on something unseen, or maybe just its new spring, and failed to slam in his wake.
***
continues...
Or read on AO3
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG13
LENGTH: ~12,000 words approx
SUMMARY: Nathan's Trouble came back gradually, a little each day ever since he walked alone down the armoury hill and left his heart behind. A few days after he finally awoke with no sensation left in his body, they found the first corpse with aether-smudged eyes.
Now he faces questions he never wanted to ask. Are the Troubles coming back? Is the apparition of Duke seen in Haven responsible for the killings? Can Croatoan's reach extend beyond the walls of the new Barn, and even death itself?
PAIRING: Duke/Nathan, Audrey/Duke/Nathan
NOTES: written for PhoenixDragon in the After Forever post-finale fic exchange: Duke isn't dead, but isn't technically alive, either. Nathan had to make a choice, Duke was not that choice. But he feels haunted and wonders if he made the right one - as attacks on Haven begin by a serial killer and Duke is the obvious suspect, even as he is not really there to defend himself.
This story is set as an alternative to the last ~2 minutes of screentime in the finale; Audrey is still in the armoury, and Nathan is still trying to live his life and rebuild Haven.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
-----
Conversations With Ghosts
Nathan's Trouble came back gradually, as if it seeped up out of his bones, slow to reform the old familiar shape within him, yet something he could never be rid of now. Audrey and the new Barn had taken all the Troubles out of Haven, and they were supposed to be gone for good, yet all the same he was not surprised that it came back.
Croatoan had used aether to fix Audrey... fix Mara, when Mara was young. It was integral in Audrey's body now, or at least that was his understanding -- something she could not live without. So... how, exactly, had Croatoan fixed Nathan? Even assuming the damage hadn't been done irreparably by the spike of aether he'd been struck with first. Either way, aether was still in him, and it recognised its former role.
It was almost funny, almost apt. After all, why should he be the one who got to return home to a normal life, when Duke was dead, when Audrey was trapped forever in the armoury that should have been Croatoan's prison? Jennifer, Charlotte, so many others. Even the Teagues had paid more, in the end.
The resurgence of full feeling started to noticeably fade after a few months, but touch lingered, traces of it, diminishing slowly for maybe another month after that. Not much more than three months from the day the Armoury had pulled the Troubles out of Haven, he was back to normal.
He thought of it that way: back to normal. The morning he woke up with no sensation in his body, his soul felt nothing more than resignation.
A few days later, the first corpse turned up with black-smudged dead eyes.
"You're wrong," he said into the phone, sluggish for the hour, hating that once more groping for the phone and the lamp in the dark had become a near-impossible task, and without the mumbling of Audrey or the bright definition of her sleepy body beside him to make up for it. "You must be mistaken."
"I sure as hell am not," Gloria snapped. "It looks like the others. Like the work of Croatoan." There was an edge in her voice. Not that Nathan couldn't understand why there would be. "Get down here and see it for yourself."
"I'm coming," Nathan grunted.
The dawn light cast a yellow and grey filter over the recovering town of Haven, quiet and eerie with the hour. Nathan had to judge his newly-unfeeling hands with care on the steering wheel. The skeletal shapes of scaffold from repairs and new builds loomed raggedly darker grey-on-grey from either side of Main Street. For a stretch of several seconds on the turn, all the windows on one side reflected and gleamed yellow from a chance angling of the rising sun, and then he was driving onto a less built up road with the dazzle and the scattered skeletons left behind him. Like the sun had crossed a threshold, though, there was suddenly more yellow in the world than grey, light enough to better see by. Several crows left a straggly tree and signpost at the roadside as the Bronco sailed past, cawing discordantly and beating their shadowing wings far too loud on the air.
Nathan pulled up outside Carla Jenkins' house.
He hadn't recognised it by the address alone, but he'd been here just a handful of days since, to respond to a callout. Carla had been pleasant and full of life and energy, and might have been flirting, but Nathan was so far from having any capacity to be interested that he'd not put any thought into figuring that question out.
He hadn't imagined, when Gloria said she was sitting on a corpse with black smudged eyes, that he'd know who it was. He should've, probably -- there weren't that many people left in Haven. Most who were there now were the tenacious survivors of Troubles, darkness, Duke...
Inside, Gloria was slumped on the arm of the sofa and drinking coffee from a flask. Stan was standing looking grim. There was no sign of Vicki. Home with the baby, most likely.
Carla Jenkins, who in school had been Carla Rose, lay dead on the floor, just like all those others who'd had their Troubles ripped out of them.
"Was she Troubled?" Nathan couldn't remember, but there again, very few people had not been Troubled, at the end. If she had been, it had been something minor enough it hadn't ever exploded to the degree the news had reached him.
"No-one's supposed to be Troubled," Gloria said sharply, rising from her perch and setting her cup aside. Her eyes were hard as she pinned them on him, and... he should have foreseen that she would notice, if anyone did.
"Mine came back," Nathan reluctantly came clean. Stan's jaw dropped. "It's... I didn't think it was something to worry anyone about. Croatoan damaged, then fixed me with aether, in the back-and-forth on that last day. Aether that the Barn... Armoury didn't pull away, it seems like, maybe because it's keeping me alive."
"You kept that one quiet," Gloria said, her eyes narrowed.
"You didn't run my DNA sample," Nathan pointed out.
"Yeah? Well, clearly I should've. Fool idea to assume people would mention stuff that might be significant."
"I thought it was just me..." Nathan crouched down and reached for Carla's face, but stalled just short of allowing his fingers to connect with the skin below her eye. He wouldn't feel it anyway.
Other people knowing made his situation real in a manner it hadn't been until now. He swallowed, not feeling that, either, and reminded himself that without Audrey, without Duke, there wasn't much he was interested in touching anyway.
Yet he had already been aware that there was aether remaining, even with the Troubles gone. Could leftover scraps of aether be responsible for this, or...
Were the Troubles really gone?
Nathan did not want to be chief in a Troubled town that had shot its last bolt and expended all its last hopes, and stood with nothing but empty hands. He'd resigned himself to his Trouble returning when so much had been won for everyone else. But to think of all the Troubles returning, after they'd lost and sacrificed so much, fought so hard to see them gone forever, that was intolerable.
"Nathan, hon, are you all right?" Gloria's voice was still sharp, but her compassion and concern rang out clearly.
He realised his breath had quickened to such degree that he was on the verge of a panic attack. His head spun. He strove for control.
"Yes..." he gasped. "We need to bring Dwight in on this. What's left of the Guard, too." Further irony after all the time they'd spent trying to kill him. The Teagues were gone, and so much else of the infrastructure that Haven relied upon to cope with the Troubles. Audrey...
"He's not Chief anymore." Stan shifted uncomfortably. "He's not even in the force."
"Didn't want to wake up his daughter, at this hour," Gloria said. "Didn't see the point, until we'd had this chat. He is retired. Rib cage like glass, the number of shots he's taken to the chest. We need him, all the same."
"Mm." Nathan's brain was busy juggling a dozen contrary sources for panic. "Pool resources again. Find out if the Guard know of Troubles that have come back. Find out if Carla's friends or family -- or neighbours -- know what she did, if that was back. Find out--"
"Maybe you should put a guard on yourself," Stan interrupted, uneasily, and flustered for interrupting. "If whoever did this is targeting Troubles that have returned."
"I--" It would never have occurred to him. "We'll see what sort of numbers we're dealing with, first."
***
Heading back from the scene of the killing as full daylight was starting to emerge from the misty yellow dawn, Nathan saw a mirage. There one moment, gone the next, while Nathan was stopped at a crossroad. Duke Crocker bent to his car window and touched the bodywork of the Bronco.
Nathan slewed the car to one side and scrambled out, but there was no sign of the dead man. He spun in place and yelled, "Duke!" to no avail.
It had been a split second, and what he'd seen of Duke and what he'd seen Duke do had been very ordinary, not the least bit ghostly.
But he could only think -- think past the memory of tightening his hands and clasping struggling flesh and squeezing tight -- past that he could only think of Duke, collecting Troubles for Croatoan; of all the aether concentrated into his body when he died. And if some part of Duke was still around... maybe powered by aether which had been left or overlooked, what if that wasn't a good thing? What would become of such a traumatized spirit, no longer flesh and blood, no longer strictly carrying the Crocker Trouble? Would he re-enact the role Croatoan had created him for in death, Nathan's obliging act of murder no salvation after all?
The thought was chilling, and it sent that shiver down his spine even through the nerves that couldn't feel, making Nathan squirm and shudder.
He made himself get back into the Bronco and move on. He had a meeting to get to that was almost as unpleasant to contemplate as such thoughts.
They were supposed to be ex-Guard, now, but instead of disbanding, the Guard seemed to have transmogrified into a sort of weird self-help group that put up obtuse meeting posters around town. Troubles Anonymous, Nathan couldn't help but dub it -- at least in the privacy of his own thoughts. It wasn't as though it was actually funny. There were enough people with PTSD in town, and he might've been grateful for the chance to talk about the things they'd been through himself, but relations were still far too raw with far too many of the people involved. He could not reveal so much to that contingent publicly. Or even attend.
Dread was pooling in his stomach, a churning, sticky, psychosomatic lump above his groin, as he walked into his office and found it already occupied. Lionel Harp, the head of the Guard-run self-help division, looked like he'd been turned out of bed five minutes ago. The man he'd brought with him looked belligerent and more awake. Nathan thought his name was Verne. Dwight looked emotionless and competent as always. Almost always. Nathan hadn't realised he was physically in such bad condition as Gloria's words had indicated. He frowned and looked the larger man over with a bit more intensity than he might normally, but he had enough other things on his mind that he quickly moved on. He needed to discover how far this stretched, how bad was the scale of the Troubles' return and the Armoury's failing?
"Your Trouble is back?" Dwight opened with, before he could speak, returning the intense study. "Nathan--" Serious, grim and so, so sorry.
"It's alright," Nathan said, waving him off. He sat on the edge of his desk rather than in the chair. Having Dwight there made it weird. It still felt a little like it was Dwight's office now, even though it had been Nathan's first. He stared at his empty hands and realised he'd forgotten to get a coffee to bolster him on the way in. Well, no real problem. His throat sounded dry, but it didn't bother him as such. Although when he added, "I'm fine, we need to find out who else has been affected so far--" the sentence terminated with a bout of coughing.
Lionel shocked him with a shake of his head and a flat, "No-one's come to us with anything like this." There was an edge in his voice, a distrust, a fear, despite the negative report of his words. "Wuornos, if you're playing some sort of sick stunt--"
Nathan picked up the stapler from his desk in a blind grab behind himself, flipped back the base and slammed the stapling mechanism into his palm. "I can't feel. I'm not making this up, or... losing it." Dwight made a disgruntled noise that said he disagreed as he leaned over and wrenched the stapler from him. "I wasn't going to do it again."
"I've heard nothing of any other Troubles coming back, either," Dwight said.
"Carla Jenkins died this morning. Same way as the others died back when Croatoan was killing. That requires two things--" Nathan tried to control his breathing. "One, for her to be Troubled, and two, for some agent of Crotoan to be on the loose to harvest her Trouble."
Dwight shook his head. "Or this is something we haven't seen. We know so little about the aether, even now. I'd hoped Audrey and Charlotte--" His voice wavered "--would be able to give us answers, but we lost both of them, and the Troubles too, with so much left unexplained."
"Maybe it's just Wuornos." Verne was definitely an unfriendly, and now that he spoke Nathan recognised him as one of the men baying for blood at that mockery of a trial. "Hell, it makes perfect sense to me--" He moved his hands in an expansive gesture, mouth stretched in a rictus grin that wasn't all mirth; too much tension behind this subject. "All the death and destruction visited on this town in the past year is down to him. Why should he get to be cured?"
It wasn't anything Nathan hadn't thought himself, but Dwight's chair slammed on the floor as he rose. "Get out." He looked as though he intended to bodily throw both of them out. "I'll talk to Nathan alone."
Given the size of Dwight, and the fact that if he had issues with physical fragility Lionel and Verne evidently weren't aware of them, the two Guardsmen left. Lionel threw a mildly apologetic glance back.
"You're an idiot," Dwight said, as the door shut. "Give me that hand."
Dwight picked the staple out, holding Nathan's hand firmly between his two broader ones. The prongs hadn't closed, and the two metal points slid out easily, leaving only pinprick red dots, no worse than expected. Nathan had stapled himself before. By accident, he'd done it before.
"What do you think?" he asked. His breathing and heartbeat were starting to normalise. At least, he couldn't hear his heartbeat anymore. Embarrassment was catching up, though, at how close he'd come to losing it. "It's..." He scraped his free hand over his face. "Before Carla, I did think it was just me. Croatoan hit me with a blast of aether, at the end. Might've fixed me with it, too. For all I know, it's still in me. So it just... found the place where the Trouble used to be, and slipped back into the gaps?"
Dwight's shoulders moved in a shrug like an earth tremor. "I think we need to treat this and the murder as two separate things. Unless we find more people starting to express their Troubles again. I'll ask. I'll get them to ask." He jerked his thumb toward the door, where the Guardsmen had gone.
"There's something else." Nathan remembered it suddenly, and then wondered if he should mention it at all. He'd not been convinced it wasn't some kind of hallucination. "I saw Duke. On the road, on the way here."
"Duke...?"
"Just for a second. He was like -- like a ghost--"
They both stared at each other in unison. "You saw a ghost of Duke?" Dwight repeated, unusually lost and uncertain. "I spoke to Duke's ghost, back when -- back before the aether left town. You, uh, remember that?"
Nathan remembered he'd not been able to see what Dwight was talking about, and had not been sure he could completely believe him. "Have you seen him since?" His voice had become even more of a thready rasp, he noted almost academically, as though he was watching and listening to himself process that from outside.
Dwight shook his head. "I thought he'd gone with the aether. But if the aether in you didn't go..."
"Duke had a lot of aether filtered through him, the way Croatoan used him, the way the Crocker Trouble worked," Nathan said. "Maybe that's become something different, either from the Troubles or the raw stuff from the void. Who knows, it mutated in him before. A kind of aether that sticks, even to..." He swallowed, uneasily. "Even when the body's dead and buried."
Had killing Duke transformed him into a monster?
Dwight's face only went calmer and grimmer. "Come get a coffee and calm down, Nathan," he entreated. "You'll solve nothing this way. And finding out what happened with Carla Jenkins could take days of waiting until all Gloria's tests come back. If we even understand the results when they do," he added in a disenchanted murmur.
Nathan nodded and reluctantly went with Dwight.
He spent the rest of the day trying to tell himself that Carla Jenkins was some freak event. Maybe the Barn had missed a Trouble in the first collection, and its continued function had dragged the Trouble out of Carla later, with disastrous results. There were, he told himself, other possible explanations. Especially in this arena where they understood next to nothing.
But the following day, he was called in the morning with the news that two more dead bodies of former Troubled people awaited him.
***
In the mirror, as Nathan was getting ready to go out to the new crime scene, feeling scattered and frayed, he kept imagining he saw flashes of something at the edges of his vision.
Calm down and stop being an ass. The thought flitted across his mind with a certain alien quality that made him stop and review. It... felt like someone else had said it. But there was no one else there, and he was certain he had heard nothing through his ears.
"Duke?" he said, aloud, and felt ridiculous. He shook his head and dried his face.
I don't know what's happening here, but I'm going to fix this, alright?
That, too, could have been his own thought, yet he had the distinct feeling it was not. Before he could analyse it, the feeling was gone, and Nathan felt stupid for his brief-entertained imaginings. He finished readying himself and drove out in the Bronco to the new scene.
Gloria was already there, pouting and grumbling, the baby under her arm in just as grumpy a state. "Vicki's at the Johnston home. I thought we'd left well behind the days of waking up to two murders in Haven."
"Gerald Johnston?" Nathan asked, kneeling down over the body of Merle Bridge and studying the dead man's eyes. He'd seen Merle the other day, same as he'd only recently seen Carla. Haven's population was a lot smaller than it used to be, but he was still relieved that he hadn't seen Gerald Johnston in months. Since before the new Barn, and in fact it was news to him that Gerald had still been alive, after those last frenetic days.
He'd seen Merle at the community hall's re-opening ceremony, supposedly a celebration of the town starting to be put back together.
Merle and Gerald had both definitely been on the Troubled list.
"What if it's..." Kneeling down over the body, he reached for the right words. "If it's not a murder, but some failing of the Armoury. If people's Troubles are escaping, trying to get back in."
Gloria shrugged -- as best she could, holding Aaron -- and pulled a face. "When it comes to that sort of mumbo jumbo, my guess is as good as yours. Seems to me it's as likely as anything else."
"Our best suspect otherwise is a dead man," Nathan muttered. And Nathan did not want it to be Duke. He had killed Duke to stop more killing at Duke's hands, because Duke had asked him, and he hated it. It couldn't have been in vain, that murderous reach extending even beyond Duke's sacrifice, even when Croatoan was meant to be gone.
Gloria narrowed her eyes at him, perhaps thinking on the oddness of the comment, perhaps just taking it as a reference to how Dave had killed. "I've seen stranger things," she said glibly, shrugging the uncomfortable moment off, and settled the baby in his stroller.
Nathan forced himself to set about the rote of taking evidence. What evidence was there going to be, for either a mystical process or a murderous dead man? If Croatoan was using someone new, he told himself, then there could be physical evidence to tie that person to the scene. And he scoured the location with a fine-toothed comb. Then he headed on to the next scene. Everything there was much the same: no real sign of any disturbance not caused by the body falling over, and the only damage on the corpse the familiar black aether-scored eyeballs.
Panic was duller and quieter than the day before. Something was badly wrong, but Nathan did not know the answers, had no leads and no obvious course of action to prevent whatever this was from continuing. Audrey was gone. Vince and Dave were gone. Charlotte was gone. Every resource they'd had about Haven's mysteries was gone. He was... useless.
He came in to the police station -- coffee and bag of sugared donuts firmly in hand after yesterday's lesson, and he'd force feed himself calories if that was what it took to push the panic back down -- and frowned at the reports left on his desk from the interviews conducted in connection with the Carla Jenkins killing.
Don't know what you'll make of this, said a yellow sticky note in Dwight's handwriting. Should be good news, but then ?explanation?
Nathan frowned at the note, then peeled it off and read the reports.
No friend, relative or neighbour had seen any indication that Carla's Trouble had returned. No friend, relative or neighbour had thought her behaviour had changed recently, in such a manner that she could have been keeping a returned Trouble secret, or that she had acted as if she was in any way under some new source of stress.
Nathan sat back in his chair and stared into space. He stirred himself after a while to drink coffee, the probable coldness of which had no impact upon him, and reached for a donut.
Three deaths in two days. Was this going to escalate? Would he have even more new bodies facing him tomorrow?
Was every resource he had to find out what was happening really gone? Those flashes of Duke, if they were more than just his own restless guilt, were they anything he could do any more with? But then Dwight, who had reportedly spoken to Duke after his death, had not been able to contact him since. Nathan didn't know how to reach Duke, if he was even there to be reached.
Audrey... Since she had left, he had never tried to... would never try... She had chosen her own fate, after all, no going back, no point other than to torture himself and risk further contact with forces that had almost torn Haven and even the whole world apart. But surely circumstances such as these called for action.
He looked at the clock on the office wall, the second hand ticking toward midday like a countdown to destruction.
He stood up, shaking. He was unsteady as a drunk as he headed for the door.
This was absolutely something he had to try. Even if the worst could be a lot worse than him ending up looking ridiculous, screaming at a hilltop.
He told Laverne as he walked past her to take messages for him. He didn't know how long he was going to be out.
***
The disappearance of an historic monument of the scale and visibility of the old armoury had been something for which no explanation was necessary in Haven itself, but to the world outside it had been a harder sell. In the end, Nathan had figured nothing was more misleading than the truth, and marked it up as 'vanished overnight'. "Maybe aliens took it," he'd suggested to the two buildings inspectors who'd popped up a few weeks later. They'd laughed at the line and gawped at the absence and poked tentatively at the ground for sinkholes, and nobody else had ever been back.
Nathan didn't much like returning to the site.
Not just that this was the place he'd finally lost Audrey, after such a long fight. There was an eerie feeling, a charge in the air, like that place they'd found when looking in the woods after the disappearance of Audrey II's memories. Something powerful had manifested here: it left a permanent mark on the soul of the place.
The floor plan of the armoury, starting to become overgrown with grass, was surprisingly small on the hill's brow.
Nathan stood in the centre of it. "Audrey?" he asked the humming air, alive with vibration he could taste, and he could hear the thrum with his ears though he couldn't feel it. This was the place -- a connection still held true, from here to wherever the Armoury was now. "Audrey, I need to talk--"
He hadn't been at all sure it would work. Was half convinced he was being utterly stupid. But the world turned white and too-bright around him.
"Nathan!" For a moment, his arms were full of her. His face was alive again as she ran her fingers over his cheeks. His hand renewed, as she grabbed and held it. His lips--
Sensation wasn't gone as Audrey pulled back. He realised that as had happened in the Barn, his Trouble was nullified by the power of the Armoury. "Nathan, what are you doing here? It could be dangerous."
"Vince can't make sure I walk out of here with all my memories intact?" Nathan croaked, only half in jest. Vince was off to one side, trying to make himself inconspicuous -- absurd, for such a large man in an otherwise blank space.
Nathan hadn't expected this to work. When the Troubles had gone, he had thought that was a line drawn underneath it all. He, Audrey, Duke, were over like the Troubles, over like the taste of magic -- malign as much of it had been -- intruding his ordinary human life. But if he could come here and call out to Audrey at any time...
"We can't take your memories," Audrey said. "But the Barn isn't, strictly speaking, on Earth any more. Stepping through dimensions is always a risk. So I hear." She eyed Vince sideways.
"Are you..." All Nathan's thoughts and plans and practicalities derailed when faced with her. "Are you all right? Audrey..."
"I am." Her eyes glittered. He didn't believe her. What the hell was there here for her, what was this as any kind of life, stuck in this space, in this nothing? "Nathan, why are you here?"
"I need to know," Nathan made himself ask, "Is Croatoan still captive here?" He looked around, wondering if the killer would materialise out of the white space.
"I assure you he is," Vince said. "The old bastard's in retreat, taken up contemplation. Learned it from Duke, I think, after the time spent walking around inside his head, because he sure as hell didn't learn it from my brother."
Dark Duke had never seemed much into contemplation. Nathan shook off the memory of killing him as it asserted itself more strongly than ever. "Someone... We found something. You're sure he's not walking around in someone's head again, out in the real world?" Nathan asked. Vince's assurances didn't mean much to him. Seeing Croatoan would mean more. He barely looked at Vince, though, for all his concerns. He couldn't tear his eyes away from Audrey, here with him again in defiance of everything he'd thought possible.
"Positive," Audrey said, grimly. "There is no way for even his consciousness to slip out of the Barn just like that. This is Croatoan's prison, and we were careful." Her lips twisted and he couldn't help but think that there was something she was not saying, maybe even something she was hiding. But what she said was, "You mustn't come here again." After his responding silence, staring into her eyes... "What's happening in Haven?"
"We're finding more corpses who look like they've had the aether ripped from them. I don't know how it's possible when... when the Troubles are gone." He averted his gaze from Audrey's sad eyes. She had done this as much for him as anything. He couldn't tell her his own Trouble had returned.
"It's not possible," Vince said, finally moving closer. "Nathan, that can't happen."
"Well, it's happening." Nathan grimly spit out the words. "We don't know the effects overexposure to aether has on people. Dwight said he saw a -- like a ghost version of Duke. With all the aether siphoned through him, what if that did something? What if he's still around--still killing but in a different way?" His voice had all but risen to a shout, but his fears finally choked the words into silence.
He'd hoped they'd have an answer, but all Audrey gave him was a bigger question, and news he'd never expected. "Duke came to us, too," she said quietly.
"--What?" He could only stare at her dumbly.
"Before you." Her voice gathered breathless excitement and momentum. "Today. He pulled the same stunt, in fact. He always was that little bit quicker..." Audrey teased, but there were tears in her eyes. "I didn't realise that... something of Duke... was still left behind, or I'd never have just left him, I never would! But he seemed normal. Oh, Nathan, he really did. He was still Duke, he was okay..."
"Damn it!" The rage rose in place of any other emotions or thoughts that Nathan couldn't hope to deal with, causing her hands to retreat from him. Would she have told him about Duke, the thought flitted across his mind, if he hadn't raised that fear? "If Duke's still around, why doesn't he communicate with me?! He was supposed to have spoken to Dwight, before, but I've not seen or heard a thing in all of this time! Months, he's been there--" --the insides of Nathan's eyelids stamped with his dying face--
Something felt like it was tearing inside him. Was it because he had killed Duke, that Duke wouldn't come to him? He didn't remember his nightmares, but his waking thoughts were bad enough. Did Duke blame him? Nathan had wondered, so many times, if that deed had truly been necessary. Duke had asked him but Nathan could have refused. Croatoan had turned, in the end. Duke hadn't had to die.
Three months, he'd thought Duke dead, Audrey gone, both of them unreachable. But they had all been here in the same place in the space of a day. If that could happen, there was still hope. It wasn't over. Perhaps there was still a way for them to somehow be together... and both of them had had some inkling of that, without communicating it to him.
"Oh, Nathan," Audrey said, as if she could see all of those thoughts in his face. "You can't see him. He still hasn't made peace with you..."
"Or you haven't forgiven yourself," Vince suggested tersely.
"Duke... If Duke was here..." Nathan fumbled the words. He tried to reassert some control, reason with himself. This wasn't about him. He had let himself choose love over Haven before. Now, it was his responsibility to rebuild, and he had to hold onto that. "I need to talk to Duke. If he's out there, he could be something to do with this. If I could pass word to him for us all to come back at the same time... would I be able to see him if we were both here, in the Armoury...? The way the rules worked differently in the Barn, before."
Audrey's breath caught. "Oh. That could work. But, Nathan..." He could see her wanting to tell him he couldn't and mustn't do this again, the impulse being weighed against her own desire to see them together. He dragged his eyes from her because it hurt too much to watch.
"Nathan, look at me."
"I... perhaps it's not a good idea. Perhaps none of this is." He forced out the constricted words, and made himself hold up a hand between them to impede his view. He needed to leave, before he wanted to stay here forever, before she broke him again by telling him he couldn't. This meeting wasn't a gift, it was no more than torment. "I... I have to..." He had to go back to Haven and turn the wheels on finding a solution to all of this. He didn't know what he'd do if he saw Duke again.
"If you can fetch Duke..." she said, voice breathy and almost disappearing. "And return... one more time.... for the sake of Haven."
She wasn't made of light, it was just the Armoury's bright interior. But he felt like she was too radiant for him to bear being near her. Then the next moment, she wasn't there anymore. The white light was gone and he was standing in the space on top of the hill where the Armoury had been.
***
Nathan went through the rest of the afternoon in a daze. He had not lost time in the Armoury, and the time seemed to have slowed for him now. He spoke to some imagined Duke periodically when he was alone, telling him -- potentially telling no-one -- that he was going back to Audrey that evening and Duke should come with him. Perhaps in the Armoury they'd be able to talk. He felt more like he was going mad than achieving anything.
The anticipation almost hurt. The idea of seeing Duke again, of Duke being there -- all this time, perhaps -- to be seen if only Nathan had the eyes to see, was almost too incredible and awful to contemplate. What was Nathan going to say, when they were face to face? Nathan had brought Duke back to Haven after he'd been free and clear and escaped his damned 'destiny'. Then Nathan had killed him.
A breath of air seemed to rustle past him, and in that moment it seemed something touched his face, an impossible feat anyway. He jolted up from his chair -- how long had he been sitting, locked in that daze? -- and repeated, breathlessly, his speech about meeting Duke at the site of the Armoury.
Jeeze, would you shut up about that? The thought slid paper-thin through the back of his mind.
Nathan clenched his teeth so hard something clicked.
He looked at the clock: it was almost time.
He grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair, pulled it on over his shoulders. The habits of years spent numb hadn't eased so much in three months that he couldn't settle easily right back into them now. It was sad just how easily.
"I'm going now," he told Duke. He rubbed his forehead, pointlessly, pressing with his fingers until he heard his bones grind. "...Well, I hope you're coming." He muttered it more to himself this time than the maybe-ghost. He strode out of the office, stalling just past the threshold with an indrawn breath when the door caught on something unseen, or maybe just its new spring, and failed to slam in his wake.
***
continues...
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